Abstract
Kant’s Critique of Reason was a new field purporting to inquire into a priori knowledge. His self-appointed successors invented another field, ‘epistemology’, which they believed to be itself a priori. To convince themselves of this they followed a principle (first made explicit by Kuno Fischer) that a priori knowledge cannot be known a posteriori. This principle is a synthetic judgment which was widely accepted because it was disguised as an analytic judgment. It is interesting that by the same fallacy one can arrive at the opposite conclusion (‘empiricist epistemology’). And in legal philosophy we can see that the dispute about the League of Nations has the very same structure.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Two terminological remarks may be useful. On the one hand, philosophy as a system contains for Nelson two subsystems, viz. logic and metaphysics. Logic consists only of analytic propositions and metaphysics only of synthetic a priori propositions. Metaphysics in its turn consists of two parts, the first concerning the natural world and the second ethical questions (the ‘realm of freedom’). On the other hand, the adjective ‘rational’ refers in this context to the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘empirical’ as usual in the Leibniz-Wolff school. We should distinguish this sense from the related but different and later usage by which people talk about ‘rational mechanics’ in the sense of a mathematical deductive science (see e.g. Truesdell 1968, 1991).
- 2.
This celebrated and oft-repeated dictum can be found on p. 99 of Fischer (1862).
- 3.
Nelson’s way out of the dilemma was the subject of his dissertation (1904) and the starting point, never relinquished, of all his philosophical efforts. Because Nelson’s way out was pretty controversial among his contemporaries, he prefers in these methodological lectures to avoid going into it.
- 4.
The reader will notice that five of the six boxes in Fig. 1 contain noun phrases instead of full sentences (see Footnote 6 in Chapter “Lecture VIII”). This is immaterial, for one could replace the former with the latter at any time. The diagram contains thus three inferences, which can be read as follows: (1) The complete disjunction between inter-state anarchy and the world-state together with the unacceptability of inter-state anarchy implies the necessity of a world-state; (2) The complete disjunction between inter-state anarchy and the world-state together with the denial that a world-state is necessary implies the denial that inter-state anarchy is unacceptable; (3) The unacceptability of inter-state anarchy together with the denial that a world-state is necessary implies that the disjunction between inter-state anarchy and the world-state is incomplete.
- 5.
See Footnote 3 in Chapter “Lecture VIII”.
- 6.
The following argument is stated by Nelson in an excessively abstract form. To facilitate understanding I have throughout replaced the abstract terms with the concrete example that Nelson has in mind.
- 7.
Indeed, if anarchy between sovereign states is unacceptable—here Nelson would agree with the pacifists—then a world sovereign is necessary—here Nelson parts company with the pacifists. And again, if a world sovereign is not necessary—here Nelson would agree with the legal scholars he criticises—then anarchy between sovereign states would be perfectly acceptable—here Nelson parts company with the legal scholars.
References
Fischer, Kuno. 1862. Akademische reden [Academic Addresses]. Stuttgart: Cotta.
Nelson, Leonard. 1904. Die kritische Methode und das Verhältnis der Psychologie zur Philosophie: Ein Kapitel aus der Methodenlehre. Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule (N.F.) 1(1): 1–88. [Reprinted in Nelson (1971–1977), vol. I, pp. 9–78. English translation: The Critical Method and the Relation of Philosophy to Psychology: An Essay in Methodology, in Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy: Selected Essays (pp. 105–157), New Haven, Yale University Press, 1949].
Nelson, Leonard. 1971–1977. Gesammelte schriften, 9 vols. eds. Paul Bernays, Willy Eichler, Arnold Gysin, Gustav Heckmann, Grete Henry-Hermann, Fritz von Hippel, Stephan Körner, Werner Kroebel, and Gerhard Weisser. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Truesdell, Clifford. 1968. Essays in the history of mechanics. New York: Springer.
Truesdell, Clifford. 1991. A first course in rational continuum mechanics, vol. I, 2nd ed. Boston: Academic Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nelson, L. (2016). Lecture XIX. In: A Theory of Philosophical Fallacies. Argumentation Library, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20783-4_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20783-4_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20782-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20783-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)