Empirismus versus Rationalismus?: Kritik eines philosophie-historischen Schemas.

Pozzo, Riccardo ; GUNN, ALBERT E.

ENGFER, Hans-Jurgen. Empirismus versus Rationalismus?: Kritik eines philosophie-historischen Schemas. Paderborn: Schoningh, 1996. 461 pp. Cloth, DM 68.00--This volume is dedicated to two philosophico-historical categories, whose origin dates back to Bacon's famous ,simile of the ants, the spiders, and the bees (see Novum Organum I, c. 95), and which are widely diffused as a consequence of Hegel's reconstruction of the history of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel began his; exposition of philosophy in the modern age with Bacon's empiricism and Descartes's rationalism and he has been followed in this by virtually all historians of philosophy to the present day. Engfer, however, mentions Hegel only when he comes to discuss the position of Bacon (p. 33).

Let us consider the question mark Engfer has placed after "empiricism against rationalism" in the title of his book. Engfer points out that the pair of concepts empiricism and rationalism constitutes a "scheme," a "scheme" needing criticism, according to Engfer. As a matter of fact, Nietzsche, in section 6 of Vom Nutzen und Nachteile der Geschichte, also implied that coherent wholes bearing on historical objects only exist in somebody's imagination. Categories like empiricism and rationalism rarely do justice to a philosopher's position. The authors Engfer deals with before Kant, namely Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Wolff, even Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, have indeed presented many aspects that contradict their subsumption under one or the other side of this dichotomy. The same holds for Gassendi and Thomasius, who have been considered as mediating between the two positions. An exclusive disjunction like either empiricist or rationalist does not hold. Quite correctly, Engfer remarks that the sources of Bacon's simile refer to the Aristotelian tradition, insofar as Aristotle was the first to distinguish between experience and science (p. 22). Coming to Kant, Engfer makes clear why he has talked of a scheme: Kant himself distinguished between a "historical or empirical" history of philosophy and a "philosophical" history of philosophy. While the former borrows its facts from the historical narrative, the latter rather aims at sketching, on the basis of systematic reflections, "an a priori scheme for the history of philosophy" (p. 432; see Fortschritte der Metaphysik, in Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 20, pp. 340-3). One cannot fail to notice, however, that in the passage quoted by Engfer, Kant is not dealing with empiricism and rationalism as categories for interpreting previous philosophical positions. He is dealing with the problem of how to write history of philosophy in general.

Some integrations may be opportune. The proper context for this Kantian passage can be found in the Anweisungen, wie die Philosophie, Philologie und diejenigen Wissenschaften, worin die philosophische Facultat den Unterricht giebt, that is, in the course guide promulgated for the University of Konigsberg in 1770 (reprinted in Michael Oberhausen and Riccardo Pozzo, eds., Vorlesungsverzeichnisse der Universitat Konigsberg 1720-1804 [Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1999] xxxii-xxxiv). This document shows that in Kant's time "Historia Philosophiae" was not considered a philosophical, but rather a historical course, to be taught during the fifth semester. Kant's problem was, therefore, how to provide a genuinely philosophical history of philosophy as opposed to mere doxography. Kant did not make clear, however, whether the pair of concepts empiricism and rationalism belongs to the latter or to the former.

The indexes at the end of Engfer's book are very helpful. The bibliography, however, reveals a complete ignorance of the studies by Giovanni Santinello (see first of all the volume dedicated to the second half of the eighteenth century of the Storia delle storie generali della filosofia, vols. 3.1-3.2, Giovanni Santinello, ed. [Padova: Antenore 1988]) and Giuseppe Micheli (see Kant storico della filosofia [Padova: Antenore, 1982]). This is regrettable, since Santinello and Micheli have given noteworthy interpretations of the philosophico-historical categories Engfer deals with--Riccardo Pozzo, The Catholic University of America.