Presentazione

Throughout all its stages – from its origins in the works of Comte, John Stuart Mill and Spencer, through the empiriocriticism of Avenarius and Mach, to the logical empiricism of the Vienna and Berlin Circles – European positivism exhibits an explicit anti-metaphysical attitude, which involves the rejection of any process of inquiry that goes beyond experience or that yields assertions unverifiable by means of experience alone. The positivist critique is a critique of traditional philosophical thinking, insofar as such thinking can be identified with the history of metaphysics. So positivism presents itself as an anti-philosophical movement, or rather as a cultural trend that, in Husserl’s words, “decapitates philosophy” and so implicitly marks its end. The aim of this special issue is to outline the scope and limits of the anti-metaphysical attitude of European positivism, and, more specifically, to assess whether and to what extent such attitude is grounded on further – and perhaps hidden – metaphysical assumptions. Themes of contributors are the various senses of “metaphysics” that are relevant to the positivist critique; the diverse theoretical positions endorsed by positivist thinkers in their attack on metaphysics (linguistic criticism, realism, monism, empiricism, physicalism, phenomenalism, biologism, naturalism, etc.); and the relations between theleogical-structural and phenomenological-observative aspects of experience positivistically conceived, at the level of both scientific and ordinary experience.