Jules Henri Poincaré Analysis

Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) [Nancy, Caen, Paris]. A French representative of the most recent type of Positivism (that which includes pragmatic tendencies), Jules stated his position in such works as Science and Hypothesis (1902). Here his concern is with the philosophy of science, and his approach is that of the mathematician. He asserted that the postulates of science are the conventions determined by fitness with experience and by the demand for consistence. A priori truth is akin to mathematical induction. In the latter, if the truth of a formula in a given case implies its truth for an immediately succeeding case, then an infinite series of instances follow. Poincaré noted that this is an algebraic process and does not apply in

The latter, Croce asserted, has two fundamental modes – the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical is either intuitive or intellectual; the intuitive gives the content of knowledge, the intellectual gives the arrangement. Intuition is a general process creating the content of imagination and feeling as well as the data of knowledge, it is immediate expression and is the pre-eminent faculty of the artist and poet. According to this philosopher, their intuitions are more vivid, and they have more skill than average persons in expressing them. Concepts generalise the content of intuitions. Real concepts, like quantity, existence, beauty, are present in all experience. He considered that mathematics and the sciences develop pseudo-concepts, mental fictions, which are not valid in reference to reality as a whole, but only in the special areas for which they are generated. Croce insisted that practical consciousness has to do with action. It is dependent upon the theoretical: we must know in order to act. Practical consciousness takes two essential forms – economics and ethics. The former centres in individual advantage; the latter in social ends. The latter depends upon the former, and there can be no moral activity without economic action, though the reverse may be true; thus they are closely related to each

Moore (1873- ) [Cambridge]. An outstanding representative of realism in England, Moore regarded the function of philosophy as the analysis of common sense, not its destruction. This analysis should apply to the knowledge of things and of other persons. Moore contends that nature is non-mental and is directly known in perception. The knowledge process does not effect any change in the object. In refuting idealism he noted a distinction between the act of sensing an object and the object itself. According to his theory, the awareness of whiteness is not itself white. The whiteness is objective, the awareness subjective. Mental activity is Diaphanous, referring to the objective which is presented through sensation. Relations are external not internal, as idealism has held. Moore’s Princpia Ethica was published in 1903; in his ethical theory he regarded the good as “indefinable” and something immediate, to be grasped by a direct intuition, not by