PHILOSOPHERS BORN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WIKIPEDIA

JULHO 2007

Nicola Abbagnano

Nicola Abbagnano.

Nicola Abbagnano (15 July 1901 September 9, 1990) was an Italian existential philosopher. Nicola Abbagnano was born in Salerno[1]. He studied in Naples and taught at Turin. In 1972 he moved to Milan, where he collaborated to Indro Montanelli's Il Giornale. For a short while, he was assessor for culture in the comune of Milan. From 1952, together with Norberto Bobbio, he was codirector of Rivista di filosofia. Abbagnano's philosophy was defined by himself "positive existentialism". His "philosophy of possible" condemned other existentialists for either denying human possibility or exaggerating it. In his later work he tended to adopt a more naturalistic and stientific approach to philosophy.

Selected bibliography

Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero (1923) La fisica nuova. Fondamenti di una nuova teoria della scienza (1934) Introduzione all'esistenzialismo (1942) History of Philosophy (3 volumes, 1946-1950) L'esistenzialismo positivo ("The Positive Existentialism", 1948) Possibilit e libert ("Possibility and Liberty", 1956) Storia della filosofia (1966) Dizionario di filosofia (1987)

H. B. Acton
Harry Burrows Acton (1908 1974) was a British academic in the field of political philosophy, known for books defending the morality of capitalism, and attacking MarxismLeninism. He in particular produced arguments on the incoherence of Marxism, which he described as a 'farrago' (in philosophical terms). His book The Illusion of the Epoch, in which this appears, is a standard point of reference. Other interests were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and Sidney Webb. He had teaching positions at the London School of Economics, Bedford College, the University of Edinburgh where he was Professor of Moral Philosophy, and the University of Chicago. He was editor of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, of which he was for a time Director. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1952 to 1953.

Works

The Illusion of the Epoch:Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (1955) The Philosophy of Language in Revolutionary France (1959) Dawes Hicks Lecture of the British Academy What Marx Really Said (1967) Philosophy of Punishment (1969) editor Kant's moral philosophy (1970) The Morals of Markets: an Ethical Exploration (1971) essays edited by David Gordon and Jeremy Shearmur The Right to Work and the Right to Strike (1972) The ethics of capitalism (The Company and its Responsibilities) (1972) The idea of a spiritual power: 1973 Auguste Comte memorial trust lecture (1974)

Mortimer Adler

Mortimer Adler around 1963

Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 June 28, 2001) was an American Aristotelian philosopher and author. He was born in New York City, the son of an immigrant jewelry salesman. He dropped out of school at 14 years of age and went to work as a secretary and copy boy at the New York Sun, hoping to become a journalist. After a year, he took night classes at Columbia University to improve his writing. It was there that he became interested, after reading the autobiography of the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill, in the great philosophers and thinkers of Western civilization. Adler was driven to continue his reading after learning that Mill had read Plato when he was only five years old, while he had not read him at all. A book by Plato was lent to him by a neighbor and Adler became hooked. He then decided to study philosophy at Columbia, where he received a scholarship. But he was so focused on philosophy that he failed to complete the requisite physical education course to earn his bachelor's degree. Adler became an instructor at Columbia in the 1920s. He continued to participate in the Honors program (today the Core Curriculum) which had been started by John Erskine. This program focused on the reading of the great Classics. His tenure at the university included study with such eminent thinkers as Erskine and John Dewey, the famous American pragmatist philosopher. This kind of environment inspired his early interest in reading and the study of the "Great Books" of Western Civilization. He also promoted the idea that philosophy should be integrated with science, literature, and religion.

Biography
Originally wanting to become a journalist, Adler took writing classes at night where he discovered the works of men he would come to call heroes: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and others. He went on to study philosophy at Columbia

University. Though he failed to pass the required swimming test for a bachelor's degree (a matter that was rectified when Columbia gave him an honorary degree in 1983), he stayed at the university and eventually received a teaching position and a doctorate in psychology.
[1]

In 1930 Robert Hutchins, the newly appointed president of the University of Chicago, whom Adler had befriended some years earlier, arranged for him to be hired by Chicagos law school as a professor of the philosophy of law, after the philosophers at Chicago resisted Adler's appointment to the philosophy faculty.[2][3] Adler was the first "non-lawyer" to join the law school faculty.[4] Adler and Hutchins went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in 1952. He also served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopdia Britannica since its inception in 1949, and succeeded Robert Hutchins as its chairman from 1974. As the director of editorial planning for the fifteenth edition of Britannica from 1965, he was instrumental in the major reorganization of knowledge embodied in that edition. [5] He introduced the Paideia Proposal which resulted in his founding the Paideia Program, a grade-school curriculum centered around guided reading and discussion of difficult works (as judged for each grade). With Max Weismann, he founded The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas. Adler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works (such as How to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers. He was also an advocate of economic democracy and wrote an influential preface to Louis Kelso's The Capitalist Manifesto. Adler was often aided in his thinking and writing by Arthur Rubin, an old friend from his Columbia undergraduate days. In his own words:
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never write books for my fellow professors to read. I have no interest in the academic audience at all. I'm interested in Joe Doakes. A general audience can read any book I writeand they do.

Adler took a long time in his own life to make up his mind about theological issues. He considered himself a pagan when he wrote How to Think About God in 1980. In Volume 51 of the Mars Hill Audio "Journal" (2001), Ken Myers includes his 1980 interview with Adler, conducted after How to Think About God was published. Myers reminisces, "During that interview, I asked him why he had never embraced the Christian faith himself. He explained that while he had been profoundly influenced by a number of Christian thinkers during his life, ...there were moralnot intellectualobstacles to his conversion. He didn't explain any further." Myers goes on to point out that Adler finally "surrendered to the Hound of Heaven" and "made a confession of faith and was baptized" only a few years after that interview. Offering insight into Adler's conversion, Meyer quotes Adler from a subsequent 1990 article in Christianity magazine: "My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy."

In 2000, Adler became a Roman Catholic. He can be considered a Catholic philosopher due to his lifelong participation in the Neo-Thomist movement, despite not being a Catholic for most of this time. In his 1980 interview, Myers playfully asked Adler which single book he would want to take on a desert island. Adler responded with eleven:

Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War [1] 5 or 6 of Plato's Dialogues Aristotle's Ethics & Politics Augustine of Hippo's Confessions Plutarch's Lives Dante's Divine Comedy some plays of Shakespeare Montaigne's Essays Gulliver's Travels Locke's Second Treatise of Government [2] Tolstoy's War and Peace

In the summer of 1981 Adler conducted a seminar at the Aspen Institute in Colorado based on his book Six Great Ideas. It was filmed by PBS for a popular television series hosted by Bill Moyers the following year. Adler was a controversial figure in some circles who saw his focus on the classics as eurocentric and dogmatic, and he was never afraid to speak his mind. Adler was also a world federalist.

Quotations
"The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind." "We ought to desire only that which is good for us." "Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men." "[I]f local civil government is necessary for local civil peace, then world civil government is necessary for world peace." - Philosopher at Large, 1977 "Every person is called to the same common vocation, that of being a good citizen and a thoughtful human being." "There is no truth, only evidence."

Works

Mortimer Adler around 1992 Dialectic (1927) The Nature of Judicial Proof: An Inquiry into the Logical, Legal, and Empirical Aspects of the Law of Evidence (1931, with Jerome Michael) Diagrammatics (1932, with Maude Phelps Hutchins) Crime, Law and Social Science (1933, with Jerome Michael) Art and Prudence: A Study in Practical Philosophy (1937) What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology (1937) The Philosophy and Science of Man: A Collection of Texts as a Foundation for Ethics and Politics (1940) How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940), 1966 edition subtitled A Guide to Reading the Great Books , 1972 revised edition with Charles Van Doren, The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading: ISBN 0-671-21209-5 A Dialectic of Morals: Towards the Foundations of Political Philosophy (1941) How to Think About War and Peace (1944) The Revolution in Education (1944, with Milton Mayer) The Capitalist Manifesto (1958, with Louis O. Kelso) ISBN 0-8371-8210-7 The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (1958) The New Capitalists: A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings (1961, with Louis O. Kelso) The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Controversies about Freedom (1961) Great Ideas from the Great Books (1961) The Conditions of Philosophy: Its Checkered Past, Its Present Disorder, and Its Future Promise (1965) The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (1967)

The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense (1970) The Common Sense of Politics (1971) The American Testament (1975, with William Gorman) Some Questions About Language: A Theory of Human Discourse and Its Objects (1976) Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (1977) Reforming Education: The Schooling of a People and Their Education Beyond Schooling (1977, edited by Geraldine Van Doren) Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (1978) ISBN 0-684-83823-0 How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan (1980) ISBN 0-02016022-4 Six Great Ideas: Truth-Goodness-Beauty-Liberty-Equality-Justice (1981) ISBN 002-072020-3 The Angels and Us (1982) The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto (1982) How to Speak / How to Listen (1983) ISBN 0-02-500570-7 Paideia Problems and Possibilities: A Consideration of Questions Raised by The Paideia Proposal (1983) A Vision of the Future: Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better Society (1984) ISBN 0-02-500280-5 The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus (1984, with Members of the Paideia Group) Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985) ISBN 0-02-500330-5 A Guidebook to Learning: For a Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom (1986) We Hold These Truths: Understanding the Ideas and Ideals of the Constitution (1987) Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1988, edited by Geraldine Van Doren) Intellect: Mind Over Matter (1990) Truth in Religion: The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth (1990) ISBN 002-064140-0 Haves Without Have-Nots: Essays for the 21st Century on Democracy and Socialism (1991) ISBN 0-02-500561-8 Desires, Right & Wrong: The Ethics of Enough (1991) A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher At Large (1992) The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (1992) Natural Theology, Chance, and God (The Great Ideas Today, 1992) The Four Dimensions of Philosophy: Metaphysical-Moral-Objective-Categorical (1993) Art, the Arts, and the Great Ideas (1994) Adler's Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher's Lexicon (1995)

Edited works

The New Technology: Servant or Master (in work, with Phillip W. Goetz) Scholasticism and Politics (1940) Great Books of the Western World (1952, 52 volumes), 2nd edition 1990, 60 volumes A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas (1952, 2 volumes), 2nd edition 1990 The Great Ideas Today (1961-1977, 17 volumes), with Robert Hutchins, 19781999, 20 volumes Gateway to the Great Books (1963, 10 volumes), with Robert Hutchins The Annals of America (1968, 21 volumes) Propdia: Outline of Knowledge and Guide to The New Encyclopdia Britannica 15th Edition (1974, 30 volumes) Great Treasury of Western Thought (1977, with Charles Van Doren)

References
1. 2. 3. 4.
^ "Remarkable Columbians" Columbia U. website on Adler ^ Charles Van Doren,"Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001)", Columbia Forum online, November 2002 ^ Peter Temes, "Death of a Great Reader and Philosopher", Chicago Sun-Times, 3 July 2001 ^ Centennial Facts of the Day, U Chicago Law School website 5. ^ Mortimer J. Adler, A Guidebook to Learning: For the Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom . MacMillan Publishing Company, New York, 1986. p.88

Theodor W. Adorno
Western Philosophy 20th century philosophy

Name: Birth: Death: School/tradition: Main interests: Notable ideas: Influences: Influenced:

Theodor W. Adorno September 11, 1903 (Frankfurt, Germany) August 6, 1969 (Visp, Switzerland) critical theory social theory, psychoanalysis, musicology, cultural studies The Culture Industry, the Authoritarian Personality, the negative dialectic, non-conformist conformist Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Husserl Jrgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, John Zerzan

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher, pianist, musicologist, and composer. He was a member of the Frankfurt School along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jrgen Habermas, and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project. Already as a young music critic and amateur sociologist, Theodor W. Adorno was primarily a philosophical thinker. The label social philosopher emphasizes the socially critical aspect of his philosophical thinking, which from 1945 onwards took an intellectually prominent position in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

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Biography
The early Frankfurt years
Theodor (or "Teddie") was born in Frankfurt as an only child to the wine merchant Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (18701941, of Jewish descent, converted to Protestantism) and the Catholic singer Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It was the second half of this name that he adopted as his surname upon becoming a naturalized American citizen in the 1930s ("Wiesengrund" was abbreviated to "W"). His musically talented aunt Agathe also lived with the family. The young Adorno passionately engaged the piano; he especially liked four-handed playing because, he later wrote, [citation needed] the need for coordination increased his skill and appreciation. His childhood joy was increased by the family's annual summer sojourn in Amorbach. He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium where he proved to be a highly gifted student: at the exceptionally early age of 17 he graduated from the Gymnasium at the top of his class. In his free time he took private lessons in composition with Bernhard Sekles and read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason together with his friend Siegfried Kracauer 14 years his elder on Saturday afternoons. Later he would proclaim that he owed more to these readings than to any of his academic teachers. At the University of Frankfurt (today's Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitt) he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology and sociology. There he wrote his first academic work, a review of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. He completed his studies swiftly: by the end of 1924 he graduated with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl. (Jacques Derrida, whose criticism of the use of the notions of "immediacy" and "self-presence" in Western metaphysics may owe a debt to Adorno, also wrote his first thesis on Husserl.) Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.

Vienna intermezzo
During his student years in Frankfurt Adorno had written a number of music critiques. He believed composition and music criticism would be his future profession. With this goal envisioned, he used his relationship to Alban Berg, who had made a name for himself with the opera Wozzeck, to pursue studies in Vienna beginning in January, 1925. He also formed contacts with other greats of the Viennese School, namely to Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. His own musical compositions are shaped by the style of Berg and Schoenberg. Schoenbergs revolutionary atonality particularly inspired the 22-year-old to pen philosophical observations on the new music, though they were not well received by its proponents. The disappointment over this caused him to cut back on his music critiques to enable his career as academic teacher and social researcher to flourish. He did however remain editor-in-chief of the avant-garde magazine Anbruch. His musicological writing already displayed his philosophical ambitions. Other lasting influences from Adorno's time in Vienna included Karl Kraus, whose lectures he attended with Alban Berg, and Georg Lukcs whose Theory of the Novel had already enthused him while attending Gymnasium and whose History and Class Consciousness he had reviewed a year previously.

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The intermediate Frankfurt years

After returning from Vienna, Adorno experienced another setback. After his dissertation supervisor Hans Cornelius and Cornelius' assistant Max Horkheimer voiced their concerns about Adorno's professorial thesis - a comprehensive philosophical-psychological treatise he withdrew it in early 1928. Adorno took three more years before he received the venia legendi, after submitting the manuscript Kierkegaard: Construction of the aesthetic (Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des sthetischen) to his new supervisor, Paul Tillich. The topic of Adorno's inaugural lecture was the Current Importance of Philosophy, a theme he considered programmatic throughout his life. In it, he questioned the concept of totality for the first time, anticipating his famous formula directed against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel the whole is the untrue (from Minima Moralia). However, Adorno's credential was revoked by the Nazis, along with those of all professors of non-Aryan descent, in 1933. Among Adorno's first courses was a seminar on Benjamin's treatise The Origin of German Tragic Drama. His 1932 essay "On the Social Situation of Music" (" Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik") was Adorno's contribution to the first issue of Horkheimer's Zeitschrift fr Sozialwissenschaft ("journal for sociology"); it wasn't until 1938 that he joined the Institute for Social Research.

Commuter between Berlin and Oxford (1934-1937)

Beginning in the late 1920s during stays in Berlin, Adorno established close relations with Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch; Adorno had become acquainted with Bloch's first major work, Geist der Utopie, in 1921. Moreover, the German capital, Berlin, was also home of chemist Margarethe ('Gretel') Karplus (1902-1993), whom Adorno would marry in London in 1937. In 1934, fleeing from the Nazi regime, he emigrated to England, with hopes of obtaining a professorship at Oxford. Though Adorno was not appointed professor at Oxford, he undertook an in depth study of Husserl's philosophy as a postgraduate at Merton College. Adorno spent the summer holidays with his fiance in Germany every year. In 1936, the Zeitschrift featured one of Adorno's most controversial texts, "On Jazz" (" ber Jazz"). It should be noted that "jazz" was frequently used to refer to all popular music at the time of Adorno's writing. This article was less an engagement with this style of music than a first polemic against the blooming entertainment and culture industry. Adorno believed the culture industry was a system by which society was controlled though a top-down creation of standardized culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression. Extensive correspondence with Horkheimer, who was then living in exile in the United States, led to an offer of employment in America.

migr in the USA (1938-1949)

After visiting New York for the first time in 1937 he decided to resettle there. In Brussels he bade his parents, who followed in 1939, farewell, and said goodbye to Benjamin in Sanremo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe, thus limiting their very rigorous future communication to letters. Shortly after Adorno's arrival in New York, Horkheimer's 12

Institute for Social Research, which was then resettled at Columbia University, accepted him as an official member. He also served as musical consult on the 'Radio Project' (also known as Lazarsfeld/Stanton Analysis Programme) directed by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld at Princeton University. Very soon, however, his attention shifted to direct collaboration with Horkheimer. They moved to Los Angeles together, where he taught for the following seven years and served as the co-director of a research unit at the University of California. Their collective work found its first major expression in the first edition of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklrung) in 1947. Faced with the unfolding events of the Holocaust, the work begins with the words: Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. (2002 translation, 1) Seit je hat Aufklrung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklrte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils. (1947 German edition) In this influential book, Adorno and Horkheimer outline civilization's tendency towards self-destruction. They argue that the concept of reason was transformed into an irrational force by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humanity itself. It is this rationalization of humanity that was identified as the primary cause of fascism and other totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Adorno did not consider rationalism a path towards human emancipation. For that, he looked toward the arts. After 1945 he ceased to work as a composer. By taking this step he conformed to his own famous maxim: "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" ( Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch). (Adorno was, however, to retract this statement later, saying that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream... hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.") He was entrusted with the honorable task to advise Thomas Mann on the musicological details of his novel Doktor Faustus. Apart from that he worked on his 'philosophy of the new music' (Philosophie der neuen Musik) in the 1940s, and on Hanns Eisler's Composing for the films. He also contributed 'qualitative interpretations' to the Studies in Anti-Semitic Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.

Late Frankfurt years (1949-1969)

After the war, Adorno, who had been homesick, did not hesitate long before returning to Germany. Due to Horkheimer's influence he was given a professorship in Frankfurt in 1949/1950, allowing him to continue his academic career after a prolonged hiatus. This culminated in a position as double Ordinarius (of philosophy and of sociology). In the

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Institute, which was affiliated with the university, Adorno's leadership status became ever more and more apparent, while Horkheimer, who was eight years older, gradually stepped back, leaving his younger friend the sole directorship in 1958/1959. His collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, led to greater prominence in post-war Germany when it was released by the newly founded publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp. It purported a 'sad science' under the impression of Fascism, Stalinism and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no alternative: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly." [1] (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen) The work raised Adorno to the level of a foundational intellectual figure in the West German republic, after a last attempt to get him involved in research in the USA failed in 1953. Here is a list of his multifaceted accomplishments:

In 1952 he participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans (commented on critically by Peter R. Hofsttter). From 1954 onwards, he taught musicology in the summer academies in Kranichstein. Numerous radio debates (among others with Ernst Bloch, Elias Canetti and Arnold Gehlen) Numerous lectures in Berlin and around Europe (Paris, Vienna, Italy, at the 'documenta' in Kassel in 1959, in Czechoslovakia in 1968) Release of Walter Benjamin's letters and writings In 1961 he initiated the positivism debate (Positivismusstreit) at a meeting of the German Sociological Association in Tbingen. 1963-1967, he was Chairman of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Soziologie. In his capacity, he headed 1964 the 15th sociology conference, Max Weber and Sociology Today and in 1968 he headed the 16th sociology conference, Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.

Adorno Monument in Frankfurt (desk, chair, lamp, carpet and other utilities like the metronome of his working room).

Final years (1967-1969)

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In 1966 extraparliamentary opposition (APO) formed against the grand coalition of Germany's two major parties CDU/CSU and SPD, directed primarily against the planned Notstandgesetze (emergency laws). Adorno was an outspoken critic of these policies, which he displayed by his participation in an event organized by the action committee Demokratie im Notstand ("Democracy in a State of Emergency"). When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer at a demonstration against a visit by the Shah of Iran, the leftwing APO became increasingly radicalized, and the universities became a place of unrest. To a considerable extent it was students of Adorno who interpreted a theory of revolt, thus executing a 'praxis' from 'Critical Theory'. It is said that Adorno asked for the help of police to remove the students that had occupied the Frankfurt Institute in fear of vandalism. Therefore Adorno in particular became a target of student action. He sharply criticised the anti-intellectual trend in the 60's Left, which he called "actionism," (strongly in need of citation here) defined as the belief that actions such as protests and strikes could change the political structure by themselves without being supported by solid theory and an organized program or party. On the other side of the spectrum, the right accused him of providing the intellectual basis for leftist violence. In 1969 the disturbances in his lecture hall, most famously as female students occupied his speaker's podium bare-breasted, increased to an extent that Adorno discontinued his lecture series. In a letter to Samuel Beckett, he wrote: "The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary at least has a surprising note." One biographer on Adorno, Stefan-Mller Doohm, contends that he was convinced the attacks by the students were directed against his theories as well as his person and that he feared that the current political situation might lead to totalitarianism. He left with his wife on a vacation to Switzerland. Despite warnings by his doctor, he attempted to ascend a 3,000 meter high mountain, resulting in heart palpitations. The same day, he and his wife drove to the nearby town Visp, where he suffered heart palpitations once again. He was brought to the town's clinic. In the morning of the following day, August 6, he died of a heart attack.

Theory
Adorno was to a great extent influenced by Walter Benjamin's application of Karl Marx's thought. Adorno, along with other major Frankfurt School theorists such as Horkheimer and Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism was able to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed. Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness. Adorno's work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensuous, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works.

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Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this massproduced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern. At the time this was considered important because of the role which the state took in cultural production; Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives left and right the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology. Many aspects of Adorno's work are relevant today and have been developed in many strands of contemporary critical theory, media theory, and sociology. Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past (Auschwitz), morals or the Culture Industry. The latter has become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of Adorno's reflections on aesthetics and music have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of essays on the subject, many of which had not previously been translated into English, has only recently been collected and published as Essays on Music. Adorno, again along with the other principal thinkers of the Frankfurt school, attacked positivism in the social sciences and in philosophy. He was particularly harsh on approaches that claimed to be scientific and quantitative, although the collective Frankfurt School work The Authoritarian Personality that appeared under Adorno's name was the single most influential empirical study in the social sciences in America for decades after its publication in 1950.

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Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not. Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a nondominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts.

Adorno and his critics

Critiques of Adorno's theories include other Marxists. Other critics include Ralf Dahrendorf and Karl Popper, positivist philosophers, neoconservatives, and many students frustrated by Adorno's style. Many Marxists accuse the Critical Theorists of claiming the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx without feeling the obligation to apply theory for political action.

Marxist criticisms
According to Horst Mller's Kritik der kritischen Theorie ("Critique of Critical Theory"), Adorno posits totality as an automatic system. This is consistent with Adorno's idea of society as a self-regulating system, from which one must escape (but from which nobody can escape). For him it was existent, but inhuman, while Mller argues against the existence of such a system. In his argument, he claims that Critical Theory provides no practical solution for societal change. He concludes that Jrgen Habermas, in particular, and the Frankfurt School, in general, misconstrue Marx. Georg Lukacs, a Marxist philosopher, infamously described Adorno as having taken up residence in the 'Grand Hotel Abyss', in his 1962 preface to The Theory of the Novel. This was understood to mean that Lukacs (who at the time supported "socialist realism" and in general the Marxism of the East German regime) associated Adorno with a dated protoMarxism, that indulged in despair, despite a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle.

Positivist criticisms
Positivist philosophers accuse Adorno of theorizing without submitting his theories to empirical tests, basing their critique on Karl Popper's revision of Logical Positivism in which Popper substituted "falsifiability" as a criterion of scientificity for the original "verifiability" criterion of meaning proposed by A.J. Ayer and other early Logical Positivists. In particular, interpreters of Karl Popper apply the test of "falsifiability" to Adorno's thought and find that he was elusive when presented with contrary evidence.

Conservative criticism

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Drawing on the Positivist critique, conservatives also deride Adorno as a theorist unwilling to submit to experimental verification. However, a more intricate criticism is offered by the followers of Leo Strauss, who also believe in a hermeneutics of culture, and often echo many of Adorno's criticisms of accessibility and art. Their critique rests on the anti-capitalist nature of Adorno's orientation, arguing that, while, mass culture may consist of bread and circuses, that these are essential for social function and their removal or reduction in importance as "useful lies", would threaten the continued operation of the market and society, as well as higher philosophical truth[citation needed].

Adorno's responses to his critics

Adorno's defenders reply to his positivist and neoconservative critics by pointing to his extensive numerical and empirical research, notably the "F-scale" in his work on Fascist tendencies in individual personalities in The Authoritarian Personality. And in fact, quantitative research using questionnaires and other tools of the modern sociologist was in full use at Adorno's Institute for Social Research. Adorno also argued that the authoritarian personality would, of course, use culture and its consumption to exert social control, but that such control is inherently degrading to those who are subjected to it, and instead such personalities would project their own fear of loss of control on to society as a whole. However, as a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to factor in the effect of reflection on the societal object, Adorno realized that some criticism (including deliberate disruption of his classes in the 1960s) could never be answered in a dialogue between equals if, as he seems to have believed, what the naive ethnographer or sociologists thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.

Adorno's sociological methods

Institut and Adorno-Ampel (Adorno-traffic light) at Senckenberganlage in Frankfurt am Main Because Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he believed that the language the sociologist uses, like the language of the ordinary person, is a political construct in large measure that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts installed by 18

dominant classes and social structures (such as our notion of "deviance" which includes both genuinely deviant individual and "hustlers" operating below social norms because they lack the capital to operate above: for an analysis of this phenomenon, cf. Pierre Bourdieu's book The Weight of the World). Thus Adorno felt that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered...including revising theories that were found to be false. For example, in essays published in Germany on Adorno's return from the USA, and reprinted in the Critical Models essays collection (ISBN 0-231-07635-5), Adorno praised the egalitarianism and openness of US society based on his sojourn in New York and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955. Prior to going to the USA, and as shown in his rather infamous essay "On Jazz", Adorno seems to have thought that the USA was a cultural wasteland in which people's minds and responses were formed by what he, rather nastily, called "the music of slaves". One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American (and Americanized) sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 1930s after fleeing Hitler. As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance (MIT 1995): Lazarsfeld was the director of a project, funded and inspired by David Sarnoff (the head of RCA), to discover both the sort of music that listeners of radio liked and ways to improve their "taste", so that RCA could profitably air more classical music...Sarnoff was, it appears, genuinely concerned with the low level of taste in this era of "Especially for You" and other forgotten hits, but needed assurance that RCA could viably air opera on Saturday afternoons. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's habit of "jumping to conclusions" without being willing to do the scut work of collecting data. Adorno, however, rather than being arrogant, seems to have had a depressive personality, and Rolf Wiggershaus tells an anecdote which doesn't fit the image formed of an arrogant pedant: he noted that the typists at the Radio Research Project liked and understood what Adorno was saying about the actual effect of modern media. They may have responded to comments similar to that found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Adorno with his close associate Max Horkheimer, that it appeared that movie-goers were less enthralled with the content even of "blockbusters" of the era, films that are now lauded by Hollywood mavens as "art", than by the air-conditioned comfort of the theaters--an observation reflected in movie business at the time by the expression that one found a good place to sell popcorn and built a theatre around it.

Adorno translated into English

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While even German readers can find Adorno's work difficult to understand, an additional problem for English readers is that his German idiom is particularly difficult to translate into English. A similar difficulty of translation is true of Hegel, Heidegger, and a number of other German philosophers and poets. As a result, some early translators tended toward over-literalness. In recent years, Edmund Jephcott and Stanford University Press have published new translations of some of Adorno's lectures and books, including Introduction to Sociology, Problems of Moral Philosophy and his transcribed lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Aristotle's "Metaphysics", and a new translation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Professor Henry Pickford, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has translated many of Adorno's works such as The meaning of Working Through the Past.A new translation has also appeared of the Philosophy of New Music by Robert HullotKentor, from University of Minnesota Press, and of the correspondence with Alban Berg, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, and the letters to Adorno's parents, all by Wieland Hoban and published by Polity Press. These fresh translations are less literal in their rendering of German sentences and words, and are more accessible to English readers.

Adorno and Music Theory

Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his understanding of music and Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporary composer's atonal (less so "twelve-tone") techniques (Adorno had studied composition for several years with Alban Berg), which challenged the hierarchical nature of traditional tonality in composition. For even if "the whole is untrue", for Adorno we retain the ability to form partial critical conceptions and submit them to a test as we progress towards a "higher" awareness. This role of a critical consciousness was a common concern in the Second Viennese School prior to the Second World War, and demanded that composers relate to the traditions more as a canon of taboos rather than as a canon of masterpieces that should be imitated. For the composer (poet, artist, philosopher) of this era, every work of art or thought was thus likely to be shocking or difficult to understand. Only through its "corrosive unacceptability" to the commercially-defined sensibilities of the middle class could new art hope to challenge dominant cultural assumptions. Adorno's followers argue that he seems to have managed the very idea that one can abandon totality while still being able to rank artistic and ethical phenomena on a tentative scale, not because he was a sentimentalist about this ability but because he saw the drive towards totality (whether the Stalinist or Fascist totality of his time, or globalization of the market today) as derivative of the ability to make ethical and artistic judgement, which, following Kant, Adorno thought part of being human. Thus his method (better: antimethod) was to use language and its "big" concepts tentatively and musically, partly to see if they "sound right" and fit the data. For example, his question in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N., 1950, ISBN 0-393-31112-0). This and other works written during his sojourn in California was whether American Fundamentalist authoritarianism could be spoken of as having a relationship to Continental Fascism without sounding a false note in terms of the partial

20

totality of a "theory" that American authoritarians MIGHT bring about a different but equally or more pernicious form of Fascism in the US. Adorno was concerned that a genuine sociology retain a commitment to truth including the willingness to self-apply. Today, his life can be read as a protest against what he would call the "reification" of political polls and spin as well as a culture that in being aggressively "anti" high culture, seems every year to make more and more cultural artifacts of less and less quality that are consumed with some disgust by their "fans", viewed as objects themselves.

Select bibliography (by publication in English)

Philosophy of Modern Music (1949) The Authoritarian Personality (et al. 1950). New York: Harper. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973 (Published in German in 1966) Prisms (1967) Aesthetic Theory (Published in German in 1970) Dialektik der Aufklrung (1944 with Horkheimer). Translations: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1973. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Cal.:Stanford University Press, 2002. Minima Moralia (1974) Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1983). Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1989). Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991). Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992). Critical Theory Since Plato (1992). Hegel: Three Studies (1993). Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (1998). Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1998). Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (2000). Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (2001).

References
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno theory.org.uk: Theodor Adorno Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Theodor Adorno Gravesite Illuminations - The Critical Theory Project Theodor Adorno

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Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment published in Other Voices, n.1 v.1, 1997. "Adorno during the 1950s" by Juergen Habermas Sartre and the Philosophy of Music to Th. W. Adorno

22

Virgil Aldrich
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Virgil C. Aldrich (1903, India-May 28, 1998, Salt Lake City, Utah) was an American philosopher of art, language, and religion.

Writings

Philosophy of Art, (1963) The Body of a Person, (1988) "Pictures and Persons" in Review of Metaphysics (1975) "Description and expression: Physicalism restricted" (1977), Inquiry 20: 149164 Design, Composition, and Symbol

23

Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A.D. Aleksandrov, 1952, after becoming a rector of the Leningrad State University

A.D. Aleksandrov, undated

Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov (Russian: , alternative transliterations: Alexandr or Alexander (first name), and Alexandrov (last name)) (August 4, 1912July 27, 1999), was a Soviet/Russian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and mountaineer.

Scientific career
A.D. graduated from the Department of Physics of Leningrad State University. His advisors there were Vladimir Fok, a physicist, and Boris Delaunay, a mathematician. In 1933 A.D. worked at the State Optical Institute (GOI) and at the same time gave lectures at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of the University. He completed his 24

Ph.D. in 1935 at the University and later in 1937 a D.Sc. dissertation. He became a professor at the University, while also working at LOMI, the Leningrad Department of the Steklov Mathematical Institute. Appointed the rector of the university in 1952, A.D. remained in this position until 1964. In 1946 he became a corresponding member, and in 1964 a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Since 1975 he was also a member of the Italian National Academy. Since 1964 and until 1986 A.D. lived in Novosibirsk, heading the Laboratory of Geometry of the Institute of Mathematics of the Siberian Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences, teaching at Novosibirsk State University. In 1986 he returned to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), to head the geometry laboratory at the LOMI (now PDMI, Petersburg Department of the Mathematical Institute).

Awards
Partial list of the awards, medals, and prizes of A.D.:

USSR State Prize (Stalin Prize, Stalinskaya Premiya) (1942) Lobachevsky International Prize (1951) Euler medal (1992)

One of many orders that he was awarded was given to him in 1990 for his active defence of genetics during the period when it was declared a pseudoscience in the Soviet union and fought against (see Lysenkoism).

Works by A.D.
A.D. has written a multitude of books, scientific papers, textbooks for various levels (schools to universities). He also wrote non-mathematical papers, memoirs about famous scientists, and philosophical essays dealing with the moral values of science. A full bibliography is available in [1].

Students of A.D.

I. Liberman, S. Olovianishnikoff, P. Kostelyanetz all the three of them perished on the battlefields of the Great patriotic war A. Pogorelov from Kharkov A. Yusupov from Bukhara Students from the A.D.'s Leningrad period (ordered by the time of joining the seminars): Yu. Borisov, V. Zalgaller, Yu. Reshetnyak, I. Bakelman, Yu. Volkov, A. Zamorzaev, S. Bogacheva (who later married A.D.), Yu. Borovskii, R. Pimenov Sobchuk and Starokhozyayev from Ukraine G. Rusiyeshvili from Georgia (country) B. Frank and H. Frank from Germany 25

Yu. Burago, V. Kreinovich Moved from Alma-Ata after A.D.'s lecture tour there: M. Kvachko, V. Ovchinnikova, E. Sen'kin Stayed in Alma-Ata: A. Zilberberg, V. Strel'cov, D. Yusupov Novosibirsk students: A. Guc, A. Kuz'minykh, A. Levichev, A. Shaydenko

Both in St. Petersburg and in Novosobirsk A.D. was doing joint research also with some of his students' students. Several of them became his co-authors: V. Berestovskii, A. Verner, V. Gol'dshtein, S. Krushkal', S. Kutateladze, N. Necvetaev, I. Nikolaev, V. Ryzhik. His last (doctoral) student was Grigori Perelman, who in 2002 made a breakthrough in the proof of Thurston's geometrization conjecture, which contains the Poincar conjecture as a special case.

Mountaineering
A.D. became attracted to alpinism under the influence of his advisor B.N. Delaunay. In the summer of 1937, after defending his D.Sc., together with I. Chashnikov he makes a first climb to the Chotchi summit, and with K. Piskaryov performs a climb of Bu-Ul'gen via the western wall (one of the first wall climbs in the history of the Soviet alpinism). [] In 1940 he participates in a record-making traversal[] He manages, almost by a miracle, to stop the fall of A. Gromov, who had fallen along with a snow shelf. It was with this traversal that A.D. Aleksandrov completed the alpinist sports master requirements. The Great Patriotic war postponed awarding him this honorary title until 1949. (See A.D. Aleksandrov in the mountains (an alpinist biography) , Savvon S.M., [1], p.182183) During his rectorship, A.D. also advanced the mountaineering sport activities in the university, actively participating in the climbs. The fiftieth birthday was celebrated by A.D. in the mountains with his friends. On that day he made a solo first climb of an unnamed peak 6222 m (Shakhdarinsk ridge, Pamir), that as he suggested was then named "The peak of the Leningrad university." During later years A.D. didn't undertake climbs due to health problems, yet he never ceased dreaming of climbs. Finally, in 1982, the year of his seventieth birthday, he, together with K. Tolstov, performs in Tian Shan his last climb, of the Panfilov Peak (same source)

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See also

Cauchy's theorem

References
1. . . . . (Academician Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov. Recollections. Publications. Biographical materials, in Russian). Editors: G.M. Idlis and O.A. Ladyzhenskaya. Moscow, Nauka publishing house, 2002. 2. Yu. F. Borisov, "On the 90th anniversary of the birth of A.D. Aleksandrov (1912 1999)", Russ. Math. Surv., 2002, 57 (5), 10171031. 3. Yu. F. Borisov, V.A. Zalgaller, S.S. Kutateladze, O.A. Ladyzhenskaya, A.V. Pogorelov, Yu. G. Reshetnyak, " 90- .. (19121999)", Uspekhi Mat. Nauk, 2002, 57 (5), 169181. 4. A.M. Vershik, "Alexander Danilovich as I knew him (in Russian).",St. Petersburg University, No. 3-4 (2004), 36-40.

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Louis Althusser
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy

Name: Louis Althusser October 16, 1918 Birth: Birmendres, Algeria October 23, 1990 (aged 72) Death: Paris, France School/tradition: Marxism, Structuralism Main interests: Politics, Economics, Ideology The 'Epistemological Break', Problematic, Notable ideas: Overdetermination, Ideological State Apparatuses, Interpellation Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci, Influences: Benedict de Spinoza, Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, tienne Balibar, Judith Influenced: Butler, Anthony Giddens, Perry Anderson, Nicos Poulantzas, Jean-Luc Marion, Slavoj Zizek

Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuse) (October 16, 1918 October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the prestigious cole Normale Suprieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. He was a lifelong member and sometimes strong critic of the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of the communist project. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and democratic socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European Communist Parties, as well as the problem of the 'cult of personality' and of ideology itself. Althusser is commonly referred to as a Structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he is critical of many aspects of structuralism.

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Biographical information
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Early life
Althusser wrote two autobiographies, L'Avenir dure longtemps, or "The Future Lasts a Long Time," which is published in America as "The Future Lasts Forever," in a single volume with Althusser's other, shorter, earlier autobiography, "The Facts." These documents provide most of the information known about his life. Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendres, near Algiers, to a piednoirs family. He was named after his paternal uncle who had been killed in the First World War. Althusser alleged that his mother had intended to marry his uncle and married his father only because of the brother's demise. Althusser also alleges that his mother treated him as a substitute for his deceased uncle, to which he attributes deep psychological damage. 30

Following the death of his father, Althusser moved from Algiers with his mother and younger sister to Marseilles, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Etudiante Chrtienne in 1937. Althusser performed brilliantly at school at the Lyce du Parc in Lyon and was accepted to the elite cole normale suprieure (ENS) in Paris. However, he found himself enlisted in the run-up to World War Two, and like most French soldiers following the Fall of France Althusser was interned in a German POW camp. Here, his move towards Communism was to begin. He was relatively content as a prisoner, and remained in the camp for the rest of the war, unlike many of his contemporaries who escaped to fight againfor this, Althusser later had reason to chastise himself.

Health
After the war, Althusser was able finally to attend ENS. However, he was in poor health, both mentally and physically. In 1947, he received electroconvulsive therapy. Althusser was from this time to suffer from periodic mental illness for the rest of his life. The ENS was sympathetic however, allowing him to reside in his own room in the school infirmary. Althusser found himself living at the ENS in the Rue d'Ulm for decades, except for periods of hospitalization.

Post-War
In 1946, Althusser met Hlne Rytman, a revolutionary of Lithuanian-Jewish ethnic origin eight years older than he. She remained his companion until Althusser killed her in 1980. Formerly a devout, if left-wing, Roman Catholic, Althusser joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1948, a time when others such as Merleau-Ponty were losing sympathy for the party. That same year, Althusser passed the agrgation in philosophy with a dissertation on Hegel, which allowed him to become a tutor at the ENS.

De-Stalinisation
With the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev began the process of "deStalinisation". For many Marxists, including the PCF's leading theoretician Roger Garaudy, this meant the recovery of the humanist roots of Marx's thought, such as the theory of alienation. Althusser, however, opposed this trend, sympathising instead with the criticisms made by the Communist Party of China, albeit cautiously. His stance during this period earned him notoriety within the PCF and he was attacked by its secretary-general Waldeck Rochet. As a philosopher, he was treading another path, which would later lead him to "random materialism" (matrialisme alatoire); however, this didn't stop him from enforcing the marxist orthodox thought to supposed "heretics", such as during his 1973 answer to John Lewis. Despite the involvement of many of his students in the events of May 1968, Althusser initially greeted these developments with silence. He was later to follow the official PCF 31

line in describing the students as victim to "infantile" leftism. As a result, Althusser was attacked by many former supporters. In response to these criticisms, he revised some of his positions, claiming that his earlier writings contained mistakes, and a significant shift in emphasis was seen in his later works.

1980s
On November 16, 1980, Althusser strangled his wife, Hlne Legotien nee Rytmann, to death, following a period of alleged mental instability. The exact circumstances are debated, with some claiming it was deliberate, others accidental. Althusser himself claimed not to have a clear memory of the event, saying that, while he was massaging his wife's neck, he discovered he had strangled her. Since he was alone with his wife when she died, it is difficult to come to firm conclusions. Althusser was diagnosed as suffering from diminished responsibility, and he was not tried, but instead committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital. Althusser remained in hospital until 1983. Upon release, he moved to Northern Paris and lived reclusively, seeing few people and no longer working, except for producing his autobiography. He died of a heart attack on October 22, 1990 at the age of 72.

Thought
Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume Reading Capital, which collects the work of Althusser and his students on an intensive philosophical re-reading of Karl Marx's Capital. The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as "critique of political economy," and on its object. The current English edition of this work includes only the essays of Althusser and tienne Balibar, while the original French edition contains additional contributions from Jacques Ranciere, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet. Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained very influential in Marxist philosophy. Althusser's essay On the Young Marx draws a term from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard in proposing a great "epistemological break" between Marx's early, "Hegelian and Feuerbachian" writings and his later, properly Marxist texts. His essay Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being," which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity." His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony). Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his best-known essay is Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation [1]. The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the 32

structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology; to not be subjected to it. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once and for all by the epistemological break: this "break" is not a chronologically-determined event, but a process. Instead of an assured victory, there is a continuous struggle against ideology: "Ideology has no history".

The 'epistemological break'

It was Althusser's view that Marx's thought had been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He fiercely condemned various interpretations of his works - historicism, idealism, economism - on the grounds that they had failed to realise that with the "science of history", historical materialism, Marx had constructed a revolutionary view of social change. These errors, he believed, resulted from the notion that Marx's entire body of work could be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Althusser held, it contains a radical "epistemological break". Though the early works are bound by the categories of German philosophy and classical political economy, with The German Ideology (written in 1845) there is a sudden and unprecedented departure which paves the way for Marx's later works. The problem is compounded by the fact that even Marx himself did not fully comprehend the significance of his own work, being only able to communicate it obliquely and tentatively. The shift can only be revealed by way of a careful and sensitive "symptomatic reading". Thus, it is Althusser's project to help us fully grasp the originality and power of Marx's extraordinary theory, giving as much attention to what is not said as to the explicit. He held that Marx had discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of Thales to mathematics, Galileo to physics or, better, Freud's psychoanalysis, in that the structure of his theory is unlike anything posited by his predecessors. Althusser believed that underlying Marx's discovery was a ground-breaking epistemology centred on the rejection of the dichotomy between subject and object, which makes Marx's work incompatible with its antecedents. At the root of the break is a rejection of the idea, held by the classical economists, that the needs of individuals can be treated as a fact or 'given' independent of any economic organisation, and could therefore serve as a premise for a theory explaining the character of a mode of production and as an independent starting-point for a theory about society. In Althusser's view, Marx did not simply argue that people's needs are largely created by their social environment and thus vary with time and place; rather, he abandoned the very idea that there could be a theory about what people are like which was prior to any theory about how they come to be that way. As well as this, Marx's theory is built on concepts - such as forces and relations of production - that have no counterpart in classical political economy. Even when existing terms are adopted - such as the combination of David Ricardo's notions of rent, profit and interest through the theory of surplus value - their meaning and relation to other concepts in the theory is significantly different. Furthermore, apart from its unique structure, historical materialism's explanatory power is unlike that of classical political economy; whereas 33

political economy explained economic systems as a response to individual needs, Marx's analysis accounted for a wider range of social phenomena in terms of the parts they play in a structured whole. Resultantly, Marx's Capital provides both a model of the economy and a description of the structure and development of a whole society. Though Althusser steadfastly held onto the claim of its existence, he later asserted that the turning point's occurrence around 1845 was not so clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism and Hegelianism were to be found in Capital. He even went so far as to state that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme [1] and some notes on a book by Adolph Wagner [2] were fully free from humanist ideology. In fact, Althusser considered the epistemological break to be a process instead of a clearly defined event. He described Marxism and psychoanalysis as "scissional" sciences, which always had to struggle against ideology, thus explaining the succeeding ruptures and splittings. They are scissional sciences because their object ("class struggle" or the topic of the unconscious) is itself split and divided.

Practices
Because of Marx's belief in the close relation between the individual and society, it is, in Althussers view, pointless to try to build a social theory on a prior conception of the individual. The subject of observation is not individual human elements, but rather 'structure'. As he has it, Marx did not explain society by appealing to the properties of individual persons - their beliefs, desires, preferences and judgements - but rather broke it up into related units called practices. He uses this analysis to defend Marxs historical materialism against the charge that it crudely posits a base and superstructure and then attempts to explain all aspects of the superstructure by appealing to features of the base. For Althusser, it was a mistake to attribute this view, based on economic determinism, to Marx: much as he criticises the idea that a social theory can be founded on an historical conception of human needs, so does he dismiss the idea that an independently defined notion of economic practice can be used to explain other aspects of society. Like Lukcs, Althusser believed that both the base and the superstructure were dependent on the whole. The advantage of practices over individuals as a starting point is that although each practice is only a part of a complex whole of society, a practice is a whole in itself in that it consists of various different kinds of parts; economic practice, for example, contains raw materials, tools, individual persons, etc. all united in a process of production. Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes economic practice, ideological practice and politico-legal practice which together make up one complex whole. In his view all practices are dependent on each other. For example, amongst the relations of production of capitalist societies are the buying and selling of labour power by capitalists and workers. These relations are part of economic practice, but can only exist within the context of a legal system which establishes individual agents as buyers and sellers; furthermore, the arrangement must be maintained by political and ideological means. From this it can be seen that aspects of economic practice depend on the superstructure and vice versa.

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Contradiction and overdetermination

An analysis understood in terms of interdependent practices helps us to conceive of how society is organised, but also allows us to comprehend social change and thus provides a theory of history. Althusser explains the reproduction of the relations of production by reference to aspects of ideological and political practice; conversely, the emergence of new production relations can be explained by the failure of these mechanisms. Marxs theory seems to posit a system in which an imbalance in two parts could lead to compensatory adjustments at other levels, or sometimes to a major reorganisation of the whole. To develop this idea Althusser relies on the concepts of contradiction and non-contradiction, which he claims are illuminated by their relation to a complex structured whole. Practices are contradictory when they grate on one another and non-contradictory when they support one another. Althusser elaborates on these concepts by reference to Lenins analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin posited that in spite of widespread discontent throughout Europe in the early 20th century, Russia was the country in which revolution occurred because it contained all the contradictions possible within a single state at the time. It was, in his words, the weak link in a collection of imperialist states. The revolution is explained in relation to two groups of circumstances: firstly, the existence within Russia of large-scale exploitation in cities, mining districts, etc., disparity between urban industrialisation and medieval conditions in the countryside, and lack of unity amongst the ruling class; secondly, a foreign policy which played into the hands of revolutionaries, such as the elites who had been exiled by the Tsar and had become sophisticated socialists. This example is used by Althusser to reinforce his claim that Marx did not see social change as the result of a single contradiction between the forces and the relations of production, but rather held a more complex view of it. The differences between events in Russia and Western Europe highlight that a contradiction between forces and relations of production may be necessary, but not sufficient, to bring about revolution. The circumstances that produced revolution in Russia, mentioned above, were heterogeneous, and cannot be seen to be aspects of one large contradiction. Each was a contradiction within a particular social totality. From this, Althusser draws the conclusion that Marxs concept of contradiction is inseparable from the concept of a social whole. In order to emphasise that changes in social structure relate to numerous contradictions, Althusser describes these changes as "overdetermined", using a term taken from Sigmund Freud. This interpretation allows us to account for how many different circumstances may play a part in the course of events, and furthermore permits us to grasp how these states of affairs may combine to produce unexpected social changes, or ruptures. However, Althusser does not mean to say that the events that determine social changes all have the same causal status. While a part of a complex whole, economic practice is, in his view, a structure in dominance: it plays a major part in determining the relations between other spheres, and has more effect on them than they have on it. The most prominent aspect of society (the religious aspect in feudal formations and the economic aspect in capitalist

35

ones) is called the 'dominant instance', and is in turn determined 'in the last instance' by the economy. For Althusser, the economic practice of a society determines which other aspect of it dominates the society as a whole.

Ideological state apparatuses

Because Althusser held that our desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements and so forth are the consequences of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within capitalist society, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a selfconscious agent. For Althusser, however, a persons capacity for perceiving herself in this way is not innate. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject. Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give her an idea of the range of properties they can have, and of the limits of each social practice. Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice. However, other characteristics of individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories. In Althussers view, our values, desires and preferences are inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects through the process of interpellation. Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organisations and, most importantly, the education system, as well as the received ideas they propagate [2]. There is, however, no one ISA that produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead, we learn this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth. Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history; as Althusser's first thesis on ideology states, "ideology has no history". All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of interpellation. He uses the example of an individual walking in a street: upon hearing a police whistle, or any other form of hailing, the individual turns round and in this simple movement of her body she is transformed into a subject. Althusser discusses the process by which the person being hailed recognizes herself as the subject of the hail, and knows to respond. Even though there was nothing suspicious about her walking in the street, she recognizes it is indeed she herself that is being hailed. This recognition is a mis-recognition (mconnaissance) in that it is working retroactively: a material individual is always-already an ideological subject. The "transformation" of an individual into a subject has alwaysalready happened; Althusser acknowledges here a debt toward Spinoza's theory of immanence. That is to say, our idea of who we are is delivered by ideology. The second of Althusser's theses is that "ideology has a material existence":

36

Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, describing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.
[3]

These material rituals may be compared with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, as the ISA may in a sense be compared with Foucault's disciplinary institutions. Althusser offers the example of the Voice of God - an embodiment of Christian religious ideology - instructing a person on what her place in the world is and what she must do to be reconciled with Christ. From this, Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to identify herself as a Christian, she must first already be a subject. We acquire our identities by seeing ourselves and our social roles mirrored in material ideologies.

Influence
Although Althusser's theories were born of an attempt to defend Communist orthodoxy, his manner of presenting Marxism reflected a move away from the intellectual isolation of the Stalinist era, and furthermore was symptomatic both of Marxism's growing academic respectability and of a push towards emphasising Marx's legacy as a philosopher rather than as an economist. Althusser has had broad influence in the areas of Marxist philosophy and poststructuralism: Interpellation has been popularised and adapted by the feminist philosopher and critic Judith Butler; the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses has been of interest to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek; the attempt to view history as a process without a subject garnered sympathy from Jacques Derrida; historical materialism was defended as a coherent doctrine from the standpoint of analytic philosophy by G. A. Cohen; the interest in structure and agency sparked by Althusser was to play a role in Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration; Althusser was vehemently attacked by British historian E. P. Thompson in his book The Poverty of Theory. As well as this, several of Althusser's students became eminent intellectuals in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: Alain Badiou and tienne Balibar in philosophy, Jacques Ranciere in history and the philosophy of history, Pierre Macherey in literary criticism and Nicos Poulantzas in sociology. The prominent Guevarist Rgis Debray also studied under Althusser, as did the noted philosopher Michel Foucault and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller.

37

Endnotes
1. ^ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation is available in several English volumes including Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays 2. ^ The concept may be found in the text Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, published in English in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, available online here 3. ^ Ibid., p.169-70

See also

Karl Marx Etienne Balibar Ferdinand de Saussure Roman Jakobson Claude Lvi-Strauss Roland Barthes Michel Foucault Jacques Derrida Costanzo Preve Slavoj iek Baruch de Spinoza Niccol Machiavelli Antonio Gramsci Krisis Groupe Georg Lukcs Leo Kofler Walter Benjamin Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff Jon Elster Alain Badiou Young Marx Das Kapital

References

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. (Online version) Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. For Marx. (Online version) Reading Capital (with tienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, etc.). (Online version) 38

The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. Essays in Self-Criticism. (Online version) Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists . (Onlive version) Machiavelli and Us. Politics and History. (Online version) The Humanist Controversy and Other Texts. Writings on Psychoanalysis. The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir. Althusser: A Critical Reader (ed. Gregory Elliott). Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism Callinicos, Alex (ed.), Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976). James, Susan, 'Louis Althusser' in Skinner, Q. (ed.) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. Waters, Malcolm, Modern Sociological Theory, 1994, page 116. Lewis, William, "Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism." Lexington books, 2005. (link) Resch, Robert Paul. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992. (link) Heartfield, James, The Death of the Subject Explained , Sheffield Hallam UP, 2002 [3]

External links

Althusser's concept of interpellation The Louis Althusser Internet Archive at Marxists.org Ideological State Apparatuses by Richard Wolff Louis Althusser (1918-1990) Marxist Media Theory - Althusser Althusser texts at mirror site Marx2Mao A critical review of Louis Althusser's For Marx Texts from Althusser & texts about him - in French on Multitudes website. Althusser's texts on Multitudes Texts from the October 1995 symposium "Lire Althusser aujourd'hui" A review of Althusser's Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987 Tony Judt's 1994 article "Louis Althusser, The Paris Strangler" for The New Republic

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Alan Ross Anderson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alan Ross Anderson, born 1925, was an American logician and professor of philosophy at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh. A frequent collaborator with Nuel Belnap, Anderson was instrumental in the development of relevance logic and deontic logic. Anderson died of cancer in 1973.

Relevance logic
Anderson believed that the conclusion of a valid inference ought to have something to do with (i.e. be relevant to) the premises. Formally, he captured this "relevance condition" with the principle that A entails B only if A and B share at least one non-logical constant. As simple as this idea appears, implementing it in a formal system requires a radical departure from the semantics of classical logic. Anderson and Belnap (with contributions from J. Michael Dunn, Kit Fine, Alasdair Urquhart, Robert K. Meyer, Anil Gupta (logician), and others) explored the formal consequences of the relevance condition in great detail in their influential Entailment books (see references below), which are the most frequently cited works in the field of relevance logic. Anderson and Belnap were quick to observe that the concept of relevance had been central to logic since Aristotle, but had been unduly neglected since Gottlob Frege and George Boole laid the foundations for what would come to be known, somewhat ironically, as "classical" logic. (For an example of classical logic's failure to satisfy the relevance condition, see the article on the principle of explosion.)

Deontic logic
Anderson advocated the view that sentences of the form "It ought to be (the case) that A" should be interpreted logically as:

Not-A entails v,

where v means something like a norm has been violated. He developed systems of deontic relevance logic containing a special constant v (notation varies) for this purpose. Such systems have sometimes been characterized as "reductions" of deontic logic to alethic

40

modal logic. This is misleading at best, however, since alethic modal logics generally do not contain anything like Anderson's special v constant.

Philosophy of logic
Anderson was known for being a Platonist (or realist, or monist) about logic; he believed in "The One True Logic," and he believed that it was a relevance logic.

Resources

Anderson, A. R. 1967. Some nasty problems in the formal logic of ethics. Nous I(4): 345-60. Anderson, A. R. and Belnap, N. D. 1975. Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Anderson, A. R., Belnap, N. D., and Dunn, J. M. 1992. Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691-07339-2 Mares, E. D. 1992. Andersonian deontic logic. Theoria 58: 3-20

41

Hannah Arendt
Western Philosophers 20th-century philosophy Hannah Arendt
Name: Hannah Arendt Birth: October 14, 1906 (Linden, Germany) Death: December 4, 1975 (New York, United States) School/tradition: Phenomenology Politics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Greek philosophy, Main interests: technology, Ontology, modernity, philosophy of history Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Influences: Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Kant, Tocqueville, Marx, Heidegger, Russell, Jaspers, Benjamin Jrgen Habermas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Giorgio Influenced: Agamben , Seyla Benhabib, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 December 4, 1975) was a German Jewish political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she always refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular". She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."

Biography
Hannah Arendt was born into a family of secular Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover), and grew up in Knigsberg and Berlin. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, with whom she embarked on a long, stormy romantic relationship that was criticized because of Heidegger's membership in the Nazi party. In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers. She married Gnther Stern, later knowns as Gnther Anders, in 1929 in Berlin (they divorced in 1937). The dissertation was published the same year, but Arendt was prevented from habilitating, a prerequisite for teaching in German universities, because she was Jewish. She worked for some time researching anti-Semitism before being interrogated by the Gestapo, and thereupon fled Germany for Paris. Here she met and befriended the literary critic and

42

Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. However, with the German military occupation of parts of France following the French declaration of war during World War II, and the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps, Arendt was forced to flee France. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blcher. In 1941, Arendt escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States with the assistance of the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who illegally issued visas to her and around 2500 other Jewish refugees. She then became active in the German-Jewish community in New York and wrote for the weekly Aufbau. She worked as the Executive Secretary for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. After World War II she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah. Later she resumed relations with Heidegger, and testified on his behalf in a German denazification hearing. She became a close friend of Jaspers and his Jewish wife, [1] developing a deep intellectual friendship with him and began corresponding with Mary McCarthy.[2] In 1950, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Northwestern University. She also served as a professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, as well as at The New School in New York City, and served as a fellow at Yale University and Wesleyan University. In 1959, she became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton. On her death at age 69 in 1975, Arendt was buried at Bard College in Annandale-onHudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years. Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She wrote a letter to the then president of Stanford University to convince the university to enact Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program.

Works
Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. Much of her work focuses on affirming a conception of freedom which is synonymous with collective political action among equals. Arendt theorizes freedom as public and associative, drawing on examples from the Greek "polis," American townships, the Paris Commune, and the civil rights movements of the 1960's (among others) to illustrate this conception of freedom. Another key concept in her work is "natality," the capacity to bring something new into the world, such as the founding of a government that endures.

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Arguably her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes labour, work, and action, and explores the implications of these distinctions. Her theory of political action is extensively developed in this work. Her first major book was The Origins of Totalitarianism, which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was controversial because it suggested an essential identity between the two phenomena, which some believe to be separate in both origins and nature. In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she coined the phrase "the banality of evil." She raised the question whether evil is radical or simply a function of banality - the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction. This work created a great deal of controversy and animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. The book was translated into Hebrew just recently, many decades after it was written. Her final book, The Life of the Mind, was incomplete when she died, but is still widely read in its current form. Stemming from her Gifford Lectures, this book focuses on the mental faculties of thinking and willing (in a sense moving beyond her previous work concerning the vita activa). In her discussion of thinking, she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between me and myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (which gives no positive prescriptions, but instead tells me what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (an entirely negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with one's self). In her volume on Willing, Arendt, relying heavily on Augustine's notion of the will, discusses the will as an absolutely free mental faculty that makes new beginnings possible. In the third volume, Arendt was planning to engage the faculty of judgment by appropriating Kant's Critique of Judgment, however she never lived to write it. Nevertheless, although we will never fully understand her notion of judging, Arendt did leave us with essays ("Thinking and Moral Considerations," "Some Questions on Moral Philosophy," and "The Crisis in Culture,") and lectures (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy ) concerning her thoughts on this mental faculty.

Commemoration

The asteroid 100027 Hannaharendt is named in her honour. The German railway authority operates a Hannah Arendt Express between Karlsruhe and Hanover. The German postal authority has issued a Hannah Arendt commemorative stamp.[3] Academic Genealogy 44

Notable teachers

Notable students

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Martin Heidegger Leon Botstein Karl Jaspers Herman Sinaiko

Selected works

Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (1929) The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1958) The Human Condition (1958) Between Past and Future (1961) On Revolution (1962) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) Men in Dark Times (1968) Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (1969) "Civil Disobedience" originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker. Versions of the other essays originally appeared in The New York Review of Books. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age , (Edited by Ron H. Feldman, 1978) Life of the Mind (1978) Love and Saint Augustine. Edited and with an Interpretive Essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Scott. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996/1998.. Responsibility and Judgment. Edited and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn. Schocken Books. 2003. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism . Edited by Jerome Kohn. Schocken Books. 2005. On Violence. Harvest Books. 1970. Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. Edited and with an Interpretive Essay by Ronald Beiner. The University of Chicago Press. 1992. The Promise of Politics. Edited and with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn. Schocken Books. 2005. The Jewish Writings. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. Schocken Books. 2007.

45

Further reading

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1982), Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-02660-9. (Paperback reprint edition, September 10, 1983, ISBN 0-300-03099-1; Second edition October 11, 2004 ISBN 0-300-105886.) Villa, Dana ed. (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt , Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-64198-5 (hb). Harms, Klaus: Hannah Arendt und Hans Jonas. Grundlagen einer philosophischen Theologie der Weltverantwortung. Berlin: WiKu-Verlag (2003). ISBN 3-93674984-1. (de) Elzbieta Ettinger: Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Yale University Press (1997). ISBN 0-300-07254-6. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Why Arendt Matters. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 0-300-12044-3). Dietz, Mary G. "Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics", Routledge (2002). ISBN 0-415-93244-0. Julia Kristeva. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Ross Guberman. Columbia University Press. 2001. Seyla Benhabib. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Rowan and Littlefield Publishers. 2003. Jennifer Nedelsky and Ronald Beiner, ed. Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt. Rowan and Littlefield Publishers. 2001.

Notes
1. ^ Hannah Arendt & Karl Jaspers (1992) Correspondence 1926-1969, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN 0-15-107887-4 2. ^ Hannah Arendt & Mary McCarthy (1995) Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 , Secker & Warburg, ISBN 0436-20251-4 3. ^ All aboard the Arendt express, Haaretz, 4 May 2007

External links

Crises of Our Republics, Hannah Arendt Centennary Conference at Yale University, September 29 - 30, 2006. 46

Thinking In Dark Times:The Legacy of Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt Centennary Conference at Bard College, October 27 - 29, 2006. Hannah Arendt Organization, clearinghouse for information on and about Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The American Library of Congress has The Role of Experience in Hannah Arendt's Political Thought: Three Essays by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center,New School University. With link to Arendt's papers. International Hannah Arendt Newsletter European Graduate School - Hannah Arendt "Arendt's Judgment" by Mark Greif in Dissent (magazine). "Thinking Out Loud" Review of a book of essays on Arendt, in Lingua Franca. Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism at the Technical University of Dresden The philosophical Madonna On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's death, Daniel Cohn-Bendit recalls his relationship with the great philosopher and reflects on her and on his generation at signandsight.com Hannah Arendt Thinking Space. Art Exhibtion Berlin 2006 Hannah Arendt at Jewish Virtual Library Hannah Arendt: Biography at FemBio*Find-A-Grave profile for Hannah Arendt Snowblind: Martin Heidegger & Hannah Arendt Thinking with Body and Soul: Interview with the historian Joachim Fest about Hannah Arendt, by Volker Maria Neumann, February 2006. Dossier: Hannah Arendt(German Education Server) The Hannah Arendt Collection (From Stevenson Library at Bard College) - Catalog of ArchiveHannah Arendts personal library at Bard College Benjamin Balint, Hannah Arendt, 100 Years Later, The Forward. On the occasion of the centenary of her birth Hannah Arendt and the Study of Evil, NPR audio interview with Elisabeth YoungBruehl on the centenary of Arendt's birth Jacoby, Russell. "Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundation", The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 53, Issue 16, p. B13 (December 8, 2006). Warning against Menachem Begin, Letters to the Editor New York Times December 4, 1948. Hannah Arendt, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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Raymond Aron
Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron (March 14, 1905 October 17, 1983) was a French philosopher, sociologist and political scientist. He was known for his skepticism of French leftist ideology.

Background
Aron, the son to a Jewish lawyer, studied at the cole Normale Suprieure where he met Jean-Paul Sartre (who became his friend and lifelong intellectual opponent). He was laureate of the Agrgation of philosophy (before Sartre). In 1930, he received a doctorate on the philosophy of history from the cole Normale Suprieure. In 1939, when World War II began, he was teaching social philosophy at the University of Toulouse; he left the University and joined the air force. When France was defeated, he left for London to join the Free French forces, and (1940-1944) edited their newspaper, France Libre (Free France). At the close of the war, he returned to Paris to teach sociology at the cole Nationale d'Administration and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (also known as "Sciences Po"), maintaining that the government of Vichy France and Marshal Ptain had chosen the lesser of two evils in collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. From 1955 to 1968, he taught at the Sorbonne, and after 1970 at the Collge de France. A lifelong journalist, Aron in 1947 became an influential columnist for Le Figaro, a position he held for thirty years until he joined L'Express, where he wrote a political column up to his death. Infused as he was with a liberal disposition, Aron's views on multiple citizenship and dual nationality were pessimistic. In his 1974 article, "Is Multinational Citizenship Possible?" he clearly considered it an anachronism, totally incommensurate with the logic of the sovereign-state system. Aron argued that multiple citizenship could not break the indelible link between the individual citizen and his nation-state. Citizenship, according to Aron, was a special relation between the individual and the state; citizenship defined the state's rule within a specific territory, and in turn the state determined who its citizens were and what rights and obligations bound citizens to the state.

See also

Liberalism Contributions to liberal theory

Works
48

La Sociologie allemande contemporaine, Paris: Alcan, 1935; German Sociology, London: Heinemann, 1957 Introduction la philosophie de l'histoire. Essai sur les limites de l'objectivit historique, Paris: Gallimard, 1938; Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1948 Essai sur la thorie de l'histoire dans l'Allemagne contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l'histoire, Paris: Vrin, 1938 L'Homme contre les tyrans, New York, Editions de la Maison franaise, 1944 De l'armistice l'insurrection nationale, Paris: Gallimard, 1945 L'ge des empires et l'Avenir de la France, Paris: Dfense de la France, 1945 Le Grand Schisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1948 Les Guerres en chane, Paris: Gallimard, 1951 La Coexistence pacifique. Essai d'analyse, Paris: Editions Monde nouveau, 1953 (under the pseudonym Franois Houtisse, with Boris Souvarine) L'Opium des intellectuels, Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1955; The Opium of the Intellectuals, London: Secker & Warburg, 1957 Polmiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1955 La Tragdie algrienne, Paris: Plon, 1957 Espoir et peur du sicle. Essais non partisans, Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1957 L'Algrie et la Rpublique, Paris: Plon, 1958 La Socit industrielle et la Guerre, suivi d'un Tableau de la diplomatie mondiale en 1958, Paris: Plon, 1959 Immuable et changeante. De la IVe la Ve Rpublique, Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1959 Dimensions de la conscience historique, Paris: Plon, 1961 Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1962; Peace and War, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966 Le Grand Dbat. Initiation la stratgie atomique, Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1963 Dix-huit leons sur la socit industrielle , Paris: Gallimard, 1963; Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967 La Lutte des classes, Paris: Gallimard, 1964 Essai sur les liberts, Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1965 Dmocratie et totalitarisme, 1965 Trois essais sur l'ge industriel, Paris: Plon, 1966 Les tapes de la pense sociologique, Paris: Gallimard, 1967; Main Currents in Sociological Thought, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965 De Gaulle, Isral et les Juifs, Paris: Plon, 1968 La Rvolution introuvable. Rflexions sur les vnements de mai, Paris: Fayard, 1968 Les Dsillusions du progrs, Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1969; Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society, Pall Mall Press, 1968 D'une sainte famille l'autre. Essai sur le marxisme imaginaire , Paris: Gallimard, 1969 De la condition historique du sociologue, Paris: Gallimard, 1971 tudes politiques, Paris, 1972

49

Rpublique impriale. Les tats-unis dans le monde (19451972) , Paris: CalmannLvy, 1973; The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World 1945-1973 , Little Brown & Company 1974 Histoire et dialectique de la violence, Paris: Gallimard, 1973; History and the Dialectic of Violence: Analysis of Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979 Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, Paris: Gallimard, 1976; Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, London: Routledge, 1983 Plaidoyer pour l'Europe dcadente, Paris: Laffont, 1977; In Defense of Decadent Europe, South Bend IN: Regnery, 1977 Le Spectateur engag, Paris: Julliard, 1981 (interviews) Mmoires, Paris: Julliard, 1983 Les dernires annes du sicle, Paris: Julliard, 1984 Le Marxisme de Marx, Paris: ditions de Fallois, 2002 De Giscard Mitterrand: 1977-1983 (editorials from L'Express), with preface by Jean-Claude Casanova, Paris: ditions de Fallois, 2005

Other media

Raymond Aron, spectateur engag. Entretiens avec Raymond Aron. (Duration: 160 mins.), DVD, ditions Montparnasse, 2005

Bibliography

Launay, Stephen, La Pense politique de Raymond Aron, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995 Anderson, Brian C., Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political , Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 Mahoney, Daniel and Brian Prost (eds.), Political Reason in the Age of Ideology: Essays in Honor of Raymond Aron, New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers, 2006

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J. L. Austin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy

Name: John Langshaw Austin Birth: March 28, 1911 Death: February 8, 1960 School/tradition: Linguistic philosophy, Analytic philosophy Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind, Ethics, Main interests: Ordinary language philosophy Notable ideas: Speech acts, Intentionality Influences: G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle John Searle, R.M. Hare, Judith Butler, Jean-Franois Influenced: Lyotard, Jurgen Habermas, Stanley Cavell

John Langshaw Austin (March 28, 1911 February 8, 1960) was a philosopher of language, who developed much of the current theory and terminology of speech acts. He was born in Lancaster and educated at Balliol College, Oxford University. After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He occupies a place in philosophy of language alongside Wittgenstein in staunchly advocating the examination of the way words are used in order to elucidate meaning. Unlike many ordinary language philosophers, however, Austin disavowed any overt indebtedness to Wittgenstein's later philosophy.[1] His main influence, he said, was the exact and exacting common-sense philosophy of G. E. Moore. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957.

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How to Do Things With Words

How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks what was at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he assumes are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:

First, to utter one of these sentences is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action. Second, these sentences are not true or false; rather, when something goes wrong in connection with the utterance then the utterance is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy."

The action which performative sentences 'perform' when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech act (more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the illocutionary act). For example, if you say I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth," and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship. Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," used in the course of a marriage ceremony, or "I bequeath this watch to my brother," as occurring in a will. In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is 'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it. After numerous attempts to find more characteristics of performatives, and after having met with many difficulties, Austin makes what he calls a "fresh start", in which he considers "more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something". For example: John Smith turns to Sue Snub and says Is Jeffs shirt red?, to which Sue replies Yes. John has produced a series of bodily movements which result in the production of a certain sound. Austin called such a performance a phonetic act, and called the act a phone. Johns utterance also conforms to the lexical and grammatical conventions of English that is, John has produced an English sentence. Austin called this a phatic act, and labels such utterances phemes. John also referred to Jeffs shirt, and to the colour red. To use a pheme with a more or less definite sense and reference is to utter a rheme, and to perform a rhetic act. Note that rhemes are a sub-class of phemes, which in turn are a subclass of phones. One cannot perform a rheme without also performing a pheme and a phone. The performance of these three acts is the performance of a locution it is the act of saying something.

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John has therefore performed a locutionary act. He has also done at least two other things. He has asked a question, and he has elicited an answer from Sue. Asking a question is an example of what Austin called an illocutionary act. Other examples would be making an assertion, giving an order, and promising to do something. To perform an illocutionary act is to use a locution with a certain force. It is an act performed in saying something, in contrast with a locution, the act of saying something. Eliciting an answer is an example of what Austin calls a perlocutionary act, an act performed by saying something. Notice that if one successfully performs a perlocution, one also succeeds in performing both an illocution and a locution. In the theory of speech acts, attention has especially focused on the illocutionary act, much less on the locutionary and perlocutionary act, and only rarely on the subdivision of the locution into phone, pheme and rheme.

Sense and sensibilia

In the posthumously published Sense and sensibilia -- the title is an allusion to the novel Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen -- Austin criticises sense-data theories of perception, particularly that of Alfred Jules Ayer in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. Austin argues that Ayer fails to understand the proper function of words such as "illusion", "hallucination", "looks", "appears" and "seems". He argues that these words allow us to express reservations about our commitment to the truth of what we are saying, and that the introduction of sense-data adds nothing to our understanding of or ability to talk about what we see. Ayer responded to this critique in the essay "Has Austin refuted the sense-data theory?".

Philosophical Papers
Austin's papers were collected and published posthumously as Philosophical Papers by J. O. Urmson and Geoffrey Warnock. The book originally contained ten papers, two more being added in the second edition and one in the third.

Are there A Priori Concepts?

This early paper contains a broad criticism of Idealism. The question set dealing with the existence of a priori concepts is treated only indirectly, by dismissing the concept of concept that underpins it. The first part of this paper takes the form of a reply to an argument for the existence of Universals: from observing that we do use words such as "grey" or "circular" and that we use a single term in each case, it follows that there must be a something that is named by such terms - a universal. Furthermore, since each case of "grey" or "circular" is different, it follows that universals themselves cannot be sensed. 53

Austin carefully dismantles this argument, and in the process other transcendental arguments. He points out first that universals are not "something we stumble across", and that that they are defined by their relation to particulars. He continues by pointing out that, from the observation that we use "grey" and "circular" as if they were the names of things, it simply does not follow that there is something that is named. In the process he dismisses the notion that "words are essentially proper names", asking "...why, if 'one identical' word is used, must there be 'one identical object' present which it denotes". In the second part of the article, he generalises this argument against universals to address concepts as a whole. He points out that it is "facile" to treat concepts as if they were "an article of property". Such questions as "Do we possess such-and-such a concept" and "how do we come to possess such-and-such a concept" are meaningless, because concepts are not the sort of thing that one possesses. In the final part of the paper, Austin further extends the discussion to relations, presenting a series of arguments to reject the idea that there is some thing that is a relation.

The Meaning of a Word

His paper The Meaning of a Word is a polemic against doing philosophy by attempting to pin down the meaning of the words used; for 'there is no simple and handy appendage of a word called "the meaning of the word (x)"'. Austin warns us to take care when removing words from their ordinary usage, giving numerous examples of how this can lead to error.

A Plea For Excuses

A Plea For Excuses is both a demonstration by example, and a defense of, linguistic philosophy:

...our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonable practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchair of an afternoon the most favorite alternative method.[2]

Austin proposes some curious philosophical tools. For instance, he uses a sort of word game for developing an understanding of a key concept. This involves taking up a dictionary and finding a selection of terms relating to the key concept, then looking up each of the words in the explanation of their meaning. This process is iterated until the list of words begins to repeat, closing in a family circle of words relating to the key concept.

References
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Books

Sense and sensibilia. 1959. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961, 1979. How to do things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Ed. J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. ISBN 0674411528

Papers

"How to Talk: Some Simple Ways", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol.53, (1953), pp.227-246. "Other Minds". In Austin, J.L. (Urmson, J.O. & Warnock, G.J. eds.) Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1961 [Originally published in 1946]. Performative Utterances In Austin, Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford, 1961. "A Plea for Excuses". In Austin, Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford, 1961. Performative-Constative. In The Philosophy of Language. Ed. John R. Searle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. 13-22. "Three Ways of Spilling Ink", The Philosophical Review, Vol.75, No.4, (October 1966), pp.427-440.

In translation

Otras mentes. In Austin, Ensayos filosficos. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975. 87-117. Un alegato en pro de las excusas. In Austin, Ensayos filosficos. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975. 169-92. Quand dire c'est faire ditions du Seuil, Paris. Traduction franaise de "How to do things with words" par Gilles Lane, 1970. Palabras y acciones: Cmo hacer cosas con palabras. Buenos Aires: Paids, 1971. Cmo hacer cosas con palabras.: Palabras y acciones. Barcelona: Paids, 1982. Performativo-Constativo. In Gli atti linguistici. Aspetti e problemi di filosofia del linguagio. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1978. 49-60. Ensayos filosficos. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975.

See also

Linguistics Pragmatics John Searle Adolf Reinach

Notes
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1. ^ . The Wittgenstein scholar Grayling (Grayling, A.C., Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1988, p.114) is certain that, despite the fact that Wittgensteins work might have possibly played some "second or third-hand [part in the promotion of] the philosophical concern for language which was dominant in the mid-century", neither Gilbert Ryle nor any of those in the so-called "Ordinary language philosophy" school that is chiefly associated with J.L. Austin (and, according to Grayling, G.E. Moore, C.D. Broad, Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer) were Wittgensteinians. More significantly, Grayling asserts that "most of them were largely unaffected by Wittgensteins later ideas, and some were actively hostile to them". 2. ^ A Plea for excuses, in Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers, p. 182

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Alfred Ayer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy A J Ayer

Name: Alfred Jules Ayer Birth: October 29, 1910 Death: June 27, 1989 School/tradition: Analytic Main interests: Language, Epistemology, Ethics, Meaning, Science Logical positivism, verification principle, emotivist Notable ideas: ethics Hume, Vienna Circle, Popper, Russell, Wittgenstein, Influences: Kant Influenced: R. M. Hare, Strawson, Honderich

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (October 29, 1910 June 27, 1989), better known as A. J. Ayer, was a British philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956). Ayer was the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University College London from 1946 until 1959, when he became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952. He was knighted in 1970.

Life
Ayer was born into a wealthy family of continental origin. His mother was from the DutchJewish family which later went on to found the Citron car company in France. His father was a Swiss-Calvinist who worked for the Rothschild family. He grew up in St John's Wood, London. He then received an education in the humanities at Eton College, and served in the British military during World War II, working in military intelligence for a time. He was a noted social mixer and womanizer, and was married four times, including to Dee Wells and Vanessa Lawson. Reputedly he liked dancing and attending the clubs in London. He was a keen supporter of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and was a well known face in the crowd, known to other fans as 'the prof'[citation needed]. He was a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire. Ayer was an avowed atheist,[1] and followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell by debating with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston on the topic of religion.

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Ayer was closely associated with the British humanist movement. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. In 1965, he became the first president of the Agnostics' Adoption Society and in the same year succeeded Julian Huxley as president of the British Humanist Association, a post he held until 1970. In 1968 he edited The Humanist Outlook, a collection of essays on the meaning of humanism. He taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men".[2] Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out. Shortly before his death in 1989 he received publicity after having an unusual near-death experience, which has often been misinterpreted as a move away from his lifelong and famous religious skepticism. Of the experience, Ayer first said that it "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death ... will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be."[3] However, a few days later he revised this, saying "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief".[4]

Works
Ayer is perhaps best known for his verification principle, as presented in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), according to which a sentence is meaningful only if it has verifiable empirical import, otherwise it was either "analytical" if tautologous or "metaphysical" (i.e. meaningless) if neither empirical nor analytical. He started work on the book at the age of 23[citation needed] and it was published when he was 26. Ayer's philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by those of the Vienna Circle and David Hume. His clear, vibrant and polemical exposition of them makes Language, Truth and Logic essential reading on the tenets of logical empiricism -- the book is regarded as a classic of 20th century analytic philosophy, and is widely read in philosophy courses around the world. In some ways, Ayer was the philosophical successor to Bertrand Russell, and he wrote two books on the philosopher: Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971) and Russell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on the philosophy of David Hume. In 1972-73 Ayer gave the Gifford Lectures at University of St Andrews, later published as The Central Questions of Philosophy. He still believed in the viewpoint he shared with the logical positivists: that large parts of what was traditionally called "philosophy" - including the whole of metaphysics, theology and aesthetics - were not matters that could be judged as being true or false and that it was thus meaningless to discuss them. Unsurprisingly, this

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made him unpopular with several other philosophy departments in this country and his name is still reviled by many British professors to this day. In "The Concept of a Person and Other Essays" (1963), Ayer made several striking criticisms of Wittgenstein's private language theory. Ayer's sense-data theory in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge was famously criticised by fellow Oxonian J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia, a landmark 1950s work of common language philosophy. Ayer responded to this in the essay "Has Austin Refuted the Sensedata Theory?", which can be found in his Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).

See also

A priori knowledge

References

Rogers, Ben A.J. Ayer: A Life, Grove Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8021-1673-6 (Chapter one and a review by Hilary Spurling, New York Times, December 24, 2000.)

Notes
1. ^ Ayer believed that religious language was unverifiable and as such literally nonsense. Consequently "There is no God" was for Ayer as meaningless and metaphysical an utterance as "God exists." Though Ayer could not give assent to the declaration "There is no God," he was an atheist in the sense that he withheld assent from affirmation's of God's existence. That stance of a person who believes "God" denotes no verifiable hypothesis is sometimes referred to as igtheism (defined in Paul Kurtz, The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge, ISBN 0-87975766-3, page 194) 2. ^ Rogers (1999), page 344. 3. ^ http://www.near-death.com/experiences/atheists01.html 4. ^ http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett06/dennett06_index.html

Further reading

Ted Honderich, Ayer's Philosophy and its Greatness. Anthony Quinton, Alfred Jules Ayer. Proceedings of the British Academy, 94 (1996), pp. 255-282. Graham Macdonald, Alfred Jules Ayer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 7, 2005.

Selected publications
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1936, Language, Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz. (2nd edition, 1946.) 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan. 1954, Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on freedom, phenomenalism, basic propositions, utilitarianism, other minds, the past, ontology.) 1957, The conception of probability as a logical relation, in S. Korner, ed., Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics , New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications. 1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan. 1963, The Concept of a Person and Other Essays , London: Macmillan. (Essays on truth, privacy and private languages, laws of nature, the concept of a person, probability.) 1967, Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Data Theory? Synthese vol. XVIII, pp. 11740. (Reprinted in Ayer 1969). 1968, The Origins of Pragmatism, London: Macmillan. 1969, Metaphysics and Common Sense, London: Macmillan. (Essays on knowledge, man as a subject for science, chance, philosophy and politics, existentialism, metaphysics, and a reply to Austin on sense-data theory [Ayer 1967].) 1971, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage, London: Macmillan. 1972a, Probability and Evidence, London: Macmillan. 1972b, Bertrand Russell, London: Fontana. 1973, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld. 1979, Replies, in G. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer, With His Replies, London: Macmillan; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1980, Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld. 1984, Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1986, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Penguin. 1977, Part of My Life, London: Collins. 1984, More of My Life, London: Collins

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