SOCIAL DARWINISM

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
EPISTEMOLOGY
LOGICAL POSITIVISM

Ma. Henna Glyssa C. Diaz

1. Social Darwinism
-the theory that human groups and races are
subject to the same laws of natural selection as
Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals
in nature. According to the theory, which was
popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
the weak were diminished and their cultures
delimited while the strong grew in power and in
cultural influence over the weak.
Social Darwinists held that the life of
humans in society was a struggle for
existence ruled by “survival of the
fittest,” a phrase proposed by the
British philosopher and scientist
Herbert Spencer.
• The theory was used to support laissez-
faire capitalism and political conservatism.

• Class stratification was justified on the

basis of “natural” inequalities among
individuals, for the control of property
was said to be a correlate of superior and
inherent moral attributes such as
industriousness, temperance, and
frugality.
• Attempts to reform society through state
intervention or other means would, therefore,
interfere with natural processes; unrestricted
competition and defense of the status quo were in
accord with biological selection.

• The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided;

in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of
success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was
used as a philosophical rationalization for
imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining
belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and
biological superiority.
Social Darwinism declined during the
20th century as an expanded
knowledge of biological, social, and
cultural phenomena undermined,
rather than supported, its basic tenets.
HERBERT SPENCER (1820-1903)
Herbert Spencer

Spencer is an English sociologist and philosopher,

an early advocate of the theory of evolution, who
achieved an influential synthesis of knowledge,
advocating the preeminence of the individual over
society and of science over religion. His magnum
opus was The Synthetic Philosophy (1896), a
comprehensive work containing volumes on the
principles of biology, psychology, morality, and
sociology. He is best remembered for his doctrine
of Social Darwinism.
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)

• economist, political analyst, and editor of The Economist

who was one of the most influential journalists of the
mid-Victorian period.

• In 1867 Bagehot published The English Constitution, an

attempt to look behind the facade of the British system
of government—crown, Lords, and Commons—to see
how it really operated and where true power lay. He was
one of the first to observe the overriding power of the
Cabinet in the party that commanded an effective
majority in the House of Commons.
William Graham Sumner
(1840-1910)

• U.S. sociologist and economist, prolific publicist

of Social Darwinism.
• He viewed competition for property and social
status as resulting in a beneficent elimination of
the ill adapted and the preservation of racial
soundness and cultural vigour. For him the
middle-class Protestant ethic of hard work, thrift,
and sobriety was conducive to wholesome family
life and sound public morality.
2. ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
• Analytic philosophy, also called linguistic
philosophy, a loosely related set of approaches
to philosophical problems, dominant in Anglo-
American philosophy from the early 20th
century, that emphasizes the study of language
and the logical analysis of concepts.
Bertrand Russell (1870-1970)
• British philosopher, logician, and social reformer,
founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-
American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s contributions to
logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of
mathematics established him as one of the foremost
philosophers of the 20th century.

• Russell conceived the idea of demonstrating that

mathematics not only had logically rigorous
foundations but also that it was in its entirety
nothing but logic.
G.E. MOORE (1873-1958)
• G. E. Moore, (born Nov. 4, 1873, London, Eng.—died Oct.
24, 1958, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), influential British
Realist philosopher and professor whose systematic
approach to ethical problems and remarkably meticulous
approach to philosophy made him an outstanding
modern British thinker.

• Elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in

1898, Moore remained there until 1904, during which
time he published several journal articles, including “The
Nature of Judgment” (1899) and “The Refutation of
Idealism” (1903), as well as his major ethical work,
Principia Ethica (1903).
• Because of his view that “the good” is knowable by direct
apprehension, he became known as an “ethical
intuitionist.” He claimed that other efforts to decide what
is “good,” such as analyses of the concepts of approval or
desire, which are not themselves of an ethical nature,
partake of a fallacy that he termed the “naturalistic
fallacy.”

• His other major writings include Philosophical Studies

(1922) and Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953);
posthumous publications were Philosophical Papers
(1959) and the Commonplace Book, 1919–1953 (1962).
3. EPISTEMOLOGY
• Epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature,
origin, and limits of human knowledge.
• The term is derived from the Greek epistēmē
(“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the
field is sometimes referred to as the theory of
knowledge.
• Epistemology has a long history within Western
philosophy, beginning with the ancient Greeks and
continuing to the present. Along with metaphysics, logic,
and ethics, it is one of the four main branches of
philosophy, and nearly every great philosopher has
contributed to it.
Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976)
• British philosopher, leading figure in the “Oxford
philosophy,” or “ordinary language,” movement.

• Ryle’s first book, The Concept of Mind (1949), is

considered a modern classic. In it he challenges
the traditional distinction between body and
mind as delineated by René Descartes.
• Traditional Cartesiandualism, Ryle says,
perpetrates a serious confusion when, looking
beyond the human body (which exists in space
and is subject to mechanical laws), it views the
mind as an additional mysterious thing not
subject to observation or to mechanical laws,
rather than as the form or organizing principle of
the body. What Ryle deems to be logically
incoherent dogma of Cartesianism he labels as
the doctrine of the ghost-in-the-machine.
• In Dilemmas (1954) Ryle analyzes propositions that
appear irreconcilable, as when free will is set in
opposition to the fatalistic view that future specific
events are inevitable. He believed that the dilemmas
posed by these seemingly contradictory propositions
could be resolved only by viewing them as the result of
conceptual confusion between the language of logic and
the language of events.

• Among his other well-known books are Philosophical

Arguments (1945), A Rational Animal (1962), Plato’s
Progress (1966), and The Thinking of Thoughts (1968).
4. LOGICAL POSITIVISM
Logical positivism, also called logical empiricism, a
philosophical movement that arose in Vienna in
the 1920s and was characterized by the view that
scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual
knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical
doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless.
The basic ideas of logical positivism were roughly
as follows: the genuine task of philosophy is to
clarify the meanings of basic concepts and
assertions (especially those of science)—and not
to attempt to answer unanswerable questions
such as those regarding the nature of ultimate
reality or of the Absolute.
• Logical positivism differs from earlier forms of
empiricism and positivism (e.g., that of David
Hume and Ernst Mach) in holding that the
ultimate basis of knowledge rests upon public
experimental verification or confirmation rather
than upon personal experience.

• It differs from the philosophies of Auguste

Comte and John Stuart Mill in holding that
metaphysical doctrines are not false but
meaningless—that the “great unanswerable
questions” about substance, causality, freedom,
and God are unanswerable just because they are
not genuine questions at all.
• This last is a thesis about language, not
about nature, and is based upon a general
account of meaning and of
meaninglessness.
• All genuine philosophy is a critique of
language, and (according to some of its
leading members) its result is to show the
unity of science—that all genuine
knowledge about nature can be expressed
in a single language common to all the
sciences.
• Most early Logical Positivists asserted that all
knowledge is based on logical inference from
simple "protocol sentences" grounded in
observable facts.

• They supported forms of Materialism,

Naturalism and Empiricism, and, in particular,
they strongly supported the verifiability criterion
of meaning (Verificationism), the doctrine that a
proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it
can be definitively and conclusively determined
to be either true or false.
The most important early figures in Logical Positivism were
the Bohemian-Austrian Positivist philosopher Ernst Mach
(1838 - 1916) and the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein
(especially his "Tractatus" of 1921, a text of great
importance for Logical Positivists).
ERNST MACH (1838-1916)
• Ernst Mach is an Austrian physicist and
philosopher who established important
principles of optics, mechanics, and wave
dynamics and who supported the view
that all knowledge is a conceptual
organization of the data of sensory
experience (or observation).
• Mach advanced the concept that all knowledge is
derived from sensation; thus, phenomena under
scientific investigation can be understood only in terms
of experiences, or “sensations,” present in the
observation of the phenomena.

• This view leads to the position that no statement in

natural science is admissible unless it is empirically
verifiable. Mach’s exceptionally rigorous criteria of
verifiability led him to reject such metaphysical concepts
as absolute time and space, and prepared the way for
the Einstein relativity theory.
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
• Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) was
an Austrian philosopher and logician, and has come
to be considered one of the 20th Century's most
important philosophers, if not the most important.
• philosophers, if not the most important.

• Both his early and later work have been major

influences in the development of Analytic
Philosophy and Philosophy of Language. The Logical
Positivists of the Vienna Circle in particular were
greatly influenced by his "Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus"
A.J. Ayer (1910-1989)
• Sir Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer (better known as Alfred
Ayer or A. J. Ayer) (1910 - 1989) was a 20th Century
British philosopher in the Analytic Philosophy tradition,
mainly known for his promotion of Logical Positivism and
for popularizing the movement's ideas in Britain.

• He saw himself as continuing in the British Empiricist

tradition of Locke and Hume and more contemporary
philosophers like Bertrand Russell, and is often
considered second only to Russell among British
philosophers of the 20th Century in the depth of his
philosophical knowledge.
VIENNA CIRCLE
• Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists,
and mathematicians formed in the 1920s that
met regularly in Vienna to investigate scientific
language and scientific methodology.

• The founder and leader of the group was Moritz

Schlick, who was an epistemologist and
philosopher of science.
• Among its members were Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf
Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Otto
Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann; and among the
members of a cognate group, the Gesellschaft für
empirische Philosophie (“Society for Empirical
Philosophy”), which met in Berlin, were Carl Hempel and
Hans Reichenbach. A formal declaration of the group’s
intentions was issued in 1929 with the publication of the
manifesto Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener
Kreis (“Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna
Circle”), and in that year the first in a series of congresses
organized by the group took place in Prague.
• In 1938, with the onset of World War II, political pressure
was brought to bear against the group, and it disbanded,
many of its members fleeing to the United States and a
few to Great Britain.
Moritz Schlick (1882-1936)
• Moritz Schlick is a German logical empiricist
philosopher and a leader of the European school
of positivist philosophers known as the Vienna
Circle.

• After studies in physics at Heidelberg, Lausanne,

Switzerland, and Berlin, where he studied with
the German physicist Max Planck, Schlick earned
his Ph.D. with a thesis on physics.
• His treatise, Das Wesen der Wahrheit nach der
modernen Logik (1910; “The Nature of Truth
According to Modern Logic”), reflected his
scientific training and helped him obtain a
teaching post at the University of Rostock in
1911. In 1922, after a year of teaching at Kiel, he
became professor of the philosophy of inductive
sciences at Vienna.
• There his disenchantment with earlier
philosophies of knowledge crystallized, and he
sought to establish new ways of ascertaining the
nature of “how men know what they know,” by
referring to the methods of the sciences.
THANK YOU!