La metafisica del positivismo

Throughout its many stages – from its origins in the works of Comte, Mill and Spencer, through the empirio-criticism of Avenarius and Mach, to the logical empiricism of the Vienna and Berlin Circles – Positivism betrays an explicitly anti-metaphysical attitude, which involves the rejection of any process of inquiry which goes beyond experience or yields assertions that cannot be verified by means of experience alone. Positivism offers a critique of traditional philosophical thinking, insofar as such thinking can be identified with the history of metaphysics. Positivism, therefore, presents itself as an anti-philosophical movement, or rather as a cultural trend that, in Husserl's words, «decapitates philosophy» and so implicitly marks its end. The aim of this collected volume is to outline the scope and limits of the anti-metaphysical attitude of Positivism, and, more specifically, to assess whether and to what extent such an attitude is grounded on further (perhaps hidden) metaphysical assumptions.