The archive.

The Methodenstreit had hardened into a war of slogans, naturalism against Verstehen, nomothetic against idiographic, value-free against normative, and this 1936 German treatise sets out to disarm every one of them. Kaufmann offers not a doctrine but a critique of principles: methods earn their place by problem-type and research aim, never by metaphysical prestige. Physical objectivity itself rests on schemas and measurement; social science differs because its objects include alter egos, projects, and socially available meanings, so understanding is indispensable yet never sovereign. Drawing on Weber and Schütz for controlled interpretation, he recasts marginal utility theory as an analysis of purpose-rational choice within a ranked goal-order, treats ideal types as instruments of causal control, and credits Kelsen with purifying legal dogmatics while rejecting the Sein/Sollen dualism. Plurality is preserved; its inflation into pseudo-conflict is what must go.

Demgemäß ist alle Kritik in diesem Buche Prinzipienkritik.

English translation: “Accordingly, all criticism in this book is criticism of principles.”

Understanding an action is not the same as establishing that one’s interpretation is correct. In this article, Felix Kaufmann makes that distinction central to a social science that neither imitates physics wholesale nor claims exemption from empirical testing. His example of a naval distress signal shows how deciphering words, recognizing a request, explaining an emergency, and inferring the sender’s knowledge require different evidence. Drawing on Weber and Schütz, he replaces sweeping disputes over scientific method with precise questions about what investigators assume and how their claims can be checked. Readers can discover why uncertainty need not mean vagueness, and why practical interests may shape the choice of a research problem without deciding what counts as an adequate answer.

Appeals to self-evident principles can turn disputes over social-scientific method into contests of rival certainties. In this review of Rudolf Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache, Felix Kaufmann examines an alternative: replacing claims to privileged philosophical insight with explicit rules for constructing and analysing scientific language. Writing with sociology, economics, and historical inquiry in view, he concentrates on the book’s philosophical consequences rather than its technical logical investigations. His account clarifies how Carnap distinguishes empirical questions from questions about concepts and theories, and why tolerance toward different logical systems requires clearly stated rules. Kaufmann’s endorsement remains qualified: he does not fully accept Carnap’s position, but regards it as a productive basis for debate. The review offers a concise encounter with that tension between methodological clarification and philosophy’s reduction to syntax.

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"?

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.

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.

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.