Kantotle

Speranza

This is a commentary on O. D.'s post in the thread, "Every event has a cause".

What lovely words, O. D.: "Thanks to the Grice Club, Kant is beginning to look very wise to me!". I may use that somewhere else -- in a special post to the club, even!

Also, cfr. "Thanks to Grice, Kantotle is beginning to look very wise." Recall that for Grice, Kant is sort of insufficient (for things), as Aristotle is. Kantotle, or Aristant, was Grice's pet.

I agree about the 2 + 2 = 4, and the connection with probability, and the whole problem of the analytic a priori. I think philosophers of Grice's generation were obsessed with this because Ayer had simplified things too much (R. B. Jones may agree). He had made the anti-Kantian point of dismissing the synthetic a priori, where "Every event has a cause" may belong.

I'm not saying Grice provided an excellent solution. But he was also influenced, oddly, by one of his students (I don't know of any OTHER philosopher who's been influenced so much by his younger -- not his elder): Strawson. And Strawson had made points about Kant's synthetic-a-priori in his book of lectures, "The bounds of sense".

While Ayer was into 'formal' or mathematical languages, Strawson brought ordinary English to the picture. What would it mean to say, "Every event, I'm sorry to say, does NOT have a cause". By 1956, Strawson and Grice were collaborating in "In defense of a dogma", and while this example does not feature, it should.

In conversation to Grice's biographer, Grice's wife recalls how Grice would approach the playground companion to his two children, and ask things like "Can a sweater be red and green all over. No stripes allowed". For years, he was interested in Kantotelian issues like that. Is it a matter of the ONTOLOGY (as Aristotle wants) that we Kant have that, or is it a matter of 'transcendental' cognition?

In his later writings, some in unpublished format, deposited at the Grice Collection, at the Bancroft Library in the Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley, Grice considers THIS and many other fascinating stuff.

So thanks for great input!