Philosophische Schriften

Ehrenfels’ first contribution to philosophy and psychology, published in 1886 and here reprinted, takes as its starting point the ideas of Paul Du Bois-Reymond. It deals with questions that Ehrenfels was to raise again thirty years later in the far-reaching work Cosmogony, which forms centre-piece of the present volume. He himself regarded this book as his Hauptwerk, the result of a life-time devoted to philosophical inquiry, in which metaphysical problems in particular had always claimed his attention. The aim of the Cosmogony, he wrote, “is to justify before the forum of reason a hypothesis about the origin of the world”. The aim is no less than to provide the metaphysical foundations of a new religious Weltanschauung rooted in scientific knowledge. Ehrenfels attempts to show how the origin and structure of the world can be understood as a result of the interplay of two fundamental principles - chaos, on the one hand, and Gestaltung or the production of Gestalten on the other. In addition to this attempt to develop a philosophy of religion, based Ehrenfels’ own early and influential work on the theory of Gestalt, the Cosmogony also contains remarkable contributions to the logical and ontological interpretations of probabilistic inference and causal explanation. The volume is introduced by R. M. Chisholm and contain updated bibliography as well as a table of content complete four volume edition. Of interest to: Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, theologians, sociologists, historians of ideas