The archive.

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.

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.