13
(Stolen from Fritz Waismann and from One of the First Men to Land on the Moon)
I
A famous and spirited paper by my late friend Friedrich Waismann bears the title ‘How I See Philosophy’.1 There is much in this paper that I admire; and there are a number of points in it with which I can agree, even though my approach is totally different from his.
Fritz Waismann and many of his colleagues take it for granted that philosophers are a special kind of people and that philosophy can be looked upon as their peculiar activity. And what he tries to do in his paper is to show, with the help of examples, what constitutes the distinctive character of a philosopher, and the distinctive character of philosophy, if compared with other academic subjects such as mathematics or physics. Thus he tries, especially, to give a description of the interests and activities of contemporary academic philosophers, and of the sense in which they can be said to carry on what philosophers did in the past.
Not only is all this very interesting, but Waismann’s paper exhibits a considerable degree of personal engagement in these academic activities, and even of excitement. Clearly, he himself is a philosopher, body and soul, in the sense of this special group of philosophers, and clearly, he wishes to convey to us something of the excitement which is shared by the members of this somewhat exclusive community.
II
The way I see philosophy is totally different. I think that all men and all women are philosophers, though some are more so than others. I agree of course that there is such a thing as a distinctive and exclusive group of people, the academic philosophers, but I am far from sharing Waismann’s enthusiasm for their activities and for their approach. On the contrary, I feel that there is much to be said for those (they are, in my view, philosophers of a kind) who mistrust academic philosophy. At any rate, I am strongly opposed to an idea (a philosophical idea) whose influence, unexamined and never mentioned, pervades Waismann’s brilliant essay: I mean the idea of an intellectual and philosophical elite.2
I admit, of course, that there have been a few truly great philosophers, and also a small number of philosophers who, though admirable in many ways, just missed being great. But although what they have produced ought to be of major importance for any academic philosopher, philosophy does not depend on them in the sense in which painting depends upon the great painters or music upon the great composers. Besides, great philosophy – for example, that of the Presocratics – antedates all academic and professional philosophy.
III
In my own view, professional philosophy has not done too well. It is in urgent need of an apologia pro vita sua, of a defence of its existence.
I even feel that the fact that I am a professional philosopher myself establishes a serious case against me: I feel it as an accusation. I must plead guilty, and offer, like Socrates, my apology.
I refer to Plato’s Apology because of all works on philosophy ever written I like it best. I conjecture that it is historically true – that it tells us, by and large, what Socrates said before the Athenian Court. I like it because here speaks a man, modest and fearless. And his apology is very simple: he insists that he is aware of his limitations, not wise, except possibly in his awareness of the fact that he is not wise; and that he is a critic, especially of all high-sounding jargon, yet a friend of his fellow men, and a good citizen.
This is not only the apology of Socrates, but in my view it is an impressive apology for philosophy.
IV
But let us look at the case for the prosecution against philosophy. Many philosophers, and among them some of the greatest, have not done too well. I will refer to four of the greatest – Plato, Hume, Spinoza and Kant.
Plato, the greatest, profoundest and most gifted of all philosophers, had an outlook on human life which I find repulsive and indeed horrifying. Yet he was not only a great philosopher and the founder of the greatest professional school of philosophy, but a great inspired poet; and he wrote, among other beautiful works, The Apology of Socrates.
What ailed him, and so many professional philosophers after him, was that, in stark contrast to Socrates, he believed in the elite: in the Kingdom of Philosophy. While Socrates demanded that the statesman should be wise, that is, aware of how little he knows, Plato demanded that the wise, the learned philosophers, should be absolute rulers. (Ever since Plato, megalomania has been the philosophers’ most widespread occupational disease.) Moreover, in the tenth book of The Laws Plato invented an institution that inspired the Inquisition, and he came close to recommending concentration camps for the cure of the souls of dissenters.
David Hume, who was not a professional philosopher, and who was, next to Socrates, perhaps the most candid and well-balanced of all the great philosophers and a thoroughly modest, rational and reasonably dispassionate man, was led, by an unfortunate and mistaken psychological theory (and by a theory of knowledge which taught him to distrust his own very remarkable powers of reason), to the horrifying doctrine, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’3 I am ready to admit that nothing great has ever been achieved without passion, but I believe in the very opposite of Hume’s statement. The taming of our passions by that limited reasonableness of which we may be capable is, in my view, the only hope for mankind.
Spinoza, the saint among the great philosophers and like Socrates and like Hume not a philosopher by profession, taught almost exactly the opposite to Hume, but in a way which I, for one, hold to be not only mistaken but also ethically unacceptable. He was a determinist (as was Hume), and human freedom consisted for him solely in having a clear, distinct, and adequate understanding of the true compelling causes of our actions: ‘An affect, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.’4 As long as it is a passion, we are in its clutches and unfree; once we have a clear and distinct idea of it, we are still determined by it, but we have transformed it into part of our reason. And this alone is freedom, Spinoza teaches.
I regard this teaching as an untenable and dangerous form of rationalism, even though I am a rationalist of sorts myself. First of all, I do not believe in determinism, and I do not think that Spinoza or anybody else has produced strong arguments in its support, or in support of a reconciliation of determinism with human freedom (and thus with common sense). It seems to me that Spinoza’s determinism is a typical philosopher’s mistake, even though it is of course true that much of what we are doing (but not all) is determined and even predictable. Second, though it may be true in some sense that an excess of what Spinoza means by ‘passion’ makes us unfree, his formula which I have quoted would discharge us from responsibility for our actions whenever we cannot form a clear, distinct and adequate rational idea of the motives of our actions. But, I assert, we never can do that; and although to be reasonable in our actions and in our dealings with our fellow creatures is, I think, a most important aim (and Spinoza certainly thought so too), I do not think it an aim which we can ever say that we have reached.
Kant, one of the few admirable and highly original thinkers among professional philosophers, tried to solve Hume’s problem of the rejection of reason, and Spinoza’s problem of determinism; yet he failed in both attempts.
These are some of the greatest philosophers, philosophers whom I admire much. You will understand why I feel apologetic about philosophy.
V
I never was a member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, like my friends Fritz Waismann, Herbert Feigl and Victor Kraft; in fact, Otto Neurath called me ‘the official opposition’. I was never invited to any of the meetings of the Circle, perhaps owing to my well-known opposition to positivism. (I would have been delighted to accept an invitation, for not only were some of the members of the Circle personal friends of mine, but I also had the greatest admiration for some of the other members.) Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the Circle had become not only antimetaphysical, but antiphilosophical. Schlick, the leader of the Circle,5 formulated this by way of the prophecy that philosophy, ‘which never talks sense but utters only meaningless words’, will soon disappear, because philosophers will find that ‘their audience’, tired of empty tirades, has gone away.
Waismann agreed with Wittgenstein and Schlick for many years. I think I can detect in his enthusiasm for philosophy the enthusiasm of the convert.
I always defended philosophy and even metaphysics against the Circle, even though I had to admit that philosophers had not been doing too well. For I believed that many people, and I among them, had genuine philosophical problems of various degrees of seriousness and difficulty, and that these problems were not all insoluble.
Indeed the existence of urgent and serious philosophical problems and the need to discuss them critically is, in my view, the only apology for what may be called professional or academic philosophy.
Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle denied the existence of serious philosophical problems.
According to the end of the Tractatus, the apparent problems of philosophy (including those of the Tractatus itself) are pseudo-problems which arise from speaking without having given meaning to all one’s words. This theory may be regarded as inspired by Russell’s solution of the logical paradoxes as pseudo-propositions which are neither true nor false but meaningless. This led to the modern philosophical technique of branding all sorts of inconvenient propositions or problems as ‘meaningless’. The later Wittgenstein used to speak of ‘puzzles’, caused by the philosophical misuse of language. I can only say that if I had no serious philosophical problems and no hope of solving them, I should have no excuse for being a philosopher: to my mind, there would be no apology for philosophy.
VI
In this section I will list certain views of philosophy and certain activities that are often taken to be characteristic of philosophy which I, for one, find unsatisfactory. The section could be entitled ‘How I Do Not See Philosophy’.
1. I do not see philosophy as the solving of linguistic puzzles; although the elimination of misunderstandings is sometimes a necessary preliminary task.
2. I do not see philosophy as a series of works of art, as striking and original pictures of the world, or as clever and unusual ways of describing the world. I think that if we look upon philosophy in this way, we do a real injustice to the great philosophers. The great philosophers were not engaged in an aesthetic endeavour. They did not try to be architects of clever systems; but like the great scientists they were, first of all, seekers after truth – after true solutions of genuine problems. No, I see the history of philosophy essentially as part of the history of the search for truth, and I reject the purely aesthetic view of it, even though beauty is important in philosophy as well as in science.
I am all for intellectual boldness. We cannot be intellectual cowards and seekers for truth at the same time. A seeker for truth must dare to be wise – he must dare to be a revolutionary in the field of thought.
3. I do not see the long history of philosophical systems as one of intellectual edifices in which all possible ideas are tried out, and in which truth may perhaps come to light as a by-product. I believe that we are doing an injustice to the truly great philosophers of the past if we doubt for a moment that every one of them would have discarded his system (as he should have done) had he become convinced that, although perhaps brilliant, it was not a step on the way to truth. (This, incidentally, is the reason why I do not regard Fichte or Hegel as real philosophers: I mistrust their devotion to truth.)
4. I do not see philosophy as an attempt either to clarify or to analyse or to ‘explicate’ concepts, or words, or languages.
Concepts or words are mere tools for formulating propositions, conjectures and theories. Concepts or words cannot be true in themselves; they merely serve human descriptive and argumentative language. Our aim should not be to analyse meanings, but to seek for interesting and important truths; that is, for true theories.
5. I do not see philosophy as a way of being clever.
6. I do not see philosophy as a kind of intellectual therapy (Wittgenstein), an activity of helping people out of philosophical perplexities. To my mind, Wittgenstein (in his later work) did not show the fly the way out of the bottle. Rather, I see in the fly, unable to escape from the bottle, a striking self-portrait of Wittgenstein. (Wittgenstein was a Wittgensteinian case – just as Freud was a Freudian case.)
7. I do not see philosophy as a study of how to express things more precisely or exactly. Precision and exactness are not intellectual values in themselves, and we should never try to be more precise or exact than is demanded by the problem in hand.
8. Accordingly, I do not see philosophy as an attempt to provide the foundations or the conceptual framework for solving problems which may turn up in the nearer or the more distant future. John Locke did so; he wanted to write an essay on ethics, and considered it necessary first to provide the conceptual preliminaries.
His Essay consists of these preliminaries, and British philosophy has ever since (with very few exceptions, such as some of the political essays of Hume) remained bogged down in these preliminaries.
9. Nor do I see philosophy as an expression of the spirit of the time. This is a Hegelian idea, which does not stand up to criticism. Fashions there are in philosophy, as there are in science. But a genuine searcher for truth will not follow fashion; he will distrust fashions and even fight them.
VII
All men and all women are philosophers. If they are not conscious of having philosophical problems, they have, at any rate, philosophical prejudices. Most of these are theories which they take for granted: they have absorbed them from their intellectual environment or from tradition.
Since few of these theories are consciously held, they are prejudices in the sense that they are held without critical examination, even though they may be of great importance for the practical actions of people, and for their whole life.
It is an apology for the existence of professional philosophy that men are needed to examine critically these widespread and influential theories.
Theories like these are the insecure starting point of all science and of all philosophy. All philosophy must start from the dubious and often pernicious views of uncritical common sense. Its aim is to reach enlightened, critical common sense: to reach a view nearer to the truth; and with a less pernicious influence on human life.
VIII
Let me present some examples of widespread philosophical prejudices.
There is a very influential philosophical view of life to the effect that whenever something happens in this world that is really bad (or that we greatly dislike), then there must be somebody responsible for it: there must be somebody who has done it, intentionally. This view is very old. In Homer the envy and the anger of the gods were responsible for most of the terrible things that happened in the field before Troy and to Troy itself; and it was Poseidon who was responsible for the misadventures of Odysseus. In later Christian thought it is the Devil who is responsible for evil; in vulgar Marxism it is the conspiracy of the greedy capitalists that prevents the coming of socialism and the establishment of heaven on earth.
The theory which sees war, poverty and unemployment as the result of some evil intention, of some sinister design, is part of common sense, but it is uncritical. I have called this uncritical commonsense theory the conspiracy theory of society. (One might even call it the conspiracy theory of the world: think of Zeus’ bolt of lightning.) It is widely held and, in the form of a search for scapegoats, it has inspired much political strife and has created the most frightful suffering.
One aspect of the conspiracy theory of society is that it encourages real conspiracies. But a critical investigation shows that conspiracies hardly ever attain their aims. Lenin, who held the conspiracy theory, was a conspirator, and so were Mussolini and Hitler. But Lenin’s aims -were not realized in Russia; nor were Mussolini’s or Hitler’s aims realized in Italy or in Germany.
All these conspirators become conspirators because they uncritically believed in a conspiracy theory of society.
It may perhaps be a modest but not quite insignificant contribution to philosophy to draw attention to the mistakes of the conspiracy theory of society. Moreover this contribution leads to further contributions such as to the discovery of the significance for society of the unintended consequences of human actions, and to the suggestion that we regard it as the aim of the theoretical social sciences to discover those social relations which produce the unintended consequences of our actions.
Take the problem of war. Even a critical philosopher of the status of Bertrand Russell believed that we have to explain wars by psychological motives – by human aggressiveness. I do not deny the existence of aggressiveness, but I am surprised that Russell did not see that most wars in modern times have been inspired by fear of aggression rather than by personal aggressiveness. They have been either ideological wars inspired by the fear of the power of some conspiracy, or wars which nobody wanted but which came about as the result of fear inspired by some objective situation. One example is the mutual fear of aggression which leads to an armaments race and thence to war; perhaps to a preventive war such as even Russell, who was an enemy of war and of aggression, recommended for a time, fearing (rightly) that Russia would soon have the hydrogen bomb. (Nobody wanted the bomb; it was the fear that Hitler would monopolize it which led to its construction.)
Or take a different example of a philosophical prejudice. There is the prejudice that a man’s opinions are always determined by his self-interest. This doctrine (which may be described as a degenerate form of Hume’s doctrine that reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions) is not as a rule applied to oneself (this was done by Hume, who taught modesty and scepticism with respect to our powers of reason, his own included); but it is as a rule only applied to the other fellow – whose opinion differs from our own. It prevents us from listening patiently to opinions which are opposed to our own, and from taking them seriously, because we can explain them by the other fellow’s ‘interests’. But this makes rational discussion impossible. It leads to a deterioration of our natural curiosity, of our interest in finding out the truth about things. In the place of the important question ‘What is the truth about this matter?’ it puts another question, less important by far: ‘What is your self-interest, what are your hidden motives?’ It prevents us from learning from people whose opinions differ from our own, and it leads to a dissolution of the unity of mankind, a unity that is based on our common rationality.
A similar philosophical prejudice is the thesis, at present immensely influential, that rational discussion is possible only between people who agree on fundamentals. This pernicious doctrine implies that rational or critical discussion about fundamentals is impossible, and it leads to consequences as undesirable as those of the doctrines discussed before.6
These doctrines are held by many people, but they belong to a field of philosophy which has been one of the main concerns of many professional philosophers: the theory of knowledge.
IX
As I see it, the problems of the theory of knowledge form the very heart of philosophy, both of uncritical or popular commonsense philosophy and of academic philosophy. They are even decisive for the theory of ethics (as Jacques Monod has recently reminded us).7
Put in a simple way, the main problem here as in other regions of philosophy is the conflict between ‘epistemological optimism’ and ‘epistemological pessimism’. Can we have knowledge? How much can we know? While the epistemological optimist believes in the possibility of human knowledge, the pessimist believes that genuine knowledge is beyond the power of man.
I am an admirer of common sense, though not of all of it; I hold that common sense is our only possible starting point. But we should not attempt to erect an edifice of secure knowledge upon it, but rather criticize it and improve upon it. Thus I am a commonsense realist; I believe in the reality of matter (which I think is the very paradigm of what the word ‘real’ is meant to denote); and for this reason I should call myself a ‘materialist’, were it not for the fact that this term also denotes a creed that (a) takes matter as essentially irreducible, and (b) denies the reality of immaterial fields of forces and, of course, also of mind, or consciousness; and of anything else but matter.
I follow common sense in holding that there exist both matter (‘world 1’) and mind (‘world 2’), and I suggest that there exist also other things, especially the products of the human mind, which include our scientific conjectures, theories and problems (‘world 3’). In other words, I am a commonsense pluralist. I am very ready to have this position criticized and replaced by a sounder one, but all the critical arguments against it which are known to me are, in my opinion, invalid.8 (Incidentally, I regard the pluralism here described as needed for ethics.)
All the arguments that have been advanced against a pluralistic realism are based, in the last instance, upon an uncritical acceptance of the commonsense theory of knowledge, which I regard as the weakest part of common sense.
The commonsense theory of knowledge is highly optimistic in so far as it equates knowledge with certain knowledge; everything conjectural is, so it holds, not really ‘knowledge’. I dismiss this argument as merely verbal. I readily admit that the term ‘knowledge’ carries in all languages known to me the connotation of certainty. But science consists of hypotheses. And the common-sense programme of starting from what appears to be the most certain or basic knowledge available (observational knowledge), in order to erect on those foundations an edifice of secure knowledge, does not stand up to criticism.
It leads, incidentally, to two non-commonsensical views of reality, which stand in direct contradiction to each other.
Immaterialism (Berkeley, Hume, Mach)
Behaviourist materialism (Watson, Skinner)
The first of these denies the reality of matter, because the only certain and secure basis of our knowledge consists of our own perceptual experiences; and these remain, for ever, immaterial.
The second denies the existence of mind (and, incidentally, of human freedom), because all we can really observe is human behaviour, which is in every way like animal behaviour (except that it incorporates a wide and important field, ‘linguistic behaviour’).
Both these theories are based upon the invalid commonsense theory of knowledge which leads to the traditional but invalid criticism of the commonsense theory of reality. These theories are not ethically neutral, but pernicious: if I wish to comfort a weeping child, I do not wish to stop some irritating perceptions (of mine or of yours); nor do I wish to change the child’s behaviour; or to stop drops of water from running down its cheeks. No, my motives are different – undemonstrable, underivable, but human.
Immaterialism (which owes its origin to the insistence of Descartes – who was of course no immaterialist – that we must start from an indubitable basis such as the knowledge of our own existence) reached its culmination at the turn of the century with Ernst Mach, but has now lost most of its influence. It is no longer fashionable.
Behaviourism – the denial of the existence of mind – is very fashionable at present. Although it extols observation, it not only flies in the face of all human experience, but it also tries to derive from its theories an ethically horrible theory – the theory of conditioning;9 although no ethical theory is, in fact, derivable from human nature. (Jacques Monod has rightly emphasized this point;10 see also my Open Society and Its Enemies.11) It is to be hoped that this fashion, based upon an uncritical acceptance of the commonsense theory of knowledge whose untenability I have tried to show,12 will one day lose its influence.
X
As I see philosophy, it never ought to be, and indeed it never can be, divorced from the sciences. Historically, all western science is an offspring of Greek philosophical speculation about the cosmos, the world order. The common ancestors of all scientists and all philosophers are Homer, Hesiod and the Presocratics. Central for them is the inquiry into the structure of the universe, and our place in this universe, including the problem of our knowledge of the universe (a problem which, as I see it, remains decisive for all philosophy). And it is the critical inquiry into the sciences, their findings and their methods, which remains a characteristic of philosophical inquiry, even after the sciences have broken away from it. Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy marks, in my opinion, the greatest event, the greatest intellectual revolution, in the whole history of mankind. It marks the fulfilment of a dream that was over two thousand years old; it marks the maturation of science, and its break away from philosophy. Newton himself, like all great scientists, remained a philosopher; and he remained a critical thinker, a searcher, and sceptical of his own theories. Thus he wrote in his letter to Bentley (25 February 1693) of his own theory, which involves action at a distance (italics mine):
That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance … is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.
It was his own theory of action at a distance which led him to both scepticism and mysticism. He reasoned that if all the vastly distant regions of space can interact instantaneously with each other, then this must be due to the omnipresence at the same time of one and the same being in all regions – to the omnipresence of God. It was thus the attempt to solve this problem of action at a distance which led Newton to his mystical theory according to which space is the sensorium of God; a theory in which he transcended science and which combined critical and speculative philosophy and speculative religion. We know that Einstein was similarly motivated.
XI
I admit that there are some very subtle yet most important problems in philosophy which have their natural and indeed their only place in academic philosophy; for example, the problems of mathematical logic and, more generally, the philosophy of mathematics. I am greatly impressed by the astounding progress made in these fields in our century.
But as far as academic philosophy in general is concerned, I am worried by the influence of what Berkeley used to call the ‘minute philosophers’. Criticism is the lifeblood of philosophy, to be sure. Yet we should avoid hairsplitting. A minute criticism of minute points without an understanding of the great problems of cosmology, of human knowledge, of ethics and of political philosophy, and without a serious and devoted attempt to solve them, appears to me fatal. It almost looks as if every printed passage which might with some effort be misunderstood or misinterpreted is good enough to justify the writing of another critical philosophical paper. Scholasticism, in the worst sense of the term, abounds; all the great ideas are buried in a flood of words. At the same time, a certain arrogance and rudeness – once a rarity in philosophical literature – seems to be accepted, by the editors of many of the journals, as a proof of boldness of thought and originality.
I believe it is the duty of every intellectual to be aware of the privileged position he is in. He has a duty to write as simply and clearly as he can, and in as civilized a manner as he can; and never to forget either the great problems that beset mankind and demand new and bold but patient thought, or the Socratic modesty of the man who knows how little he knows. As against the minute philosophers with their minute problems, I think that the main task of philosophy is to speculate critically about the universe and about our place in the universe, including our powers of knowing and our powers for good and evil.
XII
I might perhaps end with a bit of decidedly non-academic philosophy.
One of the astronauts involved in the first visit to the moon is credited with a simple and wise remark which he made on his return (I am quoting from memory): ‘I have seen some planets in my day, but give me the earth every time.’ I think this is not only wisdom, but philosophical wisdom. We do not know how it is that we are alive on this wonderful little planet – or why there should be something like life, to make our planet so beautiful. But here we are, and we have every reason to wonder at it, and to feel grateful for it. It comes close to being a miracle. For all that science can tell us, the universe is almost empty of matter; and where there is matter, the matter is almost everywhere in a chaotic, turbulent state, and uninhabitable. There may be many other planets with life on them. Yet if we pick out at random a place in the universe, then the probability (calculated on the basis of our dubious current cosmology) of finding a life-carrying body at that place will be zero, or almost zero. So life has at any rate the value of something rare; it is precious. We are inclined to forget this, and treat life cheaply, perhaps out of thoughtlessness; or perhaps because this beautiful earth of ours is, no doubt, a bit overcrowded.
All men are philosophers, because in one way or another all take up an attitude towards life and death. There are those who think that life is valueless because it comes to an end. They fail to see that the opposite argument might also be proposed: that if there were no end to life, life would have no value; that it is, in part, the ever-present danger of losing it which helps to bring home to us the value of life.
Notes
1 F. Waismann, in H. D. Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy, 3rd series, 2nd edn, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1961, pp. 447–90.
2 This idea comes to the fore in such remarks of Waismann’s as ‘Indeed, a philosopher is a man who senses as it were hidden crevices in the build of our concepts where others only see the smooth path of commonplaceness before them.’ ibid., p. 448.
3 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739–40; ed. L. A. Selby- Bigge, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1888 (and many later reprints), book II, part III, sec. Ill, p. 415.
4 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, book V, proposition III.
5 The Vienna Circle was, in fact, Schlick’s private seminar, and members were personally invited by Schlick. (The quoted words are from the concluding paragraphs, pp. 10 ff., of Moritz Schlick, ‘Die Wende der Philosophic’, Erkenntnis, 1, pp. 4–11.)
6 See also my paper ‘The Myth of the Framework’, in the Schilpp Festschrift, The Abdication of Philosophy, ed. E. Freeman, Open Court, La Salle, Illinois, 1976.
7 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1971.
8 See, for example, K. R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, 1979; 7th impression, 1992 (especially chapter 2).
9 The conditioner’s dream of omnipotence may be found in J. B. Watson’s Behaviourism and also in the work of B. F. Skinner, for example, Walden Two (Macmillan, New York, 1948) or Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1971). I may quote from Watson: ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants … and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist … [or] thief (J. B. Watson, Behaviourism, 2nd edn, Routledge, London, 1931, p. 104). Thus everything will depend on the morals of the omnipotent conditioner. (Yet according to the conditioners, these morals are nothing but the product of conditioning.)
10 See note 7 above.
11 K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1945; 5th edn, 1969; 14th impression, 1991–2; Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1950; and Princeton paper back, 1971.
12 See Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, chapter 2.
Translator’s note: This text was first published by the author in Philosophers on Their Own Work, vol. 3, ed. Andre Mercier and Maja Svilar, Peter Lang, Berne, Frankfurt am Main and Las Vegas, pp. 125–48. This is a revised version of the English text first published in The Owl of Minerva, ed. C. J. Bontempo and S. J. Odell, McGraw Hill, New York, 1975, pp. 41–55.