Abstract
Russo Krauss reconstructs Richard Avenarius’ intellectual career, from the early relationship with Wilhelm Wundt to the development of his philosophical system: Empiriocriticism. At first, Avenarius and Wundt collaborated to spread experimental psychology in the philosophical faculties. Later, Avenarius designed a philosophical foundation for a radically physiological experimental psychology. By distinguishing the first-person perspective from the third-person perspective, Avenarius tried to reconcile the apparently contradictory assumptions that all knowledge begins with consciousness (phenomenalism) and that consciousness depends on the brain. Psychology is thus defined not as the science of inner experience (an error that Avenarius called “introjection”), rather as the science that studies experience from the perspective of its dependency upon the nervous system.
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- 1.
Extended biographical information on Richard Avenarius can be found in the family history written by another of his brother (Avenarius 1912, 123–150).
- 2.
The two thinkers mention the Leipzig Society in their autobiographical essays (Barth 1921; Vaihinger 1921). Thanks to Vaihinger we have a brief report of the activities of the Society (Vaihinger 1875). Vaihinger also talks about Avenarius’ influence on his formation. Not only Avenarius introduced him to the work of Steinthal, that became “one of the founding basis of [Vaihinger’s] philosophical outlook;” with his “sharp criticism of Kant’s position” Avenarius also prevented Vaihinger “from turning Kantian philosophy into a dogma” (Vaihinger 1921, 190).
- 3.
Protokollbuch des Akademisch-philosophischen Vereins zu Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig, Abteilung für Handschriften und Inkunabeln, MS01304.
- 4.
For more information on these writings, see Wundt’s bibliography of those years in Robinson (2001a, 275–78).
- 5.
Cf. Avenarius’ letter to Mach , February 22, 1895 (Thiele 1968, 289–90).
- 6.
Cf. Avenarius to Wundt, May 5, 1877 (Avenarius Archive, box 12; also in Wundt Archive, NA Wundt/III/1001-1100/1015/53-56).
- 7.
Avenarius Archive, boxes 3, 16. Avenarius’ archive contains a huge folder with his notes for the main class, that he continued to update, year after year, to keep pace with the constant innovation in experimental psychology.
- 8.
Wundt further developed his ideas on scientific philosophy in the Introduction of his System der Philosophie (System of philosophy, Wundt 1889, 21–23).
- 9.
Engelmann to Wundt, June 6, 1881 (Wundt Archive, NA Wundt/III/1601-1700/1681/1/1-8). On the subject see also Robinson (1987).
- 10.
Avenarius to Wundt, February 2, 1883 (Avenarius Archive, box 12; Wundt Archive, NA Wundt/III/1001-1100/1023/85-88).
- 11.
“We designate with E every value open to description, insofar it is assumed as a content of an assertion of another human individual” (Avenarius 1888, 15).
- 12.
Wittgenstein will adopt a similar position in his Remarks on Psychology. He denies that psychological statements indicate what is happening inside a man, thus having the same meaning in the first-person and in the third-person. On the contrary, he affirms that the first-person and the third-person have heterogeneous meanings: the former expresses what I live; the latter denotes what I observe, namely the actions of my fellow men. The first consequence is that the first-person assertions no longer have any advantage in verifiability, while according to the traditional conception they possess a greater certainty, since I—and only I—can look into myself and be sure of what is happening inside me. The second consequence is that there is no longer a shadow of doubt surrounding the third-person statements, since they do not indicate the inscrutable inner being, but simply the observable outward behavior (Wittgenstein 1967, §472; 1988, §44, 63, 692).
- 13.
The term “survival” derives from Edward B. Tylor, who defined it as a cultural phenomenon outliving the set of conditions under which it developed. It is worth noting that some readers of Avenarius—like Wundt himself (1898, 52)—argued that his notion of introjection was nothing more than a reprise of Tylor’s theory about animism (Tylor 1871). Avenarius discussed the contact points between the two concepts. They both represent an incorrect analogical understanding, an improper judgment of the form “X is similar to me.” Nonetheless, in the case of animism, the error consists in the disproportionate extension of the judgment: not only my fellow-men but everything (trees, stones, waterfalls, etc.) is a being like me. Whereas in the case of introjection the problem lies in the erroneous content of the judgement: the thing (whether a fellow-man, a tree, a stone…) is similar me, meaning that it has an experience inside itself. This content is erroneous since it attributes to the thing (that is supposed to be similar to me) something that it is not actually true about myself, namely the existence of a supposed “inner being” inside me (Avenarius 1894–1895, 18, 154).
- 14.
Wundt believed that the reaction to stimuli was made of five moments: “(1) the transmission from the sensory organ to the brain, (2) the entering in the field-of-vision of the consciousness, or perception, (3) the entering in the point-of-vision of attention, or apperception, (4) the time of the will, which is required in order to induce the registrant movement in the central organ, (5) the transmission of the thus produced motor excitation to the muscles and the increase of energy in the latter” (Wundt 1874, 727, emphasis mine). The possibility of an experimental, physiological psychology for Wundt relied on the possibility to observe the first and latter, physiolog ical, moments, thus calculating the time-interval of the intermediate, psychological, moments. Then, the subject of the experiment had to integrate this quantitative calculus with his qualitative, introspective account of the three moments of perception, apperception and voluntary act. On the topic see also Robinson (2001b).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
It is worth noting that Avenarius was probably one of the few students attending Fechner’s lessons. An entry on Fechner’s diary of that time records that the auditors in his class had increased from two to nine (Döring and Plätsch 1987, 292). Indeed, Fechner’s success was not prompt, but it grew over the years thanks to few important authors that were influenced by him, such as Ebbinghaus, Wundt, and the already mentioned Mach and Avenarius.
- 18.
Fechner attributed the difference between the psychical and the physical to a matter of points of view already in his Zend-Avesta (Fechner 1851). However, it is not sure whether Mach and Avenarius had read this book, since they do not make any reference to it in their works. For a more comprehensive analysis of the topic of Fechner’s psychophysical parallelism see Heidelberger (2004, 165–90), and Wegener (2009).
- 19.
Heidelberger (2010) examined Fechner’s concept of “functional relationship” and its influence on Mach .
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Russo Krauss, C. (2019). Richard Avenarius. In: Wundt, Avenarius, and Scientific Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12637-7_2
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