4th+American+philosophical+movements+of+the+1930’s

Outside Examples @Philosophy Novel Connections @Works Cited

**4 types of Philosophy**

 * ====**Pragmatism**====
 * ====**Logical Empiricism**====
 * ====**Positivism**====
 * ====**Surrealism**====

=**Pragmatism:**=

"A reasonable and logical way of doing things or of thinking about problems that is based on dealing with specific situations instead of on ideas and theories" (Merriam-Webster dictionary)
====Simplified: An approach to a situation is considered pragmatic when an idea or proposition is proven to be true by showing that the idea is practical and efficient. Pragmatism is also implied when an idea is rejected on the grounds of being inefficient and impractical. (Internet Encyclopedia)====
 * ==== Origins Debatable ====
 * ==== William James (1842-1910) first to publish idea of pragmatism ====
 * ==== C.S. Pierce (1839-1914) believed to be first to use word pragmatism as a philosophical concept ====
 * ====John Dewey====
 * ====American philosopher extinguished for work on "perfecting" pragmatism (John Dewey)====
 * ====Focused on pragmatism specifically related to education====
 * ====Called instrumentalism because the brain is an instrument of intellect that is geared towards evaluating problems for their effectiveness====
 * ====Retired in 1930 at beginning of Great Depression====

=**Logical Empiricism:**= "a philosophical movement that stresses the function of philosophy as a method of criticizing and analyzing science and that rejects all transcendental metaphysics, statements of fact being held to be meaningful only if they have verifiable consequences in experience and instatements of logic, mathematics, orphilosophy itself, and with such statements of fact deriving their validity from the rules of language" (Dicionary.com)

==== Logical positivism differs from earlier forms of empiricism and positivism (e.g., that of David Hume and Ernst Mach) in holding that the ultimate basis of knowledge rests upon public experimental verification rather than upon personal experience. It differs from the philosophies of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill in holding that metaphysical doctrines are not false but meaningless—that the “great unanswerable questions” about substance, causality, freedom, and God are unanswerable just because they are not genuine questions at all. This last is a thesis about language, not about nature, and is based upon a general account of meaning and of meaninglessness. All genuine philosophy (according to the group that came to be called the (Vienna Circle) is a critique of language; and (according to some of its leading members) its result is to show the unity of science—that all genuine knowledge about nature can be expressed in a single language common to all the sciences. ====



Ernst Mach (February 18, 1838 – February 19, 1916)

Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in something like //a priori// truths. But it is a biologized //a priori// : what is //a priori// to an individual organism was //a posteriori// to its ancestors; not only does the //a priori// pre-form experience, but the //a priori// is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the //a priori// to explain how knowledge is possible, Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how an //a priori// is possible. One more patch of philosophy, it was thought, yielded to science.

David Hume(1711-1776)

According to Logical Positivists, a group of philosophers who developed their ideas beginning in the 1920s, to say that a proposition is meaningful means that it is based on sense data (experience) or is a mere linguistic convention (a truth that we simply decide to accept by definition, a tautology). The meaning of a statement about the world is a prediction of what sense data you would experience //if// you were to be in a particular situation



Ludwig Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 - 1951)

Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. There are two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein's thought—the early and the later—both of which are taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. By showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new insights into the relations between world, thought and language and thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein, mostly recognized in the //Philosophical Investigations//, who took the more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional problems.

=**Positivism:**=

=
is a philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism.(Dicionary.com) ===== //Simplified Definition:// Positivism is a way of thinking developed by famous philosopher Auguste Comte and is based on the assumption that it is possible to observe social life and establish reliable, valid knowledge about how it works.

** Famous Positivists ** 1.Sir Karl Popper- generally regarded as one of the greastest philosophers in positivism of science in the 1920's

2. Auguste Comte (1798- 1857)- developed the whole idea of postivism. Put his views in "The Course in Positive Philosophy", a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842.

= =

= = =**Surrealism:**= Explanation-"Surrealism is a movement in art and literature that tries to represent the subconscious mind by creating fantastic imagery and juxtaposing ideas that seem to contradict each other."(Surrealism.org)



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