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The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series

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Taking up again the tradition of the Friesian School, this is a non-peer-reviewed electronic journal and archive of philosophy, inaugurated on line July 6, 1996, four years before the end of the 20th Century, just as the brilliant, courageous, prolific, and little appreciated German philosopher [image: nelson.jpg]Leonard Nelson (1882-1927) started his Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule, Neue Folge, attempting a "Reformation of Philosophy," four years after the beginning of the 20th Century.
The essays at this site, addressing many philosophical, historical, scientific, religious, economic, legal, and political issues, range from the fully annotated and technical to more informal and discursive discussions, often originally written for undergraduate classes. Many items therefore should be intelligible to those not familiar with all the arcana of academic philosophy, or with academic philosophy at all. This is done deliberately, since the trend, by which philosophy has obscured and esotericized itself and mostly dropped out of popular and literate culture, should be resisted. Work of a similar range, with the appropriate philosophical orientation and grounding, is acceptable and desired.
Submissions will be considered that relate to the persons, issues, and history illustrated in the following statements, biographical sketches, and editorial essays. Treatments of issues that do not involve the Friesians or other philosophers mentioned below directly are sought if they parallel or supplement Kantian or Friesian doctrine, from metaphysics to political economy, or throw light on the history of philosophy in ways at least consistent with Friesian principles. Exemplary and supplementary works from recent philosophy may be found under Reviews. Contributions that do address the Friesians, etc., need not conform to the direction of interpretation that is editorially preferred.
Although now with several contributed works, the number of submissions to the journal remains thin, often inappropriate, and all but never from academic philosophers or graduate students. The website thus may seem largely like the personal project of the editor. That will remain the case as long as interest in the Friesian School is minimal, as it is now (at least outside of Germany), and as long as the tendency of contemporary philosophy is to illiberal and irrationalist nihilism, as detailed below. It must fall upon someone to maintain the tradition, however long it takes until interest will sustain itself. Much of the content of the site, which has accumulated more than 90 megabytes of material, including graphics, is therefore editorial.
The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series, employing the new medium of the World Wide Web, already [image: horzawar.gif] linked from numerous sites and indices around the world, receiving up to 2,504,524 hits and 153,114 page views from 63,114 unique users a week, rather than becoming another dusty, obscure presence on library shelves, avoids the costs and complications of publishing, binding, mailing, and subscriptions, and establishes a Friesian presence in a way that is immediately accessible to potentially every computer on earth, from California to Australia, Taiwan, Korea, China, Greece, Romania, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Iceland, Brazil, Croatia, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, and more, an opportunity for the curious, for those concerned with the sterility, obscurantism, and tendentiousness of recent philosophy, and for those dedicated to Leonard Nelson's own project of Socratic Philosophy.

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Home Page last updated 25 June 2008, Solar Term[image: terms10b.gif], "Summer Solstice"

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The Project of the Friesian School

The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series seeks to promote the further development of the Critical Philosophy of [image: kant.jpg]Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in the direction indicated by Sir Karl Popper's remark in The Open Society and Its Enemies that "serious men," such as Arthur Schopenhauer [image: arthur.jpg] (1788-1860) and Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843)[image: fries.gif] (shown at right), did not at first take seriously the "senseless and maddening webs of words," as Schopenhauer put it, of G.W.F. Hegel.
The Kantian sense of "Critical," it should be noted, is unrelated to recent uses of the term in "critical" literary theory, "critical legal theory," "critical race theory," or even in "multicultural" textbook treatments of "critical thinking," in all of which the word is usually a dissimulating substitute for "Marxist" -- where all analysis is about "power" and class relationships, is contemptuous of "bourgeois" values and freedoms, including freedom of speech, and where the "voices" of other cultures are always coincidentally about oppression by capitalism and/or globalization. Considering the millions murdered, tortured, enslaved, and impoverished by Marxists in the 20th Century, one would have to consider continued true believers among the most uncritical people, let alone the most naive or dishonest, in intellectual history -- a description that is sadly all too applicable to much academic culture in the United States, where Marxist doctrine and Leninist behavior are alive and well. These recent uses of "critical," meaning the dogmatic application of ideology rather than any genuinely critical attitude, are thus oxymoronic examples of Orwellian "double think," just as when terms like "people's republic" and "democratic republic" were used to mean, not popular sovereignty and responsible government, but totalitarian statism and dictatorship. Now, combinations of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others, as developed by Sartre, Marcuse, Foucault, Derrida, etc., is promoted under the term "Theory," and scholarly work that doesn't invoke the canon and its jargon is dismissed as "under-theorized." Thus, a miserable and largely exploded fragment of 20th Century philosophy comes to be accepted, mainly outside of philosophy, as the equivalent of essential and unproblematic method and truth. Since this preserves a small flame from the moral, political, and economic debacle of Marxism, it is a nice irony that one of the signers of Karl Marx's own doctoral dissertation on Democritus was none other than Jakob Fries.
Philosophy and her neglected customer, humanity, truly stand in need of alternative philosophical ideas and approaches. In the Twentieth Century, philosophy was like a confused and clumsy person who repeatedly tries to commit suicide, but keeps failing, though with the addition of debilitating damage at each attempt. In a classic sophistic dilemma of false alternatives, respected academic philosophy often seemed to have offered only two choices:
•First, the sterility and agnosticism of positivistic, scientistic, and merely analytic schools, characteristically, if not always originally, Anglo-American, which have frequently denied the possibility of knowledge in metaphysical or ethical matters, and sometimes the possibility of constructive philosophical knowledge at all, with, according to Karl Popper, a "concentration upon minutiae (upon 'puzzles') and especially upon the meanings of words; in brief .... scholasticism." As Allan Bloom said, "Professors of these schools [i.e. positivism and ordinary language analysis] simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." Students and the intellectually curious looking for some concern, any concern, about the truths of being and value, the content of wisdom, or some humane purpose, found instead what has aptly been called a "valley of bones." Although continuing analytic philosophy sometimes appears as a small island of some sanity in a sea of increasing nonsense, as with John Searle, it retains almost all of its sterility, futility, and what could even be called autism. The Proceedings still receives e-mail from people passionately advocating so miserable, impoverished, and incoherent a theory as Logical Positivism.
•Second, the nihilism, relativism, pseudo-science, and frequent political authoritarianism and dogmatism of the originally Continental alternatives:  Existentialism, Marxism, deconstruction, and now "post-modernism." Deconstruction, Bloom said, "is the last, predictable, stage in the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy." The truly last stage, however, is the "post-modern" combination of Anglo-American sterility with the higher irrationalism of a politicized deconstruction, the kind of thing we find in Richard Rorty's denial of philosophical, moral, or even scientific knowledge but affirmation of trendy leftist "solidarity." This combination represents, as Bloom perceived, the appalling, terrifying, and tragically ironic adaptation of the philosophical foundations of Fascism, from people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who both despised mere liberalism, to supposedly progressive political causes, replacing the Classical Liberal principles, now widely scorned by both left and right, of the Enlightenment foundations of liberal, free market democracy. Hence, one need hardly ask why students and scholars are more frequently directed to study the authoritarian Thomas Hobbes, a defender of political absolutism and judicial positivism, rather than the libertarian John Locke, one of the inspirations of the American Revolution, as he had been the apologist of the English Glorious Revolution (1688). Indeed, Locke is so widely ignored, that leftists often think of Hobbes as some kind of representative of liberalism and criticize the individualism of his "state of nature"! -- even while breathing deep of his statism and authoritarianism. [note] Western academics and intellectuals have truly and heartily taken up the cause of totalitarianism, fallen from the dead hands of fascism and communism, with the same goals, through the same methods, namely, laws about speech, thought crimes, disarmament of civilians, political control of private property and private relationships, denigration of religion, political propaganda through state schools, the militarization of police, the destruction of the rule of law through discretionary powers given to executive officials and bureaucrats, the subversion of trial by jury, etc. etc. There are also new twists, like the distortion of civil rights law into a means of abolishing civil rights. Although Anglo-American philosophy tended to worship at the feet of science, the drift of academia to the left has led to characteristically totalitarian political attacks on science itself. The "post-modern" move may even be called the "post-Copernican" move, where the "de-centering" of meaning and objectivity (giving new meaning to the word "obscurantism"), returns the "marginalized" literary critic or theorist to the Ptolemaic center of the universe, whence modern science, now demystified and unmasked as an instrument of Euro-centric oppression, had proudly thought to have dislodged an arrogant humanity. Where the arrogance has settled now is all too plain to those familiar with American academic life.
The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series takes the editorial view that Schopenhauer and Fries represent the most critical, fruitful, and faithful response to Kant and that Schopenhauer, Fries, Nelson, and all those who have used or been strongly influenced by Critical Kantian and Friesian ideas represent an avenue of development from Kant that provides an alternative philosophical tradition, rational, positive, and Classically Liberal, right through the Twentieth Century and to the present. This journal, therefore, editorially subscribes to certain Principles of Friesian Philosophy, expressed both in summary statements and in editorial essays. [note] Work in their spirit must be encouraged and a forum provided for it, when and if it develops. Such is the project here. Since The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series is not a peer-review journal, and is seeking specific and rare kinds of work, it has not attracted a large number of submissions over its eleven and a half year (1996-2008) life. But neither has it attracted submissions that were written mainly or merely for credit towards academic tenure. Although philosophy journals reject90%...