Getting something from nothing: The Vienna Circle and Current Analytic Philosophy

Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.

Date: 11/04/2024

Time: 16h45

Venue: New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, HS 3F

Abstract:

A central priority for the Vienna Circle was the exclusion of metaphysics by Kant’s own criteria, i.e. on the basis of Wittgenstein’s argument that there could be no synthetic a priori statements. Can this still be taken seriously? How? Is it perhaps a “barrier to entailment” like those recently studied by Gillian Russell in her investigations about the provability of “Hume’s Law” (the prohibition of normative conclusions from descriptive premisses)? The preliminary conclusion reached in this talk is that the Vienna Circle’s case against the synthetic a priori rests on a simpler and more straighforward pre-systematic intuition than Gillian Russell’s version of “Hume’s Law” or its cognates. While this simple and intuitive case against the synthetic a priori is ignored or sidelined by some recent developments in analytic philosophy (analytic metaphysics, neokantian ethics, etc.), this talk argues for a revival of the Vienna Circle’s insight, particularly to push back against these
developments in current analytic philosophy.