[Lecture Nine] Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 33 minutes
Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »
In this lecture: Dr. Peikoff explores how the conclusions of the Logical Positivists produced the Analytic school of philosophy that argued that debating how people used ordinary language was the sum of philosophy. He explains how Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein approached “language games” as cut off from facts and reality. He concludes by illustrating how this divorce of language from reality led to an emotive theory of ethics.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| How does Moore’s approach to philosophy fundamentally differ from previous approaches? |
| What is the theory of definite description? |
| Explain the steps Russell used to arrive at his theory of material implication. |
| What is the main error of the logical atomists’ approach to language? |
| How did Wittgenstein derive his theory of language games? |
| According to the Analysts, what is the function of philosophy? |
| In Analytic Philosophy, what is the basis for ethics? Is there a final authority in ethics? |
| What is the basic mistake in the Analytic view of language? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:10:47 | How did pragmatists justify imagination and hypothetical thinking for the sake of art or science, in other words without frustrating, perplexing doubt? |
| 2:12:12 | Aren’t Dewey’s ethics seekers consulting absolutes, i.e., reality, when they consult scientists about the consequences inherent in their choice of action? |
| 2:13:22 | What does Moore mean by unanalyzable terms which he says compose ethical statements? Why does he call his ethical theory “ethical intuitionism”? |
| 2:15:38 | The statement “a thing can’t be A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect” means I use the word “respect” in a certain way. The former statement is a necessary statement, the latter is a contingent one. Since the logical positivists equate the two, aren’t they destroying their own distinction between necessary and contingent statements? |
| 2:19:29 | Is there a difference between Aristotle’s “each man pursues some good” and Mill’s “all men seek pleasure”? |
| 2:22:03 | If there is no distinction between “mental” and “physical” in pragmatist terms, how can the Dewey/Peirce school invalidate emotions as a guide to the meaningful? In their assertion of the collective as the basis for what works, aren’t Dewey/Peirce really admitting an individual emotional preference for that approach? |
| 2:23:21 | In the example you cited on Logical Positivism—John has eaten arsenic, arsenic is poisonous, therefore John has eaten poison—wouldn’t a positivist say that since you have made a logical deduction, the conclusion has nothing to say about reality? |
| 2:24:59 | Do questions make statements about facts of reality, or is it sufficient to say that they refer to facts? |
| 2:25:53 | Can the concept “fact” ever be used properly to describe the epistemological status of an idea, such as “hypothesis,” “theory,” “law,” etc. or is “fact” restricted only to the field of metaphysics? |
| 2:27:51 | Is there any validity in the theory that one’s language and its grammar determines or limits one’s mental activity or thinking? |
| 2:29:39 | What is an “operational theory of meaning” and what school of philosophy holds it? |
| 2:31:23 | If statements do not refer to facts, how is it possible to analyze their use? Words which have no referents are empty sounds. Such an idea of language makes analysis impossible. |