Author	Feigl, Herbert. author
Title	Inquiries and Provocations [electronic resource] : Selected Writings 1929-1974 / by Herbert Feigl ; edited by Robert S. Cohen
Imprint	Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands, 1981
Connect to	http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9426-9
Descript	XII, 456 p. online resource

The title is his own. Herbert Feigl, the provocateur and the soul (if we may put it so) of modesty, wrote to me some years ago, "I'm more of a catalyst than producer of new and original ideas all my life . . . ", but then he comยญ pleted the self-appraisal: " . . . with just a few exceptions perhaps". We need not argue for the creative nature of catalysis, but will simply remark that there are 'new and original ideas' in the twenty-four papers selected for this volume, in the extraordinary aperrus of the 25-year-old Feigl in his Vienna dissertation of 1927 on Zufall und Gesetz, in the creative critique and articulation in his classical monograph of 1958 on The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'; and the reader will want to turn to some of the seventy other titles in our Feigl bibliography appended. Professor Feigl has been a model philosophical worker: above all else, honest, self-aware, open-minded and open-hearted; keenly, devotedly, and even arduously the student of the sciences, he has been a logician and an empiricist. Early on, he brought the Vienna Circle to America, and much later he helped to bring it back to Central Europe. The story of the logical empiricist movement, and of Herbert Feigl's part in it, has often been told, importantly by Feigl himself in four papers we have included here

1. No Pot of Message [1974a] -- 2. The Origin and Spirit of Logical Positivism [1969a] -- 3. The Power of Positivistic Thinking [1963b] -- 4. The Wiener Kreis in America [1969d] -- 5. Scientific Method without Metaphysical Presuppositions [1954] -- 6. Probability and Experience [1930] -- 7. Meaning and Validity of Physical Theories [1929] -- 8. Confirmability and Confirmation [1951a] -- 9. The Logical Character of the Principle of Induction [1934a] -- 10. What Hume Might Have Said to Kant [1964a] -- 11. Operationism and Scientific Method (and Rejoinder) [1945a] and [1945b] -- 12. Existential Hypotheses [1950b] -- 13. Logical Reconstruction, Realism and Pure Semiotic [1950c] -- 14. De Principiis Non Disputandumโ{128}ฆ ? [1950a] -- 15. Empiricism at Bay? [1971e] -- 16. The Mind-Body Problem in the Development of Logical Empiricism [1950d] -- 17. Physicalism, Unity of Science and the Foundations of Psychology [1963d] -- 18. Mind-Body, Not a Pseudoproblem [1960] -- 19. Some Crucial Issues of Mind-Body Monism [1971a] -- 20. Naturalism and Humanism [1949a] -- 21. Validation and Vindication: An Analysis of the Nature and the Limits of Ethical Arguments [1952] -- 22. Everybody Talks about the Temperature [1964c] -- 23. Is Science Relevant to Theology? [1966a] -- 24. Ethics, Religion, and Scientific Humanism [1969e] -- Bibliography of Works Cited -- Bibliography of Herbert Feigl -- Name Index