[Vdp] This Friday: Symposium "Science and Politics" (and a reminder for Thursday)

Dear all, this Friday we have our symposium "Science and Politics" as part of the Dissertant*innenseminar. We start again at 2pm at the Verein (Campus, Hof 1, Eingang 1.2). Unfortunately, there will be only two talks, because Silke Körber had to withdraw for health reasons (best wishes to Silke: get well soon!). This will be the schedule now: 2-3pm: Bianca Crewe (UBC Vancouver): The Symbolic View of Science and its Application in Politics 3-4pm: Christian Damböck (IVC): Fascism as Illogical Reasoning. Rudolf Carnap's Forgotten Approach I add abstracts to this email and attach the paper for the second talk. To those of you interested in Neue Sachlichkeit, here also a reminder to the book presentation for Hans-Joachim Dahms (ed.), /Franz Roh 1890-1965. Eine Kollektivbiografie/, which takes place tomorrow, Thursday, 5pm, at the IWK (in German): https://www.iwk.ac.at/events/franz-roh-1890-1965-kunstkritiker-vorkaempfer-… best wishes and see you soon Christian *Symposium "Science and Politics", Vienna Circle Society (Campus, Hof 1, Eingang 1.2), Friday, December 6, 2pm:* 2pm: Bianca Crewe (UBC Vancouver): The Symbolic View of Science and its Application in Politics It is now common knowledge that a sea-change occurred in the philosophy of science towards the end of the nineteenth century. Many philosophers of this era characterize the preceding paradigm as mechanisticor materialist, in reference to the philosophical outlook, derived by science and presupposed by science, that suggests a specific view of the methods, aims, and standards of intelligibility in science and epistemology. Here, I will describe how this paradigm operates in the work of three representatives of philosophy in the twentieth century: Ernst Cassirer, Alfred North Whitehead, and Philipp Frank. These figures position themselves as overcoming mechanistic philosophy through an understanding of science as symbolic. I focus on how their broadly functionalist, semiotic views develop out of reflections on the methods of the physical sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century (particularly electromagnetic theory), and how this is taken up in their later work in considerations of the role of symbols in politics and culture more generally. All three, I argue, have a critical project in common, aimed at freedom from historically conditioned symbols. The primary tool they use in this project is narratives of the history of philosophy of science. In the case of Whitehead, my focus is primarily on two lecture series’, published respectively as Science and the Modern World in 1925, and Symbolism: its Meaning and Effect in 1927. My focus in Cassirer will be his application of symbolic forms to nationalism, and in the case of Frank, I will offer a reading of his symbolic view of science in service of a humanistic project “synthesizing” the sciences with other parts of human culture, without just latching onto evocative general terminology in the sciences (like matter, energy, etc.) to do so. This project moves to recognize the centrality of the concept of the symbol in twentieth century philosophy; its genesis, and its common place in the work of seemingly diverse philosophers, towards a different thematic emphasis in the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science. 3pm: Christian Damböck (IVC): Fascism as Illogical Reasoning. Rudolf Carnap's Forgotten Approach In his now completely forgotten contribution to the Harvard Tercentenary Celebration in 1936, Rudolf Carnap outlines a theory of illogical reasoning that can be interpreted as a theory of fascist politics. While theories of fascism often see the loss of humanistic values as the primary problem, Carnap sees the values of humanism as natural components of the scientific world conception, so that anti-humanism and fascism can only arise as a consequence of the loss of the latter. According to Carnap, illogical thinking occurs in three forms: (a) political attitudes are disguised as facts or destiny, (b) inconsistent or logically misconstrued value systems are accepted, (c) insufficiently confirmed or empirically false premises are taken as a basis. Fascism arises from propaganda that spreads illogical thinking in society. I contextualize Carnap's 1936 approach to explain why it was not pursued further and why value-based theories of fascism continue to prevail today. On this basis, I also outline some consequences of a Carnapian understanding of fascism for contemporary politics.