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      4 Two recommendable introductory guides to Heidegger are S. Mulhall, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and ‘Being and Time’, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), and also M. Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger (London: Granta, 2005).

      5 There are several useful online resources: see, for example, the excellent entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ (by M. Wheeler); and further, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/ (by W. J. Korab-Karpowicz).

      6 A site dedicated to information on Heidegger and links to related web pages in English can be found at http://www.beyng.com/. The Partially Examined Life (M. Linsenmayer) has a free preview podcast on Heidegger’s Being and Time at https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/02/07/episode-32-heidegger-what-is-being/. And S. West of Philosophize This! explains Heidegger in a podcast on Podtail, ‘Episode 100: Heidegger – Phenomenology and Dasein’ at https://podtail.com/en/podcast/philosophize-this/episode-100-heidegger-pt-1-phenomenology-and/.

      Notes

      ^* Martin Heidegger, being and time [Sein und Zeit, 1927], excerpts from §§ 1, 2, 3, 4, 15, 26, 29. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 21, 25, 31, 32–5, 95–8, 160–1, 172–4.

      1 1 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism [L’existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946].

      2 2 Heidegger’s term is ‘falling’: Being and Time, § 38.

11 The End of Metaphysics? Rudolf Carnap, The Elimination of Metaphysics^*

      The whole enterprise of metaphysics came under heavy attack in the 1920s and 1930s from a group of philosophers (originally based in Vienna) who came to be known as ‘logical positivists’. Prominent among these was Rudolph Carnap, who taught at Vienna and Prague, and later (after emigrating to the United States in 1936) at Chicago and Los Angeles. One of the slogans of the positivists (to be found in the extract that follows) was ‘the meaning of a statement lies in the method of its verification’. David Hume, as we have seen (extract 7, above), insisted that all our knowledge concerning matters of fact must be based on experience; Immanuel Kant (extract 8) had denied the viability of metaphysics that attempted to free itself from all reference to sensory experience. Carnap’s position is that the traditional claims of metaphysicians are, in the strict sense, meaningless: they are ‘pseudo-statements’ that fail to assert anything at all.

      Carnap argues first, that many of the individual words used by metaphysicians are no more than ‘empty shells’, since those who use them do not provide any empirical criterion for their use. In order to be meaningful a given word ‘F’ must be supported by rules which enable us to verify, in a concrete case, whether something is F or not. For a word (such as ‘arthropod’) to mean something, it must be possible to specify the truth-conditions for the basic sentences in which that word occurs (these basic sentences are ones whose content can be fixed through some kind of observation or sensory experience). So for Carnap the only meaningful sentences are either those which (like those of logic and mathematics) are true simply in virtue of their form, or those which ‘fall within the domain of empirical science’. ‘Any statement one desires to construct which does not fall within these categories is automatically meaningless.’

      Using this framework, Carnap argues that it is overgenerous to dismiss traditional metaphysics as merely a collection of ‘speculations’ or ‘fairy tales’. For assertions in these latter categories, though we may dismiss them, are at least capable of being true or false; metaphysical claims, by contrast, fail to make any intelligible assertions whatever. At best they can be thought of as expressions of some kind of ‘attitude towards life’ – something that could better be done in poetry or music.

      Despite the vigorous and in some ways salutary challenge it offered, the programme of the positivists for the ‘elimination of metaphysics’ had ground to a halt by the 1960s. There turned out to be serious problems in formulating the verification principle in a way which was stringent enough to exclude traditional metaphysics, yet liberal enough to accommodate the complex theoretical statements of natural science.

      There have been many opponents of metaphysics from the Greek sceptics to the empiricists of the nineteenth century. Criticisms of very diverse kinds have been set forth. Many have declared that the doctrine of metaphysics is false, since it contradicts our empirical knowledge. Others have believed it to be uncertain, on the ground that its problems transcend the limits of human knowledge. Many anti-metaphysicians have declared that occupation with metaphysical questions is sterile. Whether or not these questions can be answered, it is at any rate unnecessary to worry about them; let us devote ourselves entirely to the practical tasks which confront active men every day of their lives!

The development of modern logic has made it possible to give a new and sharper answer to the question of the validity and justification of metaphysics. The researches of applied logic or the theory of knowledge, which aim at clarifying the cognitive content of scientific statements and thereby the meanings of the terms that occur in the statements, by means of logical analysis, lead to a positive and to a negative result. The positive result is worked out in the domain of empirical science; the various concepts of the various branches of science are clarified; their formal, logical and epistemological connections are made explicit. In the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless. Therewith a radical elimination of metaphysics is attained, which was not yet possible from the earlier anti-metaphysical standpoints …

      In saying that the so-called statements of metaphysics are meaningless, we intend this word in its strictest sense. In a loose sense of the word a statement or a question is at times called meaningless if it is entirely sterile to assert or ask it. We might say this for instance about the question ‘what is the average weight of those inhabitants of Vienna whose telephone number ends with “3”?’ or about a statement which is quite obviously false like ‘in 1910 Vienna had 6 inhabitants’ or about a statement which is not just empirically, but logically false, a contradictory statement such as ‘persons A and B are each a year older than the other’. Such sentences are really meaningful, though they are pointless or false; for it is only meaningful sentences that are even divisible into (theoretically) fruitful and sterile, true and false. In the strict sense, however, a sequence of words is meaningless if it does not, within a specified language, constitute a statement. It may happen that such a sequence of words looks like a statement at first glance; in that case we call it a pseudo-statement. Our thesis, now, is that logical analysis reveals the alleged statements of metaphysics to be pseudo-statements…

      A word which (within a definite language) has a meaning, is usually also said to designate a concept; if it only seems to have a meaning while it really does not, we speak of a ‘pseudo-concept’. How is the origin of a pseudo-concept to be explained? Has not every word been introduced into the language for no other purpose than to express something or other, so that it had a definite meaning from the very СКАЧАТЬ