Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.
Former Principal, A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India
examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.”
History is a means to understand the past and present. History is the analysis and interpretation of the human past that enables us to study continuity and change over time.. It is an act of both investigation and imagination that seeks to explain how people have changed over time. Historians use all forms of evidence to examine, interpret, revisit, and reinterpret the past.
The purpose of historical inquiry is not simply to present facts but to search for an interpretation of the past. Virtually every subject has a history and can be analyzed and interpreted in historical perspective and context;
The different interpretations of the past allows us to see the present differently and therefore imagine—and work towards—different futures. Through the study of history we can investigate and interpret why society developed as it has and determine what influences have affected the past and present and shape the future. It helps one to understand the immense complexity of our world and provides insights to help cope with the problems and possibilities of the present and future.
It is commonly acknowledged that an understanding of the past is fundamental to an understanding of the present. The analysis and interpretation of history provide an essential context for evaluating contemporary cultures. Understanding the present configuration of society is not the only reason to study the past; history also provides unique insight into human nature and human civilization
Historical Retrospect of Idealism
Pre-Christian Origins: Plato
The beginnings of the idealist philosophical position are generally attributed to Plato, but may be traced back to the thought of his teacher, Socrates. Plato, father of Idealism, espoused this view about 400 years BC, in his famous book, The Republic. Plato believed that there are two worlds. The first is the spiritual or mental world (World of Ideas ), which is eternal, permanent, orderly, regular, and universal. There is also the world of appearance, the world experienced through sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound, that is changing, imperfect, and disorderly. This division is often referred to as the duality of mind and body.
In his writings Plato is most concerned with separating the permanent from the temporary, the real from that which is merely illusory. To this end, Plato separates the day to day reality of things seen and felt from the eternal reality which can only be known through the thought processes. Those things that we see and feel and experiences are simply temporary, they are merely reflections.
Plato distinguished between the use of reason and the use of the senses. His position was that in order to know something of the Real World (the realm of pure Ideas) we need to withdraw from the use of our senses and rely on a purely intellectual approach. Plato, then, was the first philosophy to lay the logical groundwork necessary to support a theory of immaterial reality.
Plato argued that only concepts are real since they do not change over time as do the objects they represent. Nothing exists until the idea of it exists, hence some supreme power must have conceived of the universe before it came into existence. Real objects are the concepts in one’s mind, which must be delivered by the teacher, a kind of mental midwife (see “maieutics” in the Archives). This was the original, philosophical meaning of “idealism,” seldom used any more outside the philosophy classroom
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century:
From this movement came the development of the modern idealistic views of Descartes,Berkley, Kant, Hegel and Royce.
Rene Descartes -Modern idealism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is largely defined by a group of philosophers who were writing at the time. In his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes arrived at his Cartesian first principle Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes decided that he could throw all things into doubt except that he was thinking and doubting. This supports the concept of idealism because it emphasizes the centrality or importance of the mind. Descartes, divided his world into two areas. For Descartes the two areas were the cogito and the Deity Descartes was a true doubter. He attacked his thought processes by challenging the existence of every idea including his own existence. The one truth that he proved was that in doubting everything he arrived at the consensus that even if one doubted every issue – the truth that couldn’t be denied was that one was thinking.
George Berkeley -Berkeley is commonly considered the father of modern idealism. He argues that what we experience does exist in a real physical sense, but only because it exists in the mind. A thing is the sum of our ideas of it. Common sense would indicate the absurdity of this position. If we held to the idea that a thing did not exist unless we were thinking of it we would too easily fall into a position philosophers call solipsism. Solipsism says that nothing has an existence beyond the individual’s mind and what appears to have an existence is simply in the mind of the beholder.
Berkeley carefully avoided the pitfalls of this variant of idealism and with it the problem of things winking in and out of existence. Instead, he suggested that ideas exist in the mind of God as well as in our more finite minds, thus allowing for the continuity of existence by making the universe the product of God’s thoughts. The great value in this form of idealism is that it allows for stability, complexity, and sophistication. Man may only be able to think or conceive of a limited number of dimensions; God can think of them all.
Immanuel Kant -In writing his Critique of Pure Reason, and Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tried to make sense of rationalism and empiricism within the idealist philosophy. In his system, individuals could have a valid knowledge of human experience that was established by the scientific laws of nature.. He believed in the importance of treating each person as an end and not as a means. He thought that education should include training in discipline, culture, discretion, and moral training. Teaching children to think and an emphasis on duty toward self and others were also vital points in his philosophies. The desire to grow in ones understanding of being is supported through knowledge. His views were influenced by his strong religious beliefs. He held the existence of God to be the Idea and without belief in God then things would not exist.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -Three of Hegel’s most famous books are Phenomenology of Mind, Logic, and Philosophy of Right. In these readings, Hegel emphasizes three major aspects: logic, nature, and spirit. Hegel maintained that if his logical system were applied accurately, one would arrive at the Absolute Idea, which is similar to Plato’s unchanging ideas. Nature was considered to be the opposite of the Absolute idea. Idea and nature together form the Absolute Spirit which is manifested by history, art, religion, and philosophy. Hegel’s idealism is in the search for final Absolute Spirit. Examining any one thing required examining or referring to another thing. Hegel’s thinking is not as prominent as it once was because his system led to the glorification of the state at the expense of individuals. Hegel thought that to be truly educated an individual must pass through various stages of the cultural evolution of mankind.
Josiah Royce. -Royce’s Ideas were best desired as plans of actions. It was his belief that the strongest things for a person to develop is loyalty and to be of a high moral character. He supported the idea that education should be more than just a literal qualifying of information, that the moral lessons held high merit for creating a good society
Royce conceived of ideas as purposes or plans of action. He considered purposes as incomplete without an external world, and the external world as meaningless unless it was the fulfillment of these purposes. Royce believed in the importance of developing a sense of morals. This thought influences education that involves teaching about our purpose in life and how we become active participants in these purposes.
The post-Kantian German idealism of J. G. Fichte and Friedrich von Schelling, which culminated in the absolute or objective idealism of G. W. F. Hegel, began with a denial of the unknowable thing-in-itself, thereby enabling these philosophers to treat all reality as the creation of mind or spirit. Forms of post-Kantian idealism were developed in Germany by Arthur Schopenhauer and Hermann Lotze and in England by Samuel Coleridge; forms of post-Hegelian idealism were developed in England and France by T. H. Green, Victor Cousin, and C. B. Renouvier. More recent idealists include F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, Benedetto Croce, and the neo-Kantians such as Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen
Historical Retrospect of Naturalism
Ancient period
Naturalism appears to have originated in early Greek philosophy. The earliest pre –socratic philosophers, such as Thales, Anaxagoras or most especially Democritus, were labeled by their peers and successors “the physikoi” physikos, meaning “natural philosopher,” borrowing on the word physis, meaning “nature”) because they sought to explain everything by reference to natural causes alone, often distinctly excluding any role for gods, spirits or magic in the creation or operation of the world..
As for as the history of philosophy is concerned, naturalism is the oldest philosophy. The earliest figures with whom our histories of philosophy commonly begin were naturalists.
Thales The father of western philosophy ( 640 B.C.- 550 B.C.) was a mathematician, astronomer, and businessman.
For Thales, . “The principle of all things is water; all comes from water, and to water all returns, the principle of things is water, or moisture, which should not be considered exclusively in a materialistic and empirical sense. Indeed it is considered that which has neither beginning nor end – an active, living, divine force. It seems that Thales was induced to proffer water as the first principle by the observation that all living things are sustained by moisture and perish without it.
Anaximander ( 611 B.C.- 547 B.C.) was probably a disciple of Thales According to him” The principle of all things is infinite atmosphere, which has a perpetual vitality of its own, produces all things, and governs all things.:”
For Anaximander, the first principle of all things is the “indeterminate” – apeiron. There are no historical data to enlighten us as to what Anaximander may have meant by the “indeterminate”; perhaps it was the Chaos or Space of which physicists speak today .All things originate from the Unlimited, because movement causes within that mysterious element certain quakes or shocks which in turn bring about a separation of the qualities contained in the Unlimited.
The first animals were fish, which sprang from the original humidity of the earth. Fish came to shore, lost their scales, assumed another form and thus gave origin to the various species of animals. Man thus traces his origin from the animals. Because of this, Anaximander has come to be considered the first evolutionist
Anaximenes (end of the sixth century B.C., -524 B.C). He was probably a disciple of Anaximander and he composed a treatise of unknown title.According to Anaximenes the first principle from which everything is generated is air. Air, through the two opposite processes of condensation and rarefaction, which are due to heat and cold, has generated fire, wind, clouds, water, heaven and earth.He reduces the multiplicity of nature to a single principle, animated and divine, which would be the reason for all empirical becoming.
But the ancient roots of naturalism have much fuller body in four other men who have been called atomists, only two of whom were contemporaries. Leucippus and Democritus,. Epicurus (341-270 b.c.), more than a century later, whose carrier was largely subsequent to Aristotle’s was devoted to the ideas of Democritus. And Lucretius (96-55 b.c.), though not even a Greek and born almost two and one half centuries after Epicurus, was a great admirer of Epicurus. All four are called atomists because they conceived of reality as fundamentally a matter of atoms moving in space.
Leucippus and Democritus explained the Nature by two simple things: empty space and atoms. This empty space they considered to be the same as nothing, nonexistence, or nonbeing. About the substance filling empty space, giving us all the things making up the world, they reasoned that it must be constituted by small indivisible units piled one upon another. These hypothetical units they called atoms. Theoretically, at least, division of parts into smaller parts can go on indefinitely. There may be some infinitesimal unit which is elemental and cannot be divided further. This, because of its imputed indivisibility, they called an atom.
Little was said about empty space, nor could there be; it was a void in which atoms could move. The atoms, however, were considered to be of an infinite variety of sizes, shapes, and weights. Everything in Nature as we now behold it is the result of atoms moving through space. When the atoms come together in clusters, things come into being; when they move apart, objects dissolve and fall into nonexistence. Even mind and soul are made up of atoms, evolving and dissolving in the same manner. But mind and soul are made of fine, smooth atoms which are perfectly round, similar to the atoms of which fire was supposedly composed. Mind and soul, like fire, have great mobility; and their atoms therefore must be very active.
The motion of atoms in space be described as random, in the sense that there is movement in all kinds of different directions. Such random movement resulted in atoms colliding with one another, thence forming clusters and accumulating the mass to constitute such objects as rocks, trees, and planets.
From this elemental ground, Nature as we now know it has evolved Worlds whirled together as the atoms formed large masses in vast swirling motions. Vegetation grew, animals developed, and man arose, his speech and institutions resulting with the same kind of necessity as produced minerals and vegetation. .
Epicurus does go definitely beyond Democritus in considering the knowledge problem .he was at least aware that if objects are made of atoms, and the mind and soul are also made of atoms, some explanation must be found, harmonizing with the atom-space description of reality, making somewhat clear how the impression of an object gets into the mind of the man who beholds it. His solution was that objects give off a kind of film of atoms which is transmitted to the mind through the sense, anther yields a king of photographic replica of the object. This replica is not a copy pure and simple, for it is constituted by atoms given off by the object itself. It is a valid image of the object, in which the very qualities of the object are retained, having been transmitted to the mind by the particles given off by the object.
Thomas Hobbes Like the ancient naturalists, Hobbes conceived Nature as an affair of bodies moving in space.. A body he defined as a thing which exists in and of itself and has no dependence what so ever upon our though about it. Bodies exist outside of us and do not depend on any relation to us. By space Hobbes meant a place outside of the mind which can be filled by an object There yet remains one other item in Hobbes’ description of Nature, namely, motion; and motion he defined as :the privation of one place and the acquisition of another.” It is that way of behaving seen in Nature by which a body can first occupy one spot, then another, and still another, and so on. Motion is as fundamental as rest; it is not caused by something other than motion; it is its own cause. If a body is in motion, some body which is at rest will have to impeded its movement in order for it to come to rest. Contrariwise, when a body is at rest it does not get into motion unless it is pushed by another body endeavouring to get into its place.
Combining these definitions, we have Nature described by Hobbes as an aggregate of things existing outside of our minds, and therefore evidencing the reality of a space beyond us, but also an aggregate of things moving from one place to another in that space which is beyond us.
Jean Jacques Rousseau in his A Discourse on Inequality, an account of the historical development of the human race, distinguished between “natural man” (man as formed by nature) and “social man” (man as shaped by society). He argued that good education should develop the nature of man. Yet Rousseau found that mankind has not one nature but several: man originally lived in a “pure state of nature” but was altered by changes beyond control and took on a different nature; this nature, in turn, was changed as man became social. The creation of the arts and sciences caused man to become “less pure,” more artificial, and egoistic, and man’s egoistic nature prevents him from regaining the simplicity of original human nature. Rousseau is pessimistic, almost fatalistic, about changing the nature of modern man.
According to Francis Bacon, man would be able to explain all the processes in nature if he could acquire full insight into the hidden structure and the secret workings of matter. Bacon’s conception of structures in nature, functioning according to its own working method, concentrates on the question of how natural order is produced, namely by the interplay of matter and motion. In De Principiis atque Originibus, his materialistic stance with regard to his conception of natural law becomes evident. The Summary Law of Nature is a virtus (matter-cum-motion) or power in accordance with matter theory, or “the force implanted by God in these first particles, form the multiplication thereof of all the variety of things proceeds and is made up” . Similarly, in De Sapientia Veterum he attributes to this force an “appetite or instinct of primal matter; or to speak more plainly, the natural motion of the atom; which is indeed the original and unique force that constitutes and fashions all things out of matter” . Suffice it to say here that Bacon, who did not reject mathematics in science, was influenced by the early mathematical version of chemistry developed in the 16th century, so that the term “instinct” must be seen as a keyword for his theory of nature Bacon’s theory of active or even vivid force in matter accounts for what he calls Cupid in De Principiis atque Originibus . Bacon’s ideas concerning the quid facti of reality presuppose the distinction “between understanding how things are made up and of what they consist, …. and by what force and in what manner they come together, and how they are transformed” . This is the point in his work where it becomes obvious that he tries to develop an explanatory pattern in which his theory of matter, and thus his atomism, are related to his cosmology, magic, and alchemy.
Middle ages to modernity
With the rise and dominance of Christianity and the decline of secular philosophy in the West naturalism became heretical and eventually illegal, thus making it difficult to document the history of naturalism in the Middle Ages. When the Renaissance reintroduced numerous lost treatises by Greek and Roman natural philosophers, many of the ideas and concepts of naturalism were picked up again, contributing to a new Scientific Revolution that would greatly advance the study and understanding of nature Then a few intellectuals publicly renewed the case for naturalism, like Baron d’Holbach in the 18th century. In this period, naturalism finally acquired a distinct name, materialism, which became the only category of metaphysical naturalism widely defended until the 20th century, when advances in physics as well as philosophy made the original premise of materialism untenable
Today, noteworthy proponents are too numerous to count, but prominent defenders of naturalism as a complete worldview include Mario Bunge ,Richard Carrier , Daniel Dennett , and David Mill. Certain extreme varieties of politicized naturalism have arisen in the West, most notably Marxism in the 19th century and Objectivism in the 20th century.
Historical Retrospect of Realism
Although some of the early pre-Christian thinkers dealt with the problems of the physical world (most notably the early Greek physicist- philosophers, Democritus and Leucippus) the first detailed realistic position is generally attributed to Aristotle..
Reality, according to Aristotle was distinguishable into form and matter. Matter is the substance that all things have in common. For Aristotle these to substance were logically separable although always found together in the empirical world. The more closely anything approaches pure form, the higher it reigns in the Aristotle hierarchy. At the top of this hierarchy is pure form which may be viewed as the highest form of reason. It is the Prime-Mover which gives the universe its orderly nature. Matter, which is at the base of the hierarchy, is nothing by itself. Further up the scale come man, the heavens, and finally the Prime-Mover which is pure form and reason.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Comenius and Locke
Throughout his writings, John Amos Comenius emphasizes the primary importance of the gathering of knowledge or sense data.. Comenius felt that the human mind, like a mirror, reflected everything around it.
John Locke was a philosopher as Comenius was an educator, and Locke’s writings reflected this orientation just as Comenius’ showed his lifelong interest in pedagogy. Locke’s greatest contribution both to philosophy and to philosophy of education was his doctrine that ideas are not innate but that all experience is the result of impressions made on the mind by external objects. The implication of this are spelled out in his concept of the tabula rasa or the mind as a blank sheet on which the outside world must leave its impressions. At the time of birth, man’s mind is a blank slate upon which sensory experiences of the world create impressions. All ideas, according to Locke, must come from either sensation or reflection.
Nineteenth Century: Herbart
Herbart argued that all subjects are related and that Knowledge of one helps strengthen knowledge of the others. He also held that we acquires new contents they are assimilated with the existing contents.
The relationships between new ideas and old ideas occurred in what Herbart called the apperceptive mass. Within the mind, new apperceptions or presentations united with older apperceptions and struggled to rise from the unconscious level of mind to the conscious.
American Realism: The New Realists and the Critical Realists
The New Realists were so named because they emerged as a reaction to idealism. Where idealism give special status to mind, seeing it as basically the stuff from which all other things are created, the New Realists, particularly the American school, rejected this notion, giving mind no special status and viewing it as part of nature. For them things could pass in and out of knowledge and would in no way be altered by the process. Existence, they argued, is not dependent upon experience or perception, thus mind ceases to be the central pivot of the universe. Speculation, according to the New Realists, was not as fruitful as the use of the empirical methods of science.
Historical Retrospect of Humanism
Humanism is a fairly new name for a very old philosophy. The basic principles of humanism — claims and an emphasis on living a fulfilling and ethical life without religion — have been embraced by a wide variety of thinkers in different cultures for thousands of years. But not until the twentieth century did the word “humanism” become the common term for this worldview.
Humanism is a fairly new name for a very old philosophy. The basic principles of humanism — claims and an emphasis on living a fulfilling and ethical life without religion — have been embraced by a wide variety of thinkers in different cultures for thousands of years. But not until the twentieth century did the word “humanism” become the common term for this worldview..
Many of these humanist traditions have survived in some form to contribute to the humanist philosophies of the twenty-first century. Important humanist traditions include the great teachers and philosophical movements of Ancient China and India between three thousand and two thousand years ago; the philosophies of classical Greece and Rome, which survived in the Muslim world during the European
.Historical Retrospect of Perennialism
Pre-Christian Origins: Aristotle
Perennialism is not rooted in any particular time or place. Perennialism is open to the notion that universal spiritual forms Aristotle contributed to the basis realist position with his conception of form and matter. Form, it will be recalled was viewed as being at the apex of the pyramid or hierarchy while matter was at its base. Matter existed as pure potentiality. It acquired meaning only as from was imposed on it. It was form that was seen as the principle of actuality. All things were composed of form and matter. Man, for example, had a physical being composed of matter and mind composed of form. From was equated with pure rationality while mater was equated with pure materiality.
Christianity: The First Thousand Years
One of the great voices during this first thousand years of Christendom was the voice of St. Augustine. Since the works of Aristotle were lost for the first thousand year of Christianity, the great influence on the early medieval thinkers was Plato. Plato, indirectly, and Augustine, directly, set much of the pattern of Christian theology until the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. For Augustine, reason was subservient to religious dogma and the material and practical aspect of life were to play only a minor role as compared with the spiritual aspects. First came faith and then came reason.
The Thirteenth Century: St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic took the work as Aristotle and after accepting his form and matter thesis, added to it the concept of existence. He reconciled the Christian principles of his faith with the realism of Aristotle by insisting that beyond essence (the combination of form and matter) lay existence. Aristotle, according to St. Thomas, was right in what he said, but had failed to raise the question of the existence of essence. Thus, for Aquinas, essence becomes the principle of potentiality while existence becomes the principle of actuality.
Pure Existence or Pure Actuality is, of course, God. We can know Pure Existence only through revelation although we can know about it through reason. In this manner Aquinas postulated a realistic world in which man must make his way while preparing for life in the here after. While reason is able to deal with the world of nature, revelation deals with the world beyond nature. For St. Thomas, the natural world was open to all the tools of the scientist. This natural world was clearly distinguished from the world of theology where faith and revelation hold sway. The two worlds of St. Thomas Aquinas, the world of faith and the world of reason were set apart; as long as there was no interaction between the two, all was well.
Contemporary Thinkers: Maritain and Adler
a. Jacques Maritain is usually considered the most prominent contemporary spokesman of the Perennialists position.. As an educator he has written and taught both in his own country and in the United States. Maritain’s position is typical of the Neo-Thomists, with a strong reliance on reason and faith. His writings often deal with education and he has been particularly concerned with reconciling the democratic conception of education and the Perennialists point of view.
b. Mortimer Adler Although a non-Catholic, Adler has been welcomed into the perennialist camp with open arms because of his strong support of the philosophical position they espouse. Adler goes on to out that the education of man is not complete without religious education, and that there is a whole realm of knowledge with which this deals which is not attainable through rational means
Historical Retrospect of Pragmatism
One of the most important schools of philosophy of education is pragmatism. It is also as old as idealism, naturalism and realism since it is more an attitude, than a philosophy. In the fifth century B.C. Heraclitus said, “One can not step twice into the same river.” Thus, Reality is a flux, things are ever changing. Modern pragmatists agree with the Greek sophists. According to Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things.” This maxim is the basis of modern humanism. Another famous sophist Gorgias used to say, “Nothing exists and if thing exists we can never know it.” This agnosticism has led to relativism in pragmatic epistemology.
The Nineteenth Century:
Chauncey Wright, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James.Chauncey Wright is perhaps the least know of the nineteenth century contributors to the pragmatic movement. William James wrote of him that, ……he was not merely the great mind of a village – if Cambridge will pardon the expression – but either in London or Berlin he would, with equal ease, have taken the place of master which he held with us.
Charles Sanders Peirce, Although considered the founder of the American school of pragmatism, Peirce’s major contribution to the intellectual stream of pragmatism was his criterion of truth or meaning. simply says that a sentence’s meaning is the sum total of all of the sensory experience which might be conceptualized.
William James arrived on the scene at a critical time in America thought. As Americans reacted to the increasing technological and scientific changes in this country they turned philosophically to “science”. As Morton White has pointed out, “He came upon the scene when philosophy was being bullied by a tough and militant scientism, but he only organized alternative seemed to be the absolute idealism of the neo-Hegelians [sic] which he could not stomach. “
. The Twentieth Century: John Dewey’s Instrumentalism
There are several philosophers that were advocates of pragmatism.;
Francis Bacon had a significant influence on pragmatism. He suggested an inductive approach, which became the basis for the scientific method.
John Locke was a philosopher that believed that the mind at birth is blank. He disagreed with Plato in that a person learns from experiences.
Auguste Comte, who was not a pragmatist, influenced pragmatism to use science when problem solving. His dream was to use science to help reform society.
Charles Darwin, was considered the most important and influential with regards to pragmatism. He was attacked because of his religious theories. He believed that nature operates without an intended end or result. Organisms will live and then die out when changes in nature occur.
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American pragmatist that never received the recognition he deserved. He believed that ideas were nothing until they have been tested in actual experiences.
William James, made pragmatism a wider public view. He believed that an idea must be tried before it can be considered good.
John Dewey. The final philosopher, which is considered to be the greatest asset to pragmatism, has been described as the greatest as American philosophy, Dewey move from the idealist’s camp to the beginnings of a pragmatic philosophy which he was to characterize with the name of instrumentalism .In later years there were many “disciples” of John Dewey who in trying to elaborate some of his ideas went to extremes that appalled their mentor Dewey was a frequent critic of what came to be known in American educational circles as “progressivism” or the “progressive movement”.
Historical Retrospect of Analytic Philosophies
Logical positivism can be looked as the direct ancestor of Analytic philosophy. August Comte’s statements have meaning become the rallying cry among the scientists and former scientists who were interested in philosophy. The group grew out of a seminar conducted by Moritz Schlick in 1923 n Vienna. They often criticized philosophy of few like David Hume, were treated with scorn. Even the fundamental laws of Physics were rejected as meaningless by some, but Carnap insisted these laws were related to experience, albeit in a suitable way.
The earlier Analytic philosophers admitted that there are statements which are a PRIORI and yet dependable, but this they said is because such statements do not really asserts anything. The predicated simply spells out something implicitly contained in the subject, as in “Bulbs have filaments”. Synthetic statements (those in which the subject does not imply the predicate) which are not testable by observation may have a certain function but they are not, strictly speaking meaningful. Thus, the general statements like being and change good or bad and other staples of widely used traditional metaphysics and ethics are, literally make no sense.
The Analytic philosophic acquired their independent identity through the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is a difficult thinker to summaries, for much of his techniques seems to consist in shaking the reader up somewhat after the manner of a Zen masters whacks and inscrutable aphorisms. His earlier positions later modified considerably are set forth in his work. “Tractus Logico-philosophies” in the year 1922. Later on Wittgenstein concerned himself more and more with detail of ordinary language, less and less with building a formal philosophical system.
There is another reason to study history: it’s fun. History combines the excitement of exploration and discovery with the sense of reward born of successfully confronting and making sense of complex and challenging problems.
–Frank Luttmer (1996)