Reason Eclipsed
on Philosophical Schools That Eat Their Own
In Tübingen in 1961, the German Sociology Society hosted a debate between the preeminent defender of scientific positivism, Karl Popper, and a founding father of critical theory, Theodor Adorno. This event hallmarked what became known as the “positivist disputes.” For the scientific positivists, only the instrumental, cause-and-effect reasoning of the natural sciences could say anything true about the world. For the social theorists, it was the mental constructs of historically and socially shaped minds that constituted reality as such.
If there was one thing that both the Popperians and the Adornoites believed, it was that reason alone is magisterial, and that only through reason can human freedom and social harmony be won. Both parties not only assumed the basic falsehood—or, per Popper, the unfalsifiability—of religious claims about reality, but they equally presupposed the meaninglessness of metaphysics.
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Anthony Costello holds a BA in German from the University of Notre Dame, and two master’s degrees from the Talbot School of Theology/Biola University (MA Christian Apologetics, MA Theology). An Evangelical, he also served five and a half years in the U.S. Army, with one deployment to Afghanistan. He is the founder and president of the Kirkwood Center for Theology & Ethics (kirkwoodcenter.org).
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