Philosophy from an Empirical Standpoint

Denis Fisette and Riccardo Martinelli have put together the most comprehensive, ambitious, and engaging collection of essays on the philosophy of Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) to date. The volume is impressive in both scope and depth. It covers every single aspect of Stumpf's contribution to philosophy, including issues in the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and the theory of feelings (but not ethics, somewhat surprisingly). It draws on an extensive array of Stumpf's writings, both published and unpublished, and it even features a selection of archival materials, notably, the transcription of a lecture on metaphysics from the late 1880s and some correspondence between Stumpf and Brentano. Some might suspect that we should simply ‘catalogue [Stumpf's] work within the museum of academic curiosities from the turn of the 20th century’ (p. 229), as one of the contributors amusingly puts it. Fisette and Martinelli provide ample evidence that this would be a mistake.

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