Logical Positivism

Logical positivism, also called logical empiricism, a philosophical movement that

arose in Vienna in the 1920s and was characterized by the view that scientific
knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and all
traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless. A brief treatment
of logical positivism follows. For full treatment, see positivism: Logical positivism and
logical empiricism.
Logical positivism differs from earlier forms of empiricism and positivism (e.g., that
of David Hume and Ernst Mach) in holding that the ultimate basis of knowledge rests
upon public experimental verification rather than upon personal experience. It differs
from the philosophies of August Comte and John Stuart Mill in holding that metaphysical
doctrines are not false but meaninglessthat the great unanswerable questions about
substance, causality, freedom, and God are unanswerable just because they are not
genuine questions at all. This last is a thesis about language, not about nature, and is
based upon a general account of meaning and of meaninglessness. All genuine
philosophy (according to the group that came to be called the Vienna Circle) is a critique
of language; and (according to some of its leading members) its result is to show.


Phenomenology
Phenomenology (from Greek: phainmenon "that which appears" and lgos "study") is
the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As
a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century
by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the
universities of Gttingen andMunich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United
States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.
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Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic
reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that
appear in acts of consciousness. This ontology (study of reality) can be clearly
differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects,
sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another.
Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by
himself but also by students, such asEdith Stein, by hermeneutic philosophers, such
as Martin Heidegger, by existentialists, such as Max Scheler, Nicolai
Hartmann, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and by other philosophers, such
as Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion,Emmanuel Lvinas, and sociologists Alfred
Schtz and Eric Voegelin.