Some events and quotes from early 1916

February 6: Jan Smuts (future Prime Minister of South Africa) accepts command of a British force, which includes African and Indian soldiers, that is to capture German East Africa. One of Alfred North Whitehead's sons, Thomas North Whitehead (later a professor at Harvard Business School), serves in the east Africa campaign.

February 12: From a letter by Arthur Graeme West:

I got a "Spenser" from T....., and am now travelling through "The Faerie Queen" with the chaste Britomart. Yes, by all means send me "Tom Jones": those long things I can manage very well here, when we are back from the hellish trenches, where I find it hard to read, though I can manage to write letters, more or less.....How bloody people seem to be in England about peace and peace meetings. I suppose they are getting rather Prussian in the country, but are all peace meetings always broken up by soldiers (who've probably never been here at all)? (West, Diary of a Dead Officer, p. 12)

February 23: Étienne Gilson is taken prisoner by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Indian troops at Kut Al Amara

Source of above image.

March 1: An excerpt from Abhi Le Baghdad by Sisir Sarbadhikari, who served with the British Indian forces that were trapped in the Siege of Kut Al Amara (about 100 miles south of Baghdad):

A bombardment started on the morning of March 1....A Gurkha was standing outside his tent, smoking, and the bomb fell near him. For a while there was only smoke and dust. When it cleared we saw only chunks of flesh and bone; the earth around there had turned into blood-soaked mud. (Sisir Sarbadhikari, Abhi Le Baghdad, trans. Amitav Ghosh [Calcutta, 1958], p. 80)

On April 27, three British intelligence agents, including Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), offered the Ottoman commanders a million pounds' worth of gold in exchange for release of the troops at Kut. The offer was refused. The British Indian forces surrendered to the Ottoman forces on April 29, 1916. At the time, it was the largest surrender of troops that the British had made.

March 1: Benito Mussolini promoted to rank of Corporal. From his recommendation:

For his exemplary activity, high Bersaglieresque spirit and calmness. Always first in every enterprise of work or daring. Heedless of discomforts, zealous and scrupulous in the carrying out of his duties.

March 2: Charles de Gaulle is wounded and captured by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Franz Marc, 'Dreaming Horse' - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

March 4: Artist Franz Marc is killed at the Battle of Verdun. 'In one day at Verdun...7,000 horses were killed by German and French shelling....In one of his last letters before his death, the German painter Franz Marc exclaimed: "The poor horses!"' Shortly after his death, Marc's 1914 paper ('Im Fegefeuer des Krieges') is published with the epigraph 'Im Anfang war die Tat'.

March 8: Edmund Husserl's son Wolfgang Husserl is killed at the Battle of Verdun. In a letter to Hugo Münsterberg, Husserl writes, 'In this conflict, they [young Germans] went to fight in a Fichtean spirit, considering it a holy war, and to offer themselves wholeheartedly in sacrifice to the homeland'. (trans. by me from a French translation of the original German in Marc de Launay's 'Professorenkriegsliteratur' Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 3 [2001]: 83-100 [at 96, n. 47])

March 17: Apollinaire receives a head wound from shrapnel, from which he never recovered. He died in 1918.

Apollinaire

 March 20: From Siegfried Sassoon's letter to Edward Dent:

On 18 March 1916 David Thomas was wounded in the jaw and died the same evening, aged 20: ‘an artery went, & he was choked,—drowned in his own blood....When the parson had finished (& the machine-guns kept making his words inaudible) a big thing fell about 150 yds away & burst with a final smash. And so my Tommy went away, happy and stainless.

-Shortly afterwards, Sassoon writes the poem 'Golgotha'.

March 23: Wittgenstein receives orders that transfer him to the eastern front; he takes with him a copy of the Brothers Karamazov. His diary entry for April 6 is 'Life is one'.

March 24: Spanish composer Enrique Granados Campiña is killed when his ship is sunk by a U-boat.

Late March: Eugene Bullard is seriously injured at the Battle of Verdun. Though American, he had joined the French forces. He was the first African-American military pilot, and he later worked as a club owner and as Louis Armstrong's French interpreter.

Christopher Eccleston reading Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est':


Also in March: Arthur Graham West writes a poem called 'Night Patrol'.

April 3: Ernst Toller suffers from shell-shock and is removed from the front at the Battle of Verdun. On April 29, at a hospital near Strasbourg, he is diagnosed as having suffered a complete nervous collapse and is removed from active service. (F. S. L. Schouten, Ernst Toller: an intellectual youth biography, 1893-1918, Ph.D. dissertation, 2007, pp. 108-110)

April 10: After meeting with David Lloyd-George (then Minister of Munitions), Bertrand Russell writes (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell) that Lloyd-George 'was very unsatisfactory & I think only wanted to exercise his skill in trying to start a process of bargaining.' On April 25, Russell reports to Morrell that

I got the impression that Ll. George expects the war to go on for a long time yet; also that he thinks the whole situation very black. He seemed quite heartless. 

Lloyd George had invited Russell and other members of the No-Conscription Fellowship to meet and discuss the situation of conscientious objectors, some of whom were in a legal position no different from that of deserters (who could be shot).

April 22: Siegfried Sassoon writes a poem called 'Stand-to: Good-Friday morning'.

April 24-30: Lenin attends a conference of the International Socialist Commission in Kienthal, Switzerland.

April 28: In a performance at the Bürgertheater in Vienna, Austrian troops on leave re-enact the March 21st Battle of Uscieczko, which they lost to the Russians. Karl Kraus pillories the event in Die Fackel:

As those up there knelt down to pray before the audience, and as those up there saluted, and the vermin down below cheered them and sang patriotic songs, and stood there side by side in their top hats and tails, it struck him as the most terrible of all contrasts, like an infernal battle between the glory of God and the arguments of the devil, and the anguish for a delirious humanity, mocking its own sacrifice.

Audio of Kraus reading from 'Die letzten Tage der Menschheit'; and of Kraus reading a passage about Verdun.

May11: Physicist Karl Schwarzschild dies from an illness that he caught while serving on the Russian front. Albert Einstein is critical of Schwarzschild for having joined the war effort. In a letter to Michele Besso (on May 14), Einstein writes: 'Schwarzchild ... is a real loss. He would have been a gem, had he been as decent as he was clever.' (quoted from Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin [Bantam Books, 2003], p. 130)

May 12: After meeting with Prime Minister Asquith (on May 11), Bertrand Russell reports to Ottoline Morrell that he is 'immensely encouraged'. Asquith was 'very sympathetic' and seemed 'prepared to exert himself to prevent C. O.'s being shot'. On May 12, Asquith sends a note to General Haig, instructing him not to have conscientious objectors shot for disobeying orders.

May 16: Karl Planck (son of Max Planck) is killed at the Battle of Verdun.

May: Edmund Blunden arrives in France as part of the 11th Royal Sussex Battalion.

More about French philosophy's reception of German philosophy after WWI

After WWI, British and French students were awash in the anti-German sentiments of their respective cultures. But French philosophy students were exposed to the corrective influence of the two-Germanies model. Even if that influence was diminished in the post-War years, French students (and established philosophers) were subjected to another corrective influence. To wit, in the 1920s the French professorate was more diverse than that of the UK in at least one crucial respect: it included a number of very able philosophers who had been educated by German philosophy professors shortly before the War, and the former philosophers maintained their engagement with the latter group after the War. Some of the professors in the former group were from Alsace-Lorraine, a territory that belonged to Germany before the War and to France afterwards. Most of them, though, were refugees who had fled the 1917 revolution in Russia. The influence of these figures is particularly striking when one examines how Husserl re-surfaced in French philosophy after WWI.

While there had been some French publications about Husserl before the War, there wasn't much about him in the post-War French literature until 1926, when a French translation of Lev Shestov's 'Memento Mori' appeared in Révue Philosophique. This critique of Husserl drew a reply from Jean Héring, an Alsatian professor in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Strasbourg.

Héring received most of his education when his Alsatian homeland was part of Germany. He had studied with Husserl in Göttingen (in 1909). With the shift of borders at the end of the War, he became a French citizen. Shestov was born, raised, and educated in Tsarist Russia and fled to France in 1920. He later became a professor of Russian at the University of Paris. Shestov is said to have initiated the invitation for Husserl to lecture in Paris in 1929.

Another influential Russian figure is Alexandre Koyré, a historian and philosopher of science. He, too, had studied with Husserl before the War. After Husserl disapproved of Koyré's research direction, Koyré moved to Paris to continue his education. Koyré fought in the Russian army during the War and then returned to Paris, where he completed his education and taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Koyré helped with the translation into French of Husserl's 1929 Paris lectures. (Along with a younger Russian, Alexandre Kojève, Koyré would also help French philosophers to improve their understanding of Hegel.)

There was a third Russian emigré who helped to raise Husserl's profile in France between the wars: the sociologist Georges Gurvitch, who (like Koyré) had received part of his education in German universities. At the Sorbonne between 1928 and 1930, Gurvitch lectured on recent German philosophy, focusing on phenomenology (esp. that of Max Scheler). ^{(Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007], pp. 27-28)} These lectures formed the basis of his book Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande, ^{(Paris: Vrin, 1930)} which presented the ideas of Husserl, Lask, Scheler, and Heidegger.

Another figure who helped to disseminate knowledge of Husserl in France between the wars was Bernard Groethuysen, a German author who, both before and after the War, divided his time between Germany and France. In Germany, he taught philosophy and history courses. In France, he worked as an editor and essayist.

In the 1920s, Paris had one of the largest populations of Russian refugees. Many of these Russians had received at least part of their post-secondary education in Germany. While few (perhaps none) of the above-named Russian philosophers were employed by French philosophy departments, they were employed by other academic departments in French universities. I don't know of any comparable minority group in the British universities of the day that had both the ability and opportunity to counteract biases against contemporary German academic philosophy. (Isaiah Berlin received his education in the UK, and Wittgenstein had relatively little acquaintance with the German philosophy professors of his time.) It is especially instructive to compare the French engagement with Husserl in the '20s with the chilly reception of Husserl's 1922 lectures in London.

Why French philosophy wasn't as anti-German as British philosophy

After World War I, British philosophy, and not French philosophy, followed a trend of diminished engagement with its German counterpart. What accounts for this difference between the British and French philosophers?

First, note that by the early years of the 20^th Century, France had already experienced extreme antipathy towards the Kaiserreich in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Following that war, academic philosophers in France arrived at a framework that warranted continued engagement with some German philosophy.

In developing a clearer sense of the relations between French and German philosophy in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, I have found very helpful Martha Hanna's book, The Mobilization of Intellect (Harvard University Press, 1996). According to Hanna, French intellectuals developed a 'two-Germanies' hypothesis after the Franco-Prussian War. They distinguished between the good, high-culture Germany (which ended roughly with Kant) and the bad, militaristic Germany (which began with Hegel).^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 9)} In the 1870s, French scholars began to devote more time to studying Kant. In fact, French neo-Kantianism began to grow shortly after France's loss to Prussia and reached its height in the 1890s.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 35)}

In France, neo-Kantianism was one strand in French philosophy's turn from scientism.^(Ibid.) Another strand, which came to prominence in French right-wing, Roman Catholic circles during the early years of the 20^th Century, was stridently anti-German and regarded German scholars as uncreative technicians who were embroiled in scientism. Hanna describes the activities of this French, conservative school of thought during the War, including the work of Jacques Maritain and Victor Giraud.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, pp. 184-9)} In an essay that Giraud published in 1917, he characterizes 'scientisme' as 'that gross doctrine held by half-scientists or half-philosophers which has come to us from Germany and which consists in making positive science the only type of knowledge and the only rule of action.' ^{(Giraud, 'French Civilisation', in The French Miracle and French Civilisation: Two Essays, trans. H. P. Thieme and W. A. McLaughlin [Ann Arbor, MI: The Ann Arbor Press, 1917], p. 71; first published in French in 1917)}

So, in French academic circles during the early years of the 20^th Century, any general bias against German philosophy was associated with a conservative, religious orientation, one which had already been disavowed by many secular philosophers. In contrast to the French right, these secular French philosophers (esp. the neo-Kantians) had endorsed a two-Germanies model in the decades before WWI, and this model encouraged the continuing engagement with some German philosophers, especially those who worked in a Kantian vein and who repudiated what the French called 'scientisme'. This might help to explain why Husserl, for instance, enjoyed a favorable reception in post-War Paris. (Husserl lectured in Paris on Feb. 23 and 25, 1929. His lectures in London in 1922 were not so well received.)

British Germanophiles could only dream of inhabiting such a congenial environment. Some of them (e.g., John Muirhead) propounded their own 'two-Germanies' doctrine during the War and its immediate aftermath. Their approach placed Hegel on the safe, good-German side of the boundary and may have been undermined by the fact that its French counterpart had positioned Hegel as a villain.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 9, p. 23)}

Such differences might explain why, as Stuart Wallace says, the post-War years saw 'nothing in Britain to compare with Julien Benda's scathing postwar critique, La Trahison des Clercs (1927)'. ^{(Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914-1918 [Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988], p. v)} The target of Benda's critique was the anti-German propaganda that French professors had produced during the War. Wallace adds that while similar reckonings with 'the national chauvinism of professors' appeared in Germany (Hans Wehburg's Wider den Anruf der 93! [1920]) and in the USA (H. L. Mencken's articles), no British authors produced a similar repudiation of their own nation's professorial propaganda.

Some philosophy links (February)

Chad Hansen's new MOOC 'Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought'.

'Stanford scholar explores Arabic obsession with language....Key also found that the early scholars benefited from a holistic perspective. The ancients lacked the modern methodological divide between arts and sciences, and so were able to see language as a cognitive function shared between poetry and logic.'

In Our Time - Melvyn Bragg talks with Simon Blackburn, Jennifer Hornsby, and Crispin Wright about truth. and with Simon Glendinning, Joanna Hodge, and Stephen Mulhall about phenomenology.

Julie Allard on 'Ronald Dworkin: Law as Novel Writing'.

A collection of new papers on Jaegwon Kim will be available this month from Cambridge University Press.

Harald Sack on Pierre Gassendi.

Gary Saul Morson: 'On Toulmin, Tolstoy, & the Dawkinsization of the humanities'.

Steven Shapin: 'The new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.'

Richard Zach on 'Carnap on "Syntax" vs. "Semantics"'.

Elucidations podcasts: from October,  Episode 64: James Conant and Jay Elliott discuss the analytic tradition; and from December, Episode 66: Haim Gaifman discusses mathematical reasoning.

Krista Tippett interviews Paul Elie, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Robin Lovin discuss Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy. Audio recordings of some of Niebuhr's sermons and lectures.

At Philosophy Bites, Christine Korsgaard on the status of animals.

'Ethics and Aesthetics are One: The Earnestness of High Modernism in Wittgenstein and Musil' by Genese Grill.

At Philosophers Zone, Joe Gelonesi talks to David Papineau about consciousness and the brain.

Nicholas Maxwell on 'what philosophy ought to do'.

Colin Strang's obituary.

Winthrop Pickard Bell: 'Husserl asked his Canadian student to write his dissertation on Royce, and when completed he praised it. ... [Bell] received his degree in 1922. Bell was the first teacher of phenomenology at Harvard from 1922-1927; his students included Dorion Cairns and Charles Hartshorne.' More about Bell:

During the fall of 1921 [Bell] returned to academia and taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and within the same time frame made an application to have his doctorate from Göttingen University re-instated. The formal doctorate was finally issued to Dr. Bell in May of 1922. His tenure in Toronto was to be short-lived and he resigned after the spring semester. In the fall of 1922 he took up teaching in the philosophy department at Harvard University.

Rebecca Suter reviews Matthew Strecher's The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami:  'According to Strecher, the metaphysical realm in Murakami’s work is the place where individual subjects are able to connect to their “inner narrative,” get in touch with their innermost feelings and (re)construct a worldview that is closer to their true self than the false myths or “collective narratives” produced by society.'

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, a student of Kant's -- well, he attended some of Kant's lectures -- wrote some early science fiction tales. Michael Hauskeller has a blog post on Hoffmann's tale 'Sandman'. Another blog post about 'Sandman'. In his chapter of Wiley's Companion to Science Fiction, 'The Origins of Science Fiction', George Slusser devotes a section to Hoffmann's 'Sandman'.

December philosophy links

Putnam says Husserl got the gist of 'twin earth' in 1911.

Alva Noë on colour as well as Evan Thompson and Stephen Batchelor's new book.

Ivan Ilyin, Putin's philosopher.

'Marcuse Today -- Fifty years later, One-Dimensional Man is more prescient than its author could have imagined' by Ronald Aronson.

'Ernst Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 1)'.

From last November, Amartya Sen: 'Social Choice and Social Welfare'.

'Anne Jaap Jacobson on Mind and Representation'.

From the Abstract for a law paper of philosophical interest: 'The article discusses how negligence doctrine has long distinguished misfeasance (a “misdoing”) from nonfeasance (a “not doing”), purporting to provide that the former occasions liability and the latter does not.'

A new book called Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science.

Hugh Gough's review of Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment, 1685-1798 by Jennifer Powell McNutt.

'Todd Berzon on Aaron P. Johnson’s Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre: The Limits of Hellenism in Late Antiquity'.

Alan Montefiore's review of Rowan Williams' The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language.

Rowan Williams on some recent books about fairy tales.

A 1996 list of movies with philosophical content (to which yours truly contributed).

At Philosophy Bites, Julia Annas on virtue ethics and Hugh Mellor on probability.