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
Now, an ancient and fundamental problem for the philosophers is that
which has been called the problem of the categories. This problem of the
categories is simply the more formal aspect of the whole philosophical
problem just defined. The philosopher aims to comprehend the unity of
the system of human ideas and ideals. Well, then, what are the primal
ideas? Upon what group of concepts do the other concepts of human
science logically depend? About what central interests is the system of
human ideals clustered? In ancient thought Aristotle already approached
this problem in one way. Kant, in the eighteenth century, dealt with it
in another. We students of philosophy are accustomed to regret what we
call the excessive formalism of Kant, to lament that Kant was so much
the slave of his own relatively superficial and accidental table of
categories, and that he made the treatment of every sort of
philosophical problem turn upon his own schematism. Yet we cannot doubt
that Kant was right in maintaining that philosophy needs, for the
successful development of every one of its departments, a well-devised
and substantially complete system of categories. Our objection to Kant's
over-confidence in the virtues of his own schematism is due to the fact
that we do not now accept his table of categories as an adequate view of
the fundamental concepts. The efforts of philosophers since Kant have
been repeatedly devoted to the task of replacing his scheme of
categories by a more adequate one. I am far from regarding these purely
philosophical efforts made since Kant as fruitless, but they have
remained, so far, very incomplete, and they have been held back from
their due fullness of success by the lack of a sufficiently careful
survey and analysis of the processes of thought as these have come to be
embodied in the living sciences. Such concepts as number, quantity,
space, time, cause, continuity, have been dealt with by the pure
philosophers far too summarily and superficially. A more thoroughgoing
analysis has been needed. But now, in comparatively recent times, there
has developed a region of inquiry which one may call by the general name
of modern logic. To the constitution of this new region of inquiry men
have principally contributed who began as mathematicians, but who, in
the course of their work, have been led to become more and more
philosophers. Of late, however, various philosophers, who were
originally in no sense mathematicians, becoming aware of the importance
of the new type of research, are in their turn attempting both to
assimilate and to supplement the undertakings which were begun from the
mathematical side. As a result, the logical problem of the categories
has to-day become almost equally a problem for the logicians of
mathematics and for those students of philosophy who take any serious
interest in exactness of method in their own branch of work. The result
of this actual coöperation of men from both sides is that, as I think,
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