Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy by Frederick C. Beiser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy by Frederick C. Beiser Nabeel Hamid BEISER, Frederick C. Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xii + 321 pp. Cloth, $85.00 This volume is the newest installment in Frederick Beiser's emerging series of intellectual biographies of nineteenth-century German figures who are relatively little known in the Anglophone world. Following monographs on Hermann Cohen (2018) and David Friedrich Strauß (2020), Beiser's latest subject is Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), a contemporary of Schelling and Hegel best known in his century as a founder of scientific psychology and an educational theorist. Beiser's motive for presenting Herbart to today's Anglophone readers, however, has to do with neither of those dimensions of his legacy. His claim on Herbart's behalf is bold: that he was the one who "first outlined . . . our modern conception of the purpose and method of philosophy." According to Beiser, Herbart was the first to advance the idea that "philosophy is primarily an analysis of concepts, that it is a second-order logical enterprise that examines concepts rather than a first-order empirical discipline (physics, biology) that uses them." Thus, he bestows upon Herbart the moniker indicated in the book's subtitle: "If Russell and Frege are the fathers of analytical philosophy, Herbart is its grandfather." Beiser supports his central genealogical thesis with several specific claims that would draw Herbart into the orbit of contemporary philosophical naturalism: that Herbart conceived philosophy as an examination of the logic of the sciences; that Frege borrowed Herbart's slogan, "reworking of concepts" (Bearbeitung der Begriffe) to describe the business of philosophy; that Herbart upheld a sharp fact/value [End Page 543] distinction; and that he formulated a "method of relations" for the analysis of concepts derived strictly from the given. Most importantly, perhaps, given the received story of the origins of analytic philosophy as a reaction to (British) German Idealism, Beiser frames Herbart as an early opponent of the speculative systems of Fichte and Schelling, and as the source of an alternative development of transcendental idealism that anticipated the later neo-Kantian movement. Whether Herbart's claim to ancestry is convincing remains for his putative descendants to judge. To specialists in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy, Beiser's pitch to analytic philosophers risks appearing reductive. Indeed, a striking feature of Herbart's reception is its ambivalence. During the time when he was widely read, authors as varied in their intellectual orientations as Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Mach, and Matthias Jakob Schleiden contended with Herbart as, in turn, a progenitor of psychologism, a pioneer of the application of mathematics to mental phenomena, and a dogmatic scholastic, all before Frege leaned on Herbart to propose conceptual analysis as the distinctive task of philosophy that would save it from irrelevance in the face of the forward march of the positive sciences. Meanwhile, Herbart's most compelling claim to distinction, that he initiated (along with Jakob Friedrich Fries) a naturalistic alternative to the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel school of post-Kantian philosophy, has been defended previously, including in Anglophone scholarship (notably by Gary Hatfield in The Natural and the Normative). Beiser's attempt to give Herbart a place in the genealogy of analytic philosophy comes at the inevitable cost of evading some of the tensions in Herbart's work that account for his complex influence. Beiser's story—told in the lucid, engaging style we have come to expect from him—spans the length of Herbart's life and career. It also provides a clear overview of all major aspects of his teaching—from metaphysics and psychology, to pedagogy, ethics, and aesthetics. The narrative is divided into thirteen chapters. The first four cover Herbart's childhood in Oldenburg, student years in Jena, and his time in Interlaken as private tutor to an aristocratic Swiss family, which proved crucial for his lifelong interest in pedagogical theory. The next three turn to Herbart's first academic post in Göttingen and his decisive break with his teacher, Fichte, which led to his early efforts to formulate an alternative metaphysics and ethics, the latter notably infused with a Romantic idea of...