Eino Kaila

Works

• 1930Logistic Neopositivism: A Critical Study

  A study of Carnap’s “The Logical Structure of the World” (1928) that accepts the programme of a scientific philosophy but disputes that all concepts of science can be constructed from elementary experiences.

Position

Kaila is on the map as the founder of the analytic tradition in Finnish philosophy and a critical partner of logical empiricism. He shared the Vienna Circle’s aim of a scientific philosophy, but in “Logistic Neopositivism” (1930) he argued against Carnap’s “Logical Structure of the World” that the concepts of science cannot all be constructed from elementary experiences. In later work he gave testability a central place: meaningful statements must be connected with possible observations, but in physics this connection runs through complex systems of laws. Knowledge, from perception to physical theory, he described as a search for invariances – relations that remain constant through change. He saw reality as built in levels, physical, biological and psychological, each with its own lawlike structure, and in his last work he looked for a unified concept of nature in what he called terminal causality. Through his teaching he formed a generation of Finnish philosophers, among them Georg Henrik von Wright, and so prepared the strong position of logic and philosophy of science in Finland. Selected essays appeared in English as “Reality and Experience” (1979).

Life & context

Eino Kaila was born on 9 August 1890 in Alajärvi, the son of a clergyman who later became archbishop of Finland. He studied philosophy and psychology in Helsinki and took his doctorate there. From 1921 to 1930 he was professor of philosophy at the new Finnish-language University of Turku, and from 1930 to 1948 professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. In the late 1920s he visited the Vienna Circle and remained in contact with Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, while publishing critical studies of their positions. He wrote on Gestalt psychology and the psychology of personality and contributed to the reception of modern physics in Finland. In 1948 he became a member of the Academy of Finland. He died in Helsinki on 1 August 1958.

Further main works

• Der logistische Neupositivismus. Eine kritische Studie (1930)
• Persoonallisuus (1934)
• Über das System der Wirklichkeitsbegriffe (1936)
• Inhimillinen tieto (1939)
• Terminalkausalität als die Grundlage eines unitarischen Naturbegriffs (1956)
• Reality and Experience: Four Philosophical Essays (1979)