The archive.

Reliable predictions about railways and postal services do not require knowledge of every participant’s motives. For Felix Kaufmann, such ordinary cases unsettle the opposition between exact natural science and an irreducibly subjective study of society. In this 1938 article, he argues that both domains depend on interconnected, revisable judgments, while explaining why understanding purposeful conduct requires introspection as well as knowledge of external causes. Methodology offers no philosophical guarantee of truth: its task is to expose assumptions and clarify the rules by which claims are accepted, tested, and withdrawn. His comparison of scientific statements to club members—with admission requirements, ranks, and weighted votes—gives readers a concrete way to distinguish disciplinary boundaries from evidential warrant, and reliable knowledge from claims insulated against correction.

Political disagreement need not make methodological criticism futile. In this second installment, Felix Kaufmann asks how social scientists can test one another’s claims without either invoking truths immune to evidence or treating every disagreement as an irreconcilable outlook. His answer begins with rules researchers already accept in practice: standards for truth, but also preferences for simplicity, precision, and explanatory usefulness. This distinction gives concrete purchase on disputed definitions, judgments of justice, and causal explanations that mistake necessary conditions for sufficient ones. Kaufmann’s treatment of value judgments is especially pointed: he argues that scientific legitimacy depends on shared criteria of assessment, not on excluding evaluation altogether. The article offers a way to identify where a dispute concerns evidence, where it concerns research aims, and where clarification can make cooperation possible.

The crucial point, however, is this: to think scientifically is to submit implicitly to definite rules.

Scientific cooperation need not depend on agreement about what science ultimately is. In this review of the early installments of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Felix Kaufmann supports the project while rejecting its physicalist doctrine: the claim that biological, psychological, and sociological concepts can be reduced to physical concepts. His concern is concrete—efforts to eliminate metaphysical pseudo-problems may also discard genuine questions. Judgments about probability, formalization, and linguistics test another requirement of unity: whether specialists can make their problems intelligible beyond their own disciplines. The review offers a critical participant’s perspective on an ambitious cooperative enterprise, distinguishing the value of shared inquiry from the adequacy of its philosophical framework.

Each reader should be enabled to obtain a coherent view of the problems dealt with, even if he cannot understand every detail.

Can Dewey’s account of scientific inquiry stand without the naturalism and pragmatism that accompany it? In this review of John Dewey’s Logic—The Theory of Inquiry, Felix Kaufmann makes that question the basis of a discriminating endorsement. He accepts the interdependence of meanings within inquiry, but argues that naturalistic explanations rest on presuppositions requiring further analysis, and that theoretical goals remain distinguishable from practical ends. His distinctive contribution is to locate common ground between Dewey and philosophical traditions often treated as opponents, including Marburg neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s phenomenology. The review offers readers a precise way to distinguish the methodological force of Dewey’s logic from its broader philosophical commitments, without dismissing either in advance.

Admiration need not come with a compulsory reservation: Felix Kaufmann defends Sidney Hook’s enthusiastic portrait of Dewey against the demand that it include criticism. His own objection is more pointed. By painting traditional philosophy too darkly, Hook risks encouraging readers to pursue Dewey while abandoning other philosophers. This brief review draws a useful distinction between wholehearted assent to a thinker and fairness to the intellectual alternatives. Kaufmann’s praise for Hook’s clarity and organization makes his warning sharper: an effective introduction can open one path of inquiry while closing others.

If the author feels like simply saying yes, why should he say "yes, but"?

How can logic rest on experience when scientific knowledge is itself defined by logical rules? In this review of Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil, Felix Kaufmann makes that apparent circle intelligible by distinguishing receptive experience from the judgments formed upon it. His concrete example—a physical thing said to occupy a place—shows how an ordinary assertion carries assumptions about possible perceptions, including those of other people. Kaufmann explains why Husserl seeks to understand objectivity through subjective experience rather than taking the objective world as given. The review offers a compact orientation to this philosophical reversal, alongside a pointed judgment: debates about eidetic intuition should engage Husserl’s later analysis rather than remain fixed on Logische Untersuchungen. Kaufmann’s call for English translations also records his concern over the work’s restricted reception.

Felix Kaufmann’s review of John Dewey’s Theory of Valuation and J. H. Woodger’s The Technique of Theory Construction asks what methodological clarification can achieve—and what it need not discard. He welcomes Dewey’s account of ends and desires as subject to practical appraisal, yet questions whether rationalist ethics must be rejected outright: its supposedly pre-established values might instead be understood as guiding ideals for conduct. His endorsement of Woodger’s symbolic logic is similarly discriminating. A common notation can expose relations between scientific theories and mechanize routine operations without replacing the invention of hypotheses. This brief review offers a concrete encounter with Kaufmann’s critical stance: receptive to pragmatic and formal methods, attentive to their limits, and particularly alert to the difficulties posed by vague concepts in the social sciences.

When an economic prediction fails, does the failure refute the theory—or expose a mistaken use of it? In this 1942 article, Felix Kaufmann approaches the dispute between Hutchinson and Knight by distinguishing claims about facts from rules for directing inquiry. A price–demand relationship, qualified by an indefinite ceteris paribus clause, may tell economists where to begin investigating rather than what must happen. This distinction lets Kaufmann defend theoretical isolation without excusing forecasts that neglect foreseeable influences. His comparisons with physical science also challenge the idea that economics must choose between empirical testing and attention to human purposes. Readers can discover how profit-seeking and informed choice may serve as useful starting points without becoming necessary truths about human conduct.

Closer analysis reveals that the ceteris paribus clause is a way of formulating a heuristic postulate, a methodological program.

Can an economic method survive the failure of the philosophy used to justify it? In this review of Joseph Mayer’s Social Science Principles, Felix Kaufmann praises Mayer’s sustained attack on classical and neoclassical value theory while challenging the reach of its conclusions. Exposing the unreality of perfectly rational “economic man,” Kaufmann argues, does not by itself refute a method of explaining markets. His discussion of Austrian marginal utility theory makes the distinction concrete: followers could use its methods without sharing their founders’ philosophical overconfidence. This brief review offers a focused encounter with Kaufmann’s discriminating approach to methodological criticism—one that separates claims of ultimate validity from explanatory usefulness, without excusing either from scrutiny.

Philosophy can cease to rival empirical science without losing its own questions. This distinction anchors Felix Kaufmann’s review of Philipp Frank’s Between Physics and Philosophy. Kaufmann endorses Frank’s criticism of metaphysical systems that force relativity and quantum physics into preconceived schemes, but resists treating that failure as grounds for dismissing philosophical inquiry. His counterpoint is precise: rational analysis of meanings may reach further than logical positivists acknowledge, and their work on semantics may bring them back to problems explored by earlier philosophers. This short review offers a carefully drawn disagreement within an otherwise favorable assessment—showing how Kaufmann can recommend Frank’s exposition of physics and positivism while defending a continuing task for philosophy.

I am far from believing, however, that this is a death blow to philosophy, even though philosophy ceases to be a rival of empirical science.

Kaufmann relocates the objectivity of social science from private conviction to public procedure: a proposition is valid only relative to the rules that govern how claims are accepted, rejected, connected, and corrected within inquiry. Written in English under the influence of Dewey's Logic, the book refuses to seek certainty before science begins, holding that every attempt to ground empirical knowledge in self-evident truths is foredoomed. Its recurring operation is a sorting of levels, separating facts, meanings, rules of procedure, and formal relations that disputants habitually let slide into one another. Economic theory supplies his sharpest cases. Demand curves and marginal-utility principles are not empirical laws falsifiable by a single instance but theoretical rules; and Mises's a priori derivation of value and price is shown to be analytic unless tied to empirical rules. Objectivity here is procedural, not absolute; formalism clarifies rather than reduces.

All attempts to base empirical science on ultimate grounds conceived as self-evident truths are foredoomed to failure.

Disputes over capital punishment, taxation and political representation often concern not just conclusions but the standards of justice themselves. In this brief review of Ray Lepley’s Verifiability of Value, Felix Kaufmann asks what such disagreement means for the possibility of testing value judgments. He credits Lepley with a strong defense of the view that values can be tested much like facts, yet rejects its central premise: for Kaufmann, value judgments assess the correctness of valuations under presupposed standards rather than assert facts in the strict sense. The review offers a compact encounter between two approaches to verification, showing why a favorable assessment of an argument need not entail agreement about the logical character of what it seeks to establish.