埃诺·凯拉

作品

• 1930逻辑新实证主义：一项批判性研究

  对卡尔纳普《世界的逻辑构造》（1928）的研究：它赞同建立科学哲学的纲领，但否认科学的一切概念都能由基本经验构造出来。

立场

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).

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• 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)