Inquiries and Provocations: Selected Writings 19291974 (Vienna Circle Collection) (Volume 14)
(The title is his own. Herbert Feigl, the provocateur and ...)
The title is his own. Herbert Feigl, the provocateur and the soul (if we may put it so) of modesty, wrote to me some years ago, "I'm more of a catalyst than producer of new and original ideas all my life . . . ", but then he com pleted the self-appraisal: " . . . with just a few exceptions perhaps". We need not argue for the creative nature of catalysis, but will simply remark that there are 'new and original ideas' in the twenty-four papers selected for this volume, in the extraordinary aperrus of the 25-year-old Feigl in his Vienna dissertation of 1927 on Zufall und Gesetz, in the creative critique and articulation in his classical monograph of 1958 on The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'; and the reader will want to turn to some of the seventy other titles in our Feigl bibliography appended. Professor Feigl has been a model philosophical worker: above all else, honest, self-aware, open-minded and open-hearted; keenly, devotedly, and even arduously the student of the sciences, he has been a logician and an empiricist. Early on, he brought the Vienna Circle to America, and much later he helped to bring it back to Central Europe. The story of the logical empiricist movement, and of Herbert Feigl's part in it, has often been told, importantly by Feigl himself in four papers we have included here.
The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript.
(The Mental and the Physical: The Essay and a Postscript b...)
The Mental and the Physical: The Essay and a Postscript by Herbert Feigl The Mental and the Physical was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Professor Feigl's essay "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" has provoked a great deal of comment, criticism, and discussion since it first appeared as a part of the content of Volume II of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science about ten years ago. Now Professor Feigl takes account of the critical discussions and presents his own comments with respect to the most important points raised in the criticisms. The essay itself is presented here in full, along with the postscript. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science has called the essay "a 'super-colossal' survey of the mind-body problem." In its review of the earlier book containing the essay, Thought said: "This essay deserves careful reading by every philosopher concerned with genuine philosophical dialogue."
Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science)
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Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem was first...)
Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This is Volume II of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, a series published in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. The series editors are Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, who are also co-editors, with Michael Scriven, of this volume.
The ten papers by eleven authors which make up the content of this volume are the result of collaborative research of the Center in philosophical and methodological problems of science in general and psychology in particular. The contributors are Paul Oppenheim, Hilary Putnam, Carl G. Hempel, Michael Scriven, Arthur Pap, Wilfrid Sellars,
H. Gavin Alexander, P.F. Strawson, Karl Zener, Herbert Feigl, and Paul E. Meehl. In addition, an extensive discussion of "Internationality and the Mental" by Wilfrid Sellars and Roderick Chisholm is presented in an appendix.
In a review of this volume the journal Psychiatric Quarterly commented: "These essays will not prove easy for the layman to read, but he can hardly fail to find his effort rewarded if he is persistent. For the professional behavioral scientist increased awareness and cautionin his use of scientific language, and thinking about scientific theoryshould result."
One of the papers in this volume, "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" by Herbert Feigl, has been published by the University of Minnesota Press with further discussion by Dr. Feigl as a separate book, The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript.
Herbert Feigl was an Austrian-born American philosopher of science who made important contributions to the philosophical analysis of probability, to the debate over scientific realism, and to the analysis of the mind-body problem.
Background
Herbert Feigl was born on December 14, 1902 in the then Austrian town of Reichenberg (nowadays Liberec, Czech Republic). His parents were Jewish, but not religious. His father, Otto Feigl, was a skillful and highly ingenious textile designer and became later in his career one of the most influential leaders in the Austrian textile industry. Feigl's mother, who had a lifelong interest in the arts, filled Herbert with enthusiasm for classical music, particularly for the symphonies of Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler.
Education
As a youth Feigl proved himself especially gifted in academics and planned to become a chemist. When he was 16, however, he discovered a treatise on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, and, intrigued, set out to disprove it. Published in 1905, Einstein's famous theory posited a new view of space and time: the physicist argued that absolute motion did not exist, instead only relative motion between two systems or frames of reference was crucial. Space and time were seen as interconnected and making up a four-dimensional continuum Einstein named "Space-Time. "
Inspired by such new ideas, Feigl took up the study math and physics with a vigor. He chose the renowned University of Munich for further study, and headed there in 1921 to spend a year as a student of professors who were either already well-established and influential in their fields, or would later gain such distinction. After reading a work by Edgar Zilsel, Feigl decided to pursue a degree in philosophy. One of his mentors during this first year was Moritz Schlick, and when Schlick took a teaching post at the University of Vienna, Feigl followed him there. He spent a good part of the 1920s at the Austrian university, where he studied math, psychology, and theoretical physics. He also penned his first significant paper while still a student: "The Philosophical Significance of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, " which won a 1922 prize.
In 1927 Feigl earned his Ph. D. with the dissertation "Chance and Law: An Epistemological Investigation of Induction and Probability in the Natural Sciences. " The University of Minnesota named him a Regents Professor in 1967, and bestowed upon him the honor of professor emeritus in 1971.
Career
In 1924 Feigl joined a weekly discussion group with Schlick and others that became known as the "Vienna Circle. " He would remain an integral member of the group until his immigration to the United States in 1930, and played a not unimportant role in the formulation of its ideology. Rudolf Carnap and the mathematician Kurt Goedel were, along with Schlick, the leading names of the Vienna Circle and the school of philosophy to which it would become closely linked, logical positivism. Another term for this concept is "scientific empiricism, " and it arose out of the modern, early twentieth-century writings of philosophers Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore.
At their weekly gatherings, Feigl and other members of the Vienna Circle gave form to logical positivism as a school of philosophy. It was an attempt to bring the methodology and precision of the mathematical sciences to the study of philosophy, much as the recently developed movement in philosophy known as "symbolic logic" had replaced ordinary language with mathematical terms. Logical positivism offered the idea that metaphysical speculation (in other words, the "unknowable, " or to a religious believer, the "divine") was invalid and absurd as a philosophical concept. The group also argued that logical and mathematical propositions were tautological, or easily clarified in the most simplistic terms ("Either the sun will shine today, or it will not shine") and that any statements regarding morals or values were merely a reflection of human emotion. Finally, the Vienna Circle held that the function of philosophy was to interpret ideas and theories in both everyday and scientific language.
Feigl’s first teaching job was at Vienna's Volkshochschule ("People's Institute"), a select continuing education curriculum for adults, where his first class in 1927 was on the fundamentals of astronomy. Eventually he became an instructor in philosophy and his classes grew quite popular. The post allowed him to pursue the further development of his own ideas, and in 1929 his first book was published, Theorie und Erfahrung in der Physik ("Theory and Experience in Physics"). The work received a favorable mention from Einstein.
During the late 1920s Feigl became acquainted with the Bauhaus School of Art and Architecture in Germany, a controversial movement that was sometimes vilified in its day but later respected as an integral force in twentieth-century design. In classes at the Bauhaus, instructors such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer taught students how to apply the machine-age concepts of the industrial revolution to craftsmanship. It was a spirit and way of thinking which fit naturally into the Vienna Circle's ethos, and Feigl cultivated particular ties with the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
Feigl arrived in the United States at the behest of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had made him a fellow for the academic year 1930-1931. He spent part of it at Harvard University. Feigl was then hired by the University of Iowa, where he began as a lecturer in 1931, and was promoted to assistant professor the next year. He was made associate professor of philosophy in 1938, and spent the next two years in this capacity. He had already become a naturalized U. S. citizen in 1937.
Another Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1940 enabled Feigl to work at Columbia and Harvard universities as part of his investigations into the methodology of scientific explanation. To accomplish this he held discussions with many great minds in philosophy at Harvard at the time, including Bertrand Russell. His growing reputation attracted the attention of the philosophy faculty at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and he was hired as a professor of philosophy in 1940. He would spend the rest of his academic career there, and his and other well-known names in the field became virtually synonymous with the university's philosophy department and its outstanding reputation. Part of that standing was the result of Feigl's founding of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science in 1953.
The numerous books published under Feigl’s name include Readings in Philosophical Analysis, a 1949 tome written with Wilfrid Sellars; a treatise coauthored with Grover Maxwell in 1962, Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time; The "Mental" and the "Physical, " published in 1967; and Inquiries and Provocations: Selected Writings, 1929-1974, published in 1981. During his long career Feigl has served as vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and president of the American Philosophical Association. He died of cancer on June 1, 1988 in Minneapolis.
Achievements
Herbert Feigl has achieved renown in the realm of modern twentieth-century philosophical currents, initially as a member of one well-regarded movement centered in Vienna in the 1920s; he would later be credited for transporting much of its ideology and spirit to American shores when he immigrated from Austria as a young academic.
In 1953 he founded the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. This institute, for which he served as director for decades, invited distinguished international names in philosophy for seminars and discussions, and soon gained a reputation as an important nucleus in the study of philosophy. Moreover, the Center was known for its cordial ambiance, despite the serious and dissenting opinions argued there. Feigl's Center, it was noted, seemed to carry on the spirit of the Vienna Circle, which disintegrated with the rising threat of Nazism in Austria, Germany, and the rest of Europe.
(1962 Hardcover. Volume 3. No dust jacket. Minimal wear. N...)
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Paul Karl Feyerabend:
"His wit and his ability to put complex problems in simple language have convinced many doubters among scientists (who are often likely to frown upon what they think is useless mental gymnastics) and among laymen that philosophy cannot be such a monster after all, and he has also done a great deal to ally the fairly prevalent impression that an empiricist is bound to be a dry and unimaginative bore. "
Connections
In 1931 Feigl married a psychologist Maria Kasper. The couple had one child, Eric Otto.
