The archive.

Agreement with democratic ideals is not yet a demonstration of their rational validity. This distinction gives Felix Kaufmann’s review of Arthur E. Murphy’s The Uses of Reason its critical focus. Kaufmann welcomes Murphy’s defense of moral knowledge without theological or metaphysical foundations, but asks whether appeals to justice as a harmony of enlightened interests can withstand the charge that they merely disguise group preferences. His reservation concerns not the ideals themselves but the missing logical analysis of value judgments needed to defend them. The review offers a compact encounter between sympathy for Murphy’s democratic purpose and insistence on argumentative rigor: readers can see precisely where Kaufmann thinks a reasonable moral outlook still owes its skeptical opponents an answer.

Does distinguishing social from physical causation require different ways of testing causal claims, or merely different subjects of inquiry? This question sharpens Felix Kaufmann’s review of R. M. MacIver’s Social Causation. Kaufmann welcomes MacIver’s rejection of explanations that make climate, economic production, or heredity the single decisive cause, and his insistence on comparing situations before identifying what produced a change. Yet he questions whether MacIver’s classification of causal strata establishes a genuine methodological distinction. The review offers a compact encounter between sociological explanation and the philosophy of scientific testing: motives can explain action without being known infallibly, causal attribution cannot by itself establish responsibility, and differences in subject matter do not settle how claims should be verified or falsified.

A prediction can come true without having been justified when it was made. This distinction anchors Felix Kaufmann’s inquiry into what makes a scientific judgment warranted when every empirical claim remains revisable. In this 1945 article, he uses analogies with law and grammar to locate scientific correctness in procedural standards rather than guaranteed truth or eventual success. Yet rules themselves change, and observation is never free of interpretation. Examples drawn from relativity and the failed Harvard business-cycle barometer give these tensions concrete form. Readers can discover how Kaufmann defends objectivity without claiming an ultimate foundation for scientific method—and why, for him, distinguishing warranted belief from fortunate conjecture matters to social inquiry and honest public argument.

Can Kelsen’s account of legal science survive without a fundamental divide between Is and Ought? In this brief review of William Ebenstein’s The Pure Theory of Law, Felix Kaufmann praises an exposition that connects Kelsen’s questions with those of British and American jurists, while challenging a premise Ebenstein accepts. The point of disagreement is concrete: what makes statutes, judicial decisions and executive orders parts of one legal order? Where Kelsen treats the “basic norm” as a fundamental hypothesis, Kaufmann proposes understanding it as a definition of that order’s unity. His review offers a compact encounter with a sympathetic critic who seeks to preserve Kelsen’s methodological achievements while revising their philosophical basis.

Agreement with a cause need not mean accepting its evidence. In this short review of John R. Baker’s Science and the Planned State, Felix Kaufmann supports scientific independence but challenges Baker’s use of an Oxford-generated list of discoveries to establish the harmful effects of Soviet state control: other factors could explain the comparison. Writing amid debates over atomic research, Kaufmann also shifts the grounds of opposition from scientific productivity to human freedom. His particular concern is the social sciences, where political supervision threatens inquiry into rulers’ own doctrines. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who separates sympathy from proof—and asks whether the strongest defense of free research rests on the discoveries it produces or the liberty it preserves.

Do scientists really inhabit an ivory tower, indifferent to a world their theories now visibly reshape? Kaufmann takes the postwar reproach seriously, made newly awkward by the political engagement of atomic physicists, and sorts it into four charges: impractical topics, excessive abstraction, inaccessible prose, and refusal to judge values. Practical value, he answers, is often indirect: Maxwell's electromagnetism and Einstein's mass-energy formula were merely theoretical before they proved decisive. Abstraction he splits into generalization, idealization, and mediate construction, defending each while insisting on the return to concrete phenomena. On Weber's ethical neutrality he grants that science cannot fix ultimate values, yet argues that value judgments are elliptical only until their standards are named. The essay's closing defense is of veracity itself, the philosopher's task of keeping disagreement clear and discussable, even at the cost of the tower.

To foster the spirit of veracity is the foremost educational task of the philosopher. Should the fulfilment of this task relegate him to the ivory tower, then he need not be ashamed of his abode.

Scientific inquiry depends on results it must remain willing to withdraw. What, then, does it mean to call those results true? In Three Meanings of “Truth,” Felix Kaufmann argues that timeless truth cannot provide the methodological foundation for revisable empirical knowledge. His distinctive move is to separate a proposition’s meaning from the rules governing its acceptance: changing evidence can overturn an assertion without changing deductive logic. Disputes with Russell and Carnap sharpen the difference between technical obstacles to verification and the absence of applicable standards. The article offers a precise way to distinguish logical relations, warranted acceptance, and coherence as an ideal for revising methods—without assuming that successive scientific conclusions necessarily converge on a predetermined final truth.

Can Kant’s account of scientific knowledge survive the physics that overturned his assumptions about space? In this essay, Felix Kaufmann examines Cassirer’s answer: preserve the inquiry into the conditions of objective experience while relinquishing Kant’s commitment to Euclidean geometry. Scientific objects emerge through relations and laws, not as ready-made things merely copied by observation. Kaufmann tests this perspective against relativity, quantum indeterminacy, and mathematical concept formation, asking what allows changing theories to remain comparable. His sympathy is qualified: Cassirer illuminates the organization of knowledge, but Dewey offers a stronger account of how claims are tested. The resulting tension gives readers a precise way to distinguish a philosophy of scientific objectivity from an account of the procedures that warrant scientific belief.

Does ethical neutrality require political science to exclude moral judgments—or to make their standards explicit? Felix Kaufmann argues for the latter by drawing a precise analogy: ethical criticism judges valuations against moral standards, just as scientific criticism judges assertions against rules of inquiry. Neither set of standards possesses an ultimate rational justification, yet this need not make judgments within them merely subjective. His example of adultery’s status under a particular penal code shows why dependence on a framework differs from arbitrariness. Challenging Max Weber, Kaufmann gives political inquiry a task beyond abstaining from judgment: reconstructing the value hierarchies behind disagreement. Readers can discover how opponents may share commitments to freedom, order, or human dignity while differing sharply over their rank.

Two biologists can agree on experimental findings yet disagree about what those findings warrant. For Felix Kaufmann, this gap exposes a tension in John Dewey’s account of inquiry: can the development of successful habits explain their authority as standards of judgement? This article defends Dewey’s effort to bring logic into contact with scientific practice while questioning its grounding in the genesis of habits. Kaufmann locates the stronger foundation in the explicit criteria scientists presuppose when submitting results and methods to criticism. His reconstruction shows how inquiry can reach definite conclusions without granting any conclusion immunity from revision—and why explaining how scientists behave is different from clarifying what justifies their inferences.

To state that no scientific result is indubitably established is not to declare that scientific problems cannot be solved.

Read as a demand for clarity rather than a refutation of reason, the foundational crises of modern mathematics, Cantorian antinomies, the intuitionist assault on excluded middle, the arithmetization of geometry, become in Kaufmann's hands symptoms of confusions in language and abstraction. Offered here in English translation, the essay grounds logic phenomenologically: language is not a stock of sounds but a system of rules coordinating signs with intended objects, so speaking about language clarifies rather than retreats. Russell's paradox does not topple logic; it shows what follows when predicates, classes, names, and functions are herded into one undifferentiated domain, and type theory is treated as a useful symbolic device short of the real philosophical solution. Number is derived from ordered counting, induction from the completeness of that form, and Brouwer's challenge is met with stricter interpretation rather than a rival logic.

We have emphasized that language is not a system of acoustic complexes and their configurations, but a system of co-ordinating rules between these and thoughts of objects and facts in the world.

Can investigating the business cycle bring it to an end? Felix Kaufmann makes that absurd prospect the closing joke of this satirical song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. His speaker distrusts scientific abstraction, demands that science feed a nation, and calls on the state to halt value-neutral inquiry. These complaints become comic through their excess: the critic of scientific methods cannot explain why engines run, while a renowned institute’s board leaves one man doing all the work. The song offers a compact encounter with methodological controversy turned into performance, where anxiety about science’s limitations gives way to fear of its improbable power.