6 Answers

  1. positivism of any kind is dead, because it passes off a phenomenon as an entity. And thus acts as a very limited concept, leading to reductionism of the subject area where it originated.

  2. Logical positivism is a neo-positivism, the most prominent representatives of which are considered to be Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Frege. Wittgenstein later revised his views and abandoned them, so the early Wittgenstein is very different from the late one.

    Why did this happen? This is not so easy to explain, because it would require an explanation of what philosophy is, and the answer to this question, in turn, took Heidegger a 30-page article, and Deleuze a whole book. To put it very roughly and understand philosophy in the Delusional sense, every philosophy has a certain limit, a certain end point, beyond which this or that” philosophy ” cannot develop. Some philosophies therefore turn out to be very broad and tenacious, covering all branches of philosophy, from epistemology to political philosophy — for example, Marxism. In this sense, logical positivism has simply exhausted the limits of growth, having drawn all the most interesting and important conclusions from the first premises of the system, since initially this philosophy was a kind of appendage of logic in philosophy, and has ceased to develop — like many other areas of philosophy. This is, of course, a significant simplification, but the essence, I think, is clear.

    In addition, the scientific criterion developed by neo-positivists, known as the criterion of verificationism (confirmability), is outdated. After Karl Popper drew attention to the fact that complete induction is impossible, since, for example, it is impossible to know by experience whether there are pink pigeons in nature, because this would require sorting through all the pigeons. he proposed a new criterion of scientific character — falsificationism (refutability). In this logic, scientific statements are those that can be refuted. Statements in the spirit of “there is a god”, in this logic, go beyond the scope of science.

    And finally, it is not entirely correct to say that he is “dead”. It has had a significant influence on postpositivism and modern analytic philosophy, and the most elegant concepts of logical positivism survive right down to the modern philosophical debate.

  3. According to logical positivism, the world is knowable, but it is necessary to get rid of the unobservable. Modern man perfectly understands the real impossibility of this deliverance. When you try to get rid of it, there is a significant simplification of reality.

  4. Because dialectical materialism was part of the state ideology in the USSR, and everything that contradicted it was considered outdated. Also, positivism does not fit well with Orthodoxy, so it is also advantageous for Orthodox philosophers to consider positivism obsolete, especially since most Orthodox philosophers are former teachers of dialectical materialism.

  5. Hello.

    Logical positivism is very beautiful, but it is very one-dimensional. Everything we know about the world (from the point of view of this philosophical system) is observable facts, independent of each other, unchangeable and knowable once and for all. What is known is put in the treasury of science. Well, unless some errors need to be corrected. And so everything is saved unchanged.

    If the Earth had two moons, well, there would be two moons in the sky, the rest would not change.

    You do understand how life on Earth will hang from the gravity of the Moon, as a satellite? If another Moon # 2 appeared, everything would change. Everything in nature and society is connected, everything changes with time. And our knowledge of the world is being refined and revised.

    That is, life and cognition are full of dialectics-interrelation and historical development. Dialectics is confirmed in practice (both in the study of nature and society, and in the education of children and adults, and in the development of any branches of production and human relations). And logical positivism is, let's say, a crystallized metaphysics in its negative (anti-dialectical) understanding.

    Logical positivism, indeed, is not dead, many people adhere to it. Its beauty and merit, among other things, is that an attempt was made to create a “crystal palace of logic” for science, as Alexander Leonidovich Nikiforov said, and now we have epistemological anarchism. In his monograph “from formal logic to the history of science”, he talks about this in great detail.

  6. The content of the list of references for an initial introduction to philosophy strongly depends on what exactly in philosophy you are interested in, how old you are, what are the goals of studying philosophy and what other areas of knowledge you understand. But if you limit yourself to literature only in Russian, then the list will be something like this::

    Justein Gorder, “The World of Sofia”;
    Thomas Nagel, “What It All Means”;
    William James, “Introduction to Philosophy”;
    Bertrand Russell, “Problems of Philosophy”, “History of Western Philosophy”;
    J. Bajini “The pig that wanted to be eaten”;
    The Eye of Reason, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett
    About ancient philosophy, you can see Gasparov's “Entertaining Greece”, there is not much, but it is good.

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