Reconsidering Logical Positivism

Reconsidering Logical Positivism
Author: Michael Friedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1999-07-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521624763

A reinterpretation of the enduring significance of logical positivism.

Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism
Author: Alfred Jules Ayer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1959
Genre: Logical positivism
ISBN: 0029011302

An Examination of Logical Positivism

An Examination of Logical Positivism
Author: Julius Rudolph Weinberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2013-12-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317833155

First published in 2000. This is Volume II of six in the Library of Philosophy series on the Philosophy of Science. Written in 1938, philosophical systems which employ logical methods almost exclusively would undoubtedly be expected to produce non-empirical results. If, however, logic is taken simply as a method of connecting meanings it is not difficult to reconcile logical methods with empirical results. If logical formular, in other words, assert nothing about the meanings of propositions, but simply show how such meanings are connected, then an empiricism based on a logical analysis of meanings is not inconsistent. This is what the Logical Positivists have attempted to do. This book looks at two areas: the foundations of a scientific method free from metaphysics, and the elimination of pseudo-concepts introduced by metaphysics into science and philosophy.

Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism
Author: Oswald Hanfling
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1981
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

This book is a compact, accessible treatment of the main ideas advanced by the positivists, including Schlick, Carnap, Ayer, and the early Wittgenstein. Oswald Hanfling discusses such ideas as the 'verification principle' ('the meaning of this statement is the method of its verification') and the 'elimination of metaphysics, ' an attempt to show that metaphysical statements, for example about God, are unverifiable and therefore meaningless.

Logical Positivism and Existentialism

Logical Positivism and Existentialism
Author: Frederick Charles Copleston
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780826469052

Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit and specialist in the history of philosophy, first created his history as an introduction for Catholic ecclesiastical seminaries. However, since its first publication (the last volume appearing in the mid-1970s) the series has become the classic account for all philosophy scholars and students. The 11-volume series gives an accessible account of each philosopher's work, but also explains their relationship to the work of other philosophers.

Inquiries and Provocations

Inquiries and Provocations
Author: Herbert Feigl
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 476
Release: 1980-11-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9789027711014

The title is his own. Herbert Feigl, the provocateur and the soul (if we may put it so) of modesty, wrote to me some years ago, "I'm more of a catalyst than producer of new and original ideas all my life . . . ", but then he com pleted the self-appraisal: " . . . with just a few exceptions perhaps". We need not argue for the creative nature of catalysis, but will simply remark that there are 'new and original ideas' in the twenty-four papers selected for this volume, in the extraordinary aperrus of the 25-year-old Feigl in his Vienna dissertation of 1927 on Zufall und Gesetz, in the creative critique and articulation in his classical monograph of 1958 on The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'; and the reader will want to turn to some of the seventy other titles in our Feigl bibliography appended. Professor Feigl has been a model philosophical worker: above all else, honest, self-aware, open-minded and open-hearted; keenly, devotedly, and even arduously the student of the sciences, he has been a logician and an empiricist. Early on, he brought the Vienna Circle to America, and much later he helped to bring it back to Central Europe. The story of the logical empiricist movement, and of Herbert Feigl's part in it, has often been told, importantly by Feigl himself in four papers we have included here.

The Limits of Analysis

The Limits of Analysis
Author: Stanley Rosen
Publisher: Carthage Reprint
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2000
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

Philosophy in the twentieth century has been dominated by the urge for analysis, a methodology that is supposed to be comparable in clarity and correctness to scientific thought. In this brilliant and devastating attack on such exaggerated claims, Stanley Rosen demonstrates how analysis alone lacks the power to approach the deepest and most important philosophical questions. He thus provides us with a new and deeper understanding of the nature and limits of analytic thinking.

The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism

The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism
Author: Alan Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2007-09-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139826433

If there is a movement or school that epitomizes analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it is logical empiricism. Logical empiricists created a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, established mathematical logic as a topic in and tool for philosophy, and initiated the project of formal semantics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century gave logical empiricism a central place in the project. The second wave of interpretative accounts was constructed to show how philosophy should progress, or had progressed, beyond logical empiricism. The essays survey the formative stages of logical empiricism in central Europe and its acculturation in North America, discussing its main topics, and achievements and failures, in different areas of philosophy of science, and assessing its influence on philosophy, past, present, and future.

Language, Truth and Logic

Language, Truth and Logic
Author: Alfred Jules Ayer
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2012-04-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0486113094

"A delightful book … I should like to have written it myself." — Bertrand Russell First published in 1936, this first full-length presentation in English of the Logical Positivism of Carnap, Neurath, and others has gone through many printings to become a classic of thought and communication. It not only surveys one of the most important areas of modern thought; it also shows the confusion that arises from imperfect understanding of the uses of language. A first-rate antidote for fuzzy thought and muddled writing, this remarkable book has helped philosophers, writers, speakers, teachers, students, and general readers alike. Mr. Ayers sets up specific tests by which you can easily evaluate statements of ideas. You will also learn how to distinguish ideas that cannot be verified by experience — those expressing religious, moral, or aesthetic experience, those expounding theological or metaphysical doctrine, and those dealing with a priori truth. The basic thesis of this work is that philosophy should not squander its energies upon the unknowable, but should perform its proper function in criticism and analysis.