William Warren Bartley

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William Warren Bartley (born October 2, 1934 in Pittsburgh , Philadelphia, † February 5, 1990 in Oakland , California) was an American philosopher .

Life

Bartley was originally a Christian and aspired to the priesthood but turned away from the faith. He studied with Willard Van Orman Quine and did his doctorate on his own initiative with Karl Popper , contrary to the advice of those around him. Despite a very good relationship at the beginning, they separated in a dispute in 1965. In 1972 Bartley took part in the controversial Erhard Seminar Training and was subsequently active on its advisory board. He also wrote the official biography of the founder Werner Erhard . In 1974 he got in touch with Popper again. The relationship relaxed, but both could no longer reach agreement: After Bartley's death, Popper distanced himself from Bartley's views in the introduction to his myth of the framework without naming his; on a spontaneous speech received as an audio document at a meeting, he did it more clearly and with explicit reference. Bartley died before he could finish a biography of Popper.

He taught as a professor at the University of Hayward, California ( California State University, East Bay ), most recently he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution . There he collected and cataloged Popper's works. He was the editor of Popper's three-volume "Afterword" on the logic of research ( The open universe , the quantum theory and the schism of physics , realism and the goal of science ). He planned to publish Hayek's collected works, but died after completing one volume ( The fatal conceit ). From this volume, however, it is now strongly suspected that it arose largely or even completely from Bartley's own pen and is therefore not in reality a work by Hayek that Bartley had merely published, but rather a work of his own, which he renamed to Hayek, who was seriously ill and possibly no longer involved at this time, published.

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In his main work Escape into Engagement, Bartley criticized Popper's Christianity and Critical Rationalism for demanding that their followers adopt a moral creed as a basis ("Jesus Christ is Lord" on the one hand, Popper's admission of an "irrational belief in reason " in The Open Society and Its Enemies on the other hand). He countered this with the conception of Pan-Critical Rationalism , in which he replaced the belief base with what he considered to be self-sufficient assertion that all assertions can be criticized, including this assertion itself.

“I therefore argue that the constant crisis of integrity that rationalists regularly encounter, or are forced into, is caused by a neglected identity crisis in the rationalist tradition. It is neglected in part because philosophers generally fail to seek the development of a theory of rationality as much as that of an epistemology. Because of these crises, the valuable factotum in the irrationalist's house - the tu quoque argument - is the corpse in the rationalist's basement. Rationalists are overly indebted to a concept of rationality or a rationalistic identity that is impossible to attain, and the inevitable disappointment in their efforts to meet that excessive obligation prevents them from attaining integrity. At the same time, this inability of the rationalist tradition to solve its identity crisis enables many irrationalists, regardless of their ties, to preserve their own identity without a loss of integrity. "( Flucht ins Engagement , p. 90)

He replaced the morally based argumentation of Christianity and Popper with an economy of knowledge.

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Wikiquote: William Warren Bartley  - Quotes
personal data
SURNAME Bartley, William Warren
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh , Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH 5th February 1990
Place of death Oakland , California