The archive.

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.

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.

Can philosophy foster shared standards and democratic responsibility without becoming indoctrination? In this essay, Felix Kaufmann questions the expectation that philosophical education should supply an authoritative worldview. He proposes teaching through problems rather than rival systems: how mathematical proof yields new knowledge, how revisable science can claim truth, and how people who recognize the same goods can disagree over their priority. These examples disclose standards already at work in reasoning, even where philosophical interpretations diverge. Kaufmann’s distinctive concern is to clarify those commitments without compelling assent or promising that reflection will establish one best way of life. The essay offers a concrete account of how intellectual rigor, fairness, and veracity might serve democracy while preserving the limits of philosophy’s educational authority.

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.

Discarding a metaphysical sentence does not necessarily dispose of the problem it was meant to express. This distinction guides Felix Kaufmann’s examination of logical positivism: can linguistic analysis clarify knowledge without presupposing meanings and standards that linguistic conventions cannot supply? In this 1950 essay, Kaufmann reads the disagreements between Wittgenstein and Carnap as substantive conflicts, not merely successive refinements of one programme. Drawing on Husserl, he distinguishes propositions and their logical relations from assertions accepted provisionally in scientific inquiry. The distinction lets readers see why deductive entailment and the revisable procedures of science require different accounts—and why, for Kaufmann, positivism’s achievements in clarification leave its central questions about meaning, experience, and truth unresolved.