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James Wilkes
A FRACTURED LANDSCAPE OF MODERNITY
Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck
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ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
John Twyning
FORMS OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN LITERATURE, LANDSCAPE, AND ARCHITECTURE
Regenia Gagnier
INDIVIDUALISM, DECADENCE AND GLOBALIZATION
On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920
Jennifer Keating-Miller
LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND LIBERATION IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH LITERATURE
Matthew Taunton
FICTIONS OF THE CITY
Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris
Laura Mulvey
VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES 2ND EDITION
Peter de Bolla and Stefan H. Uhlig (editors)
AESTHETICS AND THE WORK OF ART
Adorno, Kafka, Richter
Misha Kavka
REALITY TELEVISION, AFFECT AND INTIMACY
Reality Matters
Rob White
FREUD’S MEMORY
Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body
Teresa de Lauretis
FREUD’S DRIVE: PSYCHOANALYSIS, LITERATURE AND FILM
Mark Nash
SCREEN THEORY CULTURE
Richard Robinson
NARRATIVES OF THE EUROPEAN BORDER
A History of Nowhere
Lyndsey Stonebridge
THE WRITING OF ANXIETY
Imaging Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture
Ashley Tauchert
ROMANCING JANE AUSTEN
Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending
Reena Dube
SATYAJIT RAY’S THE CHESS PLAYERS AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity
John Anthony Tercier
THE CONTEMPORARY DEATHBED
The Ultimate Rush
Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson
LITERATURE, POLITICS AND LAW IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND
Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley
THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE
Geoff Gilbert
BEFORE MODERNISM WAS
Modern History and the Constituency of Writing
Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley (editors)
THE LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY READER
Michael O’Pray
FILM, FORM AND PHANTASY
Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics
James A. Snead, edited by Kara Keeling, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West
RACIST TRACES AND OTHER WRITINGS
European Pedigrees/African Contagions
Patrizia Lombardo
CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES
Colin MacCabe
JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD
Second edition
Moustapha Safouan
SPEECH OR DEATH?
Language as Social Order: A Psychoanalytic Study
Jean-Jacques Lecercle
DELEUZE AND LANGUAGE
Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild
STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS
Geoffrey Ward
STATUTES OF LIBERTY
The New York School of Poets
Moustapha Safouan
JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING (translated
and introduced by Jacqueline Rose)
Stanley Shostak
THE DEATH OF LIFE
The Legacy of Molecular Biology
Acknowledgements x
Chronology xi
Introduction 1
vii
viii Contents
16. Contradictions 71
17. Confrontation 72
18. Carnap and Heidegger’s shared background 77
19. Husserl’s influence on Carnap 79
20. Metaphysics and politics 84
6. Conclusion 182
Notes 184
Bibliography 223
Index 251
Acknowledgements
x
Chronology
1865 Liebmann publishes Kant und die Epigonen, ending each chapter
with the phrase ‘We must then return to Kant’.
1870 The term ‘psychologism’ is coined by Erdmann.
1879 Frege’s Begriffschrift is published.
Wundt founds the Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie in
Leipzig, creating the first laboratory for the study of psychology.
1884 Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik is published.
1891 Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetik is published.
Frege and Husserl begin their correspondence.
1893 The first volume of Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is published.
1894 Frege publishes a polemical review of Husserl’s Philosophie der
Arithmetik.
1900 Husserl publishes the first volume of Logische Untersuchungen.
The Psychologismus-Streit ensues.
1901 Husserl publishes the second volume of Logische Untersuchungen.
1902 Russell writes to Frege pointing out Russell’s paradox (16 June).
1905 Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ published in Mind (October).
1906 Husserl and Frege resume their correspondence.
1910 The first volume of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia
Mathematica is published.
1910–1914 Carnap studies under Frege in Jena.
1912 Russell’s review of Bergson’s Laughter (‘The Professor’s Guide to
Laughter’) published in The Cambridge Review (January).
Russell presents ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’ to ‘The Heretics’ at
Cambridge (11 March).
Cohen retires from his chair at Marburg University (June).
1913 Petition against experimental psychologists taking up
philosophy chairs is signed.
1914 The Great War breaks out, marking the end of the
Psychologismus-Streit.
1915 Lask is killed in Turza-Mala while fighting in the Galician
campaign (26 May).
Windelband dies (22 October).
xi
xii Chronology
1915–1916 Hulme writes several articles in The New Age associating the
philosophies of Russell, Moore and Husserl.
1816 Husserl succeeds Rickert at the University of Freiburg (1 April).
1917 Hulme killed by a shell in Oostduinkerke (28 September).
Reinach dies fighting in Flanders (16 November).
1918 Spengler publishes the first volume of The Decline of the West.
Schlick publishes the first volume of General Theory of
Knowledge, in which he criticises Husserl.
Russell is sentenced to prison. Takes with him a copy of Husserl’s
Logische Untersuchungen, planning to review it for Mind (9 February).
1919 Neurath is imprisoned for his activities in the Bavarian Soviet
Republic. While in prison he writes ‘Anti-Spengler’.
1920 Wahl completes his doctoral thesis titled The Pluralist
Philosophies of England and America.
1921 Second edition of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (second
volume) is published, in which Husserl responds to Schlick’s
criticisms.
1922 Husserl presents ‘Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological
Philosophy’ at University College London (June).
Carnap completes and publishes his doctoral dissertation Der Raum.
Wittgenstein publishes Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
1924 Ryle becomes an Oxford don and begins teaching himself
German. He soon takes up teaching a course titled ‘Logical
Objectivism: Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl and Meinong’.
1924–1925 Carnap joins Husserl’s seminar at Freiburg.
1925 Second edition of Schlick’s first volume of General Theory of
Knowledge published, omitting the critical remarks on Husserl.
Frege dies (26 July).
1927 Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit is published.
1928 Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt is published.
Heidegger elected as Husserl’s successor at Freiburg.
First meeting of the Verein Ernst Mach (November).
1929 Ryle visits Husserl in Freiburg, stays to study with Heidegger
(January).
Davos Hochschule takes place (17 March–6 April).
Heidegger publishes Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik.
Ryle’s review of Sein und Zeit published in Mind (July).
Ryle meets and befriends Wittgenstein at the Joint Session of
the Mind Association & the Aristotelian Society in Nottingham
(12–15 July).
Heidegger presents ‘Was ist Metaphysik’ as his inaugural lecture
at Freiburg University? (24 July).
Chronology xiii
The Ernst Mach Society and the Berlin Society for Empirical
philosophy jointly hold the ‘First Conference for the Epistemology
of the Social Sciences’ in Prague. ‘The Scientific World Conception:
The Vienna Circle’ is published (15–16 September).
Carnap presents ‘Der Mißbrauch der Sprache’ to the Dessau
Bauhaus, in which he first presents Heidegger’s ‘Das Nichts
Nichtet’ as an example of nonsense (19 September).
Wittgenstein comments sympathetically on Heidegger’s
concepts of Being and Angst to Waismann (30 December).
1930 Erkenntnis is founded, with Carnap and Reichenbach as
co-editors.
Husserl writes to Dawes Hicks, commenting on Ryle’s review of
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (15 March).
1931 Cassirer publishes ‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics’ in
Kant-Studien, responding to Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant
(January).
Carnap publishes Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische
Analyse der Sprache in Erkenntnis (December).
1932 Ryle presents Systematically Misleading Expressions to the
Aristotelian Society (21 March).
Wittgenstein reads ‘Physicalistic Language as the Universal
Language of Science’ and becomes enraged with Carnap
(April–May).
Carnap presents versions of Überwindung der Metaphysik durch
Logische Analyse der Sprache at Berlin and Brünn, concluding
by noting the historical significance of the struggle against
metaphysics (July).
‘Phenomenology’ symposium organised by Ryle at the Joint
Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association at
the University of Reading (8–10 July).
Reichstag election results in the National Socialists becoming
the largest party in parliament (31 July).
Quine visits Europe on a Sheldon Travelling Scholarship, sitting
in with the Vienna Circle (August).
Ayer marries Renee Lees, and visits the Vienna Circle during his
honeymoon (25 November).
Wittgenstein dictates some critical remarks on Heidegger to
Waismann, to be sent to Schlick (December).
1933 Cassirer is forced by the rise of Nazism to emigrate to Oxford
(12 March).
Heidegger is elected Rektor of Freiburg (21 April).
The Nazi regime passes a law that requires all Jewish professors
to be fired from German Universities (28 April).
Heidegger joins the Nazi Party (1 May).
xiv Chronology
1
2 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
1. Psychologismus-Streit
The last decades of the nineteenth century brought with them excite-
ment and turbulence in academic enquiry. A number of radically new
ideas were emerging at the time, many of which would bring about
new ways of doing science, of organising the university, and ulti-
mately, in many cases, of perceiving the world. This revolutionary
period would result in the formation of the academic discipline of
psychology and the development of modern logic, among numerous
other innovations.
The various revolutions in the making are reflected in the fierce
disputes that concurrently arose across a number of disciplines of
knowledge at the time. The simultaneous enactment of these disputes
may be seen as part of a process through which these groundbreaking
innovations were received by academia and gradually became incor-
porated into academic discourse. In many cases, the radical reactions
which are to be found in these disputes failed decisively to bring about
any academic consensus on the subjects in question. It is interesting
to observe how in some of these disputes the commonly prevailing
view did not come to be accepted by the disputants through the
convincing arguments of those that defended it, but rather was
dissolved through various other means.
Our primary concern in this chapter is with the dispute which
emerged at the end of the nineteenth century over the demarca-
tion of psychology from philosophy, known in the Germanophone
world as the Psychologismus-Streit (Psychologism-dispute). The origins
8
Frege, Husserl and the Future of Philosophy 9
There are two protagonistic figures behind the dispute over psychol-
ogism: Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frege. The former was a
Moravian mathematician and philosopher, whose work became the
focal point of the dispute by instantiating the exemplary source for
the anti-psychologistic thesis in the early years of the dispute. The
latter was a mathematician, logician, and philosopher from Wismar,
famous for founding modern logic, whose work, in contrast to that
of Husserl, lurked in the shadow of the Psychologismus-Streit. Their
encounter remains to this day enigmatic and riddled with ques-
tions which are possibly as excitingly puzzling now as they were at
the end of the nineteenth century. The deep influence of both on
subsequent philosophy is immense, wide-ranging, and difficult to
underestimate.
12 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
they were working, since it is that context (as has been intimated
above) which enabled both Husserl and Frege to produce work that
was bound to become influential.
meaning, and object in his 1891 review. If this be so, then another
historical judgment – connected with the above – needs to be
revised. It has been held by many that Husserl’s distinction, in the
Logische Untersuchungen, between meaning and object of an expres-
sion is Fregean in origin. Thus, for example, Hubert Dreyfus writes:
‘Husserl simply accepted and applied Frege’s distinctions ... The
only change Husserl made in Frege’s analysis was terminological.’
Now, if Husserl’s review of Schröder already contains that distinc-
tion, then it surely antedates the publication of Frege’s celebrated
paper ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ of 1892, and Husserl must have
arrived at it independently of Frege. (Mohanty, 1982, p. 2)
What Mohanty does not clarify in this passage is the fact that Husserl
had mailed a copy of his review of Schröder to Frege. In other words,
if Mohanty is indeed right in arguing that Husserl had come to reject
psychologism prior to Frege’s review of his work, then it might not
be unlikely that Husserl’s review of Schröder inspired Frege both in
his later formulation of the rejection of psychologism,15 and in his
famous distinction between Sinn (sense, meaning) and Bedeutung
(reference, denotation),16 written soon after his correspondence with
Husserl. Frege writes to Husserl saying that ‘your notice of Schröder’s
work ... has prompted me to write down my own thoughts now’
(1980a, p. 61). A large part of Frege’s letter consists in clarifying his
views on the difference between Sinn and Bedeutung and showing
how his account contrasts with that Husserl gives in his review. In
other words, it is in response to Husserl’s writings on the subject that
Frege was prompted to write down his own views.17
4. Contra psychologismus
seen Frege introduce) but rather the nature of logic.30 Husserl thus
broadly defines logic as a Wissenschaftslehre,31 a unified theory of the
various separate sciences, which is a normative discipline32 and, by
extension, a ‘technology’ (i.e. an examination of the principles of an
art, a technē).33
with a battle cry for the new century: Back to things themselves. It
aimed to reform philosophy’s vision of itself, by giving it the
self-image of a rigorous science, a science of science. Yet, at the same time,
Husserl’s phenomenology wore an ancient Greek name. It countered
the revolutionary scientific aims of the psychologists by reviving a
quasi-Aristotelian vision of philosophy, whose main task consisted
in categorial systematisation and the intuition of essences. Where
the experimental psychologists were seen as damaging to philosophy
departments by their being unable to teach philosophy histori-
cally, Husserl had devised a way of producing a radical programme
for philosophy which would demand little institutional change –
phenomenologists fashioned after Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen
would still find no objection to teaching Plato, Aquinas, or Kant.54
This double aspect of Husserl’s (counter-)revolutionary approach
to philosophy goes relatively unnoticed by those who wish to set
Husserl against Frege as the founder of a new tradition in philosophy,
a tradition which is seen as radically opposed to that inaugurated
by Frege. To present Husserl as the founder of some phenomeno-
logical ‘movement’ within something called ‘continental philos-
ophy’ is, strictly speaking, to misrepresent Husserl’s influence. The
misrepresentation is caused at least partly by Husserl’s own insistence
on the revolutionary innovations of the method which he names
‘phenomenology’.55 For Husserl, at the roots of the inception of this
method, it is clear that it is to be a theory of science that is itself scien-
tific: phenomenology is the rigorous science which studies science. Yet,
all those thinkers most prominently taken to be associated with what
has been called the ‘continental’ phenomenological ‘movement’,
considered to be founded by Husserl, dismiss Husserl’s aimed corre-
spondence of phenomenology with its being a rigorous science. Both
the Germanophone proponents of existential phenomenology, e.g.
Martin Heidegger or Karl Jaspers, and many of the Francophone disci-
ples of Husserl, e.g. Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, reject the Husserlian definitions of phenomenology
as Wissenschaftslehre, as science of science, as rigorous science, as
logic.56 Beginning perhaps with Heidegger (although the strand of
phenomenology critical of its status as a rigorous science may be seen
to stretch further back to the early en masse reception of Husserl’s
anti-psychologism), these ‘continental’ phenomenologists can be
seen to draw from Husserl’s radical new vision for philosophy while
28 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
may find at least the potential for some further honest philosoph-
ical exchange between phenomenology and the Vienna Circle – an
exchange which unfortunately never took place beyond the few and
scattered critical comments directed against Husserl by Schlick.60
Not only were Husserl’s views generally more compatible with those
of figures in early ‘analytic’ philosophy than with those of some of his
disciples, but also his influence can also be traced within both ‘move-
ments’. Thus, among those philosophers influenced by Husserl,61 one
may count Rudolf Carnap,62 Gilbert Ryle,63 John Searle,64 as well as
numerous others (for example, Kazimierz Jerzy Skrzypna-Twardowski,
founder of the Lwów-Warsaw School of logic,65 Felix Kaufmann,
member of the Vienna Circle and Husserlian phenomenologist,66 and
the famous mathematician Kurt Gödel, also a member of the Vienna
Circle).67
What may have led to the mistaken assumption that Husserl
founded a continental tradition of philosophy that would contrast to
an analytic one is the limited influence of Husserl’s thought outside
the continent during his lifetime, as well as the slanted reception of
his thought in Britain afterwards.68 Husserl presented four lectures
at University College London in 1922 (Phenomenological Method and
Phenomenological Philosophy),69 yet despite these lectures (or perhaps
even possibly because of these, particularly since these were the first
lectures presented by a German-speaking philosopher in Britain
following the First World War), his phenomenology did not appear
to find fertile ground in the British philosophical circles of the time.70
Thus, the establishment of geographical areas of influence on their
contemporaries may have been the cause of their representation as
founders of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (or, as Dummett puts it, ‘Anglo-Austrian’)
and ‘continental’ traditions.
Yet, the geographical conception of a split between ‘Anglo-Saxon’
and ‘continental’ philosophies is highly problematic (especially
given what Dummett points out, i.e. Husserl and Frege’s proximity of
thought in relation to their Germanophone context). Thus, the work
that has been done on the Frege-Husserl relation will need to recon-
sider an assumption which has lain at the root of some of its claims,
namely the portrayal of Husserl as the archetypal philosophical hero
of a distinctively continental phenomenological movement. Such a
view is, in any case, insufficient insofar as Husserl was also involved
in the formation of various other movements. This means that the
30 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
1. Disputation at Davos
31
32 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
of the dualism that Kant had introduced between the purely formal
dimension of logical forms and their meaningfulness only in rela-
tion to a sensory content. The variation of directions taken up within
Neo-Kantianism can be seen as approaches to this common problem
with regard to the mediation between intellect and sensibility.
Throughout the Psychologismus-Streit, the various Neo-Kantian
schools developed and defended their own attempt at purifying
philosophy. Part of this effort involved, to a great extent, the rejec-
tion of the ‘psychologism’ inherent in the Kantian position regarding
the pure forms of sensible intuition, as we have seen above. For the
Neo-Kantians, the realm of philosophy pertained to the logical faculty
of pure understanding. This formal realm was largely understood in
anti-psychologistic terms, as being irreducible to the subjective.
Thus the Neo-Kantians were to develop their vision of pure philos-
ophy as an epistemological inquiry – on the one hand, for the Marburg
Neo-Kantians, primarily into mathematics and the exact sciences,
on the other hand, for the Southwest school, primarily into culture
and values.18 Despite the unifying element of looking back to Kant
through the prism of science, the two schools generally remained
separate in their research projects. Marburg Neo-Kantians were gener-
ally oriented towards the explication of the relation of philosophy
to the exact sciences, and thus their approach was directed towards
the study of logic and epistemology. The Southwest school gener-
ally sought to clarify the relation of philosophy to the humanities
and social sciences, and thus as focusing on questions of value and
culture.19
There were also other Neo-Kantians who did not subscribe to these
schools; to take one example from Heidegger’s list, the Austrian Alois
Riehl cannot be adequately categorised as a member of either school.
Another example is that of Hans Vaihinger, whose followers formed
the ‘as if’ school.20 Various philosophers were closely associated
with varieties of Neo-Kantianism despite having been considered as
members of opposing ‘schools’, e.g. Frege21 and Husserl,22 or various
figures associated with the ‘Empiriocriticism’ that developed into
logical positivism, such as Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, or Moritz
Schlick.23
Note must be taken of the dynamic tensions at play within
Neo-Kantianism, a movement which spanned from around the
eighteen-sixties to around the nineteen-thirties. Its long span covers
Questioning Metaphysics in Weimar Germany 35
I. Time-series (Quantity):
i) Moment (Unity)
ii) Series (Plurality)
iii) Unity of series (Totality)
In Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929a), put together in the
weeks following the Davos seminar, Heidegger insists on a particular
reading of the chapter on schematism that places it at the centre of
Kant’s work. For Heidegger, Kant’s elaboration of schematism is to
be read in terms of the more general project of laying the ground
for metaphysics, as ‘the freeing-up of the essential ground for onto-
logical knowledge as finite, pure intuition’ (1997, p. 63). According to
Heidegger’s interpretation, Kant’s exposition of schematism unveils
‘the grounds for the possibility of the essence of ontological knowl-
edge’ (p. 192) by identifying this ground, from which a priori synthetic
knowledge is made possible, as the transcendental imagination. In
other words, he identifies Kant’s ‘third thing’, the schematism which
is homogeneous with the two heterogeneous faculties (understanding
44 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
7. Carnap’s ‘metaphysics’
This term is used in this paper, as usually in Europe, for the field
of alleged knowledge of the essence of things which transcends
the realm of empirically founded, inductive science. Metaphysics
in this sense includes systems like that of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel,
Bergson, Heidegger. But it does not include endeavors towards a
synthesis and generalisation of the results of the various sciences.
(1959, p. 80)
When Carnap uses the term ‘metaphysics’, he does not refer to the
meaning of the word in currency today but more probably to a
specific, post-Enlightenment trend in philosophy which, devoted to
system-building, is removed from the empirical method employed
by natural science. Thus, for example, the subsequent approaches to
metaphysics in ‘analytical’ philosophy (e.g. Strawson’s descriptive
metaphysics, or Quine’s naturalistic ontology) are not touched by
Carnap’s Überwindung. Similarly, it is not precisely clear whether the
metaphysical speculation of ancient Greek thought, medieval scho-
lasticism or early modern rationalism should be counted as meta-
physics in Carnap’s account, where these generalise from the results
of their contemporary science.71 It is also not clear whether there are
also aspects of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or Bergson which are not to
be considered as ‘metaphysical’ in that they might include generali-
sation or synthesis of the results of the various sciences. (For example,
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre might be understood as such an ‘endeavor
towards a synthesis and generalisation’.)
Carnap does not take ‘metaphysics’ to mean ‘all reasoning regarding
ontology’; what the term ‘metaphysics’ refers to is to be found in its
usual use in (Germanophone) Europe at the time. In other words,
Questioning Metaphysics in Weimar Germany 49
8. Is Heidegger a metaphysician?
9. Heidegger’s nothing
That to which the relation to the world refers are beings them-
selves – and nothing besides.
That from which every stance takes its guidance are beings
themselves – and nothing further.
That with which the scientific confrontation in the irruption
occurs are beings themselves – and beyond that, nothing.
52 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
Is the nothing given only because the ‘not,’ i.e. negation, is given?
Or is it the other way around? Are negations and the ‘not’ given
only because the nothing is given? That has not been decided; it
has not even been raised expressly as a question. We assert that
the nothing is more original than the ‘not’ and negation. (1998a,
p. 86)
(1) ¬ p
or
(2) p (¬ p)
or something as inexpressible as
(3) ¬
nothing itself nihilates’ (Das Nichts selbst nichtet) (p. 90). In other
words, the nothing is neither negation of objects nor annihilation of
beings, but a condition for the possibility of the existence of either.
In order to approach this claim, one must place it within the
context of the tri-part hierarchy which we have already exposed
and the relations which hold within it. The sphere of ready-to-hand
entities constitutes a condition for the possibility of present-at-hand
objects. Similarly, the ontological sphere is more originary than either
ready-to-hand entities or present-at-hand objects (and this originary
sphere is the ‘open region’ for every possible experience of objects).
Although the former relation might be in some way intuitive, the
latter seems hard to grasp. It is through an elaboration of Heidegger’s
account of authenticity that the hierarchical relation of the onto-
logical sphere toward the ontic sphere becomes clear. According to
Heidegger, the revelation of nothingness through Angst brings about
a certain existential dilemma. As we have already mentioned, Dasein
is, on the one hand, oriented towards coping with particular tasks
at hand and, on the other, essentially finite, a being-towards-death
which could at any moment perish, ending Dasein’s engagement
with the world. Angst brings about the revelation of Dasein’s fini-
tude and thus the realisation of the fundamental contingency of all
task-fulfilling engagement with the world. Whereas the ready-to-
hand engagement with particular practical endeavours appears as if
necessary in itself, the ontological sphere reveals practical engage-
ment as one possibility among others. It is only through this recogni-
tion that Dasein realises its power to choose an authentic engagement
with its projects, whereas Heidegger holds that without a realisation
of the contingency of its endeavours (i.e. without a response to
being-towards-death), Dasein’s existence remains inauthentic.
What really takes place, though, in the realisation of Dasein’s power
to live in an authentic manner is precisely the contingency of the
appearance of entities as ready-to-hand, their determination by a
more originary, ontological dimension.103 The sphere of ontology
becomes a condition for the possibility of authentically caring for
some task at hand. What is revealed in anxiety is the Being (or world)
of ready-to-hand entities, their originary ontological dimension. The
‘Being of beings’ is itself not an entity, it cannot be construed as some
particular being or object, it is not a thing. This is what Heidegger
implies when he talks of the nothing beside beings. The Being of
58 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
of morals’ (1959, p. 80), and on the other hand, purely poetic expres-
sions of metaphysical and ethical attitudes such those as found in his
Thus Spake Zarathustra.115
Thus Carnap’s Überwindung of metaphysics is at least to some
extent a response to particular problems within the tradition Carnap
designates by the term,116 and perhaps even partly motivated by an
attempt to answer the question that had developed among that tradi-
tion regarding the status of expression in relation to theory. This
motivation pertains only to the overall reasoning behind Carnap’s
choice of a proposed Überwindung rather than constituting a justifica-
tion for it. The justification Carnap offers for his Überwindung comes
through his method of proving the meaninglessness of metaphysical
language, i.e. through linguistic analysis. Thus, although Carnap is
in fact responding to a question within metaphysics, he is not under-
taking that task in a metaphysical way but rather deems the question
resolvable only through a particular, non-metaphysical point of view,
which amounts to the analysis of language using the newly devel-
oped instruments of modern logic.
How does Carnap justify his claim that metaphysics must be over-
come? Carnap’s effort, as discussed above, is aimed at proving that
metaphysical statements are neither true nor false but nonsensical.
If metaphysics produces no truth or falsity, but mere nonsense,
then it cannot provide us with knowledge regarding its objects. The
proof for this is found through the logical analysis of metaphysical
statements.
As we saw earlier, Carnap provides a list of ways in which the
meaningfulness of a word may be judged. This constitutes one of two
methods of demonstrating the meaninglessness of metaphysics. The
second way regards a more subtle point pertaining to the difference
between ‘logical syntax’ and ‘historical-grammatical syntax’ (Carnap,
1959, p. 69). According to Carnap, a sequence of words may produce
a sentence that is well-formed according to ‘historical-grammatical
syntax’, but which is meaningless (according to ‘logical syntax’).
Thus, illusively meaningful-sounding pseudo-sentences are formed.
Carnap gives the example of the sentence (4) ‘Caesar is a prime
number’.117 Although a sentence like (5) ‘Caesar is and’ is obviously
Questioning Metaphysics in Weimar Germany 65
16. Contradictions
17. Confrontation
took Frege’s lectures, during which he did not even get a chance to
ask Frege any questions.151
Despite the Husserl’s influence looming over Carnap’s work,
Carnap (after his Aufbau) fails to refer to some substantially signifi-
cant aspects of Husserl’s thought which he develops. One particular
absence of reference which is pertinent to our discussion regards the
relation between Husserl and Carnap’s shared views on nonsense.
Carnap does not mention any particular sources for his account
of nonsense and his conception of logical syntax. The whole of
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is mentioned as a source
for Carnap’s verificationist theory of meaning – but in the Tractatus,
one may not find a specific enough theoretical development of a
definition of nonsense which can be adequately linked to Carnap’s
account of nonsense as its unique source.152 Wittgenstein’s thought
was unquestionably influential on Carnap’s notion of nonsense (and
thus his attack against Heidegger), but the manner of influence, the
divergence between what the two mean by nonsense and the degree
to which Carnap’s positivistic interpretation of Wittgenstein captures
what Wittgenstein intended is disputed among various schools
of interpreting Wittgenstein.153 Carnap may also have been influ-
enced by his discussions with Wittgenstein between 1927 and early
1929.154 During this time Wittgenstein also discussed the particular
views developed by Heidegger which Carnap also comments on –
but Wittgenstein’s comments are famously sympathetic towards
Heidegger!155
According to Carnap’s autobiography, Wittgenstein’s view that
various sentences of traditional philosophy are pseudo-sentences
was one Carnap ‘had previously developed under the influence
of anti-metaphysical scientists and philosophers’ (1963a, p. 24).
One obvious candidate here is Frege, with Carnap being his most
famous student.156 Nevertheless, it is clear that Frege and Carnap
held very different views on metaphysics, and a description of Frege
as an anti-metaphysical philosopher would be, to say the least,
inaccurate.157
Thus on the one hand, there are those grammatical laws which are
contingent and which therefore vary historically between different
languages. These laws apply only a posteriori to particular combinations
Questioning Metaphysics in Weimar Germany 81
Thus absurdity, though it does not break with any of the a posteriori
rules of grammar (but rather, as Husserl points out, with ‘the laws
of pure logic’ (2001, p. 183)), is nonetheless brought to light due
to the incompatibility of objects such as ‘round’ and ‘not-round’.164
Nonsense, on the other hand, is somehow less evident in its viola-
tion of the a priori (and not the a posteriori) rules of grammar, since
this allows for the formation of what Husserl calls the ‘indirect idea’
of meaning.
82 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
but only to indicate that once Carnap’s position is seen in this way,
it is transposed from the absolute polemical stance which has so
far been assumed in its interpretation, or even the aporia between
Heidegger and Carnap’s thesis which it is supposed to form. The
matter of disentangling the Heidegger-Carnap-Husserl triangle
becomes a concrete philosophical task at hand, capable of producing
honest dialogical exchange. A path here is opened which leads away
from the impasse.
Nevertheless, Carnap and Heidegger’s positions, once put together
as variations on Husserlian themes, appear to be taking two diver-
gent paths which follow from Husserl’s own philosophy. On the
one hand, Carnap takes Husserl to contribute towards a view of
modern logic as providing a new scientifically-minded task for
philosophy which cannot be undertaken by empirical science.
The early Husserl saw, as did Carnap, that metaphysics should not
partake in this new alignment of philosophy with science; thus, in
the Logische Untersuchungen, phenomenology was developed as a
metaphysically neutral theory of science.168 The period during which
Husserl adopted this anti-metaphysical stance coincides with what
Heidegger, at Davos, considers his alliance with Neo-Kantianism;
that he would later come to develop views on metaphysics might be
one of the causes (though, of course, not justification) for Carnap’s
lack of reference to him in 1931. On the other hand, Heidegger takes
Husserl to be proposing a new phenomenological philosophy which,
once divorced from its Cartesian origins (i.e. once it ceases to be
phenomenological and becomes existential and hermeneutical), may
provide a way of asserting the priority of philosophy over empirical
enquiry. A new understanding of the role of metaphysics is neces-
sary in either case, and in fact both Carnap and Heidegger agree on
a quasi-anthropologistic view according to which metaphysics is
unavoidably human. Their fundamental philosophical difference
regards the proper method of conduct for this unavoidable research
programme.
1. A pornographer, a phenomenologist,
and a logical positivist walk into a bar
87
88 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
From this, we can surmise that Ayer had been acquainted with Bataille
since 1945, and had already engaged in philosophical discussion with
him. It is quite peculiar and interesting that the topic of the conversa-
tion mentioned in Ayer’s autobiography, i.e. the question of whether
time was a human invention or not, seems to resemble closely the
topic of the long conversation they had in 1951 (which we will be
discussing in detail later on). Nick Trakakis concludes from this that
Ayer must have mistakenly confused the dates of his meeting with
Bataille.7 Given that Ayer recounts his relationship with Delmer as
having taken place during the last months of his stay in Paris, and
also given that Delmer was indeed acquainted with Bataille, Trakakis’
explanation is most likely flawed. Ayer did, in fact, encounter Bataille
prior to 1951, and this encounter involved a debate on a similar topic
to the one they discussed in 1951. What is also confirmed by Ayer’s
account is the fact that the encounter between the two men was not,
as Bataille’s account would imply, undertaken within the confines of
an academic setting. Rather, the two met socially through a common
friend and lover.
Their encounter outside the conventions of professional academic
practice makes their philosophical engagement unique in a multitude
of ways. It is a singular record of a quasi-private, non-formal dialogue
between philosophers whose backgrounds are both quite diverse and
at the same time related to some or other of the various forms of
modernism that flourished in their contemporary cultural life. It is in
this context that Bataille gives us the first recorded observation of a
split between ‘Continental’ and English philosophical cultures in the
twentieth century.
Was There a Sun before Men Existed? 89
The various military intelligence posts Ayer had held during the
Second World War would allow him to enjoy a sufficient amount of
leisure time. Thus he had been able to pursue an array of intellectual
interests. For example, during his stay in America, Ayer had produced
some work in film criticism, reviewing films for the popular press.8
His stay in Paris following its liberation coincided with a certain
enthusiastically thriving cultural and intellectual climate, in which
Ayer was actively involved. The sudden rise to prominence of the
then fashionable existentialism, contemporary with the liberation
of Paris, was not foreign to Ayer, who was, during its emergence,
already acquainted with several of the prominent figures associated
with it. Ayer had produced a number of articles for Horizon magazine,
reviewing this new trend and its major intellectual figures: Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus.9
Ayer’s opinion of existentialism, and particularly of Sartre, had
already been shaped by events in his life before the war, when he
had been involved in a different sort of intelligence mission. Between
November 1932 and the spring of 1933,10 Ayer was dispatched
to Vienna as a kind of British philosophical spy (posing as a
honeymooner)11 sent out by Gilbert Ryle in order to report on the
latest trends in the development of Austrian philosophical ideas.12
Once he was dispatched to Vienna, Ayer sat in with the circle (being
one of only two non-Germans, along with W. V. O. Quine, to have
ever participated in the Circle’s meetings) and, having taken in their
doctrines and discussions, produced Language, Truth, and Logic as a
book that would introduce Logical Positivism to a British audience.
Most of the book consisted of a restatement, in English, of the
core doctrines of the Vienna Circle, with alleged attempts by Ayer
to fortify these doctrines in their restatement. As part of his attempt
at importing Viennese philosophy into Britain, Ayer repeated the
Vienna Circle’s strict anti-metaphysical stance. In doing so, he
developed a criticism of Heidegger that already had been formed by
Rudolf Carnap. Although Ayer does not clearly specify the extent to
which his source is Carnap,13 he nevertheless reformulates Carnap’s
argument regarding Heidegger’s use of the word ‘nothing’. We have
90 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
previously observed that Carnap treats the use of the word ‘nothing’
by Heidegger as an example of the meaninglessness of metaphys-
ical language. ‘Nothing’, according to Carnap, is meaningless when
occurring in particular statements, within the confines of which it
can be rendered neither true nor false.
As demonstrated in Chapter 2, Carnap’s criticism of Heidegger
should be read as being derived from an argument with Heidegger
over issues that had developed within the German philosophical
traditions of the early twentieth century (i.e. Neo-Kantianism,
Lebensphilosophie, Phenomenology). Although Carnap’s commen-
tary is obviously polemical, it can also be seen as the product of at
least some engagement with Heidegger’s thought. The relation of
Heidegger and Carnap to their German philosophical predecessors
(and their very specialised discussions of the philosophy of logic) is
one which could not, at the time, have been readily obvious to a
British outsider such as Ayer.14
Thus, Ayer’s repetition of Carnap’s criticism of Heidegger simply
strips the original of any hint of subtlety. In attempting to summa-
rise Carnap’s argument, Ayer’s exposition created a kind of overstated
hostility towards Heidegger in particular, as well as towards the
‘metaphysical’ philosophy that Heidegger was mistakenly thought to
represent. Such philosophical hostility is not as straightforward in
Carnap’s view, from which Ayer had derived it. The over-statement of
Carnap’s criticism in Ayer’s 1936 Language, Truth, and Logic was forti-
fied its publication date (and subsequent popularity).15 By contrast,
Carnap’s article was only translated in 1959, by which time Ayer’s
hostility towards Heidegger as a metaphysician had become part and
parcel of the overall Anglophone reception of the Vienna Circle’s
views.
Ayer only mentions Heidegger in passing in his chapter on ‘The
Elimination of Metaphysics’. The chapter title itself already shows
the ambitiousness of Ayer’s project in relation to the outlook of the
Vienna Circle; Ayer used the term ‘elimination’ where Carnap had
talked of Überwindung, which is more aptly translated as ‘overcoming’
(with all its intended Nietzschean connotations (1959, p. 80)). Ayer
mentions Heidegger in discussing non-existent entities (a theme
already familiar to his English audience through Russell’s discussion
of Meinong in his ‘On Denoting’).16 According to Ayer,
Was There a Sun before Men Existed? 91
and mysterious; they are not used to name anything at all. To say
that two objects are separated by nothing is to say that they are
not separated; and that is all that it amounts to. What Sartre does,
however, is to say that, being separated by Nothing, the objects
are both united and divided. There is a thread between them;
only, it is a very peculiar thread, both invisible and intangible.
But it is a trick that should not deceive anyone. The confusion
is then still further increased by the attempt to endow Nothing
with an activity, the fruit of which is found in such statements as
Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts nichtet’ and Sartre’s ‘le Néant est néantisé’.
For whatever may be the affective value of these statements, I
cannot but think that they are literally nonsensical. (Ayer, 1945,
pp. 18–19)25
Ayer’s criticism of Sartre’s work had as its effect the growth of Sartre’s
personal dislike of him. When a meeting was to be arranged between
the two figures, Sartre refused the invitation, remarking that ‘Ayer est
un con’ (Rogers, 2002, p. 193). Perhaps Sartre disliked the potential
for the applicability of the principle of verification to his concept
of nothingness, or perhaps he disliked separating his philosophical
differences from his personal relations.
The opposite of the latter is true of the relation between Ayer and
Merleau-Ponty. As already noted, the two had met during Ayer’s stay
in Paris. According to Ayer’s autobiography, they had made a decision
to sustain a friendship despite their seemingly unbridgeable philo-
sophical differences.
Having set the wider intellectual scene, we can now return to Bataille’s
1951 lecture and pose, with him, that very strange question which
Was There a Sun before Men Existed? 99
For what precisely is meant by saying that the world existed before
any human consciousness? An example of what is meant is that
the earth originally issued from a primitive nebula from which the
combination of conditions necessary to life was absent. But every
one of these words, like every equation in physics, presupposes
our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to
the world in which we live goes to make up the proposition’s valid
meaning. ... Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our remote begin-
nings, but in front of us in the cultural world. What in fact do we
mean when we say that there is no world without a being in the
world? Not indeed that the world is constituted by consciousness,
but on the contrary that consciousness always finds itself already
at work in the world. (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 502)
Around 30 years later, Ayer takes up the discussion from the Parisian
bar again in an article on Merleau-Ponty, by quoting the above passage.
Ayer seems puzzled by the fact that Merleau-Ponty accepts the seem-
ingly idealist position they had argued over years ago48 – although
he acknowledges that ‘it is not exactly a return to either absolute or
to subjective idealism ... but while solipsism is avoided, the outlook
remains anthropocentric’ (Ayer, 1984, pp. 225–226). Interestingly, he
remarks that a possible way to understand Merleau-Ponty’s assertion
is by showing there to be a surprising conjunction of phenomenology
with pragmatism (Ayer, 1984, p. 226).49
Was There a Sun before Men Existed? 101
This problematises even further what Bataille may have had in mind
when, in 1951, he pointed out that:
wondered why I blamed that phrase of Ayer’s. There are all sorts of
facts of existence which would not have seemed quite as debatable
to me. Which means that this unknowing, whose consequences
I seek out by talking to you, is to be found everywhere. (Bataille,
1986, p. 81)
110
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 111
Jean Wahl, who is most commonly associated with the French exis-
tentialist tradition, had introduced pragmatism and early analytic
philosophy to France.10
Almost no single philosopher at Royaumont belonged exclusively,
or even predominantly, to any one of the traditions which are associ-
ated with ‘continental philosophy’. Gaston Berger had been associ-
ated with Husserlian phenomenology,11 but his activities had ranged
from the study of possible futures (a field which he named ‘prospec-
tive’) to the reformation of French state-provided education.12 Father
Hermann Leo Van Breda, a Franciscan priest, was the keeper of
the Husserl archives at Leuven – and might be seen as an excellent
Husserl scholar rather than an original ‘continental’ philosopher.13
Jean Brun was a scholar of ancient philosophy who had also written
on Kierkegaard and Christian philosophy in general.14 Ferdinand
Alquié, a philosopher and historian of early modern philosophy
(who also wrote on surrealism), had also been an influence on Gilles
Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza.15 Though all the abovementioned
participants lie close to the mainstream trends in their contemporary
French philosophy (i.e. phenomenology and existentialism), their
main interests lie elsewhere. The most important exception to this
is perhaps Merleau-Ponty, who is generally considered to be in the
mainstream of ‘continental’ philosophy, in whatever way one may
attempt to define this term.
The same phenomenon is observed with many of the Anglo-American
philosophers present at Royaumont. Many of those Anglo-American
philosophers present, such as H.B. Acton,16 or Alan Gewirth,17 are
clearly not practitioners (nor are they clear proponents) of analytic
philosophy. For others, e.g. Bernard Williams, there holds a critical
relationship to analysis which is rather more ambiguous.18
Therefore, it would be mistaken to conceive of Royaumont as the
site of conflict between two predominant approaches to philosophy. If
anything, the research interests of those gathered at Royaumont point
us towards the diverse multiplicity of approaches to the practice of
philosophy employed in different parts of Europe and America. The
mere co-presence of these philosophers at the colloquium demon-
strates the incongruity of any geographical conception of a radical
split in approaches to what philosophy is and how it should be prac-
tised. The association of a geo-political territory called ‘Europe’ with
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 113
The truth is that Ryle did not always seem radically to divorce Husserl’s
phenomenology from his theory of meaning in the way that he did
122 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
(a) quasi-ontological,
(b) quasi-Platonic,
(c) quasi-descriptive, and
(d) quasi-referential descriptive statements.
One may not infer from the appearance of the types of sentences
which Ryle discusses that they allow for an ‘intuition of an essence’,
since the reality which underlies that deceiving appearance is the fact
that nothing has been denoted by them. Their seeming reference to
what Husserl takes to be ‘essences’ to be intuited is only deceivingly
produced through some particular fact about their grammatical struc-
ture. This structure allows us to take the mistaken view that they refer
to some kind of essence, which Ryle claims they do not.
Ryle is here introducing an application of the insight he developed
a few months earlier in SME, namely the notion that the grammar of
an expression may mislead philosophers and not ordinary language
users. Although the expression ‘being a so and so’ does not seem, at
first hand, to correspond to any of the particular categories of system-
atically misleading expressions Ryle develops in SME, its function is
similar: its grammar leads to a mistaken supposition of denotation,
which the expression does not fulfil. Examining the context in which
Ryle presents the example ‘being a so and so’ reveals that Ryle intends
by it to refute the denotation of universals (as semi-Platonic objects)
by such expressions. One may thus assume (though Ryle is not
perfectly clear in this case) that by citing ‘being such and such’ et al.,
Ryle means to exemplify sentences referring to universals or essences
(in reference to the second type of systematically misleading expres-
sions he discusses in SME). Thus, Ryle concludes that when Husserl
is taking such expressions to denote those essences or universals
which phenomenology is supposed to study, he is being misled into
supposing their existence or subsistence by their seeming reference
to semi-Platonic objects, which can be explained away by the kind of
linguistic analysis Ryle has developed in SME. If Ryle’s primary task
in SME was to transform linguistic analysis into sharpening Ockham’s
razor, then the first beard Ryle’s razor had shaved was Husserl’s.
8. Rylean phenomenology
In other words, by confusing these two categories (of act and dispo-
sition), philosophers have been led into a fundamentally mistaken
assumption regarding the existence of two separable substances, the
realms of mind and matter, and the series of consequent problems
which emerge from the assumption of such a distinction (e.g. the
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 131
Take, for example, the sentence ‘A round x’. If one were to substi-
tute ‘x’ for ‘table’, one would have a meaningful sentence. One
could similarly substitute ‘x’ for ‘non-round’ or ‘square’ and obtain a
sentence having a certain kind of meaning which is contradictory or
absurd (formally absurd in the former case, and materially absurd in
the latter). Yet, if one were to substitute ‘x’ for ‘or’, the result would be
nonsense, an absolutely meaningless sentence. ‘Table’ may be mean-
ingfully (though absurdly) replaced by ‘square’ because both ‘table’
and ‘square’ belong to the same kind of a priori category of meaning,
whereas ‘or’ belongs to a completely different sort of category.
Husserl distinguishes between two types of categories: on the one
hand, (analytic a priori) categories of meaning and, on the other,
(synthetic a priori) ontological categories.68 We are here primarily
concerned with the former, as it is Husserl’s account of the catego-
ries of meaning which seems to have mattered to Ryle. What Husserl
means when he mentions the term ‘categories of meaning’ is confined
to what we may today understand as syntactic categories.69 A descrip-
tion of these syntactic categories may be given through outlining
what Husserl calls the (analytic)70 ‘a priori laws governing combina-
tions of meanings’ (2001, p. 189). The function of such laws is to
allow us to give an account of ‘the truth or falsity of meanings as
such, purely on the basis of their categorial formal structure’ (Husserl,
2001, p. 79), i.e. they are to present us with the validity (in contrast to
the soundness) of propositions. Thus, once an overall account of the
laws governing the possible combinations of meanings is given, one
may then examine the truth or falsity of particular statements.
The ‘a priori laws governing combinations of meanings’ are, in
fact, as we have seen, ways of distinguishing between, on the one
hand, meaningful statements and, on the other, the nonsense which
is produced by the violation of these laws. We have also seen that,
according to Husserl, the violation of such laws takes place when,
within a statement, an expression belonging to one formal category
of meaning is replaced with one belonging to another. The mean-
inglessness that results from this replacement becomes, according to
Husserl, a test as to the differentiation between the various formal
categories. Throughout his Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl main-
tains the distinction between meaning and nonsense as a kind of test
for category differences.
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 133
I guess that our thinkers have been immunised against the idea of
philosophy as the Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives
in Cambridge and Oxford Colleges have kept them in personal
contact with real scientists. Claims to Fuehrership vanish when
postprandial joking begins.81 Husserl wrote as if he had never met
a scientist – or a joke.82 (1971b, p. 181)
We have not worried our heads over the question Which philoso-
pher ought to be Fuehrer? If we did ask ourselves this question,
we should mostly be inclined to say that it is logical theory that
does or should control other conceptual enquiries, though even
this control would be advisory rather than dictatorial. At least the
main lines of our philosophical thinking during this century can
be fully understood only be someone who has studied the massive
developments of our logical theory. This fact is partly responsible
for the wide gulf that has existed for three-quarters of a century
between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy. For, on the
Continent during this century, logical studies have, unfortunately,
been left unfathered by most philosophy departments and cared
for, if at all, only in a few departments of mathematics.85 (1971b,
p. 182)
It is hard to make out clearly what one should take this paragraph’s
performative function to be. Its various commentators have taken
it to be one of the most polemical expressions of a split between
something called ‘Continental’ philosophy and its ‘Anglo-Saxon’
other.86 What is most intriguing is that Ryle makes this statement in
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 139
It has by now become clear that the relation between Ryle and
Husserl’s views is not being presented by Ryle in a straightforward,
unambiguous manner. There is, indeed, plentiful evidence towards a
peculiarly strained relation between the use of Husserl’s ideas in Ryle’s
work and his own presentation of such a use. There is, furthermore,
the apparent aggression towards some or other aspect of Husserl’s
philosophical views presented in the passage quoted above. In other
words, it is clear by now that if the relation that holds between
Husserl and Ryle is to be diagnosed through what Ryle writes of it, it
requires of its interpreter a certain amount of suspicion and scepti-
cism regarding what Ryle writes ‘between the lines’.
Thus, it would come as no surprise to anyone acquainted with
either Husserl or Ryle’s writings on him that what follows the above
attack on Husserl is, in fact, a sustained dialogue with his work. Of
course, acquaintance with either Husserl or Ryle’s writings on him
is necessary for detecting this dialogue. The reason for this is Ryle’s
failure to mention Husserl’s name throughout his discussion of his
work. In fact, excluding the overt polemics which we have already
looked at (and some discussion of various other philosophers, such
as Russell, Wittgenstein, or Sartre), the rest of ‘Phenomenology versus
The Concept of Mind’ is an essay on themes from Husserl’s work, and
if so only partly critical. Throughout the passages that follow, Ryle
discusses various ideas and views which we have already seen him
140 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
Nevertheless, it is clear that Ryle himself did indeed follow the path
which Husserl had set out on – indeed, he did so while simultaneously
explicitly attacking various doctrines upheld by Husserl (such as his
quasi-Platonism), and perhaps most rigorously discarding Husserl’s
meta-philosophical doctrines. Yet, we have seen that even where Ryle
is critical of ‘Platonism’ or Husserlian meta-philosophy, the attempts
to formulate such criticism can be seen as formative of his philo-
sophical development. Indeed, Ryle found in Husserl not only a path
to follow but also the finest formulations of those doctrines which he
thought were important to oppose.
Seeing Ryle in this light may allow us to approach anew passages
such as the following:
Husserl’s path led him into a crevasse, from which no exit existed;
whereas the epistemological travails of contemporary English
thinkers led them, indeed, into morasses, but morasses from which
firmer ground could be reached.
First, Husserl was so bewitched by his Platonic idea that concep-
tual enquiries were scrutinies of the super-objects that he called
‘Essences’, that he persuaded himself that these enquiries should
and would grow up into another science – grow up, indeed, not
just into one science among others but into the Mistress Science,
to which all other sciences would be in tutelage.
Next, for special reasons, he was convinced that the philosophy
of mind was the basic part of philosophy. All other conceptual
enquiries were logically posterior to enquiries into the concepts of
consciousness, ideation, perception, judgement, inference, imag-
ination, volition, desire and the rest. A Platonised Cartesianism
would be the science of the basic Essences; and so be the Mistress
not only of all the other sciences, but also of all the other parts of
philosophy. (Ryle, 1971b, pp. 180–181)
The crevasse into which Husserl was led by Platonism is one which
Ryle, having seen the ‘firmer ground’ which the morasses of the
English thinkers led to, may build a bridge across. But Ryle, following
Husserl’s path, insists on attributing to Husserl the formation of
the crevasse, perhaps in order to disguise his own bridge-building
activities. Ryle seems to attribute to Husserl every mistake Husserl
made, and to others everything that Husserl got right. Every time
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 143
him that he criticise the work of his colleagues, the former’s job was
that of preserving and making available to the world the thought of a
particular thinker. Thus, what might have seemed to Ryle to be unim-
portant details (e.g. biographical facts) may have deeply insulted Van
Breda, whose life’s work had been linked to the life of Husserl.
Fr. Van Breda’s response to Ryle is appropriately calm and restricted.
Van Breda notes a disagreement between him and Ryle that came
prior to Ryle’s presentation, according to which
It is here that we can see Ryle at his most polemical: once cornered
regarding his inaccurate depiction of Husserl, he responds with an
unjustifiable kind of mockery. He fails to acknowledge the impact that
the above facts have on his preceding presentation, i.e. the conclu-
sion that several of his statements do not refer to actual historical
events. In other words, his accusations against Husserl do not pick out
actual properties of Husserl’s philosophy (e.g. that it is unrelated to
its contemporary sciences, or even that it is Platonist). Nevertheless,
despite all the apparent faults of his position, Ryle insists on denying
the importance of studying Husserl in any depth. He alludes to the
fact that the previous Royaumont colloquium had been dedicated to
the study of Husserl, thus implying that Husserl had received enough
attention at Royaumont already; the subject has been covered, and
it exceeds the bounds of the subject at hand, namely that of analytic
philosophy.94
In the quoted passage above, Ryle refers to ‘the last writings of
Husserl’, which Van Breda had already brought into the discussion
in order to dispute Ryle’s claim that Husserl’s theory of meaning was
primarily a form of Platonism:
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 147
Here Van Breda makes the straightforward point that Ryle’s reduction
of Husserlian philosophy to Platonism is not upheld by those who
study Husserl. The dismissal of the link between phenomenology and
Platonism seems to render most of Ryle’s criticism against Husserl
redundant, and disables Ryle from bundling Husserl together with
the rest of the Germanophone Platonists that he had read in order to
reject. The mode of presentation of his point, though, is less direct:
he implies that Ryle got this wrong because of some ‘gulf that sepa-
rates Anglo-Saxon philosophers from the continent’.
Initially, this may seem innocent enough. The lack of Husserl
scholars within Ryle’s contemporary Anglo-Saxon context is the
cause of his ignorance; since his studies were solitary, and received
little attention from his colleagues, Ryle’s examination of Husserl was
bound to be in some way or other unchecked and therefore at risk of
flaws. Without the elenchtic function of some review by his peers,
Ryle’s account of Husserl remained an idiosyncratic one and may
have, in many cases, got its facts wrong.
Is this statement of a ‘gulf’ between two types of philosophers one
that is intended as generalisable? It does not seem to be so, for if it
were, it would be contradicted by Van Breda’s statements a few lines
later, within the same question. Responding to Ryle’s earlier state-
ment regarding ‘the massive developments of our logical theory’
(1971b, p. 182), Van Breda points out that
one cannot ignore that the circle of Vienna was born in Vienna,
and that around this time – which was also that of Russell and
Whitehead – philosophers were enormously occupied with logic
in Austria and other continental locations. This occurred less
in France, where human mortality seems to be dead set against
148 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
In other words, even if Van Breda had intended to claim that there is a
generalisable ‘gulf that separates Anglo-Saxon philosophers from the
continent’, this gulf would have to be construed in some particular
manner which would include the Vienna Circle and the other logi-
cians mentioned above on the side of the continent.95 Rather, what
Van Breda should be taken to say, or should have said, is that there
was, with the exception of Ryle (and others, such as J. N. Findlay),
no contemporary scholarly interest on Husserl at the time in the
Anglo-Saxon world. In contrast with the dominance of ‘the three
Hs’ (Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger) over the contemporary French
academic philosophy, British and American philosophers had almost
completely ignored Husserl. Such a contingent fact was bound to
change.96 It may even be said that by now, Husserl is studied equally,
if not more, by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ than by ‘continental’ philosophers.
In the last part of his exposition, Mr. Ryle gave us some glimpses
of his own research which, for me, is not absolutely a surprise,
since I have worked with his Concept of Mind. I found here some
indications which completely satisfy me, for example, when Mr.
Ryle said that the task of a philosopher is never simply to make the
inventory of a concept, that the philosopher, when he examines
that which is hidden in a word, is led into a complex spider-web
of concepts. This appears to me to be profoundly interesting and
true. Does this conform to the program of philosophical inves-
tigation that Russell posed or that even Wittgenstein posed?
This is the question that I asked myself. I submit it to Mr. Ryle,
certainly not as an objection, but as a demand for clarification.
(2005, p. 67)
152 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
One may wonder, glancing at this passage: Where have the ‘immense
distances’ or the ‘irreducible oppositions’ which Leslie Beck has
mentioned (1962, p. 7) gone? What does this exchange have to do
with the infamous ‘méconnaissance’ between these two thinkers and
the traditions they respectively stand for?
Of course we have seen that Ryle’s misrepresentations of Husserl
in his paper had been grave – Ryle successfully disguised any debt
he owed to Husserl in superficial polemics as well as in an adamant
refusal to read Husserl in depth. Yet, despite Ryle’s attempts to present
his work as something contrary to phenomenology (as seems to be
the goal of the title of his paper), the general response it received
during its discussion, including that of Merleau-Ponty, focused on
showing the affinities between Ryle’s presentation and those phil-
osophical tasks which phenomenologists took upon themselves.
The general impression one may get from reading the dialogue that
followed Ryle’s presentation is that the persons present in that room
saw Ryle’s work as transcending any strict boundaries between English
and Franco-German philosophical traditions.
The boundaries which Ryle seems more persistent in attempting
to draw are more obvious in the passage above. In response to
Merleau-Ponty’s question, Ryle replies that he is not following some or
other ‘programme’ that was set out by either Russell or Wittgenstein.
‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont 153
Once again, even if we take this claim as one being implied by Ryle’s
sayings, it should only be taken as the particular utterance of a very
special claim rather than a generalisable statement of the existence
of two different types of philosophy (one of which is critical, and the
other dogmatic). If Ryle does, indeed, seem to wish to attack some
sort of ‘dogmatic’ Husserlianism on behalf of others in that room, the
extent of his attack should be limited to the clarification of his own
relationship to Husserl (as well as to Russell and Wittgenstein). We
have already seen how this particular relationship between Husserl
and Ryle is one which Ryle is consistently ambivalent about. Thus, it
is no surprise that, when his presentation has been taken by so many
of his peers to indicate an affinity with Husserl’s philosophy, Ryle
reverts to an almost compulsive repetition of the claim that his own
approach to Husserl is a critical one.
This repetition is undertaken in the face of the various indications
that Ryle is in fact a phenomenologist. Of course, the first indication
of this is given by Ryle himself who, as we have seen, claims that his
own The Concept of Mind ‘could be described as a sustained essay in
phenomenology, if you are at home with that label’ (Ryle, 1971b, p.
188). Glendinning points out that Ryle
This point, despite Ryle’s wishes, did find its way into the colloquium
eventually, resulting in Ryle’s various spasmodic repetitions of his
rejection of Husserlian doctrines.
In the introduction of the colloquium Jean Wahl insightfully goes
beyond the veil Ryle’s title may impose upon its reader, noting that
though Ryle insists on presenting his work as contrary to Husserl,
if one reads on one may see that in fact Ryle is no less than a
Husserlian.
Thus, already at the outset, Ryle might have found himself in the
difficult position of being introduced (though under the shadow
of a doubt) to his colleagues as potentially a phénoménologue. And
despite his best efforts to dispel the rumour of his phenomenolog-
ical convictions, the subject of his own views’ affinities to phenom-
enology is brought up in multiple instances during this discussion
of his paper.
An example of this is given by Ryle himself in his response to Ayer’s
question. Referring to what he takes as Ryle’s prohibition of the anal-
ysis of mental acts (i.e. ‘the analysis of the genre of sentences in which
the words of memory and of recollection, or locutions such as “to
remember”, “to evoke”, “to reflect on one’s past” ’ (Merleau-Ponty,
2005, pp. 63–64)), Ayer states that
Wittgenstein pushes things a little too far when he affirms that one
cannot use a phrase such as ‘to speak of ... ’ or ‘to think about ... ’
without producing a descriptive statement of the object about
which one speaks or about which one thinks. I think for my part
that one can utilize phrases of this genre in a much more liberal
sense. And I no longer see any contradiction between what I just
said and the fact that one can no longer say false or true things in
relation to words such as ‘and’ ... (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p. 64)
1. Balliol, 1967
160
Derrida and Searle 161
53). This disapproval is read in ‘the faces of Ryle, Ayer and Strawson’
(Glendinning, 2001, p. 53).
The three different instances in which Derrida recalls this
event (out of which two are conjured by his return to Britain as a
guest, in 1977, of Jonathan Culler and Alan Montefiore to speak
on ‘“philosophy and literature”’ (Derrida, 1987, p. 15) in Oxford,
and in 1999 of Simon Glendinning at Reading) vary on the theme
of breaking the silence. In La Carte Postale (1980), there is only
silence. In Arguing with Derrida (1999), he notices that ‘Ayer started
arguing – but it didn’t improve the situation’ (Glendinning, 2001,
p. 53). And finally in Without Alibi (2002), he talks of ‘an angry
outburst from Ayer, the only one to lose his cool there among Ryle,
Strawson and so forth’ (p. 127). The latter account is given within
the context of discussing lying, and particularly of revisiting a
previous essay called Limited Inc, a b c ... (which, as we shall see, is
of central importance to our discussion here) by reading an auto-
biographical incident in the life of Rousseau – in particular, a story
from his Confessions according to which Rousseau perjured himself
by falsely attributing to himself another man’s crime of stealing a
ribbon (Derrida, 2002, p. 82). Thus, the difficulty in understanding
why Ayer, having argued with Merleau-Ponty and the hypermod-
ernist Bataille, would be angry at Derrida is supplemented by the
difficulty of coming to terms with Derrida’s blend of fiction and
testimony.
Derrida also interestingly varies his attribution of the embarrass-
ment involved in his presentation. In 1987 (The Postcard), he seems
to attribute the embarrassment to the faces of Ryle, Strawson, and
Ayer, whereas in 1999 (Arguing with Derrida) he speaks of his own
embarrassment, and of it being ‘a very embarrassing situation’
(Glendinning, 2001, p. 53): ‘I was totally mad to go to Oxford then to
give that lecture!’ (Glendinning, 2001, p. 53).
If the ‘silence’ of 1967 was indeed preceded by the ‘deafness’ of
1958, then it must also be noted that it is marked by the absence of
one man, an absence which Derrida recalls later on in his recounting
of the event:
The absence of Austin,2 who had died in his late forties in 1960
(two years after he had presented his work at Royaumont), is in
a way constitutive of the future trajectory which is contained in
this silent encounter between Derrida and Oxford philosophy
in 1967.3 Had he been present at Balliol in 1967, Austin prob-
ably would have had as little to say as any of the other philoso-
phers there. Ryle’s engagement with phenomenology, and even
Ayer’s encounter with existentialism, had not prepared them for
a response to Derrida. Derrida’s hypothesis was that there was
no prospect of arguing with Ryle, Ayer, or Strawson. But it might
be closer to the truth to say that the scope of what Derrida was
saying, and the way in which he was saying it, were too dissimilar
to anything they had encountered before. They did not respond
to Derrida, because they did not have much access to his views or
any other method in which to approach them.4 Derrida probably
would have seemed quite remote from what Ryle or Ayer (and in
all likelihood, Austin had he been present) had been familiar with
as ‘continental philosophy’.
Austin’s engagement with phenomenology would most probably
have had no effect on the overall silence which Derrida came to face
in 1967. Yet, there is a story, even though one that is fragmented
and all too brief, to be told regarding the relation between phenom-
enology and Austin’s work.5 This relation might be a determining
factor in Derrida’s later encounter with Austin (and with Austin’s
absence from Balliol).
In what follows, I briefly examine Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ of
Austin’s speech-act theory in the context of the dispute to which it
gave rise between Derrida and Searle. Much has been written about
the dispute, and this chapter does not aim to reiterate previous anal-
yses. I begin by examining Austin’s relation to phenomenology (as
it is developed by Derrida) in order to point to the Husserlian thread
which ties this dispute with those encounters addressed in previous
chapters. I go on to question in whose name the dispute is undertaken,
i.e. whether the dispute itself may count as one between ‘analytic’
and ‘continental’ philosophy. This image of Derrida and Searle as
representing two movements in philosophy is, as I show, one which
is questioned by both philosophers.
Derrida and Searle 163
Austin, in his article ‘A Plea for Excuses’, famously referred to his own
work as ‘linguistic phenomenology’.
Rather than place his work under the banner of ‘analytic philosophy’,
a camp which the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ practised at Oxford
was, at the time Austin was writing,6 eager to place itself at the head
of,7 Austin chose to dismiss such a slogan-like name. In its stead, Austin
proposed the term ‘linguistic phenomenology’, only too quickly to
renounce it as ‘a mouthful’: though the term is ‘better to use’, it is
also not quite to the liking of a good linguistic phenomenologist.8
Here Austin’s resistance to high-sounding titles echoes Gilbert Ryle’s
laments over the ‘awkward terminological innovation’ (Ryle, 1971b,
p. 168) involved in Brentano and Husserl’s term ‘phenomenology’.
Other than this echo, there are no explicit references to phenom-
enology by Austin. Interestingly, Austin’s notion of a speech-act has
among its most important forerunners Husserl’s collaborator and
pupil Adolf Reinach and his associate Alexander Pfänder.9 Reinach
developed an account of social acts in which some of the key elements
of Austin’s speech-act theory can be found, e.g. in Reinach’s under-
standing of certain social acts as involving performances of particular
utterances, and in his subsequent analysis of promising as such a social
act in ‘Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechts’. There
164 Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
One can quite easily get the idea of the performative utterance –
though the expression, as I am well aware, does not exist in the
French language,11 or anywhere else. This idea was brought in to
mark a contrast with that of the declarative utterance or rather,
as I am going to call it, the constative utterance. ... The constative
utterance, under the name, so dear to philosophers, of statement,
has the property of being true or false. The performative utterance,
by contrast, can never be either; it has its own special job, it is used
to perform an action. To issue such an utterance is to perform the
action – an action, perhaps, which one scarcely could perform, at
least with so much precision, in any other way. (1963, p. 22)
3. Derrida’s Austin
I did not find his arguments very clear and it is possible that I may
have misinterpreted him as profoundly as I believe he has misin-
terpreted Austin. (1977, p. 198)
With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure.
Every time you say, ‘He says so and so,’ he always says, ‘You misun-
derstood me’. But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation,
then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who
was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that
Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism
of obscurantism).24 We were speaking French. And I said, ‘What
the hell do you mean by that?’ And he said, ‘He writes so obscurely
you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and
then when you criticize him, he can always say, “You didn’t under-
stand me; you’re an idiot.” That’s the terrorism part.’ And I like
that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK
if I quoted that passage, and he said yes. (Postrel, Feser, & Searle,
2000)
7. In whose name?
182
Conclusion 183
Introduction
1. Bataille talks of an ‘abyss’ (1986, p. 80); Ryle (1971b, p. 182) and Dummett
(1993, p. xi) talks of a ‘gulf’.
2. See Reynolds & Chase, 2011, pp. 254–255.
3. A recent survey of the field is given in Floyd, 2009; see also Beaney, 1998;
Preston, 2005.
4. See esp. Sluga, 1998; Stroll, 2000; Glock, 2008; Monk, 1996a. See also
Hylton, 1990; Hacker, 2007; Glendinning, 2006; Preston, 2007; Floyd,
2009, p. 173.
5. See e.g. Stroll, 2000; Glock, 2008. See also Reynolds and Chase, 2010;
Reynolds et al., 2010.
6. An early variant of this view is proposed by Urmson (1992), who divides
the history of philosophical analysis into four types: (i) ‘classical’ analysis
(Russell), (ii) ideal-language analysis (early Wittgenstein, Vienna Circle,
Quine, Goodman), (iii) ‘therapeutic positivist’ (p. 299) analysis (later
Wittgenstein, Ryle, Wisdom, Waismann), and (iv) ‘ordinary language’
analysis (Austin). Weitz (1966) similarly comments that ‘it has become
established practice in anthologies and histories of twentieth century
philosophy to divide its analytic parts into (a) Realism, (b) Logical Analysis
or Logical Atomism, (c) Logical Positivism, and (d) Linguistic, Ordinary
Language, or Conceptual Analysis’ (p. 1). Russell (1959, p. 216) talked of
three waves in British philosophy 1914–1959, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
Logical Positivism, and the later Wittgenstein.More recently, Hacker (1996,
pp. 4–5; 2007) proposed a similar understanding of analytic philosophy
as a series of phases in the history of philosophy, rather than defining it
as either a set of necessary and sufficient conditions or as a family resem-
blance concept. Whereas Urmson emphasises the ‘decisive break’ (1960,
p. 187) between modes of analysis, Hacker emphasises the causal links
which connect one phase to another; see also Sluga, 1998, pp. 107–108.
Simons (2000), drawing from Brentano’s (1998) view of the history of
philosophy, also proposes a four-phase history of analytic philosophy,
beginning with Russell and Moore, followed by Dewey and James, going
through Wittgenstein and Quine and culminating with Rorty. In tracing
the American aspect of this development, Simons gives an alternative
view to Hacker’s, who finds in Quine and his followers ‘the decline of
analytic philosophy in all but name’ (1996, p. xi). Simons traces a parallel
line of development in continental philosophy, starting with Brentano
and Husserl, moving on to Heidegger, then to Sartre and finally to
Derrida. For a criticism of Simons’ view, see Dummett, 2010, pp. 148–149.
184
Notes 185
7. One may emphasise the British (e.g. Hacker, 1996) or the American
perspective (Simons, 2000; Soames, 2003) of this phase.
8. As Michael Dummett points out, ‘even Japanese philosophy departments
are split between analytic philosophers, Heideggerians, Hegelians and so
on’ (2010, p. 149).
9. See Hacker, 1996, p. 274.
10. Ayer et al., 1967.
11. It is notable, however, that the first use of the term ‘analytic philosophy’ is
to be found in a critique against it, launched in 1933 by one of its earliest
opponents, R. G. Collingwood. See Beaney, 2001. Another early use of
the term is made by Nagel (1936), who had seen ‘analytic philosophy’
as a European phenomenon, ‘professed at Cambridge, Vienna, Prague,
Warsaw, and Lwów’ (p. 6).
12. Nonetheless, ‘continental philosophy’ is currently taught as a branch of
philosophy in the continent; see Gosvig (2012).
13. Despite this, there have been attempts at defining continental philosophy
in what Reynolds and Chase (2010) call ‘essentialist’ terms. For example,
Cooper (1994, pp. 4–7) points to what he sees as three definitively ‘conti-
nental’ themes: ‘cultural critique, concern with the background condi-
tions of enquiry, and ... “the fall of the self”’ (p. 4). But these themes do
not seem to sufficiently characterise a distinctively continental approach
to philosophy (e.g. they have been of philosophical concern since antiq-
uity); they are not even necessarily proper to (academic) philosophy. For
all these, Cooper notes that they are features which are not admitted by
analytic philosophers into their conception of the discipline: Strawson
(1992) admits that ‘reflection on the human condition’ belongs to ‘a
species of philosophy’ ‘quite different’ (p. 2) in its aims from analytic
philosophy (Cooper, 1994, p. 4); Williams claims that analytic philos-
ophy finds Nietzschean genealogy ‘quite embarrassing’ (Williams, 1993,
p. 13, quoted in Cooper, 1994, p. 6); Ryle’s (1949) ‘ghost in the machine’
contrasts with Sartre’s ‘bloodthirsty idol which devours all one’s projects’
(Cooper, 1994, p. 6). By referring to these themes, Cooper unwittingly
seems to point to the degree by which ‘continental’ philosophy is shaped
by exclusion.Reynolds and Chase (2010) instead see the differences
between analytic and continental philosophy in terms of family resem-
blances (i.e. neither in ‘essentialist’ nor ‘deflationary’ terms) regarding
respective attitudes towards particular themes and methodological
commitments; see Vrahimis, 2011b.
14. See Føllesdal, 1997.
15. Some examples of this include Foucault’s controversy with Habermas
(Kelly, 1994), as well as Derrida’s polemical exchanges with Foucault
(Derrida, 2001, pp. 36–76), Gadamer (Michelfelder & Palmer, 1989), and
Habermas (Thomassen, 2006).
16. Some (e.g. Braver, 2007; Critchley, 1997) might see the division stretching
back to Kant or perhaps to some post-Kantian philosopher such as Hegel
or Nietzsche (see e.g. Rosen 2001; Braver, 2007, pp. 59–162; Babich, 2003;
186 Notes
to its content and was widely taken to have been conclusively given by
Aristotle.
30. The extent of ground which Husserl’s term ‘logic’ may be said to cover
is not clear. According to Smith (2002, p. 52), there are three possible
approaches to the issue: (i) the whole of Logical Investigations is about
logic (construed in its nineteenth century sense as a kind of philosophy
of logic), (ii) only a small part of Logical Investigations is about logic
(construed as what in the nineteenth century would be called Logistik)
(iii) in the Logical Investigations, ‘logic as conceived today is integrated
with speech-act theory, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology’
(p. 52). Although the twenty-first-century view of logic (what Smith
calls the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation of Husserl) is anachronistic when
applied to Husserl, it is not completely implausible, given (i), that
Husserl may have held it.Ryle offers an interpretation of Husserl which
assumes the separability of his (‘quasi-Platonist’) ontology from his
phenomenology – perhaps this view is due to Ryle’s assumption of (ii);
see also Chapter 4, §5.
31. Husserl inherits the idea of eigentliche Wissenschaftslehre from Bolzano
(Bolzano 1972). However, whereas Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre is tied to
the notion of objective ideas, the notion of object we find in Husserl is
more nuanced; see also Simons, 1987.
32. The definition of logic as a normative discipline is the common point
between Frege’s arguments against psychologism in his 1893 first volume
of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1997, p. 202) and those which Husserl
makes here. The discussion of the is-ought distinction becomes instru-
mental in the attack on psychologism, in different ways for each author.
Frege sees a direct link between defining logic as a discipline of the way
in which thought ought to be, contrary to the way in which thought is,
which is the study that pertains to the field of psychology. Husserl criti-
cises this approach to arguing against psychologism in the Prolegomena
of the Logische Untersuchungen (2001, pp. 31–35, §§19–20), although not
explicitly directing his criticism against Frege. For a detailed exposition
of the arguments Husserl makes, see Kusch, 1995, pp. 43–58, and the
subsequent comparison between Frege and Husserl’s arguments in Kusch,
1995, pp. 60–62.
33. Husserl, for example, compares his account of logic as a technology to
the idea of l’art de penser (2001, p. 21). See also Mormann, 1991 (esp.
p. 67).Interestingly, the term ‘technology’ is also used by Ryle (1971a,
ix) in describing Carnap’s formalist project of utilising modern logic in
philosophy.
34. Husserl, 2001, p. 78; see also Chapter 4, §9 on Husserl’s categories of
meaning.
35. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983a27.
36. Chapter 2, §19 and Chapter 4, §5 give a more detailed account of Husserl’s
theory of meaning.
190 Notes
37. Among others, Brentano, Meinong, Natorp, Rickert, Sigward, Stumpf, and
Wundt, had seen Husserl’s criticism of psychologism as psychologistic. As
Kusch (pp. 90–91) points out, there were various views as to how Husserl,
it was argued, relapsed into psychologism: (i) some thought that his view
of self-evidence was psychologistic, (ii) some saw his Platonism as a form
of psychologism, (iii) others thought the division between the ideal and
the real was psychologistic, while (iv) others still saw ‘phenomenology’ or
‘descriptive psychology’ as psychologistic.
38. It is interesting to note that the derogatory term ‘existentialism’ had been
coined during the Psychologismus-Streit to denote some doctrine slightly
less offensive to psychologism, according to which the realm of logic is
dependent on existing beings; see Kusch, 1995, p. 11.
39. See also Chapter 2, §2.
40. See Rickert, 1904, p. 88; Rickert, 2002, pp. 195–196 & 211; Kroner, 1908,
pp. 241–242.
41. See Schlick, 1918, pp. 120–121; Husserl, 2001, p. 269. Following Husserl’s
complaint, Schlick withdrew his previous comments, rewriting them in a
footnote (1985, p. 139). See also Van de Pitte, 1984; Livingston, 2002.
42. See Schlick, 1985, pp. 139 & 153. Schlick had already criticised Husserl’s
first volume of the Logische Untersuchungen in his Habilitationsschrift
(1910).
43. Natorp, 1901.
44. See also Kusch’s table of all the types of objections to and accusations
levelled against Husserl (1995, p. 93), and Kusch’s table of the accusations
of ‘psychologism’ weighted from one ‘school’ against another (1995, p.
99).
45. In a footnote, Husserl refers to Frege’s arguments (along with those of the
Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp) for the separation of psychology and math-
ematics (2001, p. 406), taking them as a given for his own argument. In
the same footnote, he also withdraws the criticisms he made against Frege
in his Philosophie der Arithmetik. Heidegger’s (1978a) mention of Frege’s
work is another notable exception.
46. See Heidegger, 1978a; Kusch, 1995, p. 89.
47. See Mendelsohn, 2005, pp. 2–3. For a sociological account of Frege’s recep-
tion, see Pulkkinnen, 2000. As Kusch points out (1995, pp. 205–206), the
University of Jena was, at the time Frege was working there, an impov-
erished institution at the margins of German academia. See also Dathe,
2005; Carnap, 1963a, pp. 3–5.
48. See Dathe, 2005; Kusch, 1995, pp. 205–206.
49. British Idealism had already developed a form of anti-psychologism;
in particular F. H. Bradley in his Principles of Logic (1883) had attacked
the empiricist view that judgements and inferences are ideas, construed
psychologically.For a discussion of the anti-psychologistic influence on
Moore of F. H. Bradley, G. F. Stout and J. Ward, see Preti, 2008.
50. See Russell, 1905. See also Beaney, 2003, pp. 129–131.
51. See e.g. Carnap, 1963a, p. 3; Mendelsohn, 2005, p. 5.
Notes 191
52. To a large extent, it was through his reading of Peano (who had read
Frege’s work) that Russell had received a lot of Frege’s insights; see Beaney,
2004, pp. 130–131.
53. On the question of the relation of influence between Frege and
Wittgenstein, see e.g. Green, 1999; Reck, 2002.
54. Nevertheless, Husserl’s attitude to the history of ideas is generally a nega-
tive one – this is important in some of his later writings where he sees
philosophy on the path towards becoming rigorous science; see Husserl,
1965, p. 128.
55. Husserl insisted on continuously introducing phenomenology anew –
most of his books’ subtitles include the word ‘introduction’ or some
variant thereof (Husserl, 2001, 1962, 1960 & 1970); see Cumming, 2001,
pp. 3–4; see also Glendinning, 2007, pp. 31–33.
56. Various French philosophers of science and epistemologists (e.g. Cavaillès,
Bachelard, Canguilhem) who opposed themselves to this particular line of
phenomenological philosophers (see Foucault, 1998) were also informed
by Husserl’s early work; see Schrift, 2006, pp. 36–37.
57. See e.g. Alweiss, 2003.
58. See Monk, 1996b.
59. There might be something distorting (and, as Majer notes (1997, p. 37),
mistaken) about reading Husserl through the perspective of either side –
it is possible that a more interesting approach to Husserl is one which is
neither analytical nor continental/‘Husserlian’.
60. Though the Vienna Circle’s manifesto refers explicitly to Brentano and
his students as contributing to the scientific Weltauffassung, emphasising
their development of Bolzano’s insights in logic, no mention of Husserl
is made, but only of Höfler, Meinong, Mally, and Pichler (Carnap, Hahn
& Neurath, 1973, pp. 302–303). Perhaps this omission had been due to
Schlick’s polemical exchange with Husserl.
61. Note also that Husserl was in close contact with various philosophically-
minded mathematicians of the time, for example, Weierstrass, Hilbert,
and Cantor. The significance of this aspect of Husserl’s life and thought is
discussed in Chapter 4, §13. See also Hill & Rosado Haddock, 2000.
62. See Chapter 2, §19.
63. See Chapter 4.
64. See Chapter 5, §5.
65. See Küng, 1993; Miskiewicz, 2009; Lukasiewicz, 2009.
66. See Huemer, 2003. See also Kaufmann, 1940 & 1941.
67. In this list, one may find included almost all of the ‘analytic’ protago-
nists of our subsequent chapters.Another, lesser known, member of the
Circle associated with Kaufmann and interested in phenomenology was
Robert Neumann. Huemer also shows, quoting from Gustav Bergmann’s
diary, that the Vienna Circle ‘phenomenologists’ were considered by
other members to lie quite close to the ‘Wittgensteinians’; Waismann
‘in private recommended reading Husserl’ (Bergmann, 1993, p.
200), leading to a meeting in which Hahn asked Waismann ‘how he
192 Notes
29. See Skidelsky, 2008, pp. 160–194. This was paralleled by the vitalist oppo-
sition to Neo-Kantianism in interwar France.
30. See e.g. Windelband, 1915, pp. 273–289.
31. Most Marburg Neo-Kantians were social-democrats or socialists, whereas
the Southwesterners were predominantly conservative, and sometimes
reactionary; see e.g. Mormann, 2000, p. 45; Gordon, 2010, pp. 22–24.
32. See Cassirer, 1929. On Cassirer’s politics see Skidelsky, 2008, pp.
220–238.
33. See Cooper, 1999.
34. See e.g. Spengler, 1926, pp. 41–43.
35. See e.g. Lukács, 1980 and Marcuse, 1969.
36. Kusch (1995, pp. 211–212) claims that these may be divided into those
(e.g. Rickert) who took Lebensphilosophie as a new term that, like ‘psychol-
ogism’, one may use as an accusation against other philosophers, and
those who attempted to appropriate its force (e.g. Scheller). Kusch briefly
examines Neurath’s response to Spengler and finds it to ‘not deviate
much from other contemporaneous reproaches’ (p. 250). Yet, Neurath’s
‘Anti-Spengler’ introduces (albeit perhaps too quickly) an idea of verifica-
tion which slowly came to be transformed into the positivist ‘elimina-
tion’ of metaphysics. Neurath distinguishes between world-feeling and
world view in a manner which leads to the later distinction between
Weltanschauung and Weltauffassung, and to Carnap’s distinction between
Lebensgefühl and theory. Kusch mentions the political tone of the Vienna
Circle’s manifesto (10 years after Neurath’s ‘Anti-Spengler’) and notes
that it might have functioned to fashionably distinguish the Circle from
apolitical Professorenphilosophie (which was seen as abstaining from real-
life matters). Yet, he fails to add to this the biographical fact that Neurath’s
‘Anti-Spengler’ had been written by a Marxist who had been imprisoned
for his political activities; see also Cartwright, 1996, p. 76.
37. Rickert (1920) criticised Lebensphilosophie by arguing for a philosophical a
priori status of values which is distinct from the alignment of values with
life.
38. Although Neurath’s ideas were worlds apart from Rickert’s, Neurath
cites Rickert’s attack on Lebensphilosophie more or less approvingly in his
critique of Spengler (1973, pp. 209–210).
39. Despite Neurath’s early rejection of Spengler’s views, several concerns
derived from Lebensphilosophie lingered around the Vienna Circle. The
question of the relation of science to life was already set out in the Circle’s
1929 manifesto, which identifies the development of the scientific
Weltauffassung it proposes with its service to life and vice versa (Carnap,
Hahn & Neurath, 1973, p. 318). Surprisingly, Schlick (1927) emphasised
the role of Lebensphilosophie in developing a conception of the meaning
of life. Wittgenstein’s conception of life has an ambiguous relation with
Spengler and Lebensphilosophie; see e.g. DeAngelis, 2007; Haller, 1988, pp.
74–89.Most importantly for our topic, Carnap’s questioning of the theme
of the relation between science and life leads him gradually to his thesis
against metaphysics. The earliest development of this thesis, as well as
196 Notes
examples of Aristotle and Kant, noting that their metaphysical views were
not deemed by him as meaningless, but as false (1963b, p. 875).
72. Carnap does not clarify how far the ancient sceptics opposed metaphysics.
It is perhaps to particular aspects of ancient scepticism that Carnap is
alluding to here (for example, their development of Agrippa’s trilemma
rather than their ethics). See also Quine, 1974, pp. 2–3.
73. See Anderson, 2005, p. 302.
74. In his introduction, Carnap (1959) alludes to this when among his failed
predecessors he talks of those who believe metaphysics ‘to be uncertain, on
the ground that its problems transcend the limits of knowledge’ (p. 60).
75. See Carnap, 1936 for a clarification of the shift in Carnap’s concerns from
epistemology to semantics and the logic of science. See Richardson, 1998,
p. 91.
76. This view falls within a more general interpretative framework which
sees Neo-Kantianism as the central influence on Carnap’s early writings
(rather than, for example, Russell, which is the view established by Quine
and Goodman); see e.g. Haack, 1996; Sauer, 1989; Richardson, 1998;
Friedman, 2000.
77. The Neo-Kantians were not, in their totality, averse to metaphysics.
78. These metaphysicians belong to a Kantian tradition insofar as they are
not ‘pre-critical’ dogmatic metaphysicians: in other words, Carnap is
partly mistaken when he attributes to them knowledge of the essence of
things. Nevertheless, he is also partly correct, insofar as these thinkers are
striving, within the limitations set out by Kant, to establish an ontology
rather than an epistemology. See Limniatis, 2008 (esp. pp. 152–190).
79. Though from 1929 to 1931, Heidegger might have appeared, for Carnap,
to be a metaphysician, Heidegger’s views on metaphysics were not always
favourable, and changed throughout his career; see Inwood, 1999, pp.
126–128.
80. For example, Heidegger held a very ambivalent attitude towards Hegel;
he later set as the task of his historical lectures ‘to place Hegel’s system in
the commanding view and then to think in a totally opposite direction’
(Heidegger, 2000, p. 123).
81. It is likely that by ‘metaphysician’, Carnap simply means whoever
produces nonsensical (i.e. metaphysical) statements.
82. See Inwood, 1999, p. 126.
83. Heidegger is here criticising Cohen’s conception of das Nichts; see Gordon,
2005, p. 50.
84. See Crowell, 2001, p. 81.
85. See Chapter 1, §4b.
86. See Käufer, 2005, pp. 141–144.
87. Heidegger was ‘one of the first German philosophers seriously to read
Frege’ (Simons, 2001, p. 299); see Heidegger, 1978, p. 20. For his negative
remarks on Russell’s logic as mere calculus see Heidegger, 1978, pp. 42–43
& 174. See also Friedman, 2001, p. 39.
88. See Heidegger, 1978a, 1978b, 1978c.
200 Notes
89. See Priest, 2001; Käufer, 2005, pp. 144–146; Crowell, 2001, pp. 76–114;
Mohanty, 1988.
90. See Käufer, 2005, p. 144.
91. See Martin, 2006, pp. 103–146.
92. See Friedman, 2000, pp. 46–47.
93. Heidegger, 1996, pp. 62–67.
94. See Heidegger, 1996, pp. 70–77.
95. See Heidegger, 1996, pp. 68–69.
96. See Heidegger, 1996, p. 63.
97. Heidegger, 1996, §§39–42.
98. Heidegger, 1996, §45.
99. Heidegger, 1996, §§46–53.
100. See Heidegger, 1996, §40.
101. See Heidegger, 1998, p. 88.
102. See Heidegger, 1998, p. 89.
103. Here, ‘more originary’ does not imply temporal priority. To be thrown
in the midst of ready-to-hand entities is always temporally prior to
ontology (but not prior to an understanding of Being). An authentic
relation to the world is temporally posterior but ontologically prior.
104. Heidegger, 1998, p. 85.
105. The sphere of the ontological must be further divided into its pre-on-
tological and ontological components. The pre-ontological is the onto-
logical before it is made explicit, before an account can be given of it. For
example, the movement from anxiety to the understanding of its refer-
ence to nothing is a movement from the pre-ontological to the onto-
logical. See also Inwood, 1999, p. 109.
106. It is not clear, though, that this understanding may be applied to modern
post-Aristotelian logics (e.g. non-binary logics).
107. See Heidegger, 1996, p. 42.
108. The context in which Heidegger makes the distinction quoted above
(between categories and existentials) is that of the general differentiation
between what he calls ‘the Analytic of Dasein’ and the disciplines of
psychology, anthropology, and biology (1996, pp. 42–47).
109. Carnap, 1967, p. 148. The condition is singular and may be applied to
either of the four different ‘languages’ Carnap specifies (syntax, logical
form, epistemology or ‘phenomenology’).
110. In this, Carnap has been influenced by Lebensphilosophie, in particular
through Dilthey’s student Hermann Nohl; see Gabriel, 2003; Gabriel
further cites Naess, 1968 and Patzig, 1966.
111. It must be noted here that Carnap had first presented this thesis to a
group of artists and architects at the Bauhaus school of Dessau in 1929
under the title ‘The misuse of Language’ (Der Mißbrauch der Sprache).
This may be taken as a clue towards also reading his turn against meta-
physics as a protreptic towards artists to take over the gap that will be
left once metaphysicians realise their proper place. See Dahms, 2004,
pp. 368–370; Vrahimis, 2012b. (As Dahms notes, his use of Heidegger
Notes 201
121. It is important to note here that Husserl’s talk of the archai of the sciences
was one which was made in parallel with Husserl’s early rejection of
metaphysics; see e.g. Schmitt, 1962a & 1962b; Zahavi, 2003; Priest,
1999.
122. See Heidegger, 1993, 1998d, 2007.
123. See e.g. Rorty, 1991; Derrida, 1991.
124. See also Stone, 2006, pp. 221–222.
125. It is possible that Carnap might have meant that the sentence ‘Nothing
is outside’ (p. 70) is here translated in another language (according to
the relevant rules of transformation), into the sentence ‘There is nothing
(does not exist anything) which is outside’ (p. 70), which has a different
logical structure.
126. Heidegger agrees that he does not use ‘nothing’ as a neologism; see
Stone, 2006.
127. E.g. Conant, 2001; Käufer, 2005.
128. In his response (though not explicitly addressed to Carnap), Heidegger
(1998c) claims that ‘the question “What is metaphysics?” ... springs from
a thinking that has already entered into the overcoming [Überwindung]
of metaphysics’ (p. 231). Another implicit response to Carnap is found
in Heidegger, 1998d.
129. See Friedman, 1996b, p. 48.
130. See e.g. Friedman, 2000, p. 12.
131. See Stone, 2006; Gabriel, 2003.
132. Heidegger later discusses the Überwindung (Heidegger, 1969, p. 43) and
afterwards Verwindung (Heidegger, 1959) of metaphysics.
133. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1026a.
134. See Atkins, 1962.
135. In an earlier translation, ‘illusory problems’ is more appropriately trans-
lated as ‘pseudo-problems’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 262).
136. See Heidegger, 1971.
137. See Friedman, 2003, p. 20.
138. See Reck, 2007. On the relation of logical positivism to the ‘soft’ sciences,
see Hardcastle, 2007; Uebel, 2007; Nemeth, 2007.
139. See also Friedman, 2000.
140. See also Gabriel, 2003.
141. See Gordon, 2010, pp. 43–48.
142. Carnap studied under Frege in 1910 and 1913–14; see Thiel & Beaney,
2005, p. 30.
143. See Rosado Haddock, 2008; Mayer, 1991, 1992; Ryckman, 2007; Gabriel,
2007.
144. On the Husserlian influence on Der Raum see e.g. Sarkar, 2003.
145. See Rosado Haddock, 2008; Ryckman, 2007; Roy, 2004.
146. See Friedman, 1996a.
147. Nieli (1987, pp. 61–64) traces the change of attitude back to Carnap,
1967, whereas Mormann (2007) points to Carnap, Hahn & Neurath,
1973 as an important turning point.
Notes 203
148. See e.g. Carnap, 1950; Quine & Carnap, 1990, p. 406. On the question
of the influence of Husserl on Carnap’s notion of explication (devel-
oped from his earliest work to 1950), see Beaney, 2004. See also Beaney,
2007.
149. See Ryckman, 2007, pp. 91–92; Rosado Haddock, 2008, p. 2.
150. Rosado Haddock (2008, p. 3) points to the resemblance with Carnap of
a person in the seminar photograph but goes on to also question this
resemblance.
151. See Rosado Haddock, 2008, pp. 1–2; Carnap, 1967, pp. 4–5.
152. Wittgenstein (1922) announces that most philosophical propositions are
nonsense (4.003), which throughout the Tractatus can be taken (through
a problematically proto-verificationist reading) to mean neither true nor
false (e.g. 5.5351, 6.51).Furthermore, in the passage which follows his
announcement, he attributes to Russell’s theory of descriptions the view
that ‘the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one’
(4.0031). Both Russell and Wittgenstein’s reading of Russell are certainly
sources for Carnap’s division between logical and historico-grammatical
syntax.Carnap’s views on nonsense may have resulted from Carnap’s
break with Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning; see Carus, 2007, p.
33.
153. See e.g. Conant, 2001; Hacker, 2003.
154. See Carnap, 1963a, pp. 25–26. Carnap’s relations with Wittgenstein
ended traumatically in 1932; upon reading the offprint of Carnap’s latest
publication in Erkenntnis Wittgenstein became enraged, thinking that
Carnap was stealing his ideas; see Hintikka, 1996, pp. 131–132.
155. The text referred to here consists of notes typed by Waismann in the
presence of Schlick in 1929, later published as the ‘Lecture on Ethics’
(Wittgenstein, 1965), which excluded his very explicitly approving
comments on Heidegger; see also Murray, 1974.Wittgenstein remarks
that ‘Ich kann mir wohl denken was Heidegger mit Sein und Angst meint’
(Wittgenstein, Waismann & McGuinness, 1967, p. 68) (‘I can readily
think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread’ (Wittgenstein, 1978,
p. 80)). Given the date in which the discussion took place, Wittgenstein
must have been referring to ‘Was ist metaphysik?’In the undated notes
he dictated to Waismann for Schlick, titled ‘On the character of disquiet’
(Wittgenstein, Waismann & Baker, 2003, pp. 69–77), Wittgenstein also
quotes Heidegger’s ‘Das Nichts Nichtet’, perhaps less approvingly this
time. As Gordon Baker suspects (Wittgenstein, Waismann & Baker, 2003,
p. xvi), it is probable that he dictated these notes in December 1932,
which makes it likely that here Wittgenstein is responding to Carnap. This
might, in turn, imply that Wittgenstein’s attitude is one of replacing
the kind of criticism Carnap weighed against Heidegger. Instead of
looking for a criterion for differentiating between sense and nonsense,
Wittgenstein produces a series of aporetic remarks on Heidegger’s view.
156. On Frege’s views of senselessness, see e.g. Diamond, 1991, pp. 73–93;
Conant, 2000. The Fregean notion of nonsense which both Diamond
204 Notes
and Conant find in Wittgenstein is one which they contrast with the
Vienna Circle’s positivistic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s conception
of nonsense.Frege held that expressions such as ‘There is Julius Caesar’
(1997, p. 189) are senseless (meaning neither true or false) because they
employ a proper name (i.e. an object) as a concept word. Frege’s notion
of a sentence being senseless if and only if it is neither true nor false is
undoubtedly important in the development of Carnap’s thoughts on the
subject (as well as Russell and Wittgenstein’s).
157. See Gabriel, 2007, pp. 70–73. As we have seen, Frege (and his ‘Julius
Caesar problem’) is one of the targets of Carnap’s criticism in this
paper.
158. See Bar-Hillel, 1957.
159. This view is originally ‘not Carnap’s, nor Frege’s, nor Russell’s or
Whitehead’s or Hilbert’s, but Husserl’s’ (Rosado Haddock, 2008, p. 100);
see also Bar-Hillel, 1957, p. 367.
160. For Husserl, this distinction is particularly important, since meaningless-
ness is a method for the detection of differences between categories of
meaning; thus, this method becomes central to Husserl’s development of
his system of categories; see Thomasson, 2009.
161. The term ‘developed’ should be understood to imply here that a priori
grammatical rules appear in languages which already have certain
‘linguistic habits’ (and thereby it might seem that the a priori rules
somehow presuppose the historical formation of the a posteriori ones,
though they are logically prior).
162. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl misleadingly gives the expression (8)
‘a round square’ as an example of an absurd expression. He later clarifies
(Husserl, 1969 & 1975) that he is referring only to formal combinations
of meanings (as in the example given above), excluding the ‘material of
knowledge’ (Husserl, 2001, p. 194) entailed in the more concrete aspect
of (8). See Bachelard, 1968, pp. 7–8.Husserl emphasises that the laws
of formal grammar (what Husserl calls ‘the laws of complex meaning’
(2001, p. 183)) guard against nonsense, while ‘the laws of pure logic
establish what an object’s possible unity requires in virtue of its pure form’
thus guarding against formal absurdity.
163. ‘An object (e.g. a thing, state of affairs) which unites all that the unified
meaning conceives as pertaining to it by way of its “incompatible”
meanings, neither exists nor can exist, though the meaning itself exists’
(Husserl, 2001, p. 193). See also Tugendhat, 1982, pp. 107–120.
164. Formal absurdity results if an object is a priori impossible (due to the laws
of pure logic), while material absurdity is ultimately ontological (e.g.
results from combining ‘round’ and ‘square’). In 1931, Carnap would
have objected to the latter (though not the former).
165. Bar-Hillel (1957) points out that Husserl’s laws for avoiding nonsense
and formal countersense are ‘an interesting anticipation of the modern
conceptions of rules of formation and rules of transformation’ (p. 366)
central to Carnap’s work. Though the former may be true, it is possible
Notes 205
50. ‘The depth of this distinction may be questioned, but the fact that he
frames it in these terms does not diminish the force of Merleau-Ponty’s
argument’ (Ayer, 1984, p. 220).
51. Cf. Carman’s (2007) comparison of analytic and continental notions of
intentionality.
52. Ayer is here replying to Taylor’s exposition of the phenomenological view
that ‘perception is a kind of behaviour’ (Taylor and Ayer, 1959, p. 96),
i.e. that it is active. Taylor contrasts this phenomenological view with
the empiricist view of perception as passive, whereby impressions acquire
their significance by association ‘in the sense of a physiologically-defined
stimulus’ (Taylor and Ayer, 1959, p. 96). Taylor sees empiricism as aligned
with a problematic behaviourism; Ayer concedes that behaviourism ‘faces
obvious difficulties, but I am not so easily persuaded by Mr. Taylor that
they are insuperable’ (Taylor and Ayer, 1959, p. 115).
53. See Merleau-Ponty, 2002, pp. 17–18.
54. In 1961, Merleau-Ponty gave a lecture (hitherto unpublished) at
Manchester on the subject of Wittgenstein’s philosophy (Mays & Brown,
1972, p. 20).
55. It is followed, a year later in Britain, by a brief statement made in a review
of Croce’s My Philosophy by Isaiah Berlin, who claims that ‘no student of
contemporary philosophy, however superficial, can fail to observe that
it is divided by a chasm which divides the main portion of the conti-
nent of Europe on the one hand, from the Anglo-American world with
its Scandinavian, Austrian and Polish intellectual dependencies’ (Berlin,
1952, p. 574). Note the similarity in the imagery involved (‘chasm’,
‘abyss’), as well as the closeness of the dates; this might imply that Ayer
had been Berlin’s source. See Rée, 1993.
56. See Himanka, 2000 and Critchley, 2001, pp. 35–36.
57. One phenomenon related to Bataille’s claim is the lack of imports of
French books into England during the Second World War; see Acton,
1947. (Note that Acton, in giving a survey of at least eight years in which
French philosophy had been neglected in England, cites Ayer’s criticism
of Sartre in Horizon – but no other authors critical of Sartre.)
58. Sartre, 1975. See also Heimonet, 1996; Hollywood, 2002, pp. 25–36.
49. Thomasson (2002, 2007, 2009) and Brandl (2002) construe Ryle’s ambiva-
lent stance towards Husserl as an inheritance of his methods, coupled
with a rejection of his doctrines. Yet this distinction between method
and doctrine does not map onto Ryle’s problematic divorcing of phenom-
enology from Husserl’s theory of meaning.
50. Though ‘partly sympathetic’, these articles did not necessarily effect
sympathy; see Gallagher, 2005, pp. 293–296.
51. Hereby referred to as SME.
52. See Ryle, 1932a, p. 158.
53. See Ryle, 1932a, pp. 142–143.
54. Ryle opens SME with the meta-philosophical argument that to under-
stand the task of philosophers as that of analysing concepts and judge-
ments ‘is only a gaseous way of saying that they are trying to discover
what is meant by the general terms contained in the sentences which
they pronounce or write’ (Ryle, 1932a, p. 139), since ‘concept’ and ‘judge-
ment’ are themselves systematically misleading expressions.
55. As Ayer elsewhere says, the intuition of essences may be better envis-
aged as a study of ‘concepts at work’ rather than ‘as Husserl sometimes
seems to imply, in gazing at concepts like stars in a planetarium’, bringing
phenomenology ‘very close in practice to the linguistic analysts’ (Ayer
and Taylor, 1959, p. 121). (Ayer might have been told by Ryle that
Husserl implies phenomenology is an ‘observational science’.)Ryle’s
insistence on presenting Husserl as a kind of Platonistic geographer of
essences, in contrast to his own ‘logical geography’ of mental concepts is
misleading, given that what Husserl really meant by ‘intuiting essences’
is, precisely, a method of eidetic variation. Ryle may have inherited part
of Husserl’s method of eidetic reduction through imaginative variation;
see Thomasson, 2007.
56. Compare this with Russell’s (1905) views on Meinong.
57. See also Ryle, 1971b, p. 183.
58. Ryle links his early anti-psychologism and his interest in Husserl with his
eventual turn against Cartesianism; see Murray, 1992, p. 339.
59. See Ryle, 1927.
60. See Thomasson, 2007, pp. 281–282.
61. In this passage, Ryle is attributing these words to Brentano, in the context
of describing the kinds of questions particular to descriptive psychology
(i.e. ‘psychognosy’ or ‘phenomenology’), e.g. ‘what is it to be a case of
remembering’.
62. See also Mays, 1970.
63. See Mays, 1970. The phenomenological tradition gave a series of answers to
this threat against Husserl’s approach: (a) for Husserl, relating the problem
to a form of transcendental subjectivity is the key to both preserving
the world and engaging in the epochē, and (b) Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty retain some form of the phenomenological method while rejecting
Husserl’s Cartesianism; see Glendinning, 2007, pp. 48–58.Perhaps Ryle
may be counted among the latter, insofar as he rejects the existence of
216 Notes
84. Akehurst (2010) links a particular aspect of analytic philosophy with the
rejection of continental philosophy as a theoretical enterprise due to its
belief that it gave rise to, and backing for, Nazism.
85. Obviously Ryle is referring here to Frege and his lack of influence on his
Germanophone contemporaries (see Chapter 1, §5). Gillies (1999, p. 172)
points out that Husserl, by working on the philosophy of mathematics in
a philosophy (not mathematics) department, is the ‘striking’ exception
to the norm. (Other exceptions are the Marburg Neo-Kantians: Cohen,
Natorp and Cassirer).
86. See Glendinning, 2006, pp. 69–74; Glock, 2008, pp. 62–63; Critchley,
2001, p. 35. See also Rée, 1993.
87. His reference to ‘our logical theory’ ignores the contributions of Austrian
thinkers to the development of logic; see Monk, 1996; Textor, 2006.
88. See Thomasson, 2002, p. 123.
89. Ryle refers here to Russell’s insight that expressions such as ‘and’, ‘or’,
‘all’, and ‘some’ are not reducible to Platonic universals such as ‘and-
ness’ and ‘someness’. Yet, this idea goes back to scholastic logic’s notion
of ‘syncategoremata’ (see Ariew & Gabbey, 2003, pp. 445–447), and in
the Fourth Investigation of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen the distinc-
tion between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions is central to
Husserl’s theory of meaning.
90. See also Ryle, 1970a, p. 9. As Ryle unofficially hints (Murray, 1992, p.
339), it is possible that he was partly responsible for this solitude, as one
can surmise from the parable of his refusal to lend his copy of Sein und
Zeit to his colleagues and pupils.Perhaps the closest that Ryle had come
to encountering an Anglophone phenomenologist was his encounter
with J. N. Findlay three years after Royaumont (Ryle & Findlay, 1961).
Mentions of Husserl in this text are brief and only made in passing in
comparison with ‘analytic’ thinkers; Ryle quickly compares Husserl and
Wittgenstein’s notions of logical grammar, the breach of which is consti-
tutive of nonsense (p. 230), while Findlay mentions Husserl and Broad’s
ideas about memory (p. 239) and also briefly mentions Husserl in the
context of explicating the capacity of ordinary language to reflect upon
its own meanings (p. 240).
91. See Ryle, 1971a, pp. xxiii–xxiv.
92. See Schrift, 2006, pp. 70–71; Sorell & Rogers, 2005.
93. See e.g. Majer, 1997.
94. The fact that Ryle here alludes to the previous Royaumont collo-
quium on Husserl (where Van Breda had presented ‘La Réduction
Phénoménologique’ (1959)) seems to be left out in most references to
Ryle’s rudeness in response to Van Breda, e.g. Glock, 2008, pp. 62–63;
Critchley, 2001, p. 35.
95. Van Breda forgets to mention the Eastern European logicians present
at the colloquium, and the influence of Polish logic (not unrelated to
Husserl) on Quine who questions Ryle after him.
96. See Lapointe, 1979.
218 Notes
97. Translation: ‘When Merleau-Ponty enquired “is our programme not the
same?”, he received the firm and clear response “I hope not”’.
98. Similar versions of the same tale may be found in Glock, 2008, p. 63;
Solomon, 2003, p. 5; Pudal, 2004, p. 75.
99. ‘It was a distance within the analytic movement that he was insisting
on at that point, not a distance between that movement and phenom-
enology’ (Glendinning, 2006, p. 73).
100. Merleau-Ponty read Wittgenstein, and claims to have worked with
Ryle’s Concept of Mind. Yet, he seems to have posed a question which
was the subject of J. O. Urmson’s paper on the history of analysis, previ-
ously presented at the colloquium. Merleau-Ponty had not been present
at Urmson’s presentation, which had clearly differentiated between
various kinds of approaches to analysis, distinguishing among what may
be roughly seen as Russellian, Wittgensteinian, and Oxonian types; see
Urmson, 1992.
101. John Cottingham (2005) claims that because analytic philosophers ‘take
a derogatory attitude to the history of philosophy’ (pp. 26–27), this
implies treating their contemporaries like the historian of philosophy
might have treated the great philosophers of the past; Ryle’s position
here contradicts this claim. See also Ryle, 1971a, pp. xxiii–xxiv.
102. See also Urmson, 1992; Strawson, 1992.
103. For example, Ayer’s logical positivism, in particular his The Foundations
of Empirical Knowledge (Ayer, 1940), was used by Austin as his ‘stalking-
horse’ (Austin, 1962a, p. 1) in Sense and Sensibilia. Ryle (1971c) also
produced an ‘unrepentantly polemical’ (1971a, p. viii) essay against
Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity.
104. But see Husserl, 2001, pp. 184–186.
105. Part of this chapter was originally published in Vrahimis, 2012a.
not nonsensical but refer to some meaning, precisely because they do not
break any a priori rules of logical grammar. Yet, their objects are, as Derrida
would say, necessarily absent, they are impossible, and therefore these
statements are absurd.
21. This is what Carnap calls ‘designative meaning’, which he distinguishes
from expressive components of meaning (1959, pp. 80–81).
22. Derrida claims that ‘the green is either’ could make sense when placed
in quotation marks and uttered as an example of nonsense in Husserl’s
theory of meaning. As we shall see, Searle objects to this, claiming that
Derrida fails to acknowledge the distinction between use and mention.
23. The original paper, written in French, had been first presented in Montreal
at the Congrès international des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Francaise in
1971, and published in Marges de la Philosophie (1972); it was then trans-
lated and published in the first issue of Glyph in 1977.
24. Searle’s alliance with Foucault further undermines the claim that the
Searle-Derrida exchange exemplifies some gulf that exists between Anglo-
American and Continental philosophy; Derrida does not speak in the
name of Continental philosophy.
25. Nevertheless, Derrida later points out that Searle must have read the
English version of the text (1988b, p. 38).
26. Although Searle does not use the term, his charge of misunderstanding
coupled with his subsequent construction of Derrida’s claims into argu-
ments point to the implication that Searle considers Derrida’s Austin to be
a straw-man.
27. Derrida clearly thinks there is no such thing as a meaningless expression
by itself, since for him expressions are always related to a context.
28. For a reply, see Derrida, 1988b, pp. 80–83. See also Richmond, 1996, pp.
48–49.
29. Searle and Derrida both fail to mention the relation between Husserl’s
account and Austin’s in their exchange. Though Husserl’s account is
mentioned here because cited by Derrida, a number of other thinkers
could have been used (e.g. Carnap or the early Wittgenstein).
30. This is perhaps due to Derrida’s dismissal of Searle’s reply as having misun-
derstood his text (1988b, p. 47). Derrida assumes that a reply is already to
be found in ‘Sec’, if only one were to look at it closely enough.
31. This does not preclude their successful rational reconstruction into logi-
cally well-formed arguments. See e.g. Richmond, 1996; Moore, 2001.
32. Derrida (1998, p. 31) justifies this by citing Searle’s acknowledgement of
the help of other people who had discussed his paper with him. Derrida
notes that one of these people is his own friend Hubert Dreyfus, with
whom Derrida had various discussions in the past. Derrida thus concludes
that he also is included in ‘Sarl’.Interestingly, in 1951 Bataille had also
used Ayer’s name as a pun, confusing ‘d’Ayer’ with ‘d’hier’ (Bataille, 1986,
p. 80).
33. Searle (1983) connects his attack on Derrida (and Culler (1983), or ‘decon-
struction’) with a defence of enlightenment values against postmodernist
Notes 221
Marcuse (and his being forced out of the University of California by the
then governor Ronald Reagan). See e.g. Cobb, 2004.
45. For example, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was
founded in 1962, while the British Society for Phenomenology was founded
in 1967. See also McCumber, 2001, pp. 83–85; Mays, 1971, pp. 262–263.
46. See e.g. Koestenbaum, 1971; Van Peursen, 1972; Mays & Brown, 1972;
Pivčević, 1975; Durfee, 1976.
47. Marcello Dascal observes that the Derrida-Searle exchange is seen as an
altogether different sort of entity by Derrida and Searle. Dascal empha-
sises the fact that the type of exchange is perceived differently between
the two parties involved, with Searle starting out by engaging Derrida in
a form of discussion, to which Derrida responds as if it were a controversy,
leading to the violent dispute which ensues. See Dascal, 2001.
48. The catastrophic continuation of the Derrida-Searle dispute, with Searle’s
comments on Derrida published in the New York Review of Books (Searle,
1983), leads to the notorious 1992 ‘Cambridge affair’, i.e. the dispute
over the granting of an honorary doctorate to Derrida by Cambridge
University. Although the event may be conceived as yet another clash
between analytic and continental philosophers, a mere glance at the
list of signatories of the letter sent to the Times will allow its reader to
find among the names present there those of a number of philosophers
whose work (in the history of analytic philosophy) has contributed to the
breakdown of the ‘analytic-continental barrier’, e.g. Peter Simons, Kevin
Mulligan and Barry Smith. But see Smith, 1997 on his views of ‘conti-
nental’ philosophy in North America.
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223
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165, 206 British Society for Phenomenology,
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206, 207 Brunschvicg, Léon, 32, 197, 209
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87–8, 96, 99–103, 109, 148–9,
161, 182, 192, 205, 207, 208, Camus, Albert, 89, 205
209, 210, 211 Cantor, Georg, 145, 191
251
252 Index
Ingarden, Roman, 126 logical positivism, 34, 40, 74, 77, 89,
intentionality, 98, 101–2, 126–7, 92, 105, 106, 111, 184, 194, 202,
207, 211 206, 210, 218
logicism, 19–20, 26, 77, 188
Jaensch, Erich R., 35 Lvov-Warsaw school of Logic,
Jaspers, Karl, 27 29, 185