E.W. Beth and the Logical Empiricists

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Article

    • Pages : 49 à 76
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    • ISBN : 2-84174-179-6
    • ISSN : 1281-2463
    • URL : Lien externe
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    • Date de création : 04-01-2011
    • Dernière mise à jour : 04-01-2011

    Résumé

    Français

    This paper is concerned with Beth’s reactions to logical empiricist doctrines, mainly during the period that logical empiricism did not yet belonged to the past, beginning with Beth’s first publication , and ending at the time that Beth formulated his own conception of scientific philosophy. In Beth’s development, three phases are distinguished; in the first period, which runs from 1933 to 1940, Beth’s appeal to “evidences” is seen as a fundamental difference with the views of the logical empiricists, though Beth stood sympathetic toward their rejection of metaphysics. During a short second period, from 1940 to 1942, Beth tried to establish a form of “modern metaphysics”, which he believed to account for the logical empiricist objections against traditional metaphysics, but after 1942, in his third period, Beth propagated a “scientific philosophy” in which all results are open to revision. However, he maintained, against the logical empiricists, a principal distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), on the basis of a general hypothesis, Beth’s “complementary principle”.