Available for the first time in 20 years, here are two important works from the 1920s by the best-known representative of the Vienna Circle.

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its meaning, before we can (...) try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence.... The chief virtue of the book is its systematic character. From Frege to Quine most philosophical logicians have restricted themselves by piecemeal and local assaults on the problems involved. The book is marked by a genial tolerance. Carnap sees himself as proposing conventions rather than asserting truths. However he provides plenty of matter (...) for argument."-Anthony Quinton, Hibbert Journal. (shrink)

Among the various meanings in which the word ‘probability’ is used in everyday language, in the discussion of scientists, and in the theories of probability, there are especially two which must be clearly distinguished. We shall use for them the terms ‘probability1’ and ‘probability2'. Probability1 is a logical concept, a certain logical relation between two sentences ; it is the same as the concept of degree of confirmation. I shall write briefly “c” for “degree of confirmation,” and “c” for “the (...) degree of confirmation of the hypothesis h on the evidence e“; the evidence is usually a report on the results of our observations. On the other hand, probability2 is an empirical concept; it is the relative frequency in the long run of one property with respect to another. The controversy between the so-called logical conception of probability, as represented e.g. by Keynes, and Jeffreys, and others, and the frequency conception, maintained e.g. by v. Mises and Reichenbach, seems to me futile. These two theories deal with two different probability concepts which are both of great importance for science. Therefore, the theories are not incompatible, but rather supplement each other. (shrink)

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. Pages de début Avant-propos La réduction phénoménologique et la double vie du sujet I - Intentionnalité et intersubjectivité 1. Intentionnalité et transcendance (Husserl et Heidegger) 2. Le concept de noème (Husserl) 3. Le monde (Husserl) II - (...) Perception 1. Finitude et téléologie de la perception (Husserl) 2. Perception et herméneutique (Husserl, Cassirer et Heidegger) 3. Perception et vie naturelle (Husserl et Merleau-Ponty) III - Temporalité, historicité, langage 1. Origine du temps et temps originaire (Husserl et Heidegger) 2. La présence du passé (Husserl) 3. L'encadrement du souvenir (Husserl, Proust et Barthes) 4. La voix de son maître (Husserl et Derrida) Conclusion Pages de fin. (shrink)

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. Pages de début Avant-propos La réduction phénoménologique et la double vie du sujet I - Intentionnalité et intersubjectivité 1. Intentionnalité et transcendance (Husserl et Heidegger) 2. Le concept de noème (Husserl) 3. Le monde (Husserl) II - (...) Perception 1. Finitude et téléologie de la perception (Husserl) 2. Perception et herméneutique (Husserl, Cassirer et Heidegger) 3. Perception et vie naturelle (Husserl et Merleau-Ponty) III - Temporalité, historicité, langage 1. Origine du temps et temps originaire (Husserl et Heidegger) 2. La présence du passé (Husserl) 3. L'encadrement du souvenir (Husserl, Proust et Barthes) 4. La voix de son maître (Husserl et Derrida) Conclusion Pages de fin. (shrink)

A portrait of scholastic approaches to a qualified disagreement of opinions, focusing on the antagonism of scholastic probabilism and anti-probabilism in the early modern era.

The major part of this paper is devoted to the task of showing that Husserl's account of knowledge and truth in terms of a synthesis of fulfilment falls prey neither to a form of “metaphysics of presence” nor to a “myth of interiority” or mentalism. Husserl's presentation of the desire to know, his awareness of irreducible forms of absence at the heart of the intuitive presence of the object of knowledge and his formulation of general rules concerning the possible accomplishment (...) of a synthesis of fulfilment are therefore carefully examined. Special attention is also given to the fact that the determination of knowledge and truth provided by the Sixth Logical Investigation rests on an account of an original interweaving between the thing, consciousness, and language. Unlike in Husserl's earlier and later works, no attempt is thereby made to subordinate any of these three elements involved in all knowledge to one of the others. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete presence of an (...) ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity. (shrink)

Husserl's phenomenology of the body constantly faces issues of demarcation: between phenomenology and ontology, soul and spirit, consciousness and brain, conditionality and causality. It also shows that Husserl was eager to cross the borders of transcendental phenomenology when the phenomena under investigation made it necessary. Considering the details of his description of bodily sensations and bodily behaviour from a Merleau-Pontian perspective allows one also to realise how Husserl (unlike Heidegger) fruitfully explores a phenomenological field located between a science of pure (...) consciousness and the natural sciences. A phenomenological discussion of naturalism thus cannot limit itself to the task of discrimination, it must attempt to integrate what an eidetic analysis has separated: inside and outside, here and there, first-person and third-person perspective, motivation and causality. Husserl's phenomenology of the body thus shows that dualism is at best a methodological but never an ontological option for the mind-body problem. (shrink)

The concept of event provides the essential bridge from the realm of virtuality of the quantum state to real phenomena in space and time. We ask how much we can gather from existing theory about the localization of an event and point out that decoherence and coarse graining—though important—do not suffice for a consistent interpretation without the additional principle of random realization.

This article begins by presenting the two most important transformations that establish a genuine Husserlian approach to the imagination: the first lies in the grasping of imagination, despite its essential differences with perception and hallucination, as an intuitive, or sensuous consciousness ; the second lies in the insight that imagination, or better – phantasy –, requires no images, mental or otherwise. Further, the distinction between pure and perceptual phantasies and their respective fictional objects is drawn out. A comparison between pure (...) phantasy and memory, then leads to a closer look at the role of inner consciousness in pure phantasy and to a clarification of the ‘splitting of the subject’. The exploration of this split allows us to trace the role of the real-ego and the phantasy-ego in pure phantasy, which opens the exploration of phantasy as a consciousness of possibilities. This helps us gain clarity about the nature of both real and ideal possibilities and the respective modes of phantasy. Objects of phantasy also most easily lend themselves to an eidetic variation and to an insight into essences. Phenomenological essences concern the ideal possibility of real and ideal objects and of their experience. It is through their contribution to insight into the real and ideal conditions of possibility of different forms of intentional acts that acts of phantasy best show their potential for Husserl’s project of philosophy as a rigorous science. Imagination or fiction becomes, in his own words, the ‘vital element of phenomenology.’. (shrink)

In Matter and Memory, Bergson examines the relationship between perception and memory, the status of consciousness in its relation to the brain, and more generally, a possible conjunction of matter and mind. Our reading focuses in particular on his understanding of the evanescent presence of the present and of its debt vis-à-vis the "unconscious" consciousness of a "virtual" past. We wish to show that the Bergsonian version of a critique of "the metaphysics of presence" is, for all that, an offshoot (...) of a Platonic type of metaphysics. It is true that Bergson departs from traditional standpoints on the side of a self-sufficient and original present and a form of presence to which the transparency of consciousness would confer the character of immediate evidence. All the same, it can hardly be claimed that his rehabilitation of the past and the unconscious opens up new perspectives on how forgetting and death are bound up with the work of memory. (shrink)

Relying on Husserl as well as on the reflections by Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne, Henry on Kandinsky and Deleuze on Bacon, this essay sketches some basic problems that arise in a phenomenological account of non-figurative painting. An investigation of the distinction between phenomenological and pictorial perception, of the transposition of the painter’s mode of perception into a painted image, and of the expressive force of paintings inevitably confronts one with the enigma of the appearing of something invisible. The essay proceeds in (...) three steps. The first step describes pictorial perception in terms of a ‘seeing according to’. Such a mode of perception pays attention to visual ambiguities, to the ‘gaze of things’ and to the conditions of visibility that are ordinarily overlooked. The second step moves on to the issue of the transposition of a pictorial perception in a painted image. Deleuze’s account of “manipulated chance” proves to be very helpful here. In the final step, Henry’s and Deleuze’s emphasis on the painting’s expression of totally invisible ‘forces’ is discussed. (shrink)

Es scheint, als wären wir ein halbes Jahrhundert lang an einem Denker vorbeigegangen, der uns zur Wissens- und Wissenschaftsproblematik mehr zu sagen hatte als mancher, den wir feiern. Gemeint ist der russische Philosoph Semen Ljudvigovic Frank. Auf der Basis seiner Forschungen versucht diese Studie systematisch-kritisch einen Neuansatz, der zu ungewohnten Konsequenzen vor allem in Wissenschaftstheorie, Anthropologie und Religionsphilosophie führt.

This collection makes available, in one place, the very best essays on the founding father of phenomenology, reprinting key writings on Husserl's thought from the past seventy years. It draws together a range of writings, many otherwise inaccessible, that have been recognized as seminal contributions not only to an understanding of this great philosopher but also to the development of his phenomenology. The four volumes are arranged as follows: Volume I Classic essays from Husserl's assistants, students and earlier interlocutors. Including (...) a selection of papers from such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Ricoeur and Levinas. Volume II Classic commentaries on Husserl's published works. Covering the Logical Investigations , Ideas I , Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness , and Formal and Transcendental Logic . Volumes III and IV Papers concentrating on particular aspects of Husserl's theory including: Husserl's account of mathematics and logic, his theory of science, the nature of phenomenological reduction, his account of perception and language, the theory of space and time, his phenomenology of imagination and empathy, the concept of the life-world and his epistemology. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce qui, chez l'homme, retient ou empeche la fuite en avant d'une pulsion specifique? Une autre pulsion complementaire ou antagoniste? L'instance subjective d'un moi se pliant aux commandements du surmoi? L'ordre du corps vivant, de la raison ou du signifiant? Ou est-il pensable qu'une pulsion humaine se gouverne elle-meme en canalisant son energie excessive et en veillant a sa transformation ou a sa sublimation plutot que de se livrer a l'ivresse d'une repetition sterile?Ce livre aborde ces questions en envisageant les (...) pulsions humaines, en amont, depuis leur ancrage dans les forces de la nature ou les instincts animaux et, en aval, en vue de leur prolongement en desirs symboliquement structures. Dans une telle perspective, le questionnement psychanalytique de Freud et de Lacan rencontre tout naturellement les interrogations d'une philosophie de la nature, de la vie et de la culture. Inversement, une rehabilitation de l'energetique psychanalytique favorise la redecouverte d'une pensee philosophique, pour laquelle la dynamique des forces virtuelles prime sur la presence de substances statiques, et pour laquelle aucun acte effectif n'efface sa dette vis-a-vis d'un pouvoir-etre retenu ou d'un manque d'etre. De cette metaphysique dont le livre suit le cheminement d'Aristote a Husserl en passant par Leibniz et Schopenhauer, Nietzsche et la psychanalyse marquent aussi les limites, en projetant sur elle l'ombre du nihilisme des pulsions de mort. Au croisement des deux approches de la pulsion se dresse, a nouveau mais autrement, la question de la subjectivite. (shrink)

Philosophers have thought more about the nature of thinking than about anything else. After Plato and Aristotle, philosophers’ main concern was to promote good, that is, correct, thinking. Because correct thinking was achieved best in propositional statements, thinking became a matter of logic, and logic became a discipline dealing with the formulation of true predicative sentences.In the twentieth century, many philosophers expressed their dissatisfaction with this view. Some, such as Heidegger, have pointed to the ontological presuppositions of a logic that (...) makes truth a matter of correspondence between predicative sentences and the reality of states of affairs. Other philosophers, such as Deleuze, have .. (shrink)

Heidegger’s lecture course on “Parmenides” lays strong emphasis on the dimension of lethe in truth . Such a withdrawal belonging to unconcealment should not be confused with a dissembling or hiding . A concealment pertaining to the presence of a thing can be illustrated by means of a phenomenological description of oblivion, anamnesis, the rare, the gift and the secret. Especially Heidegger’s account of an “open secret” lends itself to a philosophical interpretation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”. Dupin recurrently meditates (...) on the right way of keeping a secret and mocks the police for confusing lethe with pseudos. Incidentally, stealing is shown to be no less a form of unconcealment than the gift. Poe’s description of how and where The Purloined Letter is openly present in the minister’s study sheds light on how a thing can remain secret by giving way to other things. (shrink)