Philosophers reading (and being read in) WWI lit

Here's another philosopher who was a soldier in WWI: Etienne Gilson, who was taken prisoner early in the Battle of Verdun (in February, 1916). Earlier, while on leave from the front, Gilson managed to put together a journal publication.

It's interesting to see how many veterans were critical of the war memoirs and novels that started appearing in the 1920s (esp. in 1929). I've noted Luce's public criticism in a Belfast sermon, which seems to have been aimed chiefly at Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That. Graves' book also drew the ire of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, who meticulously documented the book's inaccuracies in Sassoon's copy of it. 

Wittgenstein was mildly critical of R. C. Sherriff's play Journey's End (1928). According to M. O'C. Drury, Wittgenstein read the play in 1936. Drury quotes Wittgenstein as follows:

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them. I couldn't understand the humour in Journey's End. But I wouldn't want to joke about a situation like that. (M. O'C. Drury, 'Conversations with Wittgenstein', Ch. VI in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981], p. 144)

An early WWI text (1919) was Arthur Graeme West's Diary of a Dead Officer. West was killed on the front in 1917. His diary was edited for publication by his friend, the pacifist and philosopher C. E. M. Joad. There are references to Bertrand Russell in West's Diary (pp. 50-57) . West had been reading Russell's 'A Free Man's Worship' and Justice in War Time. In West, one sees the full disenchantment that is dramatized in many WWI books -- initially a religious patriot who wanted to serve King and country, West became an atheist and seemed on the point of refusing to fight any longer when he was killed by a sniper.

'Scientism' 5 - Vienna Circle and Thomists (cold war)

Fifth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Already in 1951 we find a Vienna Circle positivist (and physicist-philosopher) reacting against claims about 'scientism'. Philipp Frank wrote:

All of these groups have attempted to limit science to the collection of material and to enforce a 'philosophical interpretation' which supports the 'way of life' which they regard as a 'good' one. For this reason, they will insist upon an autonomous philosophy that will provide decisions where science, in the narrower sense, has reached a stalemate. Organizations like the Roman Church or the Third Reich in Germany [yes, he just did that] have denounced in the strongest possible terms the claims of 'active positivism' or, as Maritain puts it, of 'scientism' to discuss the high-level generalizations of science in scientific terms. We find the same attitude toward 'active positivism' in the announcements of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. They require positively a philosophy which is to control scientific work. (Frank, 'The Logical and Sociological Aspects of Science', Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 80 [1951]: at 28-29)

In his Ransoming the Time (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941), Jacques Maritain had written about 'the pseudo-metaphysics of scientism' (p. 54). Maritain had been condemning scientism in his French works as far back as 1910 (in 'La science moderne et la raison', Revue de philosophie) though I don't think he used the term 'scientisme' that early. According to James Schmidt, Maritain used 'scientisme' in books published in 1927 and 1936.

Étienne Gilson's Elements of Christian Philosophy (Doubleday, 1960) has a section titled 'Materialistic Scientism', a view that, he says, is exemplified by Marxism (p. 94).

Update (Dec. 21): Frank's rhetorical strategy is interesting. Against the Cold War tendency to place scientism in the same camp as Marxism, Frank places scientism (or active positivism) in opposition to this ideology as well as to traditionalist and far right outlooks. His reply is similar to that of Seymour Martin Lipset (quoted by Tommi Uschanov in a comment on my 4th post in this series). It's also interesting that Frank doesn't actually speak in terms of ideologies; instead, he confines himself to claims about the observed behaviour of identified 'groups' and 'organizations'.