Grice and Hare

by JLS
for the GC

Regarding Hare's views on freewill and related issues.

Originally a member of the so-called "Ordinary Language School of Philosophy", he succeeded Austin as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. He discusses issues of freedom in his earlier "Freedom and reason", and in later essays like "Prediction and Moral appraisal" (originally Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1978, repr. in his "Essays on bioethics", 1993).

Hare writes of the necessity to simplify some of the basic tenets in the so-called "Free Will controversy", especially when looking for its application in practical policies.

Grice counted Hare as possibly the most intelligent of the participants in Austin's and later Grice's own Play Group.

--- His Kantian views should have pleased the later Grice. Grice was reluctant to credit Hare with some of his best coinages, like the clistics and the tropics, while he credits the phrastics and the neustics (without citing Hare as source) in both "Aspects of Reason" and the "Retrospective Epilogue".