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After the attempt at collaboration between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle failed in the late 1930s, Adorno stood at the forefront of critical theory’s polemics against ‘positivism’. Given these later polemical exchanges, some of the tendencies common to both movements have remained overlooked. Among these is their opposition to the phenomenological tradition. This paper focusses on certain features common to Schlick’s and Adorno’s critical responses to Husserl. The Machians, including Adorno’s supervisor Hans Cornelius, were targeted by Husserl’s onslaught against psychologism in 1900. The young Schlick’s Machian background had motivated his contribution to the Psychologismusstreit, in the context of which he launched a series of objections against Husserl’s ‘independence theory of truth’. Adorno’s later doctoral dissertation under Cornelius was also motivated by the effort to defend his master against Husserl’s objections. Schlick’s criticisms intensified in later works, where Husserl’s epistemology of intuition is seen as yet another instance of the widespread confusion between knowledge and acquaintance. Schlick’s warnings against Husserl’s turn towards the irrationalist fashions of his day find their echo in Adorno’s ‘Metakritik’. Apart from their broad agreement in how they understand Husserl’s positioning within his context, Schlick and Adorno also develop a similar criticism of Husserl’s account of intuition as failing in its aspiration to discover unmediated givenness, which it confuses with mediated conceptual knowledge. Unfortunately, while Adorno explicitly acknowledges Schlick’s critique of Husserl, he also misconstrues it as a scientistic rejection of metaphysical nonsense, thus failing to acknowledge the proximity to his approach.

Comparative to the commonplace focus onto developments in mathematics and physics, the life sciences appear to have received relatively sparse attention within the early history of analytic philosophy. This paper addresses two related aspects of this phenomenon. On the one hand, it asks: to the extent that the significance of the life sciences was indeed downplayed by early analytic philosophers, why was this the case? An answer to this question may be found in Bertrand Russell’s 1914 discussions of the relation between biology and philosophy. Contrary to received views of the history of analytic philosophy, Russell presented his own ‘logical atomism’ in opposition not only to British Idealism, but also to ‘evolutionism’. On the other hand, I will question whether this purported neglect of the life sciences does indeed accurately characterise the history of analytic philosophy. In answering this, I turn first to Susan Stebbing’s criticisms of Russell’s overlooking of biology, her influence on J.H. Woodger, and her critical discussion of T.H. Huxley’s and C.H. Waddington’s application of evolutionary views to philosophical questions. I then discuss the case of Moritz Schlick, whose evolutionist philosophy has been overlooked within recent debates concerning Logical Empiricism’s relation to the philosophy of biology.

In part, the misconception has been due to a projection of the afore-mentioned division between modernizing and conserving literary tendencies throughout the history of philosophy onto a conception of the \"analytic\"/\"continental\" divide. [...]one may imagine \"continental\" philosophers as continuing the tradition of self-reflectively selecting the literary style appropriate to the expression of their ideas, while \"analytic\" philosophers, like their scholastic predecessors, value the kind of clarity that can only be achieved within prescribed norms for writing.13 This misapprehension may be dispelled, from the outset, as an inadequate overgeneralization. \"23 He sees Bergson as disinclined to correct such confusions because they align neatly with his own anti-intellectualist worldview. [...]Russell admits that his own attempt to correct such errors by way of argument might go unheeded by an anti-intellectualist.24 According to Russell, argumentation is of limited worth for Bergson: A large part of Bergson's philosophy, probably the part to which most of its popularity is due, does not depend upon argument, and cannot be upset by argument. Logical analysis shows these types of expression to involve quantification over a variable. [...]when it comes to such expressions, Carnap claims, we can easily \"transition from sense to nonsense in ordinary language\" (\"EM,\" p. 70). According to Carnap, we tend to acknowledge this in the clear-cut cases where we recognize that what is at stake is expressive meaningfulness rather than cognitive content.

Tiger Roholt concludes his discussion of the methodological divide between so-called “analytic” and “continental” philosophy of music with the declaration of his hope that “shedding some light on the divide will hasten its dissolution” (2017, 56). I will preface what follows by clarifying that it is undertaken with the same hope. By implication, Roholt does not consider an overall account of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy necessary for his project of identifying “analytic” and “continental” methodological “tendencies” in the philosophy of music. Yet, as I argue, if one hopes to be rigorous in the aforementioned task of seeing things in the right light, then what is in order is a further discussion of the relation between what Roholt says of the divide in the philosophy of music on the one hand and, on the other hand, what is left unsaid about the divide in general.

The work in this thesis is based on kernel smoothing techniques with applications to nonparametric statistical methods and especially kernel density estimation and nonparametric regression. We examine a bootstrap iterative method of choosing the smoothing parameter, in univariate kernel density estimation, and propose an empirical smoothness correction that generally improves the method for small-medium sample sizes tested. In a simulation study performed, the corrected bootstrap iterative method shows consistent overall performance and can compete with other popular widely used methods. The theoretical asymptotic properties of the smoothed bootstrap method, in univariate kernel density estimation, are examined and an adaptive data-based choice of fixed pilot smoothing parameter formed, that provides a good performance trade-off among distributions of various shapes, with fast relative rate of convergence to the optimal. The asymptotic and practical differences of the smoothed bootstrap method, when the diagonal terms of the error criterion are included or omitted, are also examined. The exclusion of the diagonal terms yields faster relative rates of convergence of the smoothing parameter to the optimal but a simulation study shows that for smaller sample sizes, including the diagonal terms can be favourable. In a real data set application both methods produced similar smoothing parameters and the resulting kernel density estimates were of reasonable smoothness.Existing methods of kernel density estimation in two dimensions are discussed and the corrected bootstrap iterative method is adapted to work in the bivariate kernel density estimation, with considerable success. Additionally, the theoretical asymptotic properties of the smoothed bootstrap method, in the bivariate kernel density estimation, are examined, and adaptive data-based choices for the fixed pilot smoothing parameters formed, that provide fast relative rates of convergence to the optimal, compared to other popular methods. The smoothed bootstrap method with the diagonal terms of the error criterion omitted, exhibits slightly faster relative rates of convergence, compared to the method which includes the diagonal terms, and in a simulation study they performed considerably well, compared to other methods. Also, we discover that a scaling transformation of the data, before applying the method, leads to poor results for distributions of various shapes, and it should be generally avoided. In an application using the iris flowers data set, both smoothed bootstrap versions suggested, produce reasonable kernel density estimates.We also look at various methods of estimating the variance of the errors in nonparametric regression and suggest a simple robust method of estimating the error variance, for the homoscedastic fixed design. The method is based on a multiplicative correction of the variance of the residuals and a comparison with popular difference-based methods shows favourable results, especially when the local linear estimator is employed.