A History of Philosophy 11: Logical Positivism and Existentialism

A History of Philosophy #11

by Frederick Charles Copleston

Included as Volume 11 in the Continuum edition, this is actually a collection of essays, which appeared in 1956 as Contemporary Philosophy. It covers Logical Positivism & Existentialism.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Frederick (Freddie) Charles Copleston was raised an Anglican and educated at Marlborough College from 1920 to 1925. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday he converted to Catholicism, and his father subsequently almost disowned him. After the initial shock, however, his father saw fit to help Copleston through his education and he attended St. John’s in Oxford in 1925, only managing a disappointing third in classical moderations. He redeemed himself somewhat with a good second at Greats in 1929.

In 1930 Copleston became a Jesuit, and, after two years at the Jesuit novitiate in Roehampton, he moved to Heythrop. He was ordained a Jesuit priest at Heythrop College in 1937 and soon after went to Germany (1938) to complete his training. Fortunately he made it back to Britain before the outbreak of war in 1939. The war made it impossible for him to study for his doctorate, as once intended, at the Gregorian University in Rome, and instead Copleston was invited to return to Heythrop to teach the history of philosophy to the few remaining Jesuits there.

While in Heythrop Copleston had time and interest to begin the work he is most famous for, his "A History of Philosophy" - a textbook that originally set out to deliver a clear account of ancient, medieval and modern philosophy in three volumes, which was instead completed in nine volumes (1975). To this day Copleston’s history remains a monumental achievement and stays true to the authors it discusses, being very much a work in exposition.

Copleston adopted a number of honorary roles throughout the remainder of his career. He was appointed Visiting Professor at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, spending half of each year lecturing there from 1952 to 1968. He was made Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1970, given a personal professorship from his own university (Heythrop, now re-established in the University of London) in 1972 and made an Honorary Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1975. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Santa Clara between 1974 and 1982, and he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen between 1979 and 1981. His lectures were published under the title Religion and the One, and were largely a metaphysical tract attempting to express themes perennial in his thinking and more personal than in his history. Gerard J. Hughes notes Copleston as remarking "large doses of metaphysics like that certainly don’t boost one’s sales".

He received honorary doctorates from a number of institutions, notably, Santa Clara University, California, University of Uppsala and the University of St. Andrews (D.Litt) in later years. He was selected for membership in the Royal Institute of Philosophy and in the Aristotelian Society, and in 1993 he was made CBE.

Copleston’s personality saw him engage in the many responsibilities bestowed upon him with generous commitment and good humour.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you know, I think this was among the first of the Copleston History of Philosophy books I devoured between 1968 and 1970 - and it precipitated a calamitous upheaval in my mind.

I read ravenously in those days, so unlike the reader I am now, "measuring out my (reading) in coffee spoons..." for I have learned the latter under the constraint of the remedy for that calamity.

Why bother anymore? I have found my raison d'etre. And cool-brained Father Copleston gave it to me 50 years ago.

Back then, for me, it started over the space of my lifetime the carefully-calculated rationalization of a foregone conclusion. For using his shining faith as a role model, over time I worked his arguments out inversely.

It was an end that more than justified the pain of its means.

You may say the radical differences between philosophical points of view proves it's all nonsense, this philosophy. Not at all, says Copleston. Different conditions create radically different points of view, and passing time creates radically new conditions!

So is there anything stable in philosophy?

Well, the end of self-knowledge is one. We CAN know OURSELVES.

And if we have faith that:

All will be well
And all manner of things will be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
And the Fire and the Rose are one

Then, as it was for a believer like Copleston -

And is now for me -

All indeed shall be well.

[Mohammad Mahdi Fallah · Rating 2 out of 5]

هرچند کتاب شامل برخی ظرایف شرحی خوب بود، آنچنان که از کاپلستون بر میاد ولی هیچ نکته بدیعی در کتاب پیدا نمی شد.
خالی از لطف نیست ذکر این نکنه که ترجمه بسیار ثقیلی داره کتاب.
به هر حال شاید خوندنش خالی از لطف نباشد.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure whether these are the essays which were republished by one reprint house as the tenth volume of his History of Philosophy, but it would be understandable if they were; they begin about where the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes end and discuss many of the major figures up to the date it was written (the revision only affected the first chapter, and it doesn't so much add any new figures as look at the philosophers he treats with a bit more hindsight.) The restriction to the logical positivists (with a good deal of discussion of the analytic tradition, if only to distinguish them) and the existentialists (in a broad sense of the term) doesn't matter so much; he wouldn't have covered the Marxist tradition anyway, and I'm not really interested in the neo-Thomists -- who else really was around in the 1950s?

However, it is a very different kind of book. Where the History was primarily descriptive, and very scholarly with two and three footnotes per page and a dozen pages of bibliography (this book has no bibliography, and the few footnotes are mainly in the rewritten first chapter), these studies -- the ones of existentialism were a course of lectures -- are basically polemical, trying to show what is wrong with those tendencies from Father Copleston's Catholic perspective. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, and he does try to approach them honestly on their own terms without presupposing Catholic theology; he succeeds in showing many of the weaknesses of those traditions, and if he isn't convincing in his defense of the traditional metaphysics and belief in God, it's because he's defending a view that isn't really defensible -- his arguments are probably the most intelligent framing of the case for religion I've read for a long while. He does have an annoying habit of disclaiming responsibility for his own criticisms -- it's almost comic the way he attributes many of them to "some Marxists"! -- and as in volume 9 of the history he has a particular animus against Sartre.

The chapters on logical positivism are general and treat the movement as a whole, without referring to any specific philosophers except (occasionally) Carnap and the early Wittgenstein, while the chapters on existentialism are focused on individuals -- Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre and Camus.

[شفيق · Rating 2 out of 5]

كنت من فترة بعيدة احد المؤمنين بالوجودية سواء الدينية او الملحدة لكنني غيرت قناعتي بها لكن هذا الكتيب نوعا ما قد يعيد ترتيب اوراقي واعادة
النظر خاصه في فكر كيركجور وسارتر