Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (; 16 August 1864 – 6 August 1937), usually cited as F. C. S. Schiller, was a German-British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein (at that time member of the German Confederation, but under Danish administration), Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California. In his lifetime he was well known as a philosopher; after his death, his work was largely forgotten.
Schiller's philosophy was very similar to and often aligned with the pragmatism of William James, although Schiller referred to it as "humanism". He argued vigorously against ideas like logical positivism, absolute idealism (such as F. H. Bradley), and the type of determinism written about by Bertrand Russell.
Life Born in 1864, one of three brothers and the son of Ferdinand Schiller (a Calcutta merchant), Schiller's family home was in Switzerland. Schiller grew up in Rugby. He was educated at Rugby School, and then went on to study at Balliol College. He would graduate in the first class of Literae Humaniores, going on to win the 1887 Taylorian scholarship for German. Schiller's first book, Riddles of the Sphinx (1891), was an immediate success despite his use of a pseudonym because of his fears concerning how the book would be received. Between the years 1893 and 1897 he was an instructor in philosophy at Cornell University. In 1897 he returned to Oxford and became fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi for more than thirty years. Schiller was president of the Aristotelian Society in 1921, and was for many years treasurer of the Mind Association. In 1926 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy. In 1929 he was appointed visiting professor in the University of Southern California, and spent half of each year in the United States and half in England. Schiller died in Los Angeles either 6, 7 or 9 August 1937 after a long and lingering illness."Notes: Dr. F.C.S. Schiller (1864–1937)" Mind, Vol. 47, No. 185, Jan 1938.
Schiller also published three books on the subject of eugenics; Tantalus or the Future of Man (1924), Eugenics and Politics (1926), and Social Decay and Eugenic Reform (1932)."F.C.S. Schiller" in American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, 2008, edited by John Lachs and Robert Talisse.
Philosophy
In 1891, Schiller made his first contribution to philosophy anonymously. Schiller feared that in his time of high naturalism, the metaphysical speculations of his Riddles of the Sphinx were likely to hurt his professional prospects (p. xi, Riddles). However, Schiller's fear of reprisal from his anti-metaphysical colleagues should not suggest that Schiller was a friend of metaphysics. Like his fellow pragmatists across the ocean, Schiller was attempting to stake out an intermediate position between both the spartan landscape of naturalism and the speculative excesses of the metaphysics of his time. In Riddles Schiller both, (1) accuses naturalism (which he also sometimes calls "pseudometaphysics" or "positivism") of ignoring the fact that metaphysics is required to justify our natural description of the world, and (2) accuses "abstract metaphysics" of losing sight of the world we actually live in and constructing grand, disconnected imaginary worlds. The result, Schiller contends, is that naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world (freewill, consciousness, God, purpose, universals), while abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (the imperfect, change, physicality). In each case we are unable to guide our moral and epistemological "lower" lives to the achievement of life's "higher" ends, ultimately leading to scepticism on both fronts. For knowledge and morality to be possible, both the world's lower and higher elements must be real; e.g. we need universals (a higher) to make knowledge of particulars (a lower) possible. This would lead Schiller to argue for what he at the time called a "concrete metaphysics", but would later call "humanism".
Shortly after publishing Riddles of the Sphinx, Schiller became acquainted with the work of pragmatist philosopher William James and this changed the course of his career. For a time, Schiller's work became focused on extending and developing James' pragmatism (under Schiller's preferred title, "humanism"). Schiller even revised his earlier work Riddles of the Sphinx to make the nascent pragmatism implicit in that work more explicit. In one of Schiller's most prominent works during this phase of his career, "Axioms as Postulates" (1903), Schiller extended James' will to believe doctrine to show how it could be used to justify not only an acceptance of God, but also our acceptance of causality, of the uniformity of nature, of our concept of identity, of contradiction, of the law of excluded middle, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more.
Towards the end of his career, Schiller's pragmatism began to take on a character more distinct from the pragmatism of William James. Schiller's focus became his opposition to formal logic. To understand Schiller's opposition to formal logic, consider the following inference: (1) All salt is soluble in water; (2) Cerebos is not soluble in water; (3) Therefore, Cerebos is not a salt. From the formal characteristics of this inference alone (All As are Bs; c is not a B; Therefore, c is not an A), formal logic would judge this to be a valid inference. Schiller, however, refused to evaluate the validity of this inference merely on its formal characteristics. Schiller argued that unless we look to the contextual fact regarding what specific problem first prompted this inference to actually occur, we can not determine whether the inference was successful (i.e. pragmatically successful). In the case of this inference, since "Cerebos is 'salt' for culinary, but not for chemical purposes",Schiller, F.C.S. (1930) page 276 without knowing whether the purpose for this piece of reasoning was culinary or chemical we cannot determine whether this is valid or not. In another example, Schiller discusses the truth of formal mathematics "1+1=2" and points out that this equation does not hold if one is discussing drops of water. Schiller's attack on formal logic and formal mathematics never gained much attention from philosophers, however it does share some weak similarities to the contextualist view in contemporary epistemology as well as the views of ordinary language philosophers.
Opposition to naturalism and metaphysics
In Riddles, Schiller gives historical examples of the dangers of abstract metaphysics in the philosophies of Plato, Zeno, and Hegel, portraying Hegel as the worst offender: "Hegelianism never anywhere gets within sight of a fact, or within touch of reality. And the reason is simple: you cannot, without paying the penalty, substitute abstractions for realities; the thought-symbol cannot do duty for the thing symbolized".Schiller, F.C.S. (1891) Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 160
Schiller argued that the flaw in Hegel's system, as with all systems of abstract metaphysics, is that the world it constructs always proves to be unhelpful in guiding our imperfect, changing, particular, and physical lives to the achievement of the "higher" universal Ideals and Ends. For example, Schiller argues that the reality of time and change is intrinsically opposed to the very modus operandi of all systems of abstract metaphysics. He says that the possibility to change is a precondition of any moral action (or action generally), and so any system of abstract metaphysics is bound to lead us into a moral scepticism. The problem lies in the aim of abstract metaphysics for "interpreting the world in terms of conceptions, which should be true not here and now, but "eternally" and independently of Time and Change." The result is that metaphysics must use conceptions that have the "time-aspect of Reality" abstracted away. Of course, "[o]nce abstracted from,"
While abstract metaphysics provides us with a world of beauty and purpose and various other "highers", it condemns other key aspects of the world we live in as imaginary. The world of abstract metaphysics has no place for imperfect moral agents who (1) strive to learn about the world and then (2) act upon the world to change it for the better. Consequently, abstract metaphysics condemns us as illusionary, and declares our place in the world as unimportant and purposeless. Where abstractions take priority, our concrete lives collapse into scepticism and pessimism.
He also makes a case against the alternative naturalist method, saying that this too results in an epistemological and moral scepticism. Schiller looks to show this method's inadequacy at moving from the cold, lifeless lower world of atoms to the higher world of ethics, meanings, and minds. As with abstract metaphysics, Schiller attacks naturalism on many fronts: (1) the naturalist method is unable to reduce universals to particulars, (2) the naturalist method is unable to reduce freewill to determinist movements, (3) the naturalist method is unable to reduce emergent properties like consciousness to brain activity, (4) the naturalist method is unable to reduce God into a pantheism, and so on. Just as the abstract method cannot find a place for the lower elements of our world inside the higher, the naturalist method cannot find a place for the higher elements of our world inside the lower. In a reversal of abstract metaphysics, naturalism denies the reality of the higher elements to save the lower. Schiller uses the term "pseudo-metaphysical" here instead of naturalism—as he sometimes does—because he is accusing these naturalist philosophers of trying to solve metaphysical problems while sticking to the non-metaphysical "lower" aspects of the world (i.e. without engaging in real metaphysics):
To show that the world's higher elements do not reduce to the lower is not yet to show that naturalism must condemn the world's higher elements as illusionary. A second component to Schiller's attack is showing that naturalism cannot escape its inability to reduce the higher to the lower by asserting that these higher elements evolve from the lower. However, Schiller does not see naturalism as any more capable of explaining the evolution of the higher from the lower than it is capable of reducing the higher to the lower. While evolution does begin with something lower that in turn evolves into something higher, the problem for naturalism is that whatever the starting point for evolution is, it must first be something with the potential to evolve into a higher. For example, the world cannot come into existence from nothing because the potential or "germ" of the world is not "in" nothing (nothing has no potential, it has nothing; after all, it is nothing). Likewise, biological evolution cannot begin from inanimate matter, because the potential for life is not "in" inanimate matter. The following passage shows Schiller applying the same sort of reasoning to the evolution of consciousness:
Taken as the type of the pseudo-metaphysical method, which explains the higher by the lower ... it does not explain the genesis of consciousness out of unconscious matter, because we cannot, or do not, attribute potential consciousness to matter. ... the theory of Evolution derives the [end result] from its germ, i.e., from that which was, what it became, potentially.