Logical Positivism

Shortly after the end of the First World War, a group of mathematicians, scientists,
and philosophers began meeting in Vienna to discuss the implications of recent
developments in logic, including Wittgensteins Tractatus. Under the leadership
of Moritz Schlick, this informal gathering (the "Vienna Circle") campaigned for a
systematic reduction of human knowledge to logical and scientific foundations. Because
the resulting logical positivism (or "logical empiricism") allowed only for the use of logical
tautologies and first-person observations from experience, it dismissed as nonsense the
metaphysical and normative pretensions of the philosophical tradition. Although
participants sometimes found it difficult to defend the strict principles on which their
programmed depended, this movement offered a powerful vision of the possibilities for
modern knowledge.
During the thirties, many of the younger positivists left Europe for England and the
United States, where their influence over succeeding generations was
enormous. Herbert Feigl and Otto Neurath concentrated on the philosophy of science,
developing and refining systematic principles for study of the natural world.
Mathematician Kurt Gdel used sophisticated reasoning to explore the limits of
the logicist programmed. Others became interested in the philosophy of
language: Gustav Bergmann continued efforts to achieve a perspicuous representation
of reality through an ideal logical language, while Friedrich Waismann began to examine
the analysis of ordinary language.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology (from Greek: phainmenon "that which appears" and lgos "study") is
the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As
a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century
by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the
universities of Gottingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United
States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.
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Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic
reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that
appear in acts of consciousness. This ontology (study of reality) can be clearly
differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects,
sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another.
Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by
himself but also by students, such asEdith Stein, by hermeneutic philosophers, such
as Martin Heidegger, by existentialists, such as Max Scheler, Nicolai
Hartmann, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and by other philosophers, such
as Paul Ricoeur, Marion, Emmanuel, and sociologists Alfred Schtz and Eric Voegelin.
















































Submitted to :
Mam Valdecantos
Submitted by :
Sharmaine Gorembalem