Taking up again the tradition of the Friesian School, this is a non-peer-reviewed electronic journal and archive of philosophy, inaugurated on line July 6, 1996, four years before the end of the 20th Century, just as the brilliant, courageous, prolific, and little appreciated German philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882-1927) started his Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule, Neue Folge, attempting a "Reformation of Philosophy," four years after the beginning of the 20th Century.
The essays at this site, addressing many philosophical, historical, scientific, religious, economic, legal, and political issues, range from the fully annotated and technical to more informal and discursive discussions, often originally written for undergraduate classes. Many items therefore should be intelligible to those not familiar with all the arcana of academic philosophy, or with academic philosophy at all. This is done deliberately, since the trend, by which philosophy has obscured and esotericized itself and mostly dropped out of popular and literate culture, should be resisted. Work of a similar range, with the appropriate philosophical orientation and grounding, is acceptable and desired.
Submissions will be considered that relate to the persons, issues, and history illustrated in the following statements, biographical sketches, and editorial essays. Treatments of issues that do not involve the Friesians or other philosophers mentioned below directly are sought if they parallel or supplement Kantian or Friesian doctrine, from metaphysics to political economy, or throw light on the history of philosophy in ways at least consistent with Friesian principles. Exemplary and supplementary works from recent philosophy may be found under Reviews. Contributions that do address the Friesians, etc., need not conform to the direction of interpretation that is editorially preferred.
Although now with several contributed works, the number of submissions to the journal remains thin, often inappropriate, and all but never from academic philosophers or graduate students. The website thus may seem largely like the personal project of the editor. That will remain the case as long as interest in the Friesian School is minimal, as it is now (at least outside of Germany), and as long as the tendency of contemporary philosophy is to illiberal and irrationalist nihilism, as detailed below. It must fall upon someone to maintain the tradition, however long it takes until interest will sustain itself. Much of the content of the site, which has accumulated more than 60 megabytes of material, including graphics, is therefore editorial.
The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series,
employing the new medium of the World Wide Web, already linked from numerous
sites and indices around the world, receiving up to 1,123,755 hits and 81,094
page views from 42,459 unique users a week, rather than becoming another
dusty, obscure presence on library shelves, avoids the costs and complications
of publishing, binding, mailing, and subscriptions, and establishes a Friesian
presence in a way that is immediately accessible to potentially every computer
on earth, from California to Australia, Taiwan, Korea, China, Romania, Germany,
Sweden, Italy, Iceland, Brazil, Croatia, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, and
more, an opportunity for the curious, for those concerned with the sterility,
obscurantism, and tendentiousness of recent philosophy, and for those dedicated
to Leonard Nelson's own project of Socratic Philosophy.
Home Page last updated 18 October 2003
The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series
seeks to promote the further development of the Critical Philosophy
of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
in the direction indicated by Sir Karl Popper's remark
in The Open Society and Its Enemies that "serious men,"
such as Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860) and
Jakob Friedrich Fries
(1773-1843) (shown at right), did not at first take seriously
the "senseless and maddening webs of words," as Schopenhauer put it, of
G.W.F. Hegel.
The Kantian sense of "Critical," it should be noted,
is unrelated to recent uses of the term in "critical" literary theory, "critical
legal theory," "critical race theory," or even in "multicultural" textbook
treatments of "critical thinking," in all of which the word is usually a
dissimulating substitute for "Marxist"
-- where all analysis is about "power" and class relationships, is contemptuous
of "bourgeois" values and freedoms, including freedom of speech, and where
the "voices" of other cultures are always coincidentally about oppression
by capitalism and/or globalization. Considering the millions murdered, tortured,
enslaved, and impoverished by Marxists in the 20th Century, one would have
to consider continued true believers among the most uncritical people,
let alone the most naive or dishonest, in intellectual history -- a description
that is sadly all too applicable to much academic culture in the United
States, where Marxist doctrine and Leninist behavior are alive and well.
These recent uses of "critical," meaning the dogmatic application of ideology
rather than any genuinely critical attitude, are thus oxymoronic examples
of Orwellian "double think," just as when terms like "people's republic"
and "democratic republic" were used to mean, not popular sovereignty and
responsible government, but totalitarian statism and dictatorship. Ironically,
one of the signers of Karl Marx's own doctoral dissertation on Democritus
was none other than Jakob Fries.
Philosophy and her neglected customer, humanity, truly stand in need of alternative philosophical ideas and approaches. In the Twentieth Century, philosophy was like a confused and clumsy person who repeatedly tries to commit suicide, but keeps failing, though with the addition of debilitating damage at each attempt. In a classic sophistic dilemma of false alternatives, respected academic philosophy often seemed to have offered only two choices:
Although Anglo-American philosophy tended to worship at the feet of science, the drift of academia to the left has led to characteristically totalitarian political attacks on science itself. The "post-modern" move may even be called the "post-Copernican" move, where the "de-centering" of meaning and objectivity (giving new meaning to the word "obscurantism"), returns the "marginalized" literary critic or theorist to the Ptolemaic center of the universe, whence modern science, now demystified and unmasked as an instrument of Euro-centric oppression, had proudly thought to have dislodged an arrogant humanity. Where the arrogance has settled now is all too plain to those familiar with American academic life.
Since The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series is not a peer-review journal, and is seeking specific and rare kinds of work, it has not attracted a large number of submissions over its seven year life. But neither has it attracted submissions that were written mainly or merely for credit towards academic tenure. Although philosophy journals reject 90% of submissions and now rarely bother to explain rejections or provide reader reports, submissions here have tended to come from non-academics, students, and independent scholars, rarely from the graduate students or junior faculty who otherwise are desperate for publications, but who will tend to write on trendy "current" issues for peer-review journals. There is still little that is trendy about the Proceedings of the Friesian School.
The editor would like to see academic philosophers working on Friesian (or at least sensible, intelligible, or edifying) material, but the lack of interest seems to be a combination of discordant Zeitgeist, as with Schopenhauer in his day, and perverse institutional incentives: The peer-review system of publication, while helping to maintain scholarly standards, also serves to screen out innovation and dissent and to promote doctrinal uniformity and a self-referential scholasticism -- the stigmata of academia becoming a rent-seeking bureaucracy. This sort of stagnation was evident in the circumstance that few early modern philosophers were academics. Now the academy has ossified again. As Charles J. Sykes says:
Unread and unreadable, the product of the professoriate is seldom intended to expand the horizons of human knowledge as much as to keep the academic machine running smoothly, the journals filled, the libraries well-stocked, the resumes bulging, and the grants awarded. Volume rather than insight is what counts, and conformity rather than originality is rewarded. [Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education, St. Martin's Griffin, 1988, p. 104]
Academic philosophers thus may not be very interested in the project of the Friesian School, any more than the theologians of Paris were interested in Descartes; but it remains to be seen if the works of contemporary academic philosophy are ever noted or remembered after or outside the incestuous community, the opaque, Hermetic references, and the impenetrable jargon of philosophy departments, clubby conferences, and the prestigious journals.
Twentieth Century philosophy passed by Leonard Nelson, but his memory, commitment, and passion, with the promise of philosophy as more than an esoteric exercise of self-congratulation, but truly as a basis of enlightened moral and political action, are preserved here against a better future, where a dedication to knowledge means that there is actually an interest in discovering the truth (not dismissing that as impossible), and in explaining it (not necessarily even at public expense) to an educated, inquiring public, in a context of Jeffersonian democracy.
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The original Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule were published by Jakob Fries's principal student, Ernst Friedrich Apelt, from 1847 until his death in 1859. That was effectively the end, for the time being, of the Friesian School. The Friesian School has suffered more than once from the premature death of its principal exponent.
Leonard Nelson rediscovered Fries's work while still a high school student, revived the tradition, usually referred to now as the Neo-Friesian School, and in 1904 began publishing the Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule, Neue Folge. Papers in the Abhandlungen remain of some note in the history of logic and mathematics, although the specifically Friesian material is, of course, largely ignored and forgotten.
Nelson's efforts brought Fries to the notice of one of the
most important 20th Century philosophers of religion Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), who then became an early
collaborator with Nelson at the University of Göttingen. Nelson also influenced
the great philosopher of science,
Sir Karl Popper 
(1902-1994), who was a relative of one of Nelson's students,
Julius Kraft (1898-1960). Popper and Kraft argued for years
about Nelson's views, although Popper had described himself as a kind of
Friesian.
Popper's doctrine of falsification, in turn, based on the
Friesian theory of justification, influenced his friend, the Nobel Laureate,
Austrian School economist, 
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) (at left) in his theories
of free market economics and constitutional government. Hayek, in turn,
was one of the formative influences on the "Chicago" school of economics,
which includes figures like Milton Friedman, Thomas
Sowell, Gary Becker, etc.
Otto's theory of "numinosity," based on the
Friesian epistemology of Ahndung, came to be used
by the founder of the "Chicago School" of
history of religion, Mircea
Eliade (1907-1986), and by the great psychologist
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
(at right), whose ideas, on their philosophical side, were also formatively
and independently influenced by Kant and Schopenhauer.
Nelson's early death and the coming of National Socialism -- some in Nelson's group fled the very day of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor -- cut short the life of the School in Germany. The Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule were then discontinued in 1937.
Many of Nelson's students became refugees during World War II, including Julius Kraft, who had first fled Nazi Germany to teach at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and then happened to find himself in the United States when the War broke out. After the War, Kraft taught in the United States and then was in London between 1954 and 1957, renewing his relationship with Karl Popper. Then, despite having lost both his parents in the Nazi Holocaust, Kraft returned to Germany and took up teaching again at the University of Frankfurt, which he had left in 1933. (Popper, on the other hand, refused to return to Vienna.) It was also in 1957 (December) that Kraft founded the journal Ratio, with both English and German editions, trusting in the Liberal inspiration of the English tradition. Ratio ran to six issues (three volumes) under Kraft's editorship, before his death in 1960.
Meanwhile, L.H. Grunebaum, another from Nelson's circle, oversaw, through the "Leonard Nelson Foundation" ("to keep before and make available to the public and to perpetuate the ethical and pedagogical ideals and ideas of Leonard Nelson..."), the translation and publication in the United States of two books containing Nelson's works, Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy [Yale, 1949; Dover, 1965], and the System of Ethics [Yale, 1956]. Nelson's great Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) was also translated but never published. Copies of the manuscript translation, however, were bound and made available in 1970.
Ratio may be considered to be the "Third Series" of the Proceedings of the Friesian School. Although it merely claimed to continue "in a new form philosophical aims pursued with uncommon seriousness and courage in the Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule," it initially featured several key articles by Kraft, by Popper, and by people from Nelson's circle, such as Gustav Heckmann, Paul Bernays, and Stephen Körner. Under the subsequent editorship of Körner himself, Ratio, with the occasional piece about Nelson, began to function as a mainstream philosophy journal. The German edition was financed by Nelson's Philosophisch-Politische Akademie e.V., which has continued under some of Nelson's students and their successors as a center for interest in Socratic Method, philosophy of mathematics, politics, and other issues -- although not acknowledging the importance of figures like Otto and Hayek for the Friesian tradition.
The English edition of Ratio was published by Basil Blackwell for the "Society for the Furtherance of the Critical Philosophy," directed by Paul Branton (1916-1990). This continued through 29 volumes until 1987, with Martin Hollis (1938-1998) as the final editor, when the German edition was discontinued and complete responsibility for the English journal was assumed by Blackwell's. A Ratio (New Series) was started and continues, but it was and is entirely without connection to the Friesian School. Now the "New Series" part of the title has been dropped, and it is called Ratio, An International Journal of Analytic [sic!] Philosophy.
Although Grete Henry-Hermann's completion of the project of editing and issuing the nine volumes of Nelson's Gesammelte Schriften [Felix Meiner Verlag Hamburg] in 1974 coincided with a significant effort to promote Nelson's thought, including a two volume 1971 English edition of Progress and Regress in Philosophy (Fortschritte und Rückschritte der Philosophie) [Blackwell's], little came of this, while professional and academic philosophy continued, as noted above, on its persistently unsatisfactory courses. The end of the Friesian Ratio in 1987 seemed to represent the nadir, the final exhaustion, in the Friesian revival begun by Nelson, as philosophical interest in Nelson was insignificant, as Nelson's students had pretty much died out, and as Nelson's works in English had completely fallen out of print. Scholarly work on Fries has grown in Germany, and successors to Nelson's Academy have continued activity with Socratic Method in Germany, the Netherlands, and England, but there remains little notice of this in America, in English language philosophy, or on the international stage. The revolutionary and seminal principles of Kant-Friesian epistemology, at the same time, seem to have been abandoned by all.
The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series is therefore founded on the determination that the lapse of Friesian philosophy in English cannot be allowed to be. Now, Leonard Nelson and Friesian principles will be here on the World Wide Web for anyone looking for alternatives to the sterile or nihilistic mainstream of 20th Century thought. Let this be the Palladium of Friesian Philosophy.
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Write letters, or submit articles (identified as such, with
name, postal address, e-mail address, and academic affliation, if any, of
author), by e-mail to Kelley L. Ross, kross@friesian.com,
or by snail mail, on diskette (for articles) or in print, to:
Kelley L. Ross
Department of Philosophy
Los Angeles Valley College
Van Nuys, CA 91401-4096
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Information about typographical or formatting errors, dead links, missing pages, or just fan mail, is especially welcome. Writers of insulting or abusive letters should consider that such correspondence may not be answered or, once its nature is recognized, even read. Merely hostile letters are welcome if their points are stated politely and succinctly. It is usually part of polite exchange for correspondents to give their names.
Any kind of correspondence whatever received that is considered significant, as information, criticism, or discussion of the material or views presented in The Proceedings of the Friesian School, may be edited and posted at the site. However, correspondence considered personal, that the writer does not want to be subject to posting, need merely be clearly identified as such.
Do not send articles in any word processing format (e.g. Microsoft Word or Word Perfect), or in HTML. Special formatting is worthless when files must be converted into HTML, which is basically ASCII text; and the HTML produced by most composers will not be in the style of the Proceedings. Special symbols, if necessary (e.g. logical or mathematical symbols), should be described in situ. Graphic files to accompany articles may be described but should not be sent until the text article is accepted. Because of the threat of viruses, large attachments, of any format, not cleared in advance, will be deleted without being opened. Items submitted in hard copy, or on hard media, for publication, or correspondence sent by mail, become the property of the publisher and will not be returned.
It has been suggested that an online message board be established for The Proceedings of the Friesian School. However, although the material at the Friesian site generates steady e-mail comment and feedback, often from people who have their own axes to grind, either philosophically or politically, there is rarely anything specifically concerning Friesian philosophy, and still little from philosophy students, either graduate or undergraduate. I will consider that there is sufficient interest in Friesian philosophy to warrant a message board when there is actually a philosophy student, preferably a graduate student, who is interested in supervising such a site. Anyone desiring such a responsibility can create a message board. If I am persuaded of their Friesian bona fides, it will be linked and promoted from this page.
Occasionally, some rare correspondents are so enthusiastic that they hope to organize a sort of Friesian movement. In general, such things seem rather hopeless. It would be enough just to have some general interest. Instead, the movement should be for the restoration of Constitutional Government and Jeffersonian Democracy in the United States, and for the promotion of the principles of liberal democracy and the free market elsewhere. There are plenty of organizations, political and non-political, partisan and non-partisan, for people to join if they wish to help in that effort.
