Positivism in the northern peripheries
generations of positivist philosophers in sweden and its neighboring countries
pp. 295-320
in: Johannes Feichtinger, Franz Fillafer, Jan Surman (eds), The worlds of positivism, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
Philosophical ideas do not travel in sealed containers, they are translated and even redescribed when introduced to a new context. This chapter examines the ways in which the pioneers of logical positivism in the Nordic countries navigated between international philosophical trends and domestic traditions in the 1930s and 1940s. Some tried to present logical empiricism as a development of the ideas of the local representatives of nineteenth-century positivism (e.g. Harald Høffding and Edward Westermarck), others found it more convenient to distance themselves from the previous generation. In Sweden, logical positivism had few advocates until a younger generation of philosophers succeeded in redescribing a local philosophical tradition, Uppsala philosophy, as a parallel movement to logical empiricism, thus furnishing post-war analytic philosophy with domestic Swedish roots.
