Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii
Philosopher Aaron Preston talks about the history of analytic philosophy and “personalism”…
7 responses to “Philosopher Aaron Preston talks about the history of analytic philosophy and “personalism”…”
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This is a fascinating interview, providing a very nice statement of the important lines of argument advanced in "Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion." That work of Preston's is one that should be standard reading for students of the history of philosophy, I think. For those who read and find this interview interesting, I should note that Preston also has a chapter in the forthcoming "Finding Meaning" print volume based on the eponymous online series of essays that appeared at 3:16 AM in 2020. In his volume chapter, Preston further develops his account of "the disappearance of moral knowledge" discussed in the interview.
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I have a question. Preston says:
"The phenomenologist Roman Ingarden raised absolutely devastating arguments against the positivists’ verificationist theory of meaning at the 1934 World Congress of Philosophy. Carnap and Neurath were present, and gave some (inadequate) responses. A version of the same argument was given by Isaiah Berlin before the Aristotelian society in 1939."
Does anyone have precise references for either of these attacks on verificationism? I have been having difficulty tracking them down.
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I have now found the Berlin piece!
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Bernard Linsky produced the first English translation of the Ingarden piece in 2018. It was published in JHAP, along with an essay on the analytic reception (or rather lack of reception) of the argument, by Linsky and Francis Jeffry Pelletier. You can find both here: https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/353
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Still on the subject of verificationism, this is from the blurb to Minimal Verificationism by Gordian Hass, published in 2015:
"In the last 50 years, this view has received tremendously bad press. Today it is mostly regarded as an outdated historical concept. Theories that have evolved since the abandonment of verificationism can, however, help overcome some of its key problems. More specifically, an adequate criterion of significance can be derived from a combination of modern theories of justification and belief revision, along with a formal semantics for counterfactuals. In view of these potential improvements, the abandonment of verificationism appears premature."
Anyone proclaiming the death of verificationism should take account of this work.
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In response to Howard –
I didn't find where it could be read online, but here's a bibliography entry for the Berlin piece:
‘Verification’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 39 (1938–9), 225–48; repr. in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), The Theory of Meaning (London, 1968: Oxford University Press), Mark J. Smith (ed.), Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences, vol. 1, Canons and Custodians: Scientific Enquiry in the 20th Century (London, 2005: Sage), 35–53, and CC; trans. Spanish
And here you'll find a PDF of the Ingarden piece, in translation, to which discussion by Carnap and Neurath is added:
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Thanks, Michael
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