The epistemology of Ernst Laas’ Idealism and Positivism

Abstract

In this thesis, I challenge a prevalent misinterpretation within the historiography of German positivism regarding Ernst Laas’ empiricist epistemology. The prevailing post-World War II interpretation inaccurately portrays Laas as a proponent of subjectivism. Such a reading, however, not only obscures the original character of Laas’ thought but, more significantly, renders incoherent his philosophical project articulated in his three-volume <i>Idealism and Positivism: A Critical Examination</i>. Against the subjectivist reading, I argue Laas’ project in <i>Idealism and Positivism</i> is characterized by its aim to refute the objection that empiricalpositivist epistemology is a species of subjectivism. To prove this, I first demonstrate that Laas’ refutation of subjectivism above all hinges on his “correlativism,” the epistemological theory Laas proposed to secure the objectivity of scientific knowledge against idealist and subjectivist critiques. However, despite the fact correlativism was the foremost epistemological idea in earlier Laas scholarship, it has been largely overlooked in contemporary accounts of Laas’ positivism. Consequently, I also make the case to revive the pre-World War II correlativist interpretation, showing that, if we are to begin to make sense of Laas’ positivism, then this requires understanding his anti-subjectivist program and the correlativist epistemology erected to support it. Beyond rectifying the philosophical-historical account of Laas’ positivism, returning to the correlativist interpretation offers a more precise grasp of the specific intellectual battleground within German philosophy of the 1870s to the 1890s, where the very possibility of objective knowledge for empiricist epistemology was contested in the dispute between the transcendental and the psychogenetic methods.