Intellectual Autobiography Research Articles

G. H. von Wright on Logical Empiricism

Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003) started his studies in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki in 1934. His teacher, Professor Eino Kaila (1890–1958), was an associate of the Vienna Circle who had changed the course of Finnish philosophy with his own version of logical empiricism. Under Kaila’s supervision, von Wright wrote his early studies on probability and defended his doctoral thesis The Logical Problem of Induction in 1941. Von Wright met Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1939 and 1947 and eventually became his successor there in 1948–1951. Later, von Wright characterized these two philosophers as his “father figures”: “Kaila had turned me into a logical positivist or empiricist. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thoroughly eradicated this personality of mine.” This article studies von Wright’s changing relation to logical empiricism. The main sources include his correspondence with Kaila in 1937–1958 and his books Den logiska empirismen (in Swedish in 1943; in Finnish in 1945) and Logik, filosofi och språk (in Swedish in 1957, in Finnish in 1958). In his “Intellectual Autobiography” (1989), von Wright described the former book as “a farewell to the philosophy of my student years”. Wittgenstein’s influence can be seen in von Wright’s denial of the unity of science and his cool cultural pessimism as expressed in his critical essays. But it is also evident that logic and exact thinking continued to be central tools and ingredients of his subsequent and highly appreciated work as an analytic philosopher.

Narrative Identity and the Redemptive Self: An Intellectual Autobiography, with Occasional Critique

<p>In this intellectual autobiography, I trace the development of the idea of narrative identity as manifest in personality and developmental psychology. As far as my own work in this area is concerned, the story begins in the early 1980s when my students and I struggled to understand the meaning of Erik Erikson’s concept of identity. Early work on a life-story model of identity aimed to situate the concept within the rapidly transforming field of personality psychology, first articulated as an alternative to the ascending conception of the Big Five traits. Eventually, I turned my attention to the redemptive life stories told by highly generative American adults, as my understanding of narrative identity came to be more fully contextualized in culture and history. While hundreds of nomothetic, hypothesis-testing studies of narrative identity have been conducted in the past two decades, the concept has also proven useful in the realm of psychobiography, as illustrated in my case studies of the redemptive life story constructed by the American President George W. Bush, and in my research into the strange case of President Donald J. Trump, whose most striking psychological attribute may be the near total absence of a narrative identity.</p>

Rudolf Carnap’s Ideas in Philosophy of Language in the Context of Conceptual Engineering

The past decade has seen notable development of conceptual engineering – a field of analytical philosophy that focuses on the critical evaluation of concepts. Most authors engaged with this area identify Rudolf Carnap’s ideas as its methodological framework and theoretical origin, placing particular emphasis on the philosopher’s method of explication. This article highlights the unquestionable influence Carnap’s thought had on conceptual engineering whilst by no means reducing it to the utilisation and advancement of explication within this field of analytical philosophy: indeed, conceptual engineering has incorporated – and brought to the forefront – much broader tenets of Carnap’s concept. This study draws on a series of the philosopher’s works, as well as his ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, to trace the evolution of his ideas about language and describe the fundamental elements revealing the ‘engineering perspective’ in his reflection. Most clearly, this perspective is evident in his interpretation of logic as a conceptual tool for acquiring and processing knowledge, ‘assembling’ it into a structure and refining the procedures of logic itself. It is shown that the origins of the engineering perspective trace back, on the one hand, to Carnap’s interest in the methodological framework of physics, particularly the measurement problem and its epistemological analysis, and, on the other, his fascination with interpretations of the nature of mathematical theory and the idea of unifying logicism and formalism by introducing the principle of tolerance, which adds a pragmatic dimension to methodology. The article examines in detail the idea of explication and its theoretical origins, which lie, in particular, in Carnap’s intention to exactify the notions expressing the degree of validity and probability. His idea of a link between the results of explication and its goal became the central principle of conceptual engineering, distinguishing it from mere conceptual analysis. It is concluded that, when considered together, Carnap’s two major ideas – explication and the principle of tolerance – can be placed in a broader context of a project seeking a rational reconstruction of the life of society and providing it with knowledge-based underpinnings.

‘Anyone can whistle’ Sondheim: The intellectual autobiography of a Sondheim studies scholar

This piece of autoethnographic writing analyses its author’s coming of age as a scholar and connects anecdotes to the history of Black actors in Sondheim’s musicals. From Reri Grist and Elizabeth Taylor in West Side Story (Winter Garden Theatre, New York City, 1957) to Francois Batiste, Adante Carter and Amber Gray in Here We Are (The Shed, New York City, 2023), Black actors co-create Sondheim’s musicals on and off official theatrical stages even as Sondheim studies as a field erases their labour. By building on Brent Staples’s experience of racism and Claude M. Steele’s theory of stereotype threat, the offensive mechanisms visited on Black men and boys are considered alongside Sondheim’s notable works throughout. Attention is also paid to what musical theatre studies scholars can learn about epistemology and historiography from Black people’s experiential knowledge and lived experience.

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Autobiography by Émile Perreau-Saussine and translated by Nathan J. Pinkoski

French author and former lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, Émile Perreau-Saussine (1972-2010), has produced an intellectual autobiography of famed philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre (born in 1929). Nathan J. Pinkoski, Research Fellow and Director of Academic Programs at the Zephyr Institute, has rendered the original French edition into English translation. Released by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2022, the volume constitutes a concise yet thoughtful interpretation of the whole of MacIntyre’s corpus. The text analyzes MacIntyre’s contributions to politics, philosophy, and theology, explaining both MacIntyre’s intellectual and historical influences and his continued relevance for the contemporary problems facing the modern world. The volume begins with a Foreword by Pierre Manent, Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at the École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales, the same that appears in the original French edition. Manent praises what he finds to be a balanced evaluation of MacIntyre, one that possesses the “necessary sympathy” while simultaneously maintaining an objective eye. But beyond praising Perreau-Saussine’s account, Manent raises concerns of his own that are worth mentioning as they anticipate many of the issues that Manent raises in his own recent work, Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason. While Manent praises MacIntyre for “identifying the central lacuna in our approach to the modern world”—the loss of real consideration of human action and practical reason, Manent is also critical of how MacIntyre departs from a more faithful understanding of Aristotle. Specifically, Manent is concerned with MacIntyre’s predilection for treating human persons as “social animals” rather than “political animals” and the implications of this approach. One manifestation of this approach, according to Manent, is that MacIntyre’s technical models of practical action place MacIntyre closer to Oakeshott than Aristotle in his understanding of tradition. The upshot of this criticism is that it raises the question of what place MacIntyre really affords human reason—whether it falls to tradition alone to raise us out of the morass of modern society or whether one can appeal to reason to settle questions of common concern or even to scrutinize and critically approbate traditions so as to keep them vibrant and alive. All in all, Manent’s appreciative, but rather critical treatment of MacIntyre is worth reading and serves as a useful contextualization for Manent’s recent work.

The Cabinetmaker's Apprentice

The Cabinetmaker's Apprentice Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) When Sir Karl Popper (1902–94) was twenty years old, he became an apprentice to Adalbert Pösch, an old master cabinetmaker in Vienna. A university student at the time, Popper claims that he learned more about the theory of knowledge from this "omniscient master" than from any of his teachers. "For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew," wrote Popper in Unending Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976), "but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance." Popper worked with this omniscient cabinetmaker for two years, after which he decided that he was "too ignorant and too fallible" to make mahogany writing desks for the rest of his life. So he did social work with neglected children for a year, and then, after five more years mainly spent studying and writing, he became a schoolteacher in 1930. He says that at that point he had no other professional ambitions. Still, after the publication of The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1935, he started to grow tired of schoolteaching. In this early book, the Austrian-British philosopher famously argued that science should adopt a methodology based on falsifiability because no number of experiments can ever prove a theory, but a reproducible experiment or observation can refute one. However, writes Popper, "non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science." "Thus a few stray basic statements contradicting a theory will hardly induce us to reject it as falsified," he continues. "We shall take it as falsified only if we discover a reproducible effect which refutes the theory." This notion of falsifiability is one that Paul Ricoeur regards as similar to his own conception of "invalidation," wherein the role of falsification is played by the conflict between competing interpretations of the text. "An interpretation," writes Ricoeur in "The Model of the Text" (1971), "must not only be probable, but more probable than another." "There are criteria of relative superiority," he continues, "which may easily be derived from the logic of [End Page 1] subjective probability." According to Ricoeur, it is the falsification of Popper found in The Logic of Scientific Discovery that renders easier this derivation. Two years after the publication of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper gave up schoolteaching and became a professional philosopher. He was thirty-four years old, and said, "I thought that I had now finally solved the problem of how to work on a writing desk and yet be preoccupied with epistemology." In 1960 the former cabinetmaker's apprentice delivered the Annual Philosophical Lecture to the British Academy. Popper surprised and offended some of his colleagues by entitling it "On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance." While the first part of the title, "On the Sources of Knowledge," was regarded as standard fare for an epistemologist at the time, the latter part, concerning the sources "of Ignorance," was not—and raised some philosophical eyebrows. As his friend put it, "Ignorance is something negative: it is the absence of knowledge." "But," he continued, "how on earth can the absence of anything have sources?" Unsure how to respond, Popper said the following: I told him that I hoped to direct attention, through the phrasing of this title, to a number of historically important although unrecorded philosophical doctrines and among them, especially, to a conspiracy theory of ignorance which interprets ignorance not as a mere lack of knowledge but as the work of some mischievous power, the source of impure and evil influences which pervert and poison our minds and instill in us the habit of resistance to knowledge. Thus, for Popper, the sources of ignorance in the British and Continental schools of philosophy often involve conspiracy theory, which although unstated is nonetheless a consequence of their stated philosophical doctrines. As Popper sees it, "the quarrel between the classical empiricism of Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill," that is, the British school, and "the classical rationalism or intellectualism of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz," that is, the Continental school, is overstated. Though it is true that "the British school...

:Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism

:<i>Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism</i>

Faith and Freedom: Contexts, Choices, and Crises in Religious Commitments

Faith and Freedom: Contexts, Choices, and Crises in Religious Commitments

The Early Days of Architectural Psychology in The United Kingdom: An Intellectual Autobiography

The Early Days of Architectural Psychology in The United Kingdom: An Intellectual Autobiography

Угольки воспоминаний

In the focus of intellectual autobiography the article examines the attitudinal development of a young man who graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University in 1970. The reading and communication of that period is presented, it is written about those outstanding philosophers, publicists, and journalists of the period of the 60-70s of the XX century, under whose influence hе developed professionally. Particular attention is paid to the story about the originality of the work of the Moscow Methodological Club, whose leader was Georgy Shchedrovitsky. The main task of the club was to put under reflective control all acts of reasoning and mental operations: nominations, definitions, descriptions, construction of ontological models and theoretical constructions, etc. To some extent, this was reminiscent of the search for Western analytical philosophy and was in the Soviet Union a matter of &amp;quot;suspicious&amp;quot; in the ideological sense. The main socially significant events of those times that determined the formation of the socio-political views of young people who do not accept the Soviet ideology are highlighted.

Body and Mind in Two Discourses on Method

The point of departure of my presentation will be the fact that in his monumental History of Autobiography, Georg Misch considered Descartes’ Discourse on Method a fine example of intellectual autobiography.&#x0D; Yet, the Discourse is a highly complex text far from a simple autobiography. And what is even more, and more disturbing is that for his work, Misch made intensive use of Dilthey’s concept of an autobiography that was meant to capture the sense of “life as narrating itself” laying down the proper, i.e. “objective” foundation for the historical sciences. But how shall we take “sincerity” in this case, which is the distinguishing feature of a real autobiography in the Dilthey-Misch sense?&#x0D; I will apply a kind of hermeneutic method trying to move back and forth in a double hermeneutic circle: I will take a look at Misch’s whole concept of an autobiography, and at the historical data in Descartes’s life and works presented in Baillet’s The Life of Monsieur Des Cartes in order to understand the autobiographic character of the Discourse moving again from the details to the whole and vice versa. In my view, Descartes’ “history of his intellect” cannot be taken as an autobiography in the Dilthey-Misch sense nor in a usual sense. The body-mind problem will play an important role in my argumentation.&#x0D; &#x0D;

Stanley Jaki: Science and Faith in a Realist Perspective

Stanley Jaki: Science and Faith in a Realist Perspective

The Embers of Memory

ABSTRACT This article, for which the focus is an intellectual autobiography, examines the development of worldview of a young person who graduated from the Moscow University Faculty of Philosophy in 1970. It highlights the main socially significant events of those times, events that determined the formation of the sociopolitical views of youth who did not accept Soviet ideology. It presents the reading circles and interactions of that period and tells of the outstanding Russian philosophers of the 1960s–1970s under whose influence this professional development took place. It considers the main topics of the key scholarship in philosophy, as well as the dynamics of research interests and problems. Particular attention is paid to the story of the originality of work by the Moscow Methodological Circle, led by Georgy P. Shchedrovitsky. The circle’s main task was to put all acts of reasoning and mental operations—naming, defining, describing, building ontological models and theoretical constructions, and so forth—under reflexive control. This was, to some extent, reminiscent of the inquiries of Western analytical philosophy, which made it a “suspicious” activity in the ideological sense in the Soviet Union. Cognition as a whole no longer seemed a “reflection” of reality, as had been proclaimed in the leading epistemological understanding of Marxist–Leninist philosophy. However, this also reflected the desire of intellectuals of the sixties and seventies to rationalize all social life as a whole. These dreams of “rationality” manifested at the time in the development of relevant topics in disciplines such as epistemology, in philosophy and methodology of science, and in sociological and psychological research. The author tells how the discussions of methodological problems of historical reconstruction began from positions like these. The discussion of discourse on knowledge in the humanities required not only intellectual audacity but social audacity as well. These discussions took place in informal, home-based seminars and represented a marginal, “clandestine” phenomenon.

ПРОПОВЕДНИЧЕСКОЕ И ИСПОВЕДАЛЬНОЕ В ПУБЛИЦИСТИКЕ Д. МЕРЕЖКОВСКОГО 1905-1908 ГГ.

The article attempts to discover elements of the predicant and confessional dimensions in D. Merezhkovsky’s social publications of 1905—1908. The predicant intention surfaces when the author strives to establish the idea of the Third Testament or the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, finding its implementation in tendentious perception of biblical verses, interpretation and resolution of contradictions, as well as the construction of an optimistic perspective. His open letter to N. Berdiaev clearly exhibits a confessional streak, combining elements of a confessional letter, an intellectual autobiography, as well as a socially oriented sermon and article.

Scholar in the SEPR spotlight: Ian Douglas

In this reflective essay of intellectual autobiography, I respond to a series of questions the journal editor Wei-Ning Xiang asked about my 55-year journey from applied geography to socio-ecological practice research. These are (1) what and/or who had inspired your career most in geography and socio-ecological practice research? (2) Throughout your 55-year academic journey, did you ever reorient your ambitions in scholarly pursuit, or even reinvent yourself in your academic life? What motivated you in each of these instances? (3) How do you measure success in your work? Among many accomplishments, what are the top three that you are most proud of? (4) From your personal experience, what would be the most important attributes for a well-lived, fully realised, and meaningful life? Do you have any tips for maintaining work-life balance? (5) Do you have any specific advice for younger scholars in geography and socio-ecological practice research? (6) What are the three most interesting images reflecting turning points in your career? I hope that my experiences and insights showcased in this essay are helpful to the younger generations of geographers and socio-ecological practice researchers.

Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics by Penelope Eckert

Reviewed by: Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics by Penelope Eckert Meredith Tamminga Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics. By Penelope Eckert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 209. ISBN 9781107122970. $29.99. In Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics, Penelope Eckert brings us her ‘intellectual autobiography’: a curated sequence of papers from her career wrapped in firstperson narratives about the social and personal context in which each paper was written. While the book covers the full span of E’s career, the focus is on third-wave sociolinguistics, which she defines as ‘a theoretical perspective that puts the meaning of variation, in all its dynamism and indeterminacy, at the center of analysis’ (xi). In tracing the origins of key third-wave theoretical constructs to earlier work by both herself and others in the first and second waves, E builds up an unmistakable narrative arc covering the full span of her career. The first two chapters of the book, presented under the heading ‘Beginnings’, deal primarily with E’s years studying Gascon in St. Pierre de Soulatan at the time when the region was shifting from Occitan varieties to French dominance. In contrast to the historical phonological focus of her M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation, the papers she chooses for inclusion here focus on the politics of multilingualism. Ch. 1, ‘Gascon’, discusses how minority nationalist projects such as the Occitan movement crucially rely on linguistic unification, but in doing so inevitably erase the finer-grained sources of linguistic diversity within their own borders (Eckert 1983). Ch. 2, ‘Stigma and meaning in language shift’, uses the relationship between French and Gascon to illustrate how diglossia involves not the peaceful coexistence of two varieties but rather the oppression and stigmatization of the ‘low’ variety; the introductory material here situates the paper’s inception in the political context of the Ann Arbor Black English trial (Eckert 1980). This pair of papers captures the beginning of E’s concern with the nuances of language’s ideological force. Although they are distinct in flavor from the rest of the chapters, their inclusion effectively foreshadows the themes of locality, identity, and the semiotic landscape found in the later chapters about the third wave. The second section, titled ‘My participation in the second wave’, is dominated by the Jocks and Burnouts of Belten High (Eckert 1989a). Chs. 3–6 lay out E’s analytic insights into the social and linguistic practices of these high school social groups in suburban Detroit. Ch. 3 (‘Jocks and Burnouts’), E’s study of the width of blue jeans as a signifier of different social groups occupying different parts of the high school (Eckert 1982), marks the first appearance of ‘style’ as a central theoretical construct that transcends linguistic practice. In Chs. 4 (‘Jocks, Burnouts and sound change’), 5 (‘The local and the extra-local’), and 6 (‘On the outs’), E delves progressively deeper into the territory laid out in Ch. 3, persuasively weaving the social life of adolescents into the study of sound change in progress (Eckert 1988, 1989b). In this, probably E’s best-known work, she argues that macrosocial structures like class and gender shape language change only insofar as they are indirectly realized on the ground through hegemonic oppositions between identifiable, locally specific social categories. The narrative portions of this section lay out clearly why the classic Jocks and Burnouts research, with its continued focus on static categories as opposed to [End Page 462] the agentive construction of meaning through stylistic practice, is not itself of the third wave. At the same time, the bracketing of the section with chapters about style nonetheless makes it evident that this work directly laid important foundations for the emergence of the third wave. The final section, ‘The third wave’, arrives at the thesis of the book: that social meaning and stylistic practice are central to understanding sociolinguistic variation (Eckert 2012). E’s cadre of notable graduate students come to the fore at the start of the section with Ch. 8, ‘The SLIC generation’. SLIC stands for the Style, Language and Ideology Cooperative/Collaborative, a studentled seminar with...

Chelovek.RU/Человек.RU

Abstract. The article proposes a version of the author's interpretation of the autobiographical experience that the philosopher and methodologist G.P. Shchedrovitsky did in his life. On the basis of this experience, the author proposes to simultaneously develop a certain methodological construct of that cultural form, which is called intellectual (philosophical) autobiography. And how is it seen as the key, sought-for unit that makes up the autobiography. The author sees the event (situation) of self-determination as such a unit. Using vital and methodological material and comprehension of different versions of the autobiographical discourse that Shchedrovitsky built, the author shows how he understood his place in history, what life strategy he developed and what requirements in this connection he made to others, companions and students, while presenting their methodological optics to autobiographical discourse. The material from the biography of Shchedrovitsky factually shows the experience of life in intellectual asceticism, although not in the categories of religious monastic asceticism. The article shows how the methodologist and philosopher built their situation of self-determination in culture and history, manifested in specific life situations. On the example of a dispute and a life conflict, the difference in self-determination of different philosophers is shown, including the example of comparing the positions of G.P.Schedrovitsky and A.A.Zinoviev.

Healing the Rift

In the introductory “Intellectual Autobiography” of the Georg Henrik von Wright volume of the Library of Living Philosophers series, von Wright mentions the discrepancy he always felt between his narrow logical-analytical professional work and a drive to make philosophy relevant to his life, calling it a rift in his philosophical personality. This article examines the nature of the rift and the various stages the problem went through during von Wright’s career. It is argued that the initial impression that his books The Varieties of Goodness and Explanation and Understanding had contributed to healing the rift, was subdued by a gradual shift in existential focus from individualistic ethics towards a critical concern for destructive ways of thinking inherent in the Western culture, connected with von Wright’s “political awakening” at the end of the 1960s. The most urgent questions of our times called for novel, non-analytical, ways of doing philosophy, employed in von Wright’s later works on science and reason, and the myth of progress. Eventually von Wright’s earlier methodological concerns were also alleviated by his belief that logical-analytical philosophy was inherently unsuitable for exposing the cultural structures it was very much a part of.

Rola tłumacza pisemnych tekstów specjalistycznych na podstawie własnych doświadczeń traduktologicznych

The goal of this paper is to determine a translator’s role in the process of translation of a scientific text. The analysis centres on philosophical texts translated from French into Polish by the author of the paper: Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision by Pierre Hadot, Philosophizing ad Infinitum by Marcel Conche, Intellectual Autobiography by Paul Ricœur, Speech and Action in Heraclitus. On the Theoretical Foundations of Moral Action by Michel Fattal, and Le Logos dans le Sophiste de Platon by Michel Fattal. A requirement is usually imposed on the translator of a specialist text to be invisible, transparent, and neutral. However, this analysis shows that this requirement cannot be met in translations of scientific texts.

Carnaps Autobiographie als Autobiographie

Abstract Rudolf Carnap’s intellectual autobiography was published in 1963. The specific characteristics of this kind of text and its reception shape his self-testimony. This article examines how these characteristics – typical narrative position and structure, problems of truth and veracity, well-rounded self-presentation – are manifest in the story Carnap tells of his life. In Carnap’s case, the subjective narrative position is the one of the successful philosopher, and Carnap meets the expectation of presenting one’s life as a unity, framed by considerations of his general attitude towards life. In line with the history of autobiographical writing in pietism, Carnap’s autobiography also includes a kind of self-justification in addition to a conversion experience, although the latter is secularized as a conversion from religion to logic-centred philosophy. In this regard, the United States are presented as a blessed country, where Carnap has reached his New Zion which he helped flourish