International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
The same freedom, which every one was to have as to the general
standpoint, was intended also for all with regard to the arrangement and
limitation of the topic. All the sectional addresses were supposed to
deal either with relations or with fundamental problems of to-day. It
would have been absurd to demand that in every case the totality of
relations or of problems should be covered or even touched. The result
would have become perfunctory and insignificant. No one intended to
produce a cyclopedia. It was essential everywhere to select that which
was most characteristic of the tendencies of the age and most promising
for the science of the twentieth century. Those problems were to be
emphasized whose solution is most demanded for the immediate progress of
knowledge, and those relations had to be selected through which new
connections, new synthetic thoughts prepare themselves to-day. That this
selection had to be left to the speaker was a matter of course.
Yet it may be said that in all these directions, with reference to the
general standpoint and with reference to problems and relations, the
Organizing Committee had somewhat prepared the choice through the
selection of the speakers themselves. As the standpoints of the leading
speakers were well known, it was not difficult to invite as far as
possible for every place a scholar whose general views would be least
out of harmony with the principles of the plan. For instance, when we
had the task before us of selecting the divisional speakers for the
Normative and for the Mental Sciences, it was only natural to invite for
the first a philosopher of idealistic type and for the latter a
philosopher of positivistic stamp, inasmuch as the whole scheme gave to
the mental sciences the same place which they would have had in a
positivistic scheme, while the normative sciences would have lost the
meaning which they had in our plan if a positivist had simply
psychologized them. In the same way we gave preference as far as
possible, for the addresses on relations, to those scholars whose
previous work was concerned with new synthetic movements, and as
speakers on problems those were invited who were in any case engaged in
the solution of those problems which seemed central in the present state
of science. Thus it was that on the whole the expectation was justified
that the most characteristic relations and the most characteristic
problems would be selected if every invited speaker spoke essentially on
those relations and on those problems with which his own special work
was engaged.
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