Empiriocriticism

"When reflecting on the history and the present situation of their field, psychologists have often seen their discipline as being in a critical state. The first author to warn of a crisis was, in 1897, the now scarcely known philosopher Rudolf Willy. He saw a crisis in psychology resulting, firstly, from a profuse branching out of psychology. Adopting a radical empiriocriticist point of view, he, secondly, made the metaphysical stance of scholars like Wilhelm Wundt responsible for the crisis. Meanwhile, the priest Constantin Gutberlet responded to the claim of crisis arguing, on the contrary, that the crisis resulted from research that was empirical only.

Throughout the discipline psychologists felt troubled by a widespread sense of fragmentation in the field. I will argue that this is due to psychology’s early social success and popularization in modern society. Moreover the paper shows that the first declaration of crisis emerged at a time when a discussion of fundamentals was already underway between Wundt and the empiriocriticist Richard Avenarius. The present historical research reveals the depth of the confrontation between Wundt and Willy, entailing a clash of two worldviews that embrace psychological, epistemological, and political aspects
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Robert Musil and the Problem of Thinking. On the epistemological aspects of literary narration The article analyzes the relations between artistic strategies employed by Robert Musil in his novels: The Confusions of Young Törless and The Man without Qualities, and the philosophical framework developed in his doctoral thesis and essays on the aesthetics and epistemology of literary creation. Specifi c for the philosophy of empiriociticism, the vision of the human subject as volatile and actively participating in cognition through ordering sensual data, is refl ected in Musil's creation of literary characters devoid of "character" or "qualities" and has been conveyed through both the expressionist and impressionist narrative techniques, based on metaphorical similes, of his debut novel. Musil's philosophy, which emphasized the notion of possibility and was close to relativism and social co nstructivism, had an effect on the artistic shape of The Man without Qualities; in this novel, the narration is characterized by ironical distance, and the epic story is restrained in favor of essayistic investigations.

principal inspirateur avec Avenarius du mouvement empiriocriticiste, pose comme préalable à la constitution d'une théorie la critique de la notion de causalité. La règle causale est présentée comme une limite à la définition d'une véritable doctrine positiviste, si bien que Mach peut écrire en 1894 : « j'espère que la science de la nature dans le futur mettra de côté les concepts de cause et d'effet, qui ont pour moi non seulement rapport au fétichisme mais aussi à cause de leur absence de clarté formelle ..». Comment dépasser ces obstacles épistémologiques, comment penser la nature grâce à une légalité n'empruntant rien à des catégories qui postulent sa décomposition ? Nous interrogerons la solution proposée par Joseph Petzold dans la logique de la perspective empiriocriticiste.

In 1923, at the height of Anatoly Lunacharsky’s importance as the Commissar of Culture and Education, his “Foundations of Positive Aesthetics” (1903) was reprinted without revisions, impacting the generation of the “heroic” Soviet avant-garde. My presentation will examine Lunacharsky’s theory, exposing its origins in the “empiriocriticist” epistemology of German-Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius. I will demonstrate that Avenarius’s principle of the “least measure of force” was enriched by Lunacharsky with a Nietzschean exaltation of life, leading to a revolutionary aesthetics that empowered both the artist and the spectator.

A reappraisal of Empiriocriticism. The paper questions the assumptions that underlie the habit of considering Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach as representatives of the same philosophical current: Empiriocriticism. The essay firstly retraces the different backgrounds, aims and intellectual trajectories of the two authors, and then indicates the various points of convergence of their thoughts. In so doing, it is possible to outline the defning topics of Empiriocriticism without the risk of overlapping the famous Mach and the lesser-known Avenarius.

In his analysis of Greek’s epistemology, Carlo Michelstaedter gets to say that “Aristotle considers a rational substance the schemes of causality.” Hiding behind a “they say,” Aristotle predicates in categories “the pre made theory of the public voice,” and gives new meaning to the concept of philosophy. Knowledge becomes subordinaton to the ‘mostly,’ doxa becomes both the source and the object of science; through Aristotle absolute knowledge becomes a system of statistical data, the most common of which will be labeled the ultimate values of absolute wisdom. To this absolute wisdom, men will be required to refer in the manners of a subaltern relationship to a hegemonic knowledge: that knowledge will force the other ideological forms to adapt to it. In our time, according to Michelstaedter, that knowledge is represented by science. The science of imperialist period inherits the prerogatives of Aristotle’s philosophy because, through technology, science brings into play the possibility of the practical (useful) modification of the world: allowing a easier satisfactions of human needs, this kind of knowledge will ‘convince’ more and more people to accept it as the most suitable
knowledge. From this point, this scientific spirit reverberates from the field of science into all the ideological manifestations of life (philosophy included). When science becomes the hegemonic discipline the entire knowledge begins to work in a scientific way. The goal of my talk will be demonstrating how, starting from this point, Michelstaedter begins to criticize Modernist theory of knowledge, embodied – in the epistemological field – by the philosophy of Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, and Richard Avenarius. For Michelstaedter the new anti-dogmatic nature of scientific knowledge will be the modality by which science, declaring its passage from classical reason to instrumental reason, starts to serve hegemonic ideologies. The new science, in fact, does not need to
present itself in a dogmatic way any more, because now – through technology – can simply present itself as the most ‘useful’ knowledge. The ‘useful’ knowledge of the imperialist period is therefore the new Aristotelian “rational substance,” i.e. the new public voice.