Five-minute digest
A History of Philosophy, Vol. XI: Logical Positivism and Existentialism
Summary
This book is not a narrative history but a set of essays in which Frederick Copleston argues with his contemporaries. It first appeared in 1956 as Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism, was revised in 1972 with a new opening chapter, and was added to the Continuum edition of A History of Philosophy in 2003 as Volume XI under the title Logical Positivism and Existentialism. The occasion was the state of philosophy in the decade after the Second World War. In Britain, the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, introduced to English readers by A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic in 1936, had taught a generation of students that a statement is meaningful only if it is a tautology or can in principle be verified by sense experience. On that test metaphysical and theological statements were neither true nor false but without literal meaning. By the 1950s the stricter positivism was giving way to the analysis of ordinary language associated with the later Wittgenstein and with Oxford, but its suspicion of metaphysics remained. On the Continent, meanwhile, existentialism had become the most discussed philosophy of the postwar years. Copleston had debated Ayer on the BBC Third Programme in 1949, and the first half of the book continues that argument at greater length. After surveying British philosophy, he examines the verification principle and asks what kind of statement the principle itself is: if it is neither an empirical hypothesis nor a tautology, it looks like a recommendation about how to use the word 'meaning', and a recommendation cannot settle whether metaphysics is possible. Further essays defend a role for metaphysics, consider the analysis of perception, and argue that terms such as 'wise' or 'good' can be predicated of God analogically, keeping a real though limited meaning. A chapter on the human person asks whether analytic philosophy had left room for the self as a subject. The second half turns to existentialism. Copleston introduces its themes of existence, freedom, anxiety and choice, traces them back to Kierkegaard, and distinguishes thinkers open to transcendence, such as Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers, from the atheist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger and Camus also figure in the discussion. He closes with a critical assessment in which he credits existentialism with recalling philosophy to the concrete person while questioning whether its descriptions of freedom can stand without a metaphysics of being. The book shows Copleston as a participant, not only a historian, and his own position, a Thomist realism open to analytic method, is stated openly. Readers who disagree with his conclusions can still use the essays as a clear guide to what the positivists and existentialists claimed. For high school students the chapters on verification and on religious language pair well with the radio debates, and the existentialism chapters with Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus.
Top Lessons
Turning a principle on itself
Copleston's central move against logical positivism is to ask whether the verification principle passes its own test. Students learn a durable habit of argument: examine the status of the rule before accepting what it rules out.
Words fit for God
Following Aquinas, Copleston argues that words like 'wise' and 'good' apply to God analogically: neither in exactly the creaturely sense nor in an unrelated one. The lesson asks how finite language can speak truly of the infinite without claiming to comprehend it.
Existence before essence?
Copleston credits the existentialists with recalling philosophy to the anxious, choosing individual, then asks whether Sartre's claim that there is no given human nature can support the moral seriousness Sartre himself demanded.
Debate as a form of charity
Copleston spent years arguing in public with Ayer and Russell. The essays model disagreement that states the other side accurately and attacks arguments rather than motives.