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The American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century. This school of thought holds that the value of an idea is based upon its practicability or utility rather than the extent to which it reflects reality.
The 19th century was a rich and diverse period in philosophy, during which the term "philosophy" acquired the distinctive meaning it holds today: a discipline distinct from the empirical sciences and mathematics. A rough division between two types of philosophical approaches in this period can be drawn.
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings that philosophers develop by forgetting what words mean in their everyday use.
- Overview
- The 19th century
- The idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
- Positivism and social theory in Comte, Mill, and Marx
- Independent and irrationalist movements
Kant’s death in 1804 formally marked the end of the Enlightenment. The 19th century ushered in new philosophical problems and new conceptions of what philosophy ought to do. It was a century of great philosophical diversity. In the Renaissance, the chief intellectual fact had been the rise of mathematics and natural science, and the tasks that this fact imposed upon philosophy determined its direction for two centuries. In the Enlightenment, attention had turned to the character of the mind that had so successfully mastered the natural world, and rationalists and empiricists had contended for mastery until the Kantian synthesis. As for the 19th century, however, if one single feature of its thought could be singled out for emphasis, it might be called the discovery of the irrational. But many philosophical schools were present, and they contended with each other in a series of distinct and powerful oppositions: pragmatism against idealism, positivism against irrationalism, Marxism against liberalism.
Western philosophy in the 19th century was influenced by several changes in European and American intellectual culture and society. These changes were chiefly the Romantic Movement of the early 19th century, which was a poetic revolt against reason in favour of feeling (see Romanticism); the maturation of the Industrial Revolution, which caused untold misery as well as prosperity and prompted a multitude of philosophies of social reform; the revolutions of 1848 in Paris, Germany, and Vienna, which reflected stark class divisions and first implanted in the European consciousness the concepts of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and, finally, the great surge in biological science following the publication of work by Charles Darwin (1809–82) on the theory of evolution. Romanticism influenced both German idealists and philosophers of irrationalism. Experiences of economic discord and social unrest produced the ameliorative social philosophy of English utilitarianism and the revolutionary doctrines of Karl Marx (1818–83). And the developmental ideas of Darwin provided the prerequisites for American pragmatism.
Kant’s death in 1804 formally marked the end of the Enlightenment. The 19th century ushered in new philosophical problems and new conceptions of what philosophy ought to do. It was a century of great philosophical diversity. In the Renaissance, the chief intellectual fact had been the rise of mathematics and natural science, and the tasks that this fact imposed upon philosophy determined its direction for two centuries. In the Enlightenment, attention had turned to the character of the mind that had so successfully mastered the natural world, and rationalists and empiricists had contended for mastery until the Kantian synthesis. As for the 19th century, however, if one single feature of its thought could be singled out for emphasis, it might be called the discovery of the irrational. But many philosophical schools were present, and they contended with each other in a series of distinct and powerful oppositions: pragmatism against idealism, positivism against irrationalism, Marxism against liberalism.
Western philosophy in the 19th century was influenced by several changes in European and American intellectual culture and society. These changes were chiefly the Romantic Movement of the early 19th century, which was a poetic revolt against reason in favour of feeling (see Romanticism); the maturation of the Industrial Revolution, which caused untold misery as well as prosperity and prompted a multitude of philosophies of social reform; the revolutions of 1848 in Paris, Germany, and Vienna, which reflected stark class divisions and first implanted in the European consciousness the concepts of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and, finally, the great surge in biological science following the publication of work by Charles Darwin (1809–82) on the theory of evolution. Romanticism influenced both German idealists and philosophers of irrationalism. Experiences of economic discord and social unrest produced the ameliorative social philosophy of English utilitarianism and the revolutionary doctrines of Karl Marx (1818–83). And the developmental ideas of Darwin provided the prerequisites for American pragmatism.
The Enlightenment, inspired by the example of natural science, had accepted certain boundaries to human knowledge; that is, it had recognized certain limits to reason’s ability to penetrate ultimate reality because that would require methods that surpass the capabilities of scientific method. In this particular modesty, the philosophies of Hume and Kant were much alike. But in the early 19th century the metaphysical spirit returned in a most ambitious and extravagant form. German idealism reinstated the most speculative pretensions of Leibniz and Spinoza. This development was due in part to the influence of Romanticism but also, and more important, to a new alliance of philosophy with religion. It was not a coincidence that all the great German idealists were either former students of theology—Fichte at Jena and Leipzig (1780–84), Schelling and Hegel at the Tübingen seminary (1788–95)—or the sons of Protestant pastors. It is probably this circumstance that gave to German idealism its intensely serious, quasi-religious, and dedicated character.
The consequence of this religious alignment was that philosophical interest shifted from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (in which he had attempted to account for natural science and denied the possibility of certainty in metaphysics) to his Critique of Practical Reason (in which he had explored the nature of the moral self) and his Critique of Judgment (in which he had treated of the purposiveness of the universe as a whole). Absolute idealism was based upon three premises:
1.That the chief datum of philosophy is the human self and its self-consciousness.
2.That the world as a whole is spiritual through and through—that it is, in fact, something like a cosmic self.
3.That, in both the self and the world, it is not primarily the intellectual element that counts but, rather, the volitional and the moral.
Thus, for idealistic metaphysics, the primary task of philosophy was understanding the self, self-consciousness, and the spiritual universe.
The absolute idealists wrote as if the Renaissance methodologists of the sciences had never existed. But if in Germany the empirical and scientific tradition in philosophy lay dormant, in France and England in the middle of the 19th century it was very much alive. In France, Auguste Comte wrote his great philosophical history of science, Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42; “Course of Positive Philosophy”; Eng. trans. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte), in six volumes. Influenced by Bacon and the entire school of British empiricism, by the doctrine of progress put forward by Turgot and the marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) during the 18th century, and by the very original social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Comte called his philosophy “positivism,” by which he meant a philosophy of science so narrow that it denied any validity whatsoever to “knowledge” not derived through the accepted methods of science. But the Cours de philosophie positive made its point not by dialectic but by an appeal to the history of thought, and here Comte presented his two basic ideas:
1.The notion that the sciences have emerged in strict order, beginning with mathematics and astronomy, followed by physics, chemistry, and biology, and culminating in the new science of sociology, to which Comte was the first to ascribe the name.
2.The so-called “law of the three stages,” which views thought in every field as passing progressively from superstition to science by first being religious, then abstract, or metaphysical, and finally positive, or scientific.
Comte’s contribution was to initiate an antireligious and an antimetaphysical bias in the philosophy of science that survived into the 20th century.
In mid-19th-century England the chief representative of the empirical tradition from Bacon to Hume was John Stuart Mill. Mill’s theory of knowledge, best represented in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), was not particularly original but rather a judicious combination of the doctrines of Berkeley and Hume; it symbolized his mistrust of vague metaphysics, his denial of the a priori element in knowledge, and his determined opposition to any form of intuitionism. It is in his enormously influential A System of Logic (1843), however, that Mill’s chief theoretical ideas are to be found.
This work—as part of its subtitle, the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, indicates—was concerned less with formal logic than with scientific methodology. Mill made here the fundamental distinction between deduction and induction, defined induction as the process for discovering and proving general propositions, and presented his “four methods of experimental inquiry” as the heart of the inductive method. These methods were, in fact, only an enlarged and refined version of Francis Bacon’s “tables of discovery.” But the most significant section of A System of Logic was its conclusion, Book VI, On the Logic of the Moral Sciences.
At the end of the 19th century there was a flowering of many independent philosophical movements. Although by then Hegel had been nearly forgotten in Germany, a Hegelian renaissance was under way in England, led by T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) constituted the high-water mark of the rediscovery of Hegel’s dialectical method. In America a strong reaction against idealism fostered the pragmatic movement, led by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Peirce, a logician, held that the function of all inquiry is to eradicate doubt and that the meaning of a concept consists of its practical consequences. James transformed Peirce’s pragmatic theory of meaning into a pragmatic theory of truth; in his The Will to Believe (1897), he asserted that human beings have a right to believe even in the face of inconclusive evidence and that, because knowledge is essentially an instrument, the practical consequences of a belief are the real test of its truth: true beliefs are those that work. Meanwhile, in Austria, Franz Brentano (1838–1917), who taught at the University of Vienna from 1874 to 1895, and Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), who taught at Graz, were developing an empirical psychology and a theory of intentional objects (see intention) that were to have considerable influence upon the new movement of phenomenology.
However, it was not any of these late 19th-century developments but rather the emphasis on the irrational, which started almost at the century’s beginning, that gave the philosophy of the period its peculiar flavour. Hegel, despite his commitment to systematic metaphysics, had nevertheless carried on the Enlightenment tradition of faith in human rationality. But soon his influence was challenged from two different directions. The Danish Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard criticized the logical pretensions of the Hegelian system; and one of his contemporaries, Arthur Schopenhauer, himself a German idealist and constructor of a bold and imaginative system, contradicted Hegel by asserting that the irrational is the truly real.
Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel was an appeal to the concrete as against the abstract. He satirized Hegelian rationalism as a perfect example of “the academic in philosophy”—of detached, objective, abstract theorizing and system building that was blind to the realities of human existence and to its subjective, living, emotional character. What a human being requires in life, said Kierkegaard, is not infinite inquiry but the boldness of resolute decision and commitment. The human essence is not to be found in thinking but in the existential conditions of emotional life, in anxiety and despair. The titles of three of Kierkegaard’s books—Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Dread (1844), and The Sickness unto Death (1849)—indicate his preoccupation with states of consciousness quite unlike cognition.
For a short time Schopenhauer competed unsuccessfully with Hegel at the University of Berlin; thereafter he withdrew to spend the rest of his life in battle against academic philosophy. His own system, though orderly and carefully worked out, was expressed in vivid and engaging language. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that the world of appearances, of phenomena, is governed by the conditions of space, time, and causality. But he held that science, which investigates the phenomenal world, cannot penetrate the real world behind appearances, which is dominated by a strong, blind, striving, universal cosmic Will that expresses itself in the vagaries of human instinct, in sexual striving, and in the wild uncertainties of animal behaviour. Everywhere in nature one sees strife, conflict, and inarticulate impulse; and these, rather than rational processes or intellectual clarity, are humankind’s true points of contact with ultimate reality.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the third member of the irrationalist triumvirate, was a prolific but unsystematic writer, presenting his patchwork of ideas in swift atoms of thought. Nietzsche viewed the task of the philosopher as destroying old values, creating new ideals, and through them erecting a new civilization. He agreed with Schopenhauer that mind is an instrument of instinct to be used in the service of life and power, and he held that illusion is as necessary to human beings as truth. Nietzsche spent much time analyzing emotional states such as resentment, guilt, bad conscience, and self-contempt.
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche provided for the 19th century a new, nonrational conception of human nature, and they viewed the mind not as open to rational introspection but as dark, obscure, hidden, and deep. But above all they initiated a new style of philosophizing. Schopenhauer wrote like an 18th-century essayist, Kierkegaard was a master of the methods of irony and paradox, and Nietzsche used aphorism and epigram in a self-consciously literary manner. For them, the philosopher should be less a crabbed academician than a “man of letters.”
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 1, 2014 · This volume contains thirty new essays by leading experts on British philosophy in the nineteenth century, and provides a comprehensive and unrivalled resource for advanced students and scholars.
Dunham, Jeremy. ‘On the Experience of Activity: William James’s Late Metaphysics and the Influence of Nineteenth-Century French Spiritualism’. Journal of the History of Philosophy. 58 (2) 2020: 267-291. Dunham, Jeremy. ‘Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe: Charles Renouvier and William James’. British Journal for the History ...
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19th-century philosophy is philosophy in the 19th century. In the 19th century the philosophies of the Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau influencing new generations of thinkers.
