This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so (...) much to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

This book concerns the history of Austrian philosophy, including the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, Meinong, Brentano, and Haller. It exhibits the continuity of empiricism and analysis in Austrian philosophy past and present.

Austrian economics starts out from the thesis that the objects of economic science differ from those of the natural sciences because of the centrality of the economic agent. This allows a certain a priori or essentialistic aspect to economic science of a sort which parallels the a priori dimension of psychology defended by Brentano and his student Edmund Husserl. We outline these parallels, and show how the theory of a priori dependence relations outlined in Husserl’s Logical Investigations can throw (...) light on the Austrian account of entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Although an important part of the origins of analytic philosophy can be traced back to philosophy in Austria in the first part of the twentieth century, remarkably little is known about the specific contribution made by Austrian philosophy and philosophers. In The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy , prominent analytic philosophers take a fresh look at the roots of analytic philosophy in the thought of influential but often overlooked Austrian philosophers including Brentano, Meinong, Bolzano, Husserl, and Witasek. (...) The contributors to this volume investigate central topics in theoretical philosophy such as intentionality, consciousness, memory, attributes, and truth as well as political philosophy and aesthetics. This original collection will be of interest to anyone studying the origins of analytic philosophy as well as contemporary debates in philosophy of language, metaphysics and mind. (shrink)

This study examines the place of the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna (1888-1938) in the evolution of the history of philosophy in Austria up to the establishment of the Vienna Circle in 1929. I will examine three aspects of the relationship between the Austrian members of the Vienna Circle and the Philosophical Society which has been emphasized by several historians of the Vienna Circle: the first aspect concerns the theory of a first Vienna Circle formed mainly by (...) H. Hahn, P. Frank and O. Neurath; the second aspect is the contention that the missing link between the Vienna Circle and the Bolzano tradition in Austria is Alois Höfler, a student of Brentano and Meinong; I will finally examine the link they established between the annexation of the Philosophical Society to the Kant-Gesellschaft in 1927 and the founding of the Vienna Circle in 1929. I will argue that this institution played a key role in the history of philosophy in Austria and is partly responsible for the formation of the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

In recent years, the Austrian School has been an influential contributor to the social sciences. Yet most of the attempts to understand this vital school of thought have remained locked into a polemical frame. The Philosophy of the Austrian School challenges this approach through a philosophically grounded account of the School's methodological, political, and economic ideas. Raimondo Cubeddu acknowledges important differences between the key figures in the School--Menger, Mises and Hayek-- but also finds important parallels between these thinkers. (...) The theory of subjective value and the theory of spontaneous order, which both rest on ideas about the limitations of human knowledge, are the most important of these parallels. Drawn together, these theories represent one of the most original avenues of research in the social sciences and a major reformulation of liberal ideology. (shrink)

Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy is presented for the 60th birthday of professor Christoph Nyíri. The essays presented here for the first time are focused on Austrian intellectual history, and on Wittgenstein's philosophy - the two main areas of Professor Nyíri's interests. Typically, the contributors are outstanding scholars of the field, including among others David Bloor, Lee Congdon, Newton Garver, Wilhelm Lütterfields, Joachim Schulte, Barry Smith. The volume is of primary interest for Wittgenstein scholars and those studying (...) the 19th and 20th century Austrian intellectual history. As the volume is presented for Professor Nyíri, the papers collected here reflect his interests in Wittgenstein and Austrian philosophy. Beginning with an introductory chapter on Nyiri's achievements in this field of scholarship, the volume is in four parts. The first part contains essays on Austrian philosophy broadly understood, more precisely on its socio-historical context (Barry Smith and Wolfgang Grassl), on the relation between Marxism and Arnold Hauser's philosophy and sociology of art (Lee Congdon), and Neurath's connection to naturalistic epistemologies (Thomas Uebel). The second part presents Wittgenstein's philosophy in context. Jaakko Hintikka's paper argues that Wittgenstein's probable dyslexia can be seen as an external influence on and a source of his philosophy. David Bloor discusses Wittgenstein's philosophy in the context of Edmund Burke's conservatism, which can be read as a background of Nyiri's influential interpretation of Wittgenstein as a conservative philosopher. Newton Garver also touches on the problem of conservatism while discussing passages of On Certainty in the context of Kant, Moore, and T.S. Eliot. Klaus Puhl's essay connects Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following to Freud's concept of retroactivity, and argues that rules emerging from empirical regularities can be seen as retroactive constructions. The papers in the third part of the volume offer close readings of Wittgenstein's works. Rudolf Lüthe offers two readings of Wittgenstein's criticism of philosophy in the Tractatus can be read in two ways with different consequences, among them is the appearance of philosophy inspired by art rather than the sciences. Joachim Schulte offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein's use of 'natural history' that can accommodate all of his remarks containing this concept. Herbert Hrachovec discusses the relation of pictorial and linguistic representations in Wittgenstein's Nachlass, arguing that there is no pronounced opposition between the two. The forth part of the book, containing three papers in German, continues the close inspection of Wittgenstein's later works. Wilhelm Lütterfelds reconstructs Wittgenstein's philosophy of time as pointing out memory being the very source of time. Katalin Neumer inspects Wittgenstein's frequent references to photographs in the context of aspect-seeing and compares them with other remarks on theatre, painting, and music. She concludes that there are no philosophically important structural differences between them. Peter Keicher's paper offers a comprehensive view on Wittgenstein's prefaces in the context of his various book-projects. The volume ends with a select bibliography of Professor Nyiri's works. (shrink)

Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics published in 1871 is usually regarded as the founding document of the Austrian School of economics. Many of the School’s prominent representatives, including Friedrich Wieser, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig Mises, Hans Mayer, Friedrich August Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, and Gottfried Haberler, as well as Israel Kirzner, Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard, and Don Lavoie, advanced and modified Menger’s research program in sometimes conflicting ways. Yet, some characteristics of the Austrian School remain (nearly) consensual from (...) its foundation through to contemporary neo-Austrian economists. In eight sections, we will briefly discuss some of the philosophical and methodological characteristics of Austrian economics: Austrian action theory and interpretative understanding, a relatively thoroughgoing subjectivism, methodological individualism, ontological individualism, apriorism, essentialism, an often overstated rejection of formal methods, and alertness to economic semantics. (shrink)

Although an important part of the origins of analytic philosophy can be traced back to philosophy in Austria in the first part of the twentieth century, remarkably little is known about the specific contribution made by Austrian philosophy and philosophers. In The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy prominent analytic philosophers take a fresh look at the roots of analytic philosophy in the thought of influential but often overlooked Austrian philosophers, including Brentano, Meinong, Bolzano, Husserl, and Witasek. The (...) contributors to this volume investigate central topics in theoretical philosophy, such as intentionality, consciousness, memory, attributes, and truth as well as political philosophy and aesthetics. This original collection will be of interest to anyone studying the origins of analytic philosophy as well as contemporary debates in philosophy of language, metaphysics and mind. (shrink)

This article sheds light on the relationship between religious philosophy and music to emphasize the formulation of religious emotions in art songs. This study's theoretical framework is based on the "Theory of Religious Philosophy and Music" Using these concepts, this paper explores the religious feelings associated with German and Austrian Art Songs by Bach and Gounod's "Ave Maria." The religious emotions of connectedness with God, serenity and love, faith in the heavens and angels, and the assistance of Christ and (...) the Virgin Mary in "Ave Maria" are ultimately a means of bridging music and religious philosophy. (shrink)

As Kevin Mulligan, more than anyone else, has demonstrated, there is a distinction within the philosophy of the German-speaking world between two principal currents: of idealism / transcendentalism, characteristic of Northern Germany; and of realism / objectivism, characteristic of Austria and the South. We explore some of the implications of this distinction with reference to the influence of Austrian (and German) philosophy on philosophical developments in Hungary, focusing on the work of Ákos von Pauler, and especially on Pauler’s reading (...) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. (shrink)

Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics, published in 1871, is usually regarded as the founding document of the Austrian School of economics. Many of the School’s prominent representatives, including Friedrich Wieser, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig Mises, Hans Mayer, Friedrich August Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, and Gottfried Haberler, as well as Israel Kirzner, Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard, Don Lavoie, and Peter Boettke, advanced and modified Menger’s research program in sometimes conflicting ways. Yet, some characteristics of the Austrian School remain (nearly) (...) consensual from its foundation through to contemporary neo-Austrian economists. In eight sections, we will briefly discuss some of the philosophical and methodological characteristics of Austrian economics: Austrian action theory and interpretative understanding, a relatively thoroughgoing subjectivism, methodological individualism, ontological individualism, apriorism, essentialism, an often overstated rejection of formal methods, and alertness to economic semantics. (shrink)

Austria, by the end of the nineteenth century, clearly lagged behind its more developed Western neighbours in matters of intellect and science. The Empire had witnessed a relatively late process of urbanization, bringing also a late development of those liberal habits and values which would seem to be a presupposition of the modern, scientific attitude. It therefore lacked institutions of scientific research of the sort that had been founded in Germany since the time of von Humboldt. On the other hand, (...) as more liberal ways began to be established in Austria - effectively in the second half of the nineteenth century - the desire to enjoy the trappings of a modern enlightened culture made itself felt. The Austrians were not of course in a position to summon forth the means to create reputable institutions and traditions of science in the narrow sense, and this created a vacuum which the theory of a practice so attractively pursued elsewhere could then fill. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

While many of the phenomenological currents in philosophy allegedly utilize a peculiar method, the type under consideration here is characterized by Franz Brentano s ambition to make philosophy scientific by adopting no other method but that of natural science. Brentano became particularly influential in teaching his students (such as Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl) his descriptive psychology, which is concerned with mind as intentionally directed at objects. As Brentano and his students continued in their investigations in (...) descriptive psychology, another side of Austrian phenomenology, namely object theory, became more and more prominent. The philosophical orientation under consideration in this collection of essays is accordingly a two-sided discipline, concerned with both mind and objects, and applicable to various areas of philosophy such as epistemology, philosophy of language, value theory, and ontology.". (shrink)

The present paper probes the relation between the metaphysics of human freedom and the Rothbardian branch of Austrian economics. It transpires that Rothbard and his followers embrace metaphysical libertarianism, which holds that free will is incompatible with determinism and that the thesis of determinism is false as pertaining to human action. However, as we demonstrate, their economics with its reliance on value scales requires for its tenability compatibilist freedom. Moreover, we attempt to show that the notion of value scales (...) (or preferences) postulated by them implies that value scales are determinative of choices people make. We contend that it is for this reason that the said Austrians should jettison their metaphysical libertarianism. (shrink)

In this paper, I re-examine Barry Smith’s list of features of Austrian Philosophy in his Austrian philosophy. The legacy of Franz Brentano. Open Court, Chicago, 1994). I claim that the list properly applies only in a somewhat abbreviated form to all significant representatives of Austrian Philosophy. Moreover, Smith’s crucial thesis that the features of Austrian Philosophy are not shared by any German philosopher only holds if we compare Austrian Philosophy to a canonical list of German (...) Philosophy II. This list, however, was established in twentieth century as a result of historical misrepresentations. If we correct these misrepresentations, we obtain another list of hidden representatives called German Philosophy I. German Philosophy I is fundamentally identical to Austrian Philosophy, whereas German Philosophy II is entirely different from both Austrian Philosophy and German Philosophy I. Therefore, a slightly modified version of Smith’s Austrian Philosophy account still makes sense as a tool to position the proscientific and rational currents of Austrian Philosophy and German Philosophy I against the tendentially anti-scientific and irrational current of German Philosophy II. (shrink)

Review of The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, by David Gordon. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993.

First published in 1986 and reprinted in 2010 in the Routledge Revivals series, this book presents the first detailed confrontation between the Austrian school of economics and Austrian philosophy, especially the philosophy of the Brentano school. It contains a study of the roots of Austrian economics in the liberal political theory of the nineteenth-century Hapsburg empire, and a study of the relations between the general theory of value underlying Austrian economics and the new economic approach to (...) human behaviour propounded by Gary Becker and others in Chicago. In addition, it considers the connections between Austrian methodology and contemporary debates in the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

Thinking of problems of aesthetics has a long and strong tradition in Austrian Philosophy. It starts with Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848); it is famously represented by the critic and musicologist Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904); and it is continued within the school of Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), in particular by Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) and Stephan Witasek (1870-1915). Nowadays the aesthetic writings of Bolzano, Ehrenfels, and Witasek are hardly known, particularly not in the Anglo-Saxon world. Austrian aesthetics is surely less known than (...) Austrian contributions to other philosophical disciplines, like ontology, epistemology or philosophy of science. One of the aims of this paper is to show that this is both regrettable and unjustified for the following reasons: Austrian aestheticians have dealt with a number of problems (mainly concerning the foundations of aesthetics) that are salient until today; in terms of subtlety and depth as well as exactness and originality, in general, they easily stand comparison with today's analytic aesthetics; and many of there views and arguments are still worthy of consideration. In this paper, the focus is on a number of hardly known Austrian contributions to aesthetics. These contributions concern the following, partly interrelated, central problems of philosophical aesthetics: i. The problem of the definition of beauty (What is beauty? What does it mean to say of an object that it is beautiful?) ii. The problem of the ontological status of works of art (What kinds of objects are works of art?) iii. The problem of the objectivity of aesthetic values (Do we claim objective validity for aesthetic value judgements, and if so, is this claim justified?) The answers of Bolzano, Meinong, Witasek and Ehrenfels to these questions will be considered. (shrink)

I consider three conditions to explain the emergence of scientific philosophy in Austrian thought at the turn of the century, concentrating on Vienna and Graz as distinct centers of philosophical development: An outlook that seeks philosophical truth in sound reasoning, combined with a commitment to developing and practicing a methodology that is not essentially dependent on any particular culture's literary–philosophical traditions; The desire to transcend national boundaries in the pursuit of philosophical understanding, as manifested in international professional conferences, publications, (...) and training of international students; and Cultural infrastructure that sustains ambitious philosophical projects, including tangible assets like financial resources, established educational institutions and communication networks, but also less conspicuous elements, such as, among others, a political environment of open inquiry, a relatively free press, community support for the enhancement of learning, and participation in an international language of science. (shrink)

Barry Smith has written a book about an important topic in philosophy and its recent history, concerning the legacy of Franz Brentano. “The Legacy of Franz Brentano” is also its subtitle, a subtitle much more revealing of its contents than its title: Austrian Philosophy. That title makes one expect either a general picture of philosophy in Austria, past and/or present, or an account of what Rudolf Haller has called Austrian Philosophy, a term that refers to its golden age, (...) to a tradition whose main characteristics are, according to Haller, empiricism, proximity to science, and a concern with language. Smith includes these properties in his characterization of the legacy of Brentano, and adds quite appropriately for that legacy “a concern with ontological structure” and “an overriding interest in the relation of macro-phenomena ... to ... micro-phenomena which underlie or are associated with them”. Smith is quite aware that this addition does not hold for the tradition of Austrian philosophy, since he opposes it to a German tradition, and delineates the former “by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath, and Popper”. (shrink)

This contribution describes some of the relations between early analytic philosophy in Cambridge and philosophy in Austria: Stout’s early approval of the writings of Brentano and his students; the high opinion in Cambridge of the Austrian way of doing philosophy. It also outlines two Austrian versions of ideas which were to be very important in early Cambridge philosophy: Husserl on definite descriptions and Meinong on structural similarities.

The book discusses Franz Brentano’s impact on Austrian philosophy. It contains both a critical reassessment of Brentano’s place in the development of Austrian philosophy at the turn of the 20th century and a reevaluation of the impact and significance of his philosophy of mind or ‘descriptive psychology’ which was Brentano's most important contribution to contemporary philosophy and to the philosophy in Vienna. In addition, the relation between Brentano, phenomenology, and the Vienna Circle is investigated, together with a related (...) documentation of Brentano's disciple Alfred Kastil. The general part deals with the ongoing discussion of Carnap's "Aufbau" and the philosophy of mind, with a focus on physicalism as discussed by Carnap and Wittgenstein. As usual, two reviews of recent publications in the philosophy of mathematics and research on Otto Neurath's lifework are included as related research contributions. This book is of interest to students, historians, and philosophers dealing with the history of Austrian and German philosophy in the 19th and 20th century. (shrink)

Current debates between behavioural and orthodox economists indicate that the role and epistemological status of first principles is a particularly pressing problem in economics. As an alleged paragon of extreme apriorism, the methodology of Austrian economics in Mises’ tradition is often dismissed as untenable in the light of modern philosophy. In particular, the defence of the so-called fundamental axiom of praxeology—“Man acts.”—by means of pure intuition is almost unanimously rejected. However, in recently resurfacing debates, the extremeness of Mises’ epistemological (...) position has been called into question. Rather than directly engaging in these exegetical discussions, this paper aims to substantiate the possibility and plausibility of conventionalist defences of praxeology per se. The proposed shift includes settling for an analytic fundamental axiom and acknowledging the prima facie tenability of other research programs than praxeology. Since conventionalist praxeology is only moderately aprioristic, mainstream economists and philosophers might be more likely to engage in fruitful discussions with those Austrian scholars who elaborate pragmatic arguments for praxeology instead of invoking pure intuition. (shrink)