Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist:
Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a priori: what is a priori to an individual organism was a posteriori to its ancestors; not only does the a priori pre-form experience, but the a priori is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the a priori to explain how knowledge is possible, Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how an a priori is possible. One more patch of philosophy, it was thought, yielded to science.
I had thought the originator of that view was Konrad Lorenz, in his Russian manuscript. Anyway, a new article by Paul Pojman. It looks very comprehensive, as articles in the increasingly diverse online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy usually are.
Pojman, Paul, "Ernst Mach", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2008/entries/ernst-mach/>.
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Nice coincidence:
> Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how
> an a priori is possible
You posted that just 10 minutes after I'd written some lecture notes on the topic. I didn't know it was due to Mach ... fortunately, what I wrote was general enough that my ignorance didn't matter. (I attributed it to the logical positivists in general, and I DID say that a lot of their views were due to Mach.)
Thanks for the interesting link. I too didn't know that Mach was an early evolutionary epistemologist. I found a nice paper by the Hungarian philosopher Caba Pléh in which he nicely traces genealogy of some ideas of evolutionary epistemology from Ernst Mach to Dan Dennett.
It appears that Ernst Mach's train of thought influenced the German psychologist Karl Bühler (who's mostly famous for his Organon-Model of Language). Bühler in turn was a teacher to both Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper, who were inspired by his ideas in different ways. Popper, and in a weaker, indirect sense, Lorenz then influenced Dan Dennetts evolutionary reasoning about stances and Popperian creatures.
http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/csaba/English/Publications/History%20and%20the…
http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/csaba/English/index_angol.htm
The site seems to be down at the moment, though