Schlick's Critique of Phenomenological Propositions

Abstract

Phenomenology in general, and the nature of phenomenological propositions in particular, has long been misrepresented to English-speaking readers by Moritz Schlick's stylistically lucid, forceful, and much anthologized article entitled Is There a Factual A Priori? It first appeared in the Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universitit zu Wien fur das Vereinsjahr I9 30/3 I . Upon its publication in translation in Feigl and Sellar's Readings in Philosophical Analysis, in I949, it became required reading for a generation to Anglo-American philosophers. views of phenomenology expressed there are presented in much the same form in other of Schlick's works that have appeared in translation in recent years. Chief among these are his magnum opus, General Theory of Knowledge,' and the articles of Volume One of the Philosophical Papers entitled The Nature of Truth in Modern Logic and Is There Intuitive Knowledge? 3 These new translations will again give currency to an unfortunate but not wholly erroneous picture of the nature of phenomenological propositions. It thus seems appropriate, even at this late date, to point out some of the difficulties in Schlick's position. But there are other reasons for doing so as well. One of these reasons is that the view that some propositions might after all be both synthetic and a prior has regained a degree of respectability Kripke's argument, for example, has been taken very seriously even by those who strive to prove that it is artfully contrived conventionalism.4 fact of the renewed