BOLZANO,BERNARD AND GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

The work of the Prague-based philosopher Bernard Bolzano gave rise to a very significant European cultural phenomenon which is generally referred to as the Austrian philosophical tradition. A fundamental feature of this tradition is its critical opposition to the philosophy of the other German-speaking countries, and to German classical philosophy in particular. In Bolzano's writings, the debate between the Austrian and the German philosophical traditions (that is with Kantian transcendental subjectivism and its implications) became a revival of the celebrated polemic between Socrates and Plato on the one hand and the sophists on the other. From Bolzano's enlightenment standpoint, Kant's immanent conception of truth as a conformity between individual thought and the universally human structure of the functioning of subjective energies was particularly unacceptable as it implies that the knowledge of truth does not offer the possibility of moral and religious transcendence. For Bolzano the only alternative to such subjective relativism was the recognition that the sphere of truth is the timeless empire of truth itself, which is not dependent on either subjective processes or objective events. The investigation of forms of saying (particularly the development of methods of variation of ideas influenced by Leibniz's combinatorial analysis) in the scope of the conception of truth in itself, led Bolzano to the theory of sentences and ideas in themselves. These, like the timeless ideal objects of our thought, provide an ontological foundation for the absolute autonomy of formal logic. The real meaning of this theory is revealed in the context of Bolzano's debate with German classical philosophy, which subordinates formal logic to common principles actively based on ontology. Instead of Kantian intuition, Bolzano supported the strictly conceptual character of mathematics, and this places him among the leaders in the attempt to emancipate it from all extraneous (metaphysical and especially objective) elements which disrupt the inner logical coherency of its structure.