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This chapter discusses the rise of ‘scientific philosophy’, which would expose the logical and conceptual bases of natural sciences. The author traces it back to the 19th-century philosopher Auguste Comte, who led the movement called Logical Positivism, the doctrine that states that the only genuine method of gaining knowledge is by scientific method through observation and experiment. It argues that the fullest and clearest version of an instrumentalist account of intentionality is that of Daniel Dennett's Content and Consciousness. It also chronicles W. V. O. Quine and the intentional vocabulary of psychology, Daniel Dennett and the intentional stance, realism, anti-realism, pragmatism, and reductivism.

Chapter 9 explores the connections between the Vienna Circle of positivism and the esoteric milieu. It shows how the founders of logical positivism, such as Otto Neurath, presented their philosophy as a kind of magical revival. It also demonstrates that other positivists—such as Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Kurt Gödel—had a pro-found preoccupation with ghosts and the paranormal. Taken as a whole, the book demonstrates how magic, like metaphysics, also haunts the beginnings of analytic philosophy. It also undoes notions of a dry and apolitical positivism, by describing positivist anti-metaphysics in terms of ideological critique.

In the literary response to logical positivism, Ludwig Wittgenstein figures both as inspiration and opposition, as the philosopher of what is the case and as the poet of what is not. Wittgenstein’s contradictory reputation reflects the complexities of his philosophy, particularly the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The text exemplifies the logical positivist philosophy to which postwar American writers responded and at the same time prefigures that very response. In casting Wittgenstein as a positivist, each for their own ends, Rudolf Carnap’s Vienna Circle and Theodor Adorno’s Frankfurt School are surprisingly aligned. Yet with its unsettled combination of logical propositions and mystical aphorisms, the Tractatus refuses to correspond to either group’s description of it. Ironically, it is Adorno’s own concept of negative dialectics that makes legible Wittgenstein’s negative aesthetics, the attempt to show the “nonsense” that cannot be said, and that reveals the ways in which Wittgenstein rejects the very positivism his text makes possible.

How did critical theory, at least as it was first envisioned by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, come to be so opposed to mathematics? Chapter 1 examines the transformation of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Walter Benjamin’s prewar confrontation with Logical Positivism into a history of thinking that equated mathematics with the downfall of Enlightenment. According to the first generation of critical theorists, the reduction of philosophy to the operations and symbols of mathematics, as proposed by Logical Positivists such as Otto Neurath and Rudolph Carnap, rendered modern philosophy politically impotent and acquiesced to the powers of industry and authoritarian government. This initial phase of critical theory defined itself against the Logical Positivists’ equation of thought and mathematics, subsuming mathematics in their interpretation of reason’s return to myth and barbarism. Horkheimer and Adorno’s postwar texts and the work of second-generation critical theorists perpetuated this image of mathematics, canonizing it as an archetype of instrumental reason, reification, and social domination.

The emergence of natural science from natural philosophy, suggested the possibility of the emergence of a science of ethics from moral philosophy by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century thinkers. Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Bentham and Mill envisioned a rigorous science of ethics. Logical Positivism divorced science and philosophical ethics, abandoning the science of ethics to Darwinian evolutionary biology and the social sciences, especially developmental psychology—notably advanced by Lawrence Kohlberg and further so by Carol Gilligan. Darwin’s account of the origin and evolution of evolution of ethics depends on group selection, which became anathema after the Modern Synthesis. E. O Wilson proposed a gene-based evolutionary account of ethics in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which humanists stridently criticized as biological determinism. Because Leopold built the land ethic on Darwinian foundations, it too depends on group selection, but is otherwise not undermined by subsequent developments in sociobiology latterly become evolutionary psychology.

In 1959, Peter Achinstein left Harvard and his Logical Positivist-influenced teachers and spent a year working at Oxford during the heyday of ordinary language philosophy. In his writings on evidence and explanation, we find competing influences from both. His explicative methodology and his rigorous approach show the deep influence of Rudolf Carnap and C. G. Hempel, while his historical contextualization and use of pragmatic machinery show his debt to J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson. Achinstein's work in the philosophy of science can be seen as the result of taking the competing views in a debate in the philosophy of language from the generation that preceded him and synthesizing them into something more fruitful.

This chapter presents G. R. Malkani's 1949 essay, “Philosophical Truth,” in which he tackles the nature of philosophical questions and the role of philosophy vis á vis science, religion, and human affairs. Malkani was longtime director of the Indian Institute of Philosophy at Amalner and was editor of the Philosophical Quarterly. He was influential both in his role as a convenor of all-India philosophical conferences at Amalner and in his role as editor of the then premier Indian philosophical journal. Malkani studied at the University of Bombay and began his career at Almaner. He was a noted Vedānta scholar who drew on Hegelian insights to expound and to defend Advaita. In his essay, Malkani first explores the question of whether Indian philosophy is stagnant and unprogressive before making his claim that a philosopher should be able to distinguish eternal truth from truth that is temporal, and that a philosophical question, if it is a legitimate one, must be capable of offering a complete solution. He also explores the concept of philosophical truth as well as the theory of truth to which Logical Positivism is driven by its own logic.