Victor Kraft

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Victor Kraft (born July 4, 1880 in Vienna ; † January 3, 1975 ibid) was an Austrian scientific theorist , philosopher and librarian . His direct disciples include the philosopher Paul Feyerabend and Ernst Topitsch and the writer Ingeborg Bachmann , who at Victor Kraft with a critical thesis on Martin Heidegger graduated was.

Life

As the son of Josef Kraft, a Viennese school director and president of the Kindergarten Association, he completed a high school (with Greek) in the 6th district of Vienna and graduated with distinction in 1899 with the Matura. He then studied history with Oswald Redlich , geography with Albrecht Penck and philosophy with Friedrich Jodl and Adolf Stöhr at the University of Vienna . He also heard numerous other lectures from other areas, not only geology, but also botany, art history and economics.

Further studies in Berlin followed, among others with Georg Simmel , Wilhelm Dilthey and Carl Stumpf . However, his philosophical developments were only little determined by his university teachers, they essentially went on independently. In 1903 he received his doctorate on the subject of knowledge of the outside world . He then took up an activity in the University Library of Vienna in the field of philosophy in 1912 . He was promoted to academic civil servant as a library assistant in 1925. In 1912, he wrote the text Weltbegriff und Wissensbegriff , with which he completed his habilitation in 1914 in the field of theoretical philosophy. In 1916 his daughter Eva Frodl-Kraft was born. He was awarded the title of associate professor in 1924.

After the Nazi occupation of Austria , he was considered to be a “ Jewish Versippter ” and had to retire because of his “ half-Jewish ” wife. He lost his venia legendi .

After his rehabilitation he was able to return to the library service in 1945. In 1947 he was appointed State Librarian General. In this position he reorganized the Vienna University Library. In the same year he was appointed associate professor of philosophy, from 1950 on full professor. In 1952 he retired .

In 1954 he became a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences .

His grave is in the Hietzinger Friedhof in Vienna.

Act

The end of the National Socialist tyranny did not lead to a renaissance of logical empiricism in Austria after 1945 , especially since the surviving emigrants of the Vienna Circle were not willing to return to Vienna without further ado. The political climate, which was hostile to neopositivism even before the German invasion (the assassination attempt on Moritz Schlick was indirectly justified by the Catholic, corporate state press), hardly improved in the post-war period until well into the 1960s: in the University of Vienna ruled the Catholic Restoration. After 1945, Victor Kraft and his student Béla Juhos (1901–1971) clearly felt the continued effect of anti-positive affects.

The then Austrian Minister of Education, Heinrich Drimmel , a fanatical Catholic, declared that for him positivism and communism were one. Neopositivism, as Drimmel stated, was just as "corrosive" as National Socialism. The legal positivism of the famous Viennese law theoretical school have left in history tracks so Drimmel, "as they have been in no bloody era before". However, his anti-totalitarian statements did not prevent Drimmel from calling former National Socialists such as B. to patronize the notorious Viennese historian Taras Borodajkewycz . Kraft's rehabilitation served primarily as a kind of science-political alibi. Kraft's student Ernst Topitsch writes in this context: “Now, under the National Socialist terror, I had dreamed of restoring intellectual freedom under the sign of Christian humanism, but what really came then was a suffocating provincial restoration, and pathetic clericalism spread in the halls of the Alma Mater an atmosphere of intellectual dishonesty that can almost be grasped with the hands, without encountering decisive resistance. "

The small circle that began to form around Kraft in the 1950s, called the "Kraft-Kreis" (Kraft-Kreis), was known to such important philosophers as Wittgenstein (though probably only once), Ernst Topitsch , Paul Feyerabend , Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright visited, could not develop a greater public impact, and Kraft had to experience how his students made careers, especially abroad.

As a member of the neopositivist Vienna Circle , which he visited regularly, Kraft worked - as the only Viennese neopositivist - on non-metaphysical, rationally based ethics and values. Although Kraft explicitly admitted to the so-called “scientific world view”, he kept a clear distance from many “dogmas” of logical empiricism. In this respect he can best be compared with Karl Popper . In contrast to Popper, Kraft did not exaggerate the internal differences between himself and the circle. Regardless of all independence, Kraft always tried to emphasize the basic similarities of Viennese neopositivism. Distance from the “mainstream” of the circle can be found in particular in the all too carefree logical-empirical postulate of “unified science”, radical value skepticism and, from an epistemological point of view, especially in Kraft's rejection of Schlick's turn (which he carried out under Wittgenstein's influence) from a critical one -realistic position towards a phenomenalist positivism. Kraft always remained an anti-phenomenalist, constructivist realist or anti-sensualist empiricist. The constructivist or " hypothetical realism " can be characterized by the following five postulates:

  1. The hypothetical character of reality.
  2. The existence of an unconscious, structured reality.
  3. The partial recognizability and comprehensibility of the world.
  4. The fundamental knowledge of the world through perception and thinking.
  5. The possibility of intersubjective science.

Kraft's philosophy of science anticipated ideas of critical rationalism : Karl Popper himself wrote in the book "The Two Basic Problems of Epistemology", which was only published in 1979 (the manuscript was written in the 1930s): "Strength takes - as far as I can judge - almost that Basic ideas of the deductivist-empirical standpoint that I represent ”.

In practical philosophy too, Kraft anticipated much of what is now part of the standard repertoire of contemporary debates: Even before RM Hare's universal prescriptivism, which today can be called a classic theory of modern moral philosophy, Kraft combined an empirical starting position with a criticism of relativism. His distance from the circle is explained not least by the fact that Kraft, like Popper, always had the influence of Neo-Kantianism .

Kraft's later "cultural utilitarianism" has remained almost unnoticed, which is mainly due to political causes. Kraft exerted the strongest (hardly noticed) influence on the later concept of the Viennese legal philosopher Alfred Verdross (1890–1980). Verdross was one of the central figures of the famous Viennese school of legal theory and wrote the most widely read standard work on international law in German at the time.

Works (selection)

  • The problem of the outside world , in: Archive for Philosophy, 2nd Department: Archive for Systematic Philosophy. New series 10, 1904, (diss.).
  • Concept of the world and concept of knowledge. An epistemological study , Leipzig 1912 (Habil.).
  • The basic forms of scientific methods , Vienna 1925. Online archive
  • The foundations of a scientific theory of values , Vienna 1937. The second (improved and expanded) version was published in Vienna in 1951.
  • On moral justification , in: Theoria 6, 1940.
  • Mathematics, Logic and Experience , Vienna 1947.
  • The Vienna Circle. The origin of neopositivism , Vienna 1950.
  • Introduction to philosophy. Philosophy, Weltanschauung and Science , Vienna 1950.
  • Epistemology , Vienna 1960.
  • Rational justification of morality , Vienna 1963.
  • The foundations of knowledge and morality , Berlin 1968.
  • Is a rational justification of social norms possible? in: Österr. Journal of Public Law 13, 1972.
  • The validity of norms . In: Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 5, 1974.
  • Popper and the Vienna Circle , in: Paul Arthur Schilpp (Ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Popper , Lasalle III, 1974.
  • The problem of universals , in: Bernulf Kanitscheider (Ed.): Festschrift for Gerhard Frey on his 60th birthday in 1976.

literature

  • Friedrich Kainz : Viktor Kraft [obituary]. In: Almanach for the year 1975 [of the Austrian Academy of Sciences] , Vienna 1976, pp. 519–557.
  • Jan Radler: Victor Kraft's constructive empiricism. A historical and philosophical investigation. Logos, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-8325-1243-8
  • Ernst Topitsch:  Kraft, Victor. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 654 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Wolfgang Schild: Knowledge and value with Viktor Kraft . In: Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie , Volume VI, 1973, pp. 208–241.
  • Ernst Topitsch (Ed.): Problems of the philosophy of science. Festschrift for Victor Kraft. Springer, Vienna 1960.
  • Friedrich Stadler : Studies on the Vienna Circle. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt (Main) 1997, ISBN 3-518-58207-0
  • Oliver Vollbrecht: Victor Kraft: rational justification of norms and logical empiricism: a philosophical study. Utz, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-8316-0344-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ NDB Victor Kraft
  2. ^ Heinrich Drimmel: From subversion to civil war , Vienna / Munich 1985, p. 338.
  3. ↑ Ernst Topitsch: Natural Law in the Change of the Century , in: Enlightenment and Criticism I / 1994.
  4. ↑ Gerhard Vollmer : Evolutionary Epistemology , 5th edition Stuttgart 1990, p. 34.
  5. ↑ Karl Raimund Popper, ed. Troels Eggers Hansen: The two basic problems of epistemology , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1979, p. 182.
personal data
SURNAME Kraft, Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Strength, Viktor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian science theorist, philosopher and state librarian general
DATE OF BIRTH 4th July 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 3rd January 1975
Place of death Vienna