II.—AVENARIUS’ PHILOSOPHY OF PURE EXPERIENCE (I.).
By Norman Smith.
Avenarius propounds his philosophy from a standpoint whose originality borders on paradox. While all previous philosophers have regarded experience as awaiting interpretation through metaphysical conceptions, Avenarius holds pure experience to be self-intelligible, and the existing metaphysical theories to be the only facts that call for philosophical explanation. Sometimes he describes his philosophy as the philosophy of pure experience, and sometimes as ‘empiriocriticism’. The former title refers to its content, the latter to its method. He claims that, as regards method, it combines and transcends the philosophies of Hume and Kant. The resulting system is as original in its positive teaching as it is novel in orientation. For though in certain aspects it is closely akin to the metaphysical idealism of Spinoza and Hegel, and recently in this country has been employed as a buttress to the Bradleian philosophy, its most competent critic has described it as the latest, and, in the present state of knowledge, the only tenable form of materialism.[1] A system so strongly affiliated is, even apart from its intrinsic merits, sufficiently remarkable to claim attention. In this article I shall state and criticise the main principles of Avenarius’ philosophy. But in so doing I shall consider them only from the point of view of the problem of knowledge, and as leading up to the statement of his theory of the introjectionist argument. That theory, which has been adopted by several English writers, I reserve for detailed criticism in a second article.[2]
- ↑ Wundt: “Ueber naiven und kritischen Realismus” in Philosophische Studien, vol. xiii., pp. 334-335, 349 ff.
- ↑ The following are the titles and dates of Avenarius’ works: Ueber die Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus, 1868. Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmasses: Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, 1876. Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, vol. i., 1888; vol. ii., 1890. Der menschliche Weltbegriff, 1891. “Bemerkungen zum Begriff des Gegenstandes der Psychologie” in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, vol. xviii. (1894), vol. xix. (1895). A very useful summary of the Kritik is given by Emil Koch in the Archiv für systematische Philosophie, vol. iv. (1898). Petzoldt has published (1900) the first volume of his Einführung in die Philosophie der reinen Erfahrung. It gives an admirable account of Avenarius’ position as embodied in the Kritik. Its value is, however, seriously impaired by its strange neglect of the Menschliche Weltbegriff. It does not seem to contain a single reference to that work, nor consequently to the more purely metaphysical aspects of Avenarius’ philosophy. Petzoldt’s second volume appeared in 1904, but I have not been able to consult it. An excellent and detailed criticism of Avenarius’ philosophy is given by Wundt in the articles above referred to. Carstanjen has contributed an article on Avenarius to Mind, N.S., vol. vi.
