Stories About People: March 2017

Johannes Rehmke

Johannes Rehmke, the German epistemologist, ontologist, and ethical philosopher, was born at Elmshorn in Schleswig-Holstein. He studied evangelical theology and philosophy at Kiel and Zürich from 1867 to 1871, receiving his doctorate in philosophy at Zürich in 1873.

After some years as a high school teacher at St. Gallen, Johannes Rehmke was appointed unsalaried lecturer in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1884. The following year he became professor of philosophy at the University of Greifswald, where he taught until 1921.

Theory of Knowledge

Johannes Rehmke did not assume the existence of two worlds: a world, only indirectly knowable, of transsubjective objects, and an immediately knowable world, with intrasubjective perceptions and the like as contents. Rather, he asserted the existence of directly knowable real objects.

Theory of Knowledge

This epistemological monism was a consequence of his ontological dualism of two essentially different kinds of being. Physical (material) beings are spatially extended and occupy a place; mental (immaterial) beings are not extended and have no place.

The nonspatial, placeless character of consciousness conflicts with the uncritical application to the subject of such concepts as "in" and "external," as exemplified in such terms as "intrasubjective" and "transsubjective"—in other words, "immanent" and "transcendent," or "content of consciousness" and "external object."

Not only does consciousness not involve the having of a content; it does not involve any kind of having by means of a relation, in any event one that presupposes the existence of at least two realities separated from one another. On the contrary, knowing without any relation between diverse things is possible from the outset, as can be seen in self-consciousness.

self-consciousness

In self-consciousness only one thing is given, the particular knowing consciousness as knowing itself and as being known by itself. Thus, Rehmke's proposition "Knowing is having without a relation" expresses the immediacy of all knowledge, including knowledge of the so-called external world, the world of objects outside the body.

In his Logik oder Philosophie als Wissenslehre (Leipzig, 1918), Rehmke sought to demonstrate the importance of the general or universal for the movement of knowledge toward clarity.

In accord with his proof of the immediacy of cognition, he rejected as false the notion that thinking is an internal, that is, intramental, activity and even rejected the notion of thought activity because the purported activity never produces a change in objects. Thinking is not a "doing" but a "finding."

thought activity

If, for example, someone makes the judgment "A boiled crayfish is red," this observation signifies that he as thinker finds anew in the object the red known before. What is thus discovered in the object is never something single, an individual being, but something repeated, a universal.

Because the universal forms part of each particular object, it is something objective. If red is found in the crayfish, the logical subject of the judgment is not simply "(boiled) crayfish," but "red boiled crayfish."

Consequently, every judgment, with respect to the universal discovered in the particular object, is logically analytic. Grammatically, with regard to the joining of the linguistic signs into a sentence, it is synthetic.

linguistic signs

In its function as predicate of a judgment, an objective universal is called a concept. Every concept is thus a universal. Because of its objectivity, the universal as concept, despite its relation to the thinking subject, cannot be merely subjective.

It is equally erroneous to confuse or to equate the concept, which is always bound up with a particular word, with that word, that is, with the phonic structure as linguistic sign.

The objectivity of the universal as a possible concept reveals the error in the phrase "concept formation." A concept (for example, "tree") is not first constructed by comparing several objects (for example, pines, beeches, and alders) by means of an "internal activity" of thought.

internal activity

The concept is presupposed in the very selection of objects of the same kind. Concept formation is really conceptual clarification, the determination of which characteristics in union constitute a concept already given.

Clarity is the guiding notion in Rehmke's logic. Johannes Rehmke claimed that, in any deepening of knowledge, the universal as logical predicate helps consciousness to obtain clarity, and ultimately unquestionable clarity.

Johannes Rehmke's conception of logic, that is, philosophy as theory of knowledge, is linked with his notion of philosophy as fundamental science, expressed in his Philosophie als Grundwissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1910).

Philosophie als Grundwissenschaft

Both theory of knowledge and fundamental science are genuine sciences, directed toward that which is simply given, that is, toward objects regardless of their being real or unreal.

They are also in equal measure philosophy because they deal with the totality of the given, in contrast with the particular sciences, each of which deals with only a particular section of the world. Theory of knowledge deals with the given as that which is thought (known); fundamental science deals with it in regard to its most universal character.

But while logic presupposes the concept "universal," and each special science presupposes its own fundamental concepts, the task of philosophy as fundamental science is to elucidate without prejudice precisely the basic "that which is most universal."

The Traditional Antology

The Traditional Antology

Theory of knowledge is not a fundamental science. Historically, it arose from an epistemological dualism, and as a consequence its form is faulty. In any case, it must presuppose the basic distinction between knower and other.

Johannes Rehmke's painstaking ontological studies in Philosophie als Grundwissenschaft of the manifold "most universal" embrace five paired notions: (1) matter and consciousness, (2) the universal and the unique, (3) unity and simplicity, (4) the changeable and the unchangeable, (5) the real and the unreal. For Rehmke, of course, the first pair was primary.

Beyond the merely negative description— immaterial, nonspatial, and place-less—the essence of the mental is completely determined by the concept of consciousness, or knowledge. Rehmke therefore opposed both materialism and idealism (spiritualism), as well as Spinozism.

concept of consciousness

Everything without exception proves to be either a unique thing (something that occurs only once, such as a unique tree) or a universal (something that is repeated, such as green or "treeness"). It follows that the unique and the universal do not exist without each other; indeed, objectively the universal belongs to the unique.

Johannes Rehmke classified the unique into individuals (for example, individual trees) and units of individuals. Johannes Rehmke divided the latter into operational units (for example, an auto with a trailer) and living units (for example, a state).

The universal is either a determination (such as angularity) or a relation (such as similarity). Johannes Rehmke attached great value to his recognition that many seemingly ontological concepts, such as space, time, being, and value, are merely relational ones.

relational ones

In connection with the third of his five pairs, unity and simplicity, Johannes Rehmke distinguished between individuals that are composed of individuals (and hence are ephemeral, passing) and individuals that are absolutely simple (and hence are everlasting). Examples of the latter are elementary particles and consciousness.

Denying the theory of substance, he held that the individual is a union of its determinations (a body, for instance, is a union of size, shape, and location). Johannes Rehmke also analyzed each specific determination into determination as such (for instance, shape as such) and particularity.

Johannes Rehmke equated the fourth relationship, the changeable and the unchangeable, with the distinction between individual and universal. In this context he pointed out that the concept of change refers only to exchange of individual characteristics, with the determination as such (for instance, the shape as such) remaining the same.

individual characteristics

Johannes Rehmke treated in detail the relationship between the real and the unreal. He defined the real as consisting in relationship of action. This enabled him to do justice to such properties of things as sweetness, which are often dismissed as merely subjective.

Psychology and Ethics

In his Lehrbuch der Allgemeinen Psychologie (Frankfurt, 1894), Johannes Rehmke stressed that human consciousness (mind) is a simple, immaterial individual being, in a constant unity of action with an essentially different body. Thus, man is not a "double-beinged" individual.

There are four general characteristics of consciousness: (1) determination of objects, each one directly perceived or imagined, even though the perception is mediated by the sense organs; (2) states (conditions), for example, delight or listlessness; (3) thought—either distinguishing (being aware of the distinct) or uniting (awareness of unity); (4) the subject, the determination of which establishes at the same time the unity of the ego. These determinations are not to be construed as mental activities.

Psychology and Ethics

Because of its intermittent character, volition, despite its relations with the above determinations, is not one of them. Johannes Rehmke's analysis of volition aided him in his solution of the problem of free will.

He separated the problem into four parts, each of which is answerable:

Is an act of the will prevented or not?
Is the volition random or conditioned?
Is there a genuine possibility of choice, or is the will constrained?
Is the volition freely selfdetermined or not?

Johannes Rehmke's theory of the will constitutes the background for his ethics. He distinguished five forms of ethics—four false and one genuine. The ethics of shrewdness has to do with men "for themselves." The ethics of the unity of control expresses duty as an "ought."

expresses duty

The ethics of the unity of life expresses duty as a "must" and comprises the ethics of society (in which unity as "being with one another" is a means to a selfish end) and the ethics of community (in which unity as "being for one another" is an end in itself ).

Finally, separating the merely social from the moral proper is the ethics of selfless love of one person as such "for another," arising from his knowledge of himself as at one with the other.

selfless love

Richard of Mediavilla

Richard of Mediavilla, or Richard of Middleton, doctor solidus, was a Franciscan philosopher, theologian, and canon lawyer. Although his date of birth and country of origin are unknown, scholars are generally agreed that he was either French or English.

We are certain that in 1283 he was appointed as one of the judges of the works of Peter John Olivi, and we possess three of his sermons, preached in Paris in 1281 and 1283. He was a master of theology in Paris during 1284–1285.

In 1288, Richard was one of the tutors of the exiled Prince Louis, son of King Charles II of Sicily and later bishop of Toulouse. Richard's last writings seem to date around 1295, when he completed his commentary on the fourth book of the Sentences of Peter Lombard. After 1295 we lose all trace of Richard of Mediavilla.

Alois Riehl

Alois Riehl, the Austrian neo-Kantian philosopher, was born in Bolzano. Riehl was consecutively Privatdozent (1870), extraordinary professor (1877), and professor (1878) at the University of Graz. He moved to the University of Freiburg in 1882, to Kiel in 1895, to Halle in 1898, and to Berlin in 1905.

Riehl's first philosophy was a realistic metaphysics based on Johann Friedrich Herbart and indirectly on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and it is of interest, just as in the case of Immanuel Kant, to study the relation between Riehl's precritical and critical writings.

Between 1870 and 1872 Riehl made his first realistic, monistic, evolutionist decisions within that dogmatic framework. His Realistische Grundzüge (Graz, 1870) centered on the problem of sensation, which he originally conceived as a polycentric reciprocal matrix of consciousness and movement.

Théodule Armand Ribot

Théodule Armand Ribot, the French psychologist, was a professor of psychology at the Sorbonne and from 1889 was the director of the psychological laboratory at the Collège de France. A philosophical disciple of Hippolyte Taine and Herbert Spencer (whose Principles of Psychology he translated), Ribot, with Taine, initiated the study in France of a positivistic and physiologically oriented psychology.

His interest in philosophy was inseparable from his interest in concrete psychological problems and persisted throughout his life. He founded and edited the Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger, one of the first French philosophical journals. Ribot influenced not only French positivists and physiological psychologists but even some thinkers who, like Henri Bergson, rejected his epiphenomenalism.

Ribot's work falls into three main periods, but he remained loyal throughout his life to the program expounded in the introduction to his first book, La psychologie anglaise contemporaine (Paris, 1870).

Renaissance

"Renaissance" is the term customarily employed to designate a cultural movement that began in Italy in the middle of the fourteenth century and spread throughout the rest of Europe. Although the term is well established in the writings of historians, its usefulness has been challenged.

Indeed, there has grown up around the concept of the Renaissance an extensive controversy that sometimes threatens completely to divert the attention of scholars from the historical facts. In part, this controversy is simply an acute form of the general problem of periodization in history.

The concept of the Renaissance, however, arouses particularly strong opposition because it involves a disparagement of the preceding period, the Middle Ages (medium aevum), from which culture presumably had to be awakened.

Andreas Rüdiger

Andreas Rüdiger, the German physician and philosopher, was born in Rochlitz, Saxony. Poverty and bad health allowed him to study only irregularly. In 1692 he served as a tutor in the home of Christian Thomasius. He was compelled to interrupt his studies completely in 1695; not until 1697 could he enter the University of Leipzig, where he studied law and medicine, receiving a master’s degree in 1700.

He received a doctorate in medicine from the University of Halle in 1703, but he continued to lecture at the University of Leipzig. From 1707 to 1712 he practiced medicine and lectured in Halle, and from 1712 until his death he did so in Leipzig.

The development of Andreas Rüdiger’s philosophy was greatly influenced by his teachers Christian Thomasius and Franz Budde.However, Christian Thomasius soon developed individual views within the Thomasian school. His medical studies centered his interests on natural philosophy and gave his thought a practical bent. Like Budde’s, Andreas Rüdiger’s mind was more systematic than Christian Thomasius’s.

Time, Being, and Becoming

The major debate in the philosophy of time, being, and becoming is between defenders of the tenseless theory of time and defenders of the tensed theory of time. During the late twentieth century into the early twenty-first century, the tenseless theory of time was defended by such philosophers as D.H. Mellor, Graham Nerlich, and L. Nathan Oaklander.

The tenseless theory implies that temporal features of events consist only of relations of simultaneity, earlier, and later than, and that all events are ontologically equal, regardless of when they occur. The tensed theory, which has many versions, is advocated by such philosophers as William Lane Craig,Quentin Smith, and Michael Tooley.

The tensed theory of time implies that some or all of the words past, present, and future are needed to describe time, although what is understood by the words future, present, and past, or by their usage as parts of phrases or sentences (e.g., whether or not they express analyzable or unanalyzable concepts) is a matter that varies among tensed theorists.

Vasubandhu

Vasubandhu was an Indian Buddhist philosopher who made significant contributions to the clarification and development of the Indian Buddhist schools of philosophy traditionally classified as the Vaibhaóika (or Sarvastivada), the Sautrantika, and the Yogacara (or Cittamatra).

Erich Frauwallner argued, on the basis of a study of Vasubandhu’s biographers, Paramartha, Buston and Taranatha, that there were two Vasubandhus, one who composed Yogacara works and lived in the fourth century CE, and another who lived in the fifth century CE and composed treatises from the Vaibhaóika and Sautrantika points of view.

But later studies disputed Frauwallner’s argument and advanced the hypothesis that there was only one author of these works and that he lived in the fourth century CE According to Buddhist tradition, Vasubandhu was at first an orthodox follower of the Vaibhaóika school, and, after having allied himself with the Sautrantika school, was convinced by his half-brother, Asaña, to accept the Mahayana scriptures (which were not accepted by the Vaibhaóikas or Sautrantikas) and to adopt the theses of the Yogacara school.

Bertrando Spaventa

Bertrando Spaventa, the Italian Hegelian philosopher, was born at Bomba in Abruzzo, educated in the seminary at Chieti, and taught for a time in the seminary at Monte Cassino before moving to Naples in 1840.

There he became one of a small circle of liberal students associated with Ottavio Colecchi (1773–1847), who taught privately in opposition to the “official” philosophy of Pasquale Galluppi. Colecchi was himself a devotee of Immanuel Kant, but he read all the German idealists carefully and in the original.

Spaventa, like the other young men in Colecchi’s circle, was convinced that the real meaning of Kant’s work was to be found in the later idealists, especially in G. W. F. Hegel, and the Hegelian interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason always remained the nodal point of his own speculations.

Respect

The ideas that people should be treated with respect and that individuals should respect themselves are important elements of everyday morality and moral philosophy.

Some theories treat respect for persons as the basis of morality or the hallmark of a just society, while selfrespect is often viewed as a core moral duty or something that social institutions must support. There is disagreement, however, about whether things other than persons, such as animals or the environment, are appropriate objects of respect.

Most generally, respect is acknowledgement of an object as having importance, worth, authority, status, or power. As its Latin root respicere (to look back) indicates, to respect something is to pay attention or give consideration to it. As the etymology also suggests, respect is responsive: the object is regarded as due, deserving, or rightly claiming acknowledgement.

Karl Stumpf

Karl Stumpf, the German psychologist and philosopher, was born in Wiesentheid, Bavaria. He studied law at Würzburg, but under the influence of Franz Brentano his interests turned to philosophy and psychology. In 1868 he took a degree at Göttingen, under Rudolf Hermann Lotze, with a dissertation on the relation between Plato’s God and the Idea of the Good.

In 1869 he entered the Catholic seminary in Würzburg, where he studied St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. A year later, having lost his faith in orthodox Christianity and having abandoned the idea of becoming a priest, he left the seminary and became docent at Göttingen, where he taught for three years. His acquaintances included the philosopher and psychologist Gustav Fechner, who used Stumpf as a subject for his experiments in aesthetics.

Stumpf ’s passionate fondness for music motivated his pioneering research in the psychology of sound perception. In 1873 he became professor of philosophy at Würzburg and in 1879, at Prague. His associates included Ernst Mach and Anton Marty.

Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin

Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin, a Russian biochemist, was noted for his contributions to the explanation for the origin of life. Profoundly influenced by Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Oparin presented a theoretical foundation that stressed both a materialistic and mechanistic explanation for both planetary formation and the evolution of life on this planet.

His understanding of astronomy, chemistry, geology, biology, and philosophy had allowed for a comprehensive view of a temporally evolving world and humankind’s place within it.

Oparin’s underlying principles encompassed not only the chemical processes that constituted the precursors to and the emergence of life but also the immense evolutionary time that was necessary for its formation. Oparin is best known for his major works The Origin of Life (1938) and Genesis and Evolutionary Development of Life (1968).

Francisco Suárez

Francisco Suárez, the Spanish scholastic philosopher and theologian, “Doctor Eximius,” was born at Granada. His father was a wealthy lawyer and Francisco was the second of eight sons, six of whom entered the religious life.

In 1564 he applied for admission to the Jesuit order. Perhaps because of ill health he showed little promise at first, and he failed to pass the examinations. Suárez appealed the verdict of his examiners, but his second examinations were not much better than the first.

The provincial agreed, however, to admit Suárez at a lower rank. Shortly after his admission to the order, he began his study of philosophy. He showed little promise in the next few months and considered abandoning his studies for a lesser occupation in the order.

Richard Swineshead

Richard Swineshead (Swyneshed; on the Continent, more commonly Suiseth) is the name now commonly ascribed to the author of the Book of Calculations (Liber Calculationum) although in various manuscripts and printed editions he is also given the first names John, Raymund, Roger, and William, among others.

Based on the work of James A. Weisheipl, a different person with the name Roger Swyneshed, who was a Benedictine monk at Glastonbury, is now credited with writing a work that is in some ways similar, titled Descriptions of Motions or On Natural Motions (Descriptiones motuum or De motibus naturalibus) dated to the mid-1330s and found in Erfurt manuscript Amplonian F 135, ff. 25va–47rb.

This same Roger Swyneshed is credited with logical works On Insolubles and On Obligations (De insolubilibus and De obligationibus) connected to standard academic exercises within medieval universities. If the same person wrote all of these works, then his views must have matured and changed considerably between the writing of the various works.

Kazimierz Twardowski

Kazimierz Twardowski had a twofold role in the recent history of philosophy. He had a decisive influence on Polish philosophy in the twentieth century; and at the turn of the twentieth century he contributed to the transformation of European philosophy in its search for new, intellectually responsible methods of philosophical inquiry.

His conception of philosophy and his specific contributions to epistemology, philosophical psychology, and theory of science helped to pave the way for the emergence of phenomenology and of some forms of analytic philosophy.

Twardowski was born in Vienna.He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he came under the influence of Franz Brentano. In 1892 he received a PhD degree from the university, and he became a lecturer there in 1894. In 1895 he was appointed to a chair of philosophy at the University of Lwów, where he taught until 1930.

Reverse Mathemathics

Reverse mathematics has its origins in Harvey Friedman's 1974 address to the International Congress of Mathematicians. In it Friedman asked two fundamental questions: "What are the proper axioms to use in carrying out proofs of particular theorems, or bodies of theorems, in mathematics?" and "What are those formal systems which isolate the essential properties needed to prove them?"

Reverse mathematics was developed as an attempt to answer these questions, and since 1974 many logicians (especially Friedman and Stephen Simpson) have contributed to this project.

The goal in reverse mathematics is to find the minimal collection S of set theoretic axioms which suffices to prove a given theorem T. Because Zermelo-Frankel set theory is too powerful to provide this type of delicate analysis, second order arithmetic is used as the axiomatization of set theory.

Henricus Regius

Regius (Henri de Roy), a Dutch academic, was a major figure in disputes over Cartesianism in Utrecht, The Netherlands, during the seventeenth century. Regius received a medical degree from the University of Padua before returning in 1638 to his hometown of Utrecht to become a professor of medicine and botany at the university.

Before his appointment there he gave private lectures based on the Dioptrics and Meteors, two of the essays published with René Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637). What Regius found to be particularly congenial in these texts was the proposal there that observable phenomena be explained in terms of the mechanical properties of insensible material parts.

In 1641 Regius took advantage of his good relations with the new rector of the university, Gisbertius Voetius, to obtain permission to submit for discussion various "medical disputations."

René Descartes

The first two disputations provide a mechanistic reinterpretation of Aristotelian notions, but in the third disputation Regius took the more aggressive tack of claiming that the union of the soul and body is not substantial, as the Aristotelians claimed, but accidental.

Voetius responded with an appendix that defended Aristotelianism against the "new philosophy," and on the advice of Descartes, Regius offered a response that suggested that the Aristotelians had difficulty avoiding atheism. In 1642 the burgomasters of Utrecht ordered the confiscation of Regius's response and endorsed a statement by the faculty that condemned the teaching of the new philosophy.

Descartes intervened by publishing attacks on Voetius in 1642 and 1644 that the burgomasters judged to be libelous. Fearful of imprisonment, Descartes sought the protection of the French ambassador, who succeeded in suppressing his arrest warrant.

Fearful of imprisonment

To this point, Descartes had a favorable opinion of Regius. However, matters took a turn for the worse in 1645 when Regius sent Descartes a draft of his Fundamenta physices. Descartes was shocked by the assertion in one section of this text that it is impossible to prove that the soul is anything more than a mode of body.

When Regius went ahead and published his text in 1646, Descartes denounced it in the preface to the French edition of the Principles (1647). A student of Regius published a broadsheet that highlighted Regius's rejection not only of a proof of immortality but also of innate ideas and the possibility of a proof of the existence of the material world.

Descartes responded in 1648 with his Notes against a Broadsheet, and Regius replied that same year with his Brevis explicatio mentis humanae. Regius's text included a letter from Petrus Wassenaer defending Regius against the charge in the preface to the Principles that he had plagiarized portions of Descartes's unpublished treatise on animals.

Petrus Wassenaer

After Descartes's death Regius published second and third editions (1654 and 1661, respectively) of the Fundamenta physices with the new title Philosophia naturalis, in which he attempted to further defend the project of freeing mechanistic physics and physiology from dogmatic metaphysics, on which Descartes had attempted to found it.

Regius's presentation there of the new science as a system of probable hypotheses is similar to the one found in the Traité de physique (1671) of the French physicist Jacques Rohault, perhaps the most influential defense of Cartesian physics in the century following Descartes's death.

Jacques Rohault

Othmar Spann

Othmar Spann, the Austrian philosopher and sociologist, was born in Vienna and educated at the universities of Vienna, Zürich, and Tübingen. He was a professor at Brünn from 1909 to 1919, when he was appointed to a chair of economics and sociology at Vienna.

Spann contrasted his “neoromantic universalism”— called neoromantic by Spann to indicate his debt to Adam Müller—with “individualism,” that is, with the doctrine that society derives its character from the independently existing qualities of the individual men composing it.

He classified as individualist such allegedly erroneous doctrines as the economic liberalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, utilitarianism, the various “social contract” theories, “natural law” theories of social life, egalitarianism, anarchism, Machiavellianism, and Marxism. As this heterogeneous grouping suggests, Spann was less interested in discussing the individual merits and faults of these doctrines than in placing them with respect to his total intellectual system.

Joseph Ernest Renan

Joseph Ernest Renan, the French critic and historian, was born in Tréguier, Brittany. He studied for the priesthood at seminaries in Paris but left the seminary of SaintSulpice in 1845 to devote himself to secular teaching and writing.

He contributed to the Revue des deux mondes from 1851 and the Journal des débats from 1853. He received a docteur ès lettres in 1852, was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions in 1856, and was elected to the Académie Française in 1878. He was appointed professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France in 1862, but the course was then immediately suspended until 1870. In 1884 he became administrator of the Collège de France.

Renan's abandonment of his priestly calling was largely determined by the doubts engendered by his philological study of the Bible. After leaving the seminary, he was strongly influenced by Marcelin Berthelot, the chemist, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Another major influence was German idealism, particularly that of G. W. F. Hegel.

Georg Ernst Stahl

Georg Ernst Stahl was a leading German medical scientist and chemist of his day. Stahl was appointed professor of medicine at the University of Halle in 1694, and from 1716 until his death he served as personal physician to Frederick William I of Prussia. His numerous medical writings had a strongly doctrinal tendency, which made them the source of lively, often bitter, controversy.

His famous phlogiston theory, an erroneous explanation of the nature of combustion and calcination, was nonetheless, before Antoine Lavoisier’s discoveries, instrumental in placing chemistry on a scientific basis. The same may be said of his studies concerning the properties and composition of acids, alkalis, and salts.

Led by his medical, rather than chemical, interests to philosophy, Stahl elaborated (particularly in his Theoria Medica Vera, 1707) a rigorous position of animism, affirming that the animal organism was formed, governed, and preserved by an immaterial principle, or soul.

Karl Leonhard Reinhold

Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the Austrian philosopher, was educated by Jesuits until the dissolution of their order in 1773, when he entered the Catholic college of the Barnabites, where he also taught, from 1778 to 1783.

In 1783 Reinhold left Vienna for Leipzig and in the same year abandoned Catholicism in favor of Protestantism. A year later he moved to Weimar, where he was invited by Christoph Martin Wieland to contribute to his Teutscher Merkur. Soon he was not only Wieland's closest friend but also his son-in-law.

Reinhold's first article, "Gedanken über Aufklärung," in which he traced the emergence of Enlightenment thought, appeared in July 1784, just a few months before the publication of Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What Is Enlightenment?" In his article Reinhold pleaded for the fuller realization of such.

Enlightenment

Enlightenment aims as greater tolerance toward religious minorities, more widespread secularization of knowledge and its greater accessibility to all sections of the population, and, above all, for the right of the individual to seek and assert truth free from fear, according to his critical reason and moral convictions.

Although two years later (1786) he was to publish a series of articles in support of Kant's critical philosophy, his second article in the Merkur (1785) was directed against Kant's unfavorable review of Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideen. The article appeared anonymously, but Reinhold later admitted his authorship to Kant.

The articles dealing with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, published under the title "Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie" from 1786 to 1787, established Reinhold's reputation as the most skillful exponent of Kant's philosophy and resulted in his being offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Jena in 1787. Reinhold was no less successful as a university teacher, and soon after his arrival Jena became one of the chief centers of Kantian studies.

Kantian studies

He attracted many students to Jena, and so great was his popularity that he was repeatedly urged to refuse the appointment offered him at the University of Kiel. Reinhold hesitated at first but eventually decided to move to Kiel in 1794, where he remained until his death.

One of the reasons for his departure, perhaps the most decisive, is revealed in a letter to Wieland that Reinhold later published in a selection of essays (Auswahl vermischter Schriften, Jena, 1796), under the title "Ueber die teutschen Beurtheilungen der französischen Revolution."

Reinhold became increasingly worried over his countrymen's reactions to the excesses of the French revolutionary tribunals. In Kiel, which was then under Danish rule, he hoped to find a calmer political climate.

Danish rule

Without condoning the terror of the revolutionaries, he nevertheless deplored the inferences that were drawn from it by leading public figures in Germany. In particular he viewed with anxiety the introduction of repressive measures and the tendency to regard the French Revolution as a conspiracy of the philosophers.

The French revolutionaries, he argued, may have been mistaken in attempting to deduce political rules from abstract principles that were often inadequately understood, but they were correct in their assessment of the desperate plight of their compatriots.

If inferences were to be drawn, these would not suggest that philosophy presented a danger to orderly government but rather that disorderly government encouraged men to invoke philosophy in a manner unwarranted by its inherent limitations.

unwarranted

Practical considerations such as these, no less than more strictly theoretical ones, prompted Reinhold to inquire more closely into the nature and scope of philosophical speculation.

Most of the works that he wrote at Kiel advanced a "fundamental philosophy" concerned with the basic presuppositions of scientifically valid thought.

As the basic axiom of his "fundamental philosophy" Reinhold postulated the principle of consciousness, which he formulated in this way: By virtue of consciousness the perceiving (erkennende) subject is capable of distinguishing himself as something distinct from, while at the same time related to, the object of his consciousness, which, however, is not the object itself but rather the idea or notion (Vorstellung) of it.

something distinct

The consciousness itself constitutes a basic and irreducible fact, capable of neither proof nor further definition. It can only verify itself by reflecting upon itself. Reinhold was anxious to demonstrate that every thought process involves both a priori and a posteriori elements.

The relation of the Vorstellung to the external object embodies its a posteriori material content (Stoff), whereas the subjective activity involved (Vorstellungsvermögen) in shaping the material content into a clear Vorstellung constitutes its a priori form (Form).

Reinhold stipulated three interconnected stages in the operation of consciousness: sense perception (Anschauung), which he classified as a receptive activity, and cognitive understanding (Verstand) and reflective reasoning (Vernunft), both of which he described as spontaneous activities.

spontaneous activities

The product of these combined activities is the Vorstellung, which, Reinhold warned, must not be confused with an "image" or an "impression," for both terms suggest mere receptivity.

Nor must it be identified with a "representation" of the object, since there is no way of either proving the identity of the Vorstellung with the object or even of comparing its similarity to the object.

It follows that the object as such, no less than the subject as such, remains not only unknowable (as Kant realized) but also inconceivable. Both subject and object, therefore, as things-in-themselves are pure abstractions. They are the residue of a Vorstellung, the thing minus the notion or conception of it.

Vorstellung

Without denying the existence of things-in-themselves, Reinhold refused to commit himself as to the nature of their existence. He explicitly stated that he was merely anxious to determine the possibility and the limitations of cognition, not to inquire into its psychological origins or into the ontological nature of the objects of cognition.

His declared aim was to provide a descriptive account, a phenomenology, rather than a theory of cognition, together with an analysis of the terminology commonly employed in this field.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, Reinhold's deliberate delimitation of his theoretical undertaking, his works provided suggestively fertile starting points for subsequent Kantian research from Johann Gottlieb Fichte to Arthur Schopenhauer.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Social Contract

“Social contract” is the name given to a group of related and overlapping concepts and traditions in political theory. Like other such aggregations in philosophy and intellectual history, it has at its center an extremely simple conceptual model, in this case that the collectivity is an agreement between the individuals who make it up.

This model suggests that it is proper to ask whether the agreement was or is voluntary in character and whether, therefore, the individual can decide to withdraw either because he no longer agrees or because the conditions that are or were understood in the agreement are not being maintained.

It suggests furthermore that the individual should be thought of as logically prior to the state or to society, and that it is meaningful to speculate on situations in which individuals existed but no collectivity was in being.

Enrique José Varona y Pera

Enrique José Varona y Pera was a Cuban philosopher, statesman, and man of letters. Beginning in the mid-1870s, Varona dominated Cuban intellectual life for fifty years. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana, was founding editor of Revista cubana, and took an active part in education and politics.

A former member of the Spanish Cortes, he became a revolutionary colleague of José Martí, was appointed secretary of public instruction and fine arts after the 1898 revolution, and served as vice-president of Cuba from 1913 to 1917.

Varona, one of the leading Latin American positivists, adapted French positivism and British empiricism to the contemporary sociopolitical and cultural situation of Cuba. Logic, psychology, and ethics were his primary philosophic concerns.

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