Felix Kaufmann, Review of Philipp Frank, Between Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Felix Kaufmann’s journal book review combines a favorable assessment of Philipp Frank’s exposition of logical positivism with a defense of philosophical inquiry beyond empirical science. It first situates Frank’s book within the Vienna Circle, then examines its opposition to metaphysics, and concludes by recommending its treatment of physics and scientific method. The central distinction is between rejecting philosophy’s claim to establish facts by pure reasoning and rejecting philosophy altogether. Kaufmann accepts the former while resisting the latter.

The reviewed book collects ten articles originally written in German, seven published between 1934 and 1938, with an introduction locating them within twentieth-century positivism. Kaufmann presents Frank’s chief aim as challenging the supposed existence of eternally insoluble philosophical problems alongside productive scientific inquiry. Frank’s criticism applies to both spiritualistic and materialistic systems: each can force physical discoveries into a preconceived metaphysical framework instead of allowing those discoveries to challenge its assumptions. Kaufmann grants the force of this criticism in discussions of relativity and quantum physics:

It can hardly be denied by anyone who has been following philosophical discussions on relativity theory and quantum physics during the last decades that this complaint is justified.

This concession does not settle philosophy’s legitimacy. Kaufmann immediately distinguishes the misuse of metaphysics in interpreting science from the existence of genuine philosophical problems. The failures Frank identifies do not establish that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, or Husserl merely engaged in idle speculation. Kaufmann identifies Comte’s account of metaphysics as an historically necessary stage ultimately superseded by scientific inquiry as the common ground of positivistic doctrines. He accepts that account only insofar as it refutes the claim that pure reasoning can yield unassailable statements about real events. Skeptical and positivistic traditions deserve lasting credit for exposing that claim’s illegitimacy.

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.

The qualification supplies the review’s conceptual pivot. Philosophy need not compete with physics in explaining events to retain a distinctive intellectual task. Kaufmann argues that one can accept Hume’s separation of matters of fact from relations between ideas while maintaining, as phenomenologists do, that rational analysis of meanings reaches further than contemporary positivists acknowledge. His objection therefore works within a distinction the logical positivists themselves endorse, rather than attempting to restore metaphysical authority over science.

Kaufmann also suggests that positivism’s own development may disclose the limits of its dismissal of earlier philosophy:

I should think, however, that in their study of "semantics" they will realize sooner or later that there are genuine problems of rational analysis which they might have been able to discover in the works of the great philosophers of the past.

Semantics becomes a possible point of rapprochement: inquiry into meaning may recover problems already explored by the philosophical tradition. Kaufmann offers this as an expectation, not a developed demonstration. His closing recommendation remains unequivocal. Frank writes clearly, chooses effective examples from physics, and provides students with an accessible introduction to logical positivism and physical method. The review’s significance lies in this balanced judgment: it endorses criticism of speculative claims about facts while defending rational analysis as a continuing philosophical enterprise.