{"id":2791,"date":"2014-07-23T10:46:58","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T08:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/?p=2791"},"modified":"2025-05-26T16:48:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T14:48:17","slug":"df-xxiii-2013-1-la-metafisica-del-positivismo-a-cura-di-luca-guidetti-e-giuliana-mancuso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/ultimi-numeri\/df-xxiii-2013-1-la-metafisica-del-positivismo-a-cura-di-luca-guidetti-e-giuliana-mancuso\/","title":{"rendered":"DF XXIII, 1, 2013: The Metaphysics of Positivism. Ed. by Luca Guidetti and Giuliana Mancuso"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
Buy the electronic version<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

DF XXIII, 2013-1:<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE METAPHYSICS OF POSITIVISM<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

ed. by Luca Guidetti and Giuliana Mancuso.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong>The first time Comte uses the word \u201cpositive\u201d it is to describe on the basis of five meanings<\/em> the new scientific methodology, as opposed to the idealistic dogmatism previously prevailing. A programmatic positive approach entails the investigation of what is \u201creal\u201d, \u201cuseful\u201d, \u201ccertain\u201d, \u201cprecise\u201d and \u201copposed to negative\u201d: regarding this last signification, as Comte points out, the true<\/em> modern philosophy has to be called \u201cpositive\u201d insofar as it is destined \u201cnot to destroy but to organize<\/em>\u201d (Discours sur l\u2019esprit positif<\/em>, 1844).These five meanings are captured by the rules of phenomenalism, nominalism, value-freedom, and methodological unity of science, which together form the normative framework of positivistic anti-metaphysics<\/em>. The leading figures of positivistic movement had nevertheless to engage in a more careful and detailed account of their anti-metaphysical views, since the project of a radical empiricism together with the related opposition to all metaphysics would soon reveal themselves (as Quine\u2019s well-known arguments also pointed out) to be based on implicitly held, and therefore dogmatic, principle assumptions<\/em>. These assumptions consist first of all in making use of \u201creal\u201d as definiens <\/em>for the other terms, in this way giving rise to the paradoxical effect that what experience is should be established on the basis of only one feature<\/em> of experience itself: \u201cfactual\u201d and \u201creal\u201d should hence constitute the unquestionable basis to reject as \u201cmetaphysical\u201d all that is not \u201cfactual\u201d and \u201creal\u201d. Together with this circulus in probando<\/em>, positivism exhibits a more serious difficulty, which jeopardizes its logical and epistemological consistency: since the basis is phenomenal and it is therefore assumed that experience is immanent, the concept of truth takes on an objectivist<\/em> shape, inasmuch as it depends on the receptive form of empirical data. To preserve truth against any possible drift in a transcendent direction, a normative <\/em>model is surreptitiously introduced, according to which all that is inexpressible in terms of perceptual immanence should be discarded. Consequently any problem about experience as a whole turns out to be meaningless and the world of values (epistemological, moral, aesthetic ones) is reduced to mere biological response of human being as an animal to environmental stimuli. But how then does human aspiration to reason and metaphysical \u201ccertainty\u201d originate? If significance criteria leave out all that is not phenomenal, positivism ends up going along with those views \u2013 such as philosophy of life and Bergsonism \u2013 according to which human being\u2019s rationality is an evidence of biological decline or, on the contrary, which consider tendency to transcendence to be the outcome of an only spiritual<\/em> element of the human nature. In its long history positivism has actually been able to rectify, broaden and make more \u201cinclusive\u201d its concept of experience by abandoning logical atomism together with the covertly metaphysical thesis that only what is singular exists and by redefining on a new logical-linguistic basis the criteria of meaningfulness. If meaning is not a given, but a rule governing the use of words, metaphysics is then not less \u201cmeaningful\u201d than empirical sciences and is, therefore, legitimate, provided that its proposition should be conceived as having a not strictly cognitive import. According to this wittgensteinian theoretical framework, if the immanence thesis makes sense, then the position of transcendence makes sense as well. But the most important contribution of some positivist approaches to current philosophical inquiry is maybe that of regarding experience as a constitutive proce<\/em>ss<\/em> the genesis of which should be investigated, together with its dynamic and functional features. In this way, instead of presenting itself as the source of any truth, metaphysical thinking turns into a characteristic<\/em> of experience, i.e. one of its modalities<\/em>. Conventionalism, relativism and constructivism can hence find, within the same worldview, a common ground with a metaphysics which is not subject to prejudice.From another point of view, the current debate in analytical philosophy shows that metaphysics can still be and actually is conceived exactly as an inquiry not less \u201ccognitive\u201d than natural sciences, but having different methods and, as subject matters, topics such as existence, identity, nature of properties, causality etc. Metaphysics so understood is nowadays in very good shape, in spite of quietist and deflationist views which give new life to old logical-positivist rejection of metaphysical disputes as meaningless or mere verbal conflicts between contrasting descriptions of the world without real import. These views are nonetheless themselves biased with unspoken metaphysical assumptions, which resemble mutatis mutandis<\/em> those logical-empirical ones and, \u00a0as remarked by a positivist who was not scared of metaphysical commitments, \u201can unexamined metaphysics, that is, one implicitly held, is for a philosopher the worst metaphysics of all\u201d (G. Bergmann).<\/p>\n

CONTENTS<\/strong><\/span>
\n(click on the titles to view the abstracts)<\/span><\/p>\n

Luca Guidetti, Giuliana Mancuso,<\/span>\u00a0Presentazione<\/a><\/em><\/span>
\nHermann L\u00fcbbe,\u00a0Positivismo e fenomenologia. Mach e Husserl<\/a><\/em><\/span> (ed. by Giuliana Mancuso)
\nRichard Fumerton, Positivism and the limits of thought<\/a><\/em><\/span>
\nErik C. Banks,\u00a0 Metaphysics for positivist: Mach versus the Vienna Circle<\/a><\/span><\/em>
\nKarl Egerton,\u00a0 Carnap, conventions, and circularity<\/a><\/em><\/span>
\nMassimo Ferrari, Moritz Schlick. Metafisica, positivismo, realismo<\/a><\/span><\/em>
\nLuca Guidetti, Logica della struttura e metafisica in Richard Avenarius<\/a><\/span><\/em>
\nManfred Sommer, Das unrettbare Ich und die heitere Passivit\u00e4t des Ernst Mach<\/a><\/span><\/em>
\nFilippo Piovesan, Le implicazioni metafisiche del positivismo: un contributo husserliano<\/a><\/em><\/span>
\nDavid Ceccarelli, Herbert Spencer e gli Stati Uniti: dalla<\/span> <\/em>Synthetic Philosophy alla metafisica del progresso<\/em><\/span><\/a>
\nMike Gane, Auguste Comte’s positivism and the persistence of metaphysics<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DF XXIII, 2013-1: THE METAPHYSICS OF POSITIVISM ed. by Luca Guidetti and Giuliana Mancuso. The first time Comte uses the word \u201cpositive\u201d it is to describe on the basis of five meanings the new scientific methodology, as opposed to the idealistic dogmatism previously prevailing. A programmatic positive approach entails the investigation of what is \u201creal\u201d, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","","category-ultimi-numeri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2791"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6426,"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions\/6426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.disciplinefilosofiche.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}