Kinderspiel!

Day 174 of A Year of War and Peace

It made me deeply blue to listen to Gary Kasparov, a hero of mine, criticize War and Peace as being outdated due to its heavy inclusion of philosophy. That critique, however, cannot be ignored. The novel does boast its fair share of philosophy, particularly in chapters such as today’s. In keeping, then, with the philosophical currents of today’s chapter let’s grapple with one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers, Friedrich August von Hayek and his essay “The Facts of the Social Sciences.”

In that philosophical essay Hayek argues against three schools of thought: Logical Positivism, Collectivist Positivism, and the German Historical School. He found fault with the emphasis on objectivity these schools applied to the social sciences. Instead, Hayek believed that there are no objective historical facts distinct from the individual human mind. That is, there can be no true objectivity in the social sciences because the subject of the social sciences, human beings, are unfathomably subjective. Therefore social science facts are not objective but, rather, wholly…