Summary Of Richard Avenarius's Critique Of Pure Experience

Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) [ Paris, Zürich]. Richard is noted for his theory of experience, which he expounded in Critique of Pure Experience (1888-1890). He claimed that the fundamental necessity of human thought is biological economy. He valued Spinoza because of his reduction of all ideas to a single one. Avenarius was aware that problems arise in experience when there is a state of tension between individual and environment, calling for a greater or lesser expenditure of energy than the individual is ready to give. When stimulus and energy on hand are equivalent, the individual feels at home. This philosopher also stated that the enlargement of experience produces new problems. Each problem disappears when adjustment has been achieved. Adjustment may be purely individual, but it must be free from subjectivity to be a real solution. The point of view of pure experience is reached in quantitative description. Avenarius was anxious to formulate a symbolic language for philosophy like that of mathematics. Edward Caird (1835-1908) [Greenock, Oxford, Glasgow]. He was a pillar of the neo-Hegelian movement in Britain, Eddy contributed to

Durkheim maintained a theory of a collective consciousness, distinguishable from the individual and having characteristics of its own, in general more coercive than those of the individual and within which the individual develops. The group, a unity within which division of labour occurs increasingly, maintains itself through customs, duties, and accepted conventions. Herein lie social values and moral ideas. Durkheim noted that community minds differ from one another; hence there are different moral standards. In time, these change. He explained that conceptions of truth are also primarily determined by the community, as are goodness and beauty. There are no absolute metaphysical or theological presuppositions. In 1893, Durkheim wrote a treatise On Division of Social