INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
It is now well over half a century since the heyday of the philosophical movement known as logical positivism or logical empiricism. Depending on how one counts, it is now approaching half a century since the official demise of this movement. Since that demise, it has been customary to view logical positivism as a kind of philosophical bogeyman whose faults and failings need to be enumerated (or, less commonly, investigated) before one's favored new approach to philosophy can properly begin. Such an attitude toward logical positivism and its demise has been widely prevalent, not only in the narrower community of philosophers of science (who characteristically have proceeded against the background of Kuhn's well-known critique), but also in the broader philosophical community as well. With our increasing historical distance from logical positivism, however, a more dispassionate attitude also has begun inevitably to emerge. No longer threatened or challenged by logical positivism as a live philosophical option, it is becoming increasingly possible to consider this movement as simply a part of the history of philosophy, which, as such, can be investigated impartially from an historical point of view. Indeed, we have seen in recent years a veritable flowering of historically oriented reappraisals of logical positivism.
In the course of these reappraisals, it has become clear–not at all surprisingly, of course – that the above-mentioned postpositivist reaction gave birth to a large number of seriously misleading ideas about the origins, motivations, and true philosophical aims of the positivist movement.
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- Reconsidering Logical Positivism , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999