The Neurath-Haller Thesis: Austria and the Rise of Scientific Philosophy

Abstract

It will be useful to begin by considering that peculiar creature of the North-American university which goes by the name of ‘Continental philosophy’. There are many hundreds of courses with this title taught each year in universities throughout the United States and Canada—a practice that is questionable, to say the least, given that such courses prove on examination to deal not with philosophy on the continent of Europe as a whole, but rather with a highly selective slice of Franco-German philosophy, a slice which sometimes seems to include Heidegger as its sole fixed point Around him is gathered a slowly rotating crew of currently fashionable, primarily French thinkers, each successive generation of which claims itself the ‘end’ of philosophy (or of ‘man’, or of ‘reason’, of ‘the subject’, of ‘identity’) as we know it, and competes with its predecessors in the wildness of the antics with which it sets out to support such claims. The later Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher, is sometimes taken account of in courses of this Continental philosophy; not, however, Husserl’s own teacher Brentano, and not, for example, such important twentieth-century German philosophers as Ernst Cassirer or Nicolai Hartmann. French philosophers working in the tradition of Poincaré (or Bergson or Gilson) are similarly ignored, as, of course, are Polish or Scandinavian or Czech philosophers.