Born today

Maybe it would be interesting to devote my blogs this year to philosophers who have been born on the day that I publish my blogs. It would be an interesting theme, but I think that soon it would become boring, not only for you but also for me. Soon, you would think: Again a biography of a philosopher? And you would stop reading them. For me, soon writing a blog would no longer be challenging. If I wouldn’t know the philosopher I wanted to write about, writing a blog would be not more than copying some biographical stuff from the Wikipedia and other relevant websites. Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to do so now and then and to draw your attention to known and less known thinkers. So, for this blog, I googled “philosopher 8 January” and this is what I found:
- Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694)
- Taixu (1890-1947)
- Sterling Power Lamprecht (1890-1973)
- Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-1997)
- Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968)
Taixu, a Chinese Buddhist philosopher, and Sterling Power Lamprecht, an American philosopher, were completely unknown to me, and I’ll ignore them here. As for, Pufendorf and Hyppolite, at least I knew their names. Pufendorf was an influential German political thinker and a precursor of the Enlightenment in Germany. The French philosopher Hyppolite was a follower of Hegel and he has also written about Marx. His works have been quite influential in his time. When teaching at the Sorbonne University, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault were among his students. However, most interesting for me is Hempel, who had a big influence on my philosophical thinking, but then just because I didn’t agree with him. When I studied sociology at the Utrecht University, Hempel had many followers. Discussing about philosophical, especially methodological, themes most of the time involved for me defending why I did not agree with him. One of the most important views of Hempel was that the basis of explanation of facts in all sciences was the so-called “covering law model”, while I thought (with others) and still think that often this model doesn’t work in the social sciences and the other human sciences. An alternative approach of social facts is the method of understanding (with a German word also called Verstehen). Influenced by the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel and especially Georg Henrik von Wright, later, in my PhD thesis, I developed a methodological foundation of this method of understanding, which to my mind had insufficiently been done till then.
But I don’t want to write about myself but about Hempel. Although on many points I don’t agree with his ideas, they are interesting, anyway. Hempel (a German born philosopher who in 1939 moved to the USA and stayed there for the rest of his life) belonged in the early 1930s to the Berlin Circle of logical positivists, a group associated with the famous Vienna Circle, which held that empirical verification and mathematics were the basis of all sciences and that there was there no place for subjectivity (a view that could not be maintained, in the end). Statements that could not be verified in some way were considered meaningless. The most important contribution of Hempel to the debate how to verify facts was the covering law model, also called deductive-nomological model or Hempel-Oppenheim model (since Hempel developed the model in cooperation with Paul Oppenheim). Basically this model says that a given phenomenon is explained by deducing its description from a law or general statement like “All A are B” or “If A is the case then B happens” plus a description of the particular circumstances in which the phenomenon in question occurs. Although actually the covering law model was not new, just Hempel’s clear formulation and his idea that it applied to all sciences, including the social sciences and history, plus his fierce defence of the model made him famous.
Although formulating the covering law model is one of Hempel’s most important contributions to philosophy, it is certainly not his only contribution. Alone and with Oppenheim he wrote books and articles on mathematics and logic. In one of my blogs I paid already attention to his Raven Paradox. All this made that Hempel left a clear mark on the development of philosophy. Although today, many ideas developed by him and by other logical positivists are considered outdated, including the covering law model, nevertheless, the 8th of January is a date to remember in the history of philosophy.