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Logical empiricists are not the first to make this proposal. It was
made explicitly oy Bertrand Russell, and it has been implicit in much
of empiricist philosophy since the eighteenth century. Empiricism, es–
pecially the British and American, has set for itself mainly methodo–
logical tasks. It has considered the problems of philosophy to be
analytical and critical, directed to the discovery of methods and limi–
tations of knowledge.
The separation of empirical and philosophical inquiry has been
already effected in large measure by the historical growth of science.
As is well known, philosophy was the matrix out of which, in the
course of time, the several sciences have crystallized. The logical em–
piricist program is the extension of this historical process to the point
where
oft
statements with empirical content are relegated to the
empirical sciences.
If
all study of empirical subject matter is preempted by the va–
rious empirical sciences, philosophy can raise only non-empirical
problems. With respect to any special science (that is, any empirical
inquiry) philosophy may concern itself with 1) non-empirical in–
vestigations of the subject matter of empirical science, or with 2)
non-empirical studies of scientific inquiry itself. In the first case, the
investigation presupposes that it is possible to have
a priori
knowledge
of the empirical world or of a transcendent reality. It has been shown,
however, that
a priori
propositions are tautologies, and that state–
ments descriptive of "transcendent reality" are purely fictive. In the
second case philosophy obviously cannot study scientific inquiry with
respect to its history, its economic or sociological aspects, or with re–
spect to the psychology of the scientist, since all these studies are em–
pirical and are properly the tasks of history, economics, sociology,
and psychology. There remains, therefore, only one type of inquiry
of science which philosophy may undertake on this program, namely,
the logical analysis of science.
Similar considerations apply to theories of criticism insofar
as such theories are distinguished from the criticism itself. A philoso–
phy of literary criticism must either assume that it is capable of dis–
covering transcendent qualities of literature, or it will have to restrict
itself to the discovery and analysis of formal or logical principles of
literary criticism. In the former case it becomes a metaphysics of
literary art such as that expressed in some passages of Plato's Phae–
drus. In the latter case it is directed towards the explicit rendering of
the basic presuppositions of some literary criticism and the formal
relations between these postulates a\ d the critical judgments or ana–
lyses of some literary work.
