Uppsala School

Historical Background and Context

The Uppsala School (Uppsalaskolan) designates a group of philosophers and legal theorists based primarily at Uppsala University in Sweden during the first half of the 20th century. Though not a formal organization, the school coalesced around the work of Axel Hägerström (1868–1939), whose lectures and writings shaped several generations of Scandinavian thinkers.

Historically, the movement emerged in a period when neo‑Kantianism and early analytic philosophy were challenging older forms of speculative metaphysics and psychologistic approaches to logic. In Sweden, philosophy had been strongly influenced by idealism and theological traditions. The Uppsala School positioned itself as a critical, scientifically oriented alternative, aiming to bring Swedish philosophy closer to the standards of logical rigor found in contemporary German and, later, Anglo‑American thought.

The school’s influence initially remained regional but later became widely discussed due to its impact on Scandinavian legal realism, debates on value theory, and the secularization of intellectual life in Sweden. Figures such as Adolf Phalén, Einar Tegen, Ingemar Hedenius, Karl Olivecrona, and Anders Wedberg developed and diversified Hägerström’s program.

Central Doctrines and Method

The Uppsala School is best known for its strict anti‑psychologism, its anti‑metaphysical stance, and its sharp distinction between facts and values.

1. Anti‑psychologism and logic
   In line with broader European criticisms of psychologism, the Uppsala School argued that logical laws cannot be reduced to empirical facts about human mental processes. Logical principles were treated as normative rules governing correct reasoning and judgment, not as descriptions of how people actually think. This non‑psychologistic view placed logic and epistemology in a domain distinct from empirical psychology.

2. Rejection of metaphysics
   The school opposed what it understood as metaphysical claims—statements that purport to describe a reality beyond possible experience or empirical verification. Influenced by neo‑Kantianism, its members held that meaningful discourse must ultimately be anchored in possible experience, conceptual analysis, or empirical science. Assertions about transcendent entities or absolute values were regarded with deep suspicion and often dismissed as pseudo‑statements lacking cognitive content.

3. Distinction between facts and values
   One of the school’s most famous doctrines is the strict separation between descriptive statements (about what is) and evaluative or normative statements (about what ought to be or what is good or right). According to Hägerström and his followers, value judgments do not describe properties in the world in the way that empirical statements do. This view underpins their approach to ethics, law, and religion, and anticipates later forms of non‑cognitivism and emotivism in Anglo‑American meta‑ethics.

4. Conceptual and logical analysis
   Methodologically, the Uppsala School emphasized careful analysis of concepts and language. Philosophical clarification was seen as a logical enterprise: exposing contradictions, uncovering presuppositions, and distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless claims. In this respect, the school converged with, though developed largely independently from, early analytic traditions.

Proponents viewed this approach as a way to establish philosophy as a critical and clarificatory discipline closely aligned with scientific inquiry, while critics argued that its anti‑metaphysical rigor risked excluding significant parts of human experience from philosophical reflection.

Ethics, Law, and Religion

The Uppsala School’s views had particularly strong repercussions in ethics, jurisprudence, and philosophy of religion.

1. Ethics and value theory
   In ethics, Hägerström advanced an influential analysis of value statements. On his view, sentences such as “X is good” or “Y is right” do not describe any objective property or fact; instead, they express attitudes, feelings, or imperatives. Thus, value judgments lack truth‑value in the ordinary descriptive sense.

   This position has been interpreted as a form of value nihilism, though members of the school differed in the extent to which they embraced that label. Supporters argued that by exposing the non‑cognitive character of value claims, the school cleared the ground for more honest and lucid moral discussion. Critics contended that such a view undermines the possibility of objective ethical reasoning and threatens to reduce morality to mere expression of preferences.

2. Legal philosophy and Scandinavian realism
   The school exerted major influence on Scandinavian legal realism, especially through the work of Karl Olivecrona and others. Legal norms, on this view, were not conceived as mysterious entities with intrinsic binding force. Instead, they were analyzed in terms of social practices, institutional facts, and the psychological and behavioral effects of legal language.

   Legal statements, like moral ones, were understood primarily as prescriptive or directive, not as descriptive reports about independently existing normative facts. This approach challenged natural‑law theories and some forms of legal positivism by insisting on a thoroughly empirical and linguistic analysis of law as a social phenomenon.

3. Religion and secular critique
   In the philosophy of religion, the Uppsala School became associated with a strong secular critique of traditional religious belief. If metaphysical and value claims lack cognitive content, then many theological statements—especially those about an absolute, transcendent deity or objective moral order—were likewise treated as non‑cognitive or meaningless in a strict philosophical sense.

   Later figures such as Ingemar Hedenius developed this critique into a broader argument for the incompatibility of certain forms of Christian doctrine with the standards of rational, scientific inquiry. Supporters saw this as contributing to the secularization and intellectual modernization of Swedish society; detractors argued that it rested on a narrow conception of meaning and rationality.

Influence, Reception, and Legacy

The legacy of the Uppsala School is mixed and continues to be debated.

In Scandinavia, its impact on philosophical education, legal theory, and public discourse was substantial. It helped shape an intellectual climate characterized by empiricism, analytic clarity, and skepticism toward traditional metaphysics and theology. In jurisprudence, its contributions to Scandinavian legal realism remain a reference point in discussions of the nature of law and legal obligation.

Internationally, the Uppsala School never became as prominent as contemporaneous movements such as logical positivism or Oxford ordinary‑language philosophy, partly due to language barriers and limited translation of its key works. Nonetheless, historians of philosophy have noted significant parallels between Hägerström’s views on values and later emotivist and prescriptivist theories in Anglo‑American meta‑ethics, as well as affinities with certain strands of logical empiricism.

Critics have charged that the school’s strict criteria for meaningfulness are overly restrictive, excluding many forms of discourse—ethical, aesthetic, religious—that many regard as central to human life. Others have questioned whether its own normative commitments (for instance, to clarity or scientific method) can be fully justified within its framework.

Supporters and sympathetic commentators, by contrast, have emphasized the Uppsala School’s enduring contributions to conceptual rigor, its role in resisting psychologism and unfounded metaphysical speculation, and its historical significance in the development of analytic and realist traditions in Northern Europe.

Today, the Uppsala School is primarily of interest to scholars of history of philosophy, legal theory, and meta‑ethics, who study it as a distinctive and influential attempt to apply neo‑Kantian and analytic methods to questions of value, law, and religion in a Scandinavian context. Its debates over the status of values, the nature of law, and the boundaries of meaningful discourse continue to inform contemporary discussions about the scope and limits of philosophical inquiry.