Abstract
There is a subclass of intuitive philosophers that indulges in a kind of mysticism. Mystical philosophers (e.g. Spinoza, Hegel, Spengler) commit the same concept-swapping fallacy that has been discussed in this book, but in their case it is additionally sustained and fed by a glaring elementary logical error: replacing the ordinary predicative logic which Aristotle founded by a pseudo-logic of identity in which the distinction between concepts and things—what we say and that of which we say it—is rejected in favour of empty formulae in which concepts are said to be identical whilst at the same time different. Finally, it is shown that the kind of analysis pursued here leads to a new clarity on a general philosophical predicament: all forms of metaphysical dogmatism share the same prejudice as their arch-enemy, metaphysical scepticism.
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Notes
- 1.
The opposition between ‘Aristotelian-Kantian’ and ‘Neoplatonic-Fichtean’ logic, which Nelson will sketch here, is more fully developed in another course of lectures, that has been translated into English (see Nelson 1962). It is clear that Nelson is convinced that Kant’s modifications to traditional Aristotelian logic were very important, a question that is moot, to say the least, from the point of view of contemporary logic. Two interesting positions on this question that it is worth the reader’s while to compare are Hintikka (1973, 1996) and Bar-Am (2008).
- 2.
Compare Nelson’s sketchy description with Russell’s expansive one (1903, §§20–26, 48–55, 66–79).
- 3.
The whole-part relation has caused innumerable headaches. The most famous logical development of the whole-part relation goes from the very crude beginnings in Husserl (1901) all the way up to the sophisticated ‘mereology’ of Leśniewski (see Luschei 1962; Urbaniak 2014). The technical level of discussion in this lecture is very far from such developments yet hopefully sufficient to identify the fallacies in question.
- 4.
This idealistic use of the word ‘type’ (in a sense similar to Plato’s eidos or idea) is characteristic of certain German thinkers, though not all—thus Max Weber’s use of ideal types is quite different; see e.g. Ringer (1997).
- 5.
The German word for ‘conceptual formula’ is Vergleichungsformel, literally ‘formula of comparison’. Nelson explains what he means as follows: “[For the mystical logician] an expression like ‘a = b’ means nothing else than ‘the two things, a and b, are in some respect equal’, which of course does not exclude that they are in some other respect different.” Analogously for expressions like ‘a ≠ b’. See Nelson (1962, 513). In other words, a conceptual formula is any form of words in which something is asserted to be vaguely equal or inequal with something else. The word Vergleichungsformel stems from Fries (1842); Kant himself only wrote of Vergleichungsbegriffe, ‘concepts of comparison’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A170, B216; cf. Fries 1828, §57, 1837, §19).
- 6.
This assertion is hugely important to understand Nelson’s brand of critical philosophy. Judgments, whether scientific or metaphysical, are about real existing things and their real natures and relations, whereas the critique of reason produces statements that are not about reality but about our concepts. Mystical pseudo-logicians would confuse these two levels. We would today say that Nelson (like Fries before him) was an extensionalist in logical matters. Due to the fact that modern mathematical logic only entered German academia after Nelson’s death (with the publication of Hilbert and Ackermann 1928), he found it difficult to put across his meaning. Like Frege (1892), Nelson uses the traditional terms Begriff (‘concept’) and Gegenstand (‘object’) to convey the difference which in first-order extensional logic is represented by predicate letters and individual variables. It has been the merit of Hintikka (1973, 1996) to use modern logical notation to give clear expression both to the Kantian distinction between analytic and synthetic, and to the corresponding links between ‘concept’ and ‘object’, ‘thinking’ and ‘intuition’. Basically, the trouble with Hegel and other ‘mystical logicians’, according to Nelson and Fries, is that they improperly and confusedly want to ‘intensionalise’ all sentences, even when they are clearly extensional. For a different view of what Hegel was after, see Bencivenga (2000).
- 7.
See Hegel (1821, Preface).
- 8.
- 9.
Not in this form in Aristotle. The nearest would be Sophistical Refutations 166b32–36.
- 10.
See Spengler (1920, 97–98).
- 11.
See Natorp (1910, 21). By ‘modern logicians’ Nelson meant those German professors who during the first two decades of the twentieth century kept writing books on ‘logic’ whilst ignoring the contemporary development of mathematical logic. Please remember that the first edition of the authoritative treatise on the subject by Hilbert and Ackermann, which changed the German situation forever (although not at once), only appeared in 1928, a year after Nelson’s death.
- 12.
This is exactly what happened in Nelson’s time with the advent of logical empiricism and logical positivism, an intellectual movement that denied all metaphysical knowledge. Nelson’s early death prevented him from confronting that movement. The irony of this story is of course that it was later shown that the famous criterion of demarcation between science and ‘metaphysics’ cannot possibly belong to science. But all this, as well as the later developments both within analytic and continental philosophy that have led to our contemporary pretty blurred situation, is too large a subject to be tackled here.
- 13.
Thus at the very least we would have to say that intuition is clear immediate knowledge, and not just immediate knowledge.
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Nelson, L. (2016). Lecture XXII. In: A Theory of Philosophical Fallacies. Argumentation Library, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20783-4_23
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