THESAVRVS GRICEIANVM
H.
P. Grice, St. John’s Oxford
Compiled
by Grice’s Playgroup, The Bodleian
a:
Grice knows that his problem with Strawson is the Square of Opposition (Grice
1989: )So he is well aware of the question about Barbara and Celarent. So this
is the ‘universalis dedicativa.’ Vide below entries for “E” (universalis
abdicative), “I” (particularis dedicativa)
and “O” (particularis abdicative). The square (figura quadrata) is
generated by criss-crossing the two categories, aptly sub-divided, --
‘quantitas’ into universalis and particularis, and qualitaas into dedicativa
and the abdicative. Refs.: Grice 1989
∀: rendered by Grice as “all,” borrowed from Gentzen’s
“All-Zeichen.” (Peano did not use it). Grice is a stickler, and uses the
brackets, (∀x) – Grice thinks
that Whitehead and Russell did perfectly well with their substitutional account
to ‘all,’ “even it that displeased my tutee P. F. Strawson.” Parsons, who Grice
admires, suggests that one treat quantification over predicative classes substitutionally,
and capture “the idea that classes are not“real” independently of the
expression forthem. Grice perceives a difficulty
relating to the allegedly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities. A
perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as
it is presented would be that in any definition of “Emissor E communicates that
p” iff “Emissor E desires that p.” which Grice would be willing to
countenance, 'p' operates simply as a
‘gap sign.’ ‘p’ does appear in the analysandum, and re-appears in the
corresponding analysans. If Grice were to advance the not wholly plausible
thesis that “to feel Byzantine” is just to have a an anti-rylean agitation
which is caused by the thought that Grice is or might *be* Byzantine, it would
surely be ridiculous to criticize Grice on the grounds that Grice saddles
himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. And
why? Well, because, alla Parsons, if a quantifier is covertly involved at all,
it will only be a universal quantifier which in such a case as this is more
than adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. Grice’s
situation vis-a-vis the ‘proposition’ is in no way different. There should be
an entry for the inverted E, the first entry under the E.
abderite: Grice was something of a logical
atomist, so he used to refer to himself as a neo-Abderite. The reference being
to Democritus and Leucippus, from Abdera. The
Grecian philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, the two earliest exponents of
atomism, later revived by Baron Russell as “logical” atomism, calling himself a
neo-abderite. Even though Abdera, in Thrace in northern Greece, is home to
three pre-Socratics Leucippus,
Democritus, and Protagoras ‘Abderite’
and the phrase ‘School of Abdera’ are applied only to Leucippus and Democritus.
We can thus distinguish between early Grecian atomism and Epicureanism, which
is the later version of atomism developed by Epicurus of Athens. This usage is
in one respect inapt: the corresponding Grecian “abderite” is used by some
snobs in antiquity as a synonym of ‘simpleton,’ not in disparagement of any of
the three philosophers of Abdera but as a regional slur, the three philosophers
but not Russell included.
abdicative: while one can draw a skull communicating that there is
danger; one can then cross out the skull indicating that there is no danger. So
the emissor communicates that there is no danger. Or rather, the emissor
communicates that it is not the case that there is danger. Since this involves
a ‘that’-clause, it is not unreasonable to speak of a ‘propositio,’ and such
would be ‘abdicativa.’ In his earliest reflections on the topic, Grice draws on
sub-perceptual illustrations rendered more or less as involving two items of
‘propositio dedicativa’ and their negation and privation: ‘The bell tolls in
Gb” and “The pillar box is red.” For the latter, “The pillar box is not blue”
can be uttered as a conclusion (“If the pillar box is red, it is not the case
that the pillar box is blue.”). For the former case, “The bell tolls in Ab” may
do. “If the bell tolls in Gb, it is not the case that the bell tolls in Ab.”
For Grice, the métier of a propositio abidcativa has to do with the abdicatum
of a conjunctum. For a more primitive rationale, Grice does not see the
complete justification. That means that Grice sees that there are OPTIONS TO
introducing a ‘propositio abdicativa’. These options are of two kinds. One is
the ‘stroke.’ If you draw a skull, a stroke, and a skull, you communicate that it
is not the case there is danger. The other involves “other than” or
“incompatible.” Again, drawsing a skull and writing INCOMPATIBLE and drawing
another skull and you communicate that it is not the case that there is danger.
abdicatum: Apuleius makes an analogy that Grice (and the Grecians
before) finds interesting. It is the ‘propositio dedicative’ apophatike’/’propositio
abdicativa’ kataphatike distinction. The ‘abdicatum’ would be the ‘negatum.’ The
‘dedicatum’ would be the ‘affirmatum.’ Apuleius’s terms make the correlation
evident and Grice preferred it to that of ‘affirmatum’ and ‘negatum,’ – “where
the correlation is not that obvious.” So there is the abdicatum, the negatum,
and the negation. ‘Negatum’ and ‘affirmatum’ are actually used when translating
Husserl from the vernacular! For Husserl, Negation negation a noetic modification of
a positing, noematic cancellation every ‘negatum’
an Object posited as existing, reiterated negation; a ‘negatum’ not a
determination produced by reflection; non-being equivalent to being validly
negated. Grice’s interest in ‘not’ as a
unary functor is central. Grice was ablet to tutor Strawson in philosophy in
that famous term. In his “Introduction to logical theory,” Strawson alleges to
show that some logical
‘laws,’ taken together, show that any truth-functional sentence or formula in
which the main constant is “~ “ is the contradictory of the sentence or formula
which results from omitting that sign.” Strawson goes on to say: “A standard
and primary use of “not” in a sentence is to assert the contradictory of the
statement which would be made by the use, in the same context, of the same
sentence without “not.” Of course we must not suppose that the insertion of
“not” anywhere in any sentence always has this effect. “Some bulls are not
dangerous” is not the contradictory of “Some bulls are dangerous.” This is why
the identification of “~” with “it is not the case that” is to be preferred to
its identification with “not” simpliciter. This identification, then, involves
only those minimum departures from the logic of ordinary language which must
always result from the formal logician's activity of codifying rules with the
help of verbal patterns : viz., (i) the adoption of a rigid rule when ordinary
language permits variations and deviations from the standard use (cf. rules “
~(p Λ ~p)”
and “ ~~p ≡ p” and the discussions in
1-8, and 2-9); (ii) that stretching of the sense of ‘exemplify’ which allows,
us, e.g., to regard ‘Tom is not mad’ as well as ‘Not all bulls are dangerous’
as 'exemplifications’ of not-p.’”
Strawson goes on: “So we shall call ‘~’ the negation sign, and read ‘~’as
‘not.’ One might be tempted to suppose that declaring formulae “ ~(p Λ ~p)” and “p v ~p”
laws of the system was the same as saying that, as regards this system, a
statement cannot be both true and false and must be either true or false. But
it is not. The rules that “ ~(p Λ ~p)” and “p v ~p”
are analytic are not rules about ‘true’ and ‘false;’ they are rules about ‘~.;
They say that, given that a statement has one of the two truth-values, then it
is logically impossible for both that statement and the corresponding statement
of the form ‘ ~p’ to be true, and for
both that statement and the corresponding statement of the form ‘~p’ to be
false.” A bit of palæo-Griceian history is
in order. Sheffer, defines ‘not’ and negation in terms of incompatibility in ‘A
set of five independent postulates for Boolean algebras, with application to
logical constants,’ Trans. American Mathematical Society. Grice does refers to
‘the strokes.’ His use of the plural is interesting as a nod to Peirce’s minute
logic in his ‘Boolian [sic] algebra with one constant.’ There is indeed
Peirce’s stroke, or ampheck (↓), Sheffer’s stroke (|, /, ↑), and and Quine’s
stroke (†, strictly Quine’s dagger). Some philosophers prefer to refer to
Peirces Stroke as Peirce’s arrow, or strictly stressed double-edged sword. His
editors disambiguate his ampheck, distinguishing between the dyadic
functor or connective equivalent to Sheffer’s stroke and ‘nor.’ While
Whitehead, Russell, and Witters love Sheffer’s stroke, Hilbert does not: ‘‘p/p’
ist dann gleichbedeutend mit ‘X̄.’ Grice explores primitiveness. It is
possible, to some extent, to qualify this or that device in terms of
primitiveness. As regards ‘not,’ if a communication-system did not contain a
unitary negative device, there would be many things that communicators can now
communicate that they would be then unable to communicate. He has two
important caveats. That would be the case unless, first, the
communication-system contained some very artificial-seeming connective like one
or other of the strokes, and, second, communicators put themselves to a good
deal of trouble, as Plato does in ‘The Sophist’ with ‘diaphoron,’ that Wiggins
symbolises with ‘Δ,’ to find, more or less case by case, complicated forms
of expression, not necessarily featuring a connective, but involving such
expressions as ‘other than’or ‘incompatible with.’ Grice further refers to
Aristotle’s ‘apophasis’ in De Int.17a25. Grice, always lured by the
potentiality of a joint philosophical endeavour, treasures his collaboration
with Strawson that is followed by one with Austin on Cat. and De Int. So what
does Aristotle say in De Int.? Surely Aristotle could have started by referring
to Plato’s Parmenides, aptly analysed by Wiggins. Since Aristotle is more of a
don than a poet, he has to give ‘not’ a name: ‘ἀπόφασις ἐστιν ἀπόφανσίς τινος
ἀπό τινος,’a predication of one thing away from another,
i.e. negation of it. This is Grice’s reflection, in a verificationist
vein, of two types of this or that negative utterance. His immediate trigger is
Ryle’s contribution on a symposium on Bradley’s idea of an internal relation,
where Grice appeals to Peirce’s incompatibility. ‘The proposition ‘This is red’
is imcompatible with the proposition, ‘This is not coloured.’ While he uses a
souly verb or predicate for one of them, Grice will go back to the primacy of
‘potching’ at a later stage. A P potches that the obble is not fang, but feng.
It is convenient to introduce this or that soul-state, ψ,
sensing that …, or perceiving that … Grice works mainly with two scenarios,
both involved with the first-person singular pronoun ‘I’ with which he is
obsessed. Grice’s first scenario concerns a proposition that implies another
proposition featuring ‘someone, viz. I,’ the first-person singular pronoun as
subject, a sensory modal verb, and an object, the proposition, it is not the
case that ‘the α is φ1.’ The denotatum of the
first-person pronoun perceives that a thing displays this or the visual
sense-datum of a colour, and the corresponding sensory modal predicate. Via a
reductive (but not reductionist) analysis, we get that, by uttering ‘It is not
the case that I see that the pillar box is blue,’ the utterer U means, i. e.
m-intends his addressee A to believe, U he sees that the pillar box is red. U’s
source, reason, ground, knowledge, or belief, upon which he bases his uttering
his utterance is U’s *indirect* mediated actual experience, belief, or
knowledge, linked to a sense-datum φ2 (red) other than φ1
(blue). Grice’s second scenario concerns a proposition explicitly featuring the
first-person singular pronoun, an introspection, involving an auditory
sense-datum of a noise. Via reductive (but not reductionist) analysis, we get
that, by uttering ‘It is not the case that I hear that the bell tolls in Gb,’ U
means that he lacks the experience of hearing that the bell tolls simpliciter.
U’s source, reason, ground, knowledge, or belief, upon which he bases his
uttering his utterance is the *direct* unmediated felt absence, or absentia, or
privatio or privation, or apophasis, verified by introspection, of the
co-relative ψ, which Grice links to the absence of the experience, belief,
or knowledge, of the sense-datum, the apophasis of the experience, which is
thereby negated. In either case, Grice’s analysans do not feature ‘not.’ Grice
turns back to the topic in seminars later at Oxford in connection with
Strawson’s cursory treatment of ‘not’ in “Logical Theory.”‘Not’ (and ~.) is the
first pair, qua unary satisfactory-value-functor (unlike this or that dyadic
co-ordinate, and, or, or the dyadic sub-ordinate if) in Grice’s list of this or
that vernacular counterpart attached to this or that formal device. Cf. ‘Smith
has not ceased from eating iron,’ in ‘Causal theory.’ In the fourth James
lecture, Grice explores a role for negation along the lines of Wilson’s
Statement and Inference.’ Grice’s ‘Vacuous Names’ contains Gentzen-type
syntactic inference rules for both ‘not’’s introduction (+, ~) and the
elimination (-, ~) and the correlative value assignation. Note that there are
correlative rules for Peirce’s arrow. Grice’s motivation is to qualify ‘not’
with a subscript scope-indicating device on ~ for a tricky case like ‘The
climber of Mt. Everest on hands and knees is not to atttend the party in his
honour.’ The logical form becomes qualified: ‘~2(Marmaduke Bloggs is
coming)1’, or ‘~2(Pegasus flies)1.’ generic
formula is ~2p1, which indicates that p is introduced
prior to ~. In the earlier James lectures he used the square bracket device.
The generic formula being ‘~[p],’ where [p] reads that p is assigned
common-ground status. Cancelling the implicata may be trickier. ‘It is not the
case that I hear that the bell tolls because it is under reparation.’ ‘That is
not blue; it’s an optical illusion.’ Cf. Grice on ‘It is an illusion. What is
it?’ Cf. The king of France is not bald because there is no king of France. In
Presupposition, the fourth Urbana lecture, Grice uses square brackets for the
subscript scope indicating device. ‘Do not arrest [the intruder]!,’ the device
meant to assign common-ground status. In ‘Method” Grice plays with the
internalisation of a pre-theoretical concept of not within the scope of ‘ψ.’
In the Kant lectures on “Aspects,” Grice explores ‘not’ within the scope of
this or that mode operator, as in the buletic utterance, ‘Do not arrest the
intruder!’ Is that internal narrow scope, ‘!~p,’ or external wide scope, ‘~!p’?
Grice also touches on this or that mixed-mode utterance, and in connection with
the minor problem of presupposition within the scope of an operator other than
the indicative-mode operator. ‘Smith has not ceased from eating iron, because
Smith does not exist ‒ cf. Hamlet sees that his father is on the rampants, but
the sight is not reciprocated ‒ Macbeth sees that Banquo is near him, but his
vision is not reciprocated. Grice is having in mind Hare’s defense of a
non-doxastic utterance. In his commentary in PGRICE, Grice expands on this
metaphysical construction routine of Humeian projection with the pre-intuitive
concept of ‘not,’ specifying the
different stages the intuitive concept undergoes until it becomes
fully rationally recostructed, as something like a Fregeian sense. In the
centerpiece lecture of the William James set, Grice explores Wilson’s Statement
and inference to assign a métier to ‘not,’ and succeeds in finding one. The
conversational métier of ‘not’ is explained in terms of the conversational
implicatum. By uttering ‘Smith has not been to prison yet,’ U implies that some
utterer has, somewhere, sometime, expressed an opinion to the contrary. This is
connected by Grice with the ability a rational creature has to possess to
survive. The creature has to be able, as Sheffer notes, to deny this or that.
Grices notable case is the negation of a conjunction. So it may well be that
the most rational role for ‘not’ is not primary in that it is realised once
less primitive operators are introduced. Is there a strict conceptual
distinction, as Grice suggests, between negation and privation? If privation
involves or presupposes negation, one might appeal to something like Modified
Occam’s Razor (M. O. R.), do not multiply negations beyond necessity. In his
choice of examples, Grice seems to be implicating negation for an empirically
verifiable, observational utterance, such as U does not see that the pillar box
is blue not because U does not exist, but on the basis of U’s experiencing,
knowing, believing and indeed seeing that the pillar box is red. This is a
negation, proper, or simpliciter (even if it involves a sense-datum phi2
incompatible with sense-datum phi1. Privation, on the other hand, would be
involved in an utterance arrived via introspection, such as U does not hear
that the bell is ringing on the basis of his knowing that he is aware of the
absence, simpliciter, of an experience to that effect. Aristotle, or some later
Aristotelian, may have made the same distinction, within apophasis between
negation or negatio and privation or privatio. Or not. Of course, Grice is
ultimately looking for the rationale behind the conversational implicatum in
terms of a principle of conversational helpfulness underlying his picture of
conversation as rational co-operation. To use his Pological jargon in Method,
in Pirotese and Griceish There is the P1, who potches that the obble
is not fang, but feng. P1 utters p explicitly conveying that p.
P2 alternatively feels like negating that. By uttering ~p, P2 explicitly
conveys that ~p. P1 volunteers to P2, ~p, explicitly
conveying that ~p. Not raining! Or No bull. You are safe. Surely a rational
creature should be capable to deny this or that, as Grice puts it in Indicative
conditionals. Interestingly, Grice does not consider, as Gazdar does, under
Palmer), he other possible unitary functors (three in a standard binary
assignation of values) – just negation, which reverses the satisfactory-value
of the radix or neustic. In terms of systematics, thus, it is convenient
to regard Grices view on negation and privation as his outlook on the operators
as this or that procedure by the utterer that endows him with this or that
basic expressive, operative power. In this case, the expressive power is
specifically related to his proficiency with not. The proficiency is co-related
with this or that device in general, whose vernacular expression will bear a
formal counterpart. Many of Grices comments addressed to this more general
topic of this or that satisfactoriness-preserving operator apply to not, and thus
raise the question about the explicitum or explicatum of not. A Griceian should
not be confused. The fact that Grice does not explicitly mention not or
negation when exploring the concept of a generic formal device does not mean
that what he says about formal device may not be particularised to apply to not
or negation. His big concession is that Whitehead and Russell (and Peano before
them) are right about the explicitum or explicatum of not being ~, even if
Grice follows Hilbert and Ackermann in dismissing Peirces arrow for pragmatic
reasons. This is what Grice calls the identity thesis to oppose to Strawsons
divergence thesis between not and ~. More formally, by uttering Not-p, U
explicitly conveys that ~p. Any divergence is explained via the implicatum. A
not utterance is horribly uninformative, and not each of them is of
philosophical interest. Grice joked with Bradley and Searles The man in the
next table is not lighting the cigarette with a twenty-dollar bill, the
denotatum of the Subjects being a Texas oilman in his country club. The odd
implicatum is usually to the effect that someone thought otherwise. In terms of
Cook Wilson, the role of not has more to do with the expressive power of a
rational creature to deny a molecular or composite utterance such as p and q
Grice comments that in the case of or, the not may be addressed,
conversationally, to the utterability of the disjunction. His example involves
the logical form Not (p or q). It is not the case that Wilson or Heath will be
prime minister. Theres always hope for Nabarro or Thorpe. The
utterer is, at the level of the implicatum, not now contradicting what his
co-conversationalist has utterered. The utterer is certainly not denying that
Wilson will be Prime Minister. It is, rather, that the utterer U wishes not to
assert or state, say, what his co-conversant has asserted, but, instead, to
substitute a different statement or claim which the utterer U regards as
preferable under the circumstances. Grice calls this substitutive disagreement.
This was a long-standing interest of Grices: an earlier manuscript reads Wilson
or MacMillan will be prime minister. Let us take a closer look at the way
Grice initially rephrases his two scenarios involving not as attached to an
auditory and a visual sense datum. I do not hear that the bell is ringing is
rationally justified by the absence or absentia of the experience of hearing
it. I do not see that the pillar box is blue is rationally justified by U’s sensing
that the pillar box is red. The latter depends on Kant’s concept of the
synthetic a priori with which Grice tests with his childrens playmates. Can a
sweater be red and green all over? No stripes allowed! Can a pillar box be blue
and red all over? Cf. Ryles’ssymposium on negation with Mabbott, for the
Aristotelian Society, a source for Grices reflexion. Ryle later discussing
Bradleys internal relations, reflects that that the proposition, ‘This pillar
box is only red’ is incompatible with ‘This pillar box is only blue.’ As
bearing this or that conversational implicata, Grices two scenarios can be
re-phrased, unhelpfully, as I am unhearing a noise and That
is unred. The apparently unhelpful point bears however some
importance. It shows that negation and not are not co-extensive. The variants
also demonstrate that the implicatum, qua conversational, rather than
conventional, is non-detachable. Not is hardly primtive pure Anglo-Saxon. It is
the rather convoluted abbreviation of ne-aught. Its ne that counts as the
proper, pure, amorphous Anglo-Saxon negation, as in a member of parliament (if
not a horse) uttering nay. Grices view of conversation as rational
co-operation, as displayed in this or that conversational implicatum
necessitates that the implicatum is never attached to this or that expression.
Here the favoured, but not exclusive expression, is not, since Strawson uses
it. But the vernacular provides a wealth of expressive ways to be negative!
Grice possibly chose negation not because, as with this or that nihilistic
philosopher, such as Schopenhauer, or indeed Parmenides, he finds the concept a
key one. But one may well say that this is the Schopenhauerian or the
Parmenidesian in Griceian. Grice is approaching not in linguistic, empiricist,
or conceptual key. He is applying the new Oxonian methodology: the reductive
analysis alla Russell in terms of logical construction. Grices implies priority
is with by uttering x, by which U explicitly conveys that ~p, U implicitly
conveys that q. The essay thus elaborates on this implicated q. For the record,
nihilism was coined by philosopher Jacobi, while the more primitive
negatio and privatio is each a time-honoured item in the philosophical lexicon,
with which mediaeval this or that speculative grammarian is especially obsessed.
Negatio translates the ‘apophasis’ of Aristotle, and has a pretty pedigreed
history. The philosophical lexicon has nĕgātĭo, f. negare, which L and S,
unhelpfully, render as a denying, denial, negation, Cicero, Sull. 13, 39:
negatio inficiatioque facti, id. Part. 29, 102. L and S go on to add that
negatio is predicated of to the expression that denies, a negative. Grice would
say that L and S should realise that its the utterer who denies. The source L
and S give is ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 32, 38. As for Grices other
word, there is “prīvātĭo,” f. privare, which again unhelpfully, L and
S render as a taking away, privation of a thing. doloris, Cic. Fin.
1, 11, 37, and 38, or pain-free, as Grice might prefer, cf.
zero-tolerance. L and S also cite: 2, 9, 28: culpæ, Gell. 2, 6,
10. The negatio-privatio distinction is attested in Grecian, indeed the
distinction requires its own entry. For it is Boethius who first renders
Aristotle’s ‘hexis’ into ‘habitus’ and Aristotle’s steresis’ into ‘privatio.’
So the the Grecians were never just happy with “ἀπόφασις (A)” and they had to
keep multiplying negations beyond necessity. The noun is from “ἀπόφημι.” Now L
and S unhepfully render the noun as as denial, negation, adding “oκατάφασις,” for
which they cites from The Sophista by Plato (263e), to give then the
definition “ἀπόφασις ἐστιν ἀπόφανσίς τινος ἀπό τινος,” a
predication of one thing away from another,
i.e. negation of it, for which they provide the source that Grice is
relying. on: Arist. Int.17a25, cf. APo. 72a14; ἀπόφασις τινός,
negation, exclusion of a thing, Pl. Cra. 426d; δύο ἀ. μίαν κατάφασιν
ἀποτελοῦσι Luc. Gall.11. If he was not the first to explore
philosophically negation, Grice may be regarded as a philosopher who most
explored negation as occurring in a that-clause followed by a propositional
complexus that contains ~, and as applied to a personal agent, in a lower
branch of philosophical psychology. It is also the basis for his linguistic
botany. He seems to be trying to help other philosopher not to fall in the trap
of thinking that not has a special sense. The utterer means that ~p. In what
ways is that to be interpreted? Grice confessed to never
been impressed by Ayer. The crudities and dogmatisms seemed too pervasive.
Is Grice being an empiricist and a verificationist? Let us go back to This is
not red and I am not hearing a noise. Grices suggestion is that the
incompatible fact offering a solution to this problem is the fact that the
utterer of “Someone, viz. I, does not hear that the bell tolls” is indicating
(and informing) that U merely entertains the positive (affirmative)
proposition, Someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls, without having an
attitude of certainty towards it. More generally, Grice is proposing, like
Bradley and indeed Bosanquet, who Grice otherwise regards as a minor
philosopher, a more basic Subjects-predicate utterance. The α is
not β. The utterer states I do not know that α is β if and
only if every present mental or souly process, of mine, has some characteristic
incompatible with the knowledge that α is β. One
may propose a doxastic weaker version, replacing the dogmatic Oxonian know
with believe. Grices view of compatibility is an application of the
Sheffer stroke that Grice will later use in accounts of not. ~p iff p|p or ~p ≡df p|p. But
then, as Grice points out, Sheffer is hardly Griceian. If Pirotese did not
contain a unitary negative device, there would be many things that a P should
be able to express that the P should be unable to express unless Pirotese
contained some very artificially-looking dyadic functor like one or other of
the strokes, or the P put himself to a good deal of trouble to find, more or
less case by case, complicated forms of expression, as Platos Parmenides does,
involving such expressions as other than, or incompatible with. V. Wiggins on
Platos Parmenides in a Griceian key. Such a complicate form of expression would
infringe the principle of conversational helpfulness, notably in its
desideratum of conversational clarity, or conversational perspicuity [sic],
where the sic is Grices seeing that unsensitive Oxonians sometimes mistake
perspicuity for the allegedly, cognate perspicacity (L. perspicacitas, like
perspicuitas, from perspicere). Grice finds the unitary brevity of not-p
attractive. Then theres the pretty Griceian idea of the pregnant proposition.
Im not hearing a nose is pregnant, as Occam has it, with I am hearing a
noise. A scholastic and mediæval philosopher loves to be figurative.
Grices main proposal may be seen as drawing on this or that
verificationist assumption by Ayer, who actually has a later essay on not
falsely connecting it with falsity. Grices proposed better analysis would
please Ayer, had Grice been brought on the right side of the tracks, since it
can be Subjectsed to a process of verification, on the understanding
that either perception through the senses (It is red) or
introspection (Every present mental or souly process of mine ) is each an
empirical phenomenon. But there are subtleties to be drawn. At Oxford, Grices
view on negation will influence philosophers like Wiggins, and in a negative
way, Cohen, who raises the Griceian topic of the occurrence of negation in
embedded clauses, found by Grice to be crucial for the rational genitorial
justification of not as a refutation of the composite p and q), and motivating
Walker with a reply (itself countered by Cohen ‒ Can the conversationalist
hypothesis be defended?). So problems are not absent, as they should not! Grice
re-read Peirces definition or reductive analysis of not and enjoyed it!
Peirce discovers the logical connective Grice calls the Sheffer Stroke, as well
as the related connective nor (also called Joint Denial, and quite
appropriately Peirces Arrow, with other Namess in use being Quines Arrow or
Quines Dagger and today usually symbolized by “/”). The relevant manuscript,
numbered MS 378 in a subsequent edition and titled A Boolian [sic] Algebra with
One Constant, MS 378, was actually destined for discarding and was salvaged for
posterity A fragmentary text by Peirce also shows familiarity with the
remarkable meta-logical characteristics that make a single function
functionally complete, and this is also the case with Peirces unfinished Minute
Logic: these texts are published posthumously. Peirce designates the two truth
functions, nand and nor, by using the symbol “” which he called
ampheck, coining this neologism from the Grecian ἀμφήκης, of equal length in
both directions. Peirces editors disambiguate the use of symbols by
assigning “” to the connective we call Sheffers troke while
preserving the symbol “/” for nor. In MS 378, A Boolian Algebra
with One Constant, by Peirce, tagged “to be discarded” at the Department of
Philosophy at Harvard, Peirce reduces the number of logical operators to one
constant. Peirce states that his notation uses the minimum number of different
signs and shows for the first time the possibility of writing both universal
and particular propositions with but one copula. Peirce’s notation is later
termed Sheffers stroke, and is also well-known as the nand operation, in
Peirce’s terms the operation by which two propositions written in a pair are
considered to be both denied. In the same manuscript, Peirce also discovers
what is the expressive completeness of ‘nor,’ indeed today rightly recognized
as the Peirce arrow. Like Sheffer, of Cornell, independently does later
(only to be dismissed by Hilbert and Ackermann), Peirce understands that these
two connectives can be used to reduce all mathematically definable connectives
(also called primitives and constants) of propositional logic. This means that
all definable connectives of propositional logic can be defined by using only
Sheffers stroke or nor as the single connective. No other connective (or
associated function) that takes one or two variables as inputs has this
property. Standard, two-valued propositional logic has no unary functions that
have the remarkable property of functional completeness. At first blush,
availability of this option ensures that economy of resources can be
obtained—at least in terms of how many functions or connectives are to be
included as undefined. Unfortunately, as Grice, following Hilbert and Ackermann
realise, there is a trade-off between this philosophical semantic gain in
economy of symbolic resources and the pragmatically unwieldy length and rather
counterintuitive, to use Grices phrase, appearance of the formulas that use only
the one connective. It is characteristic of his logical genius, however,
and emblematic of his rather under-appreciated, surely not by Grice,
contributions to the development of semiotics that Peirce grasps the
significance of functional completeness and figure out what truth functions —
up to arity 2 — are functionally complete for two-valued propositional logic,
never mind helping the philosopher to provide a reductive analysis of negation
that Grice is looking for. Strictly, this is the property of weak functional
completeness, given that we disregard whether constants or zero-ary functions
like 1 or 0 can be defined. Peirce subscribes to a semeiotic view, popular in
the Old World with Ogden and Welby, and later Grice, according to which
the fundamental nature and proper tasks of the formal study of communication
are defined by the rules set down for the construction and manipulation of
symbolic resources. A proliferation of symbols for the various connectives that
are admitted into the signature of a logical system suffers from a serious
defect on this view. The symbolic grammar fails to match or represent the
logical fact of interdefinability of the connectives, and reductive analysis of
all to one. Peirce is willing sometimes to accept constructing a formal
signature for two-valued propositional logic by using the two-members set of
connectives, which is minimally functionally complete. This means that these
two connectives — or, if we are to stick to an approach that emphasizes the
notational character of logical analysis, these two symbols —are adequate
expressively. Every mathematically definable connective of the logic can be
defined by using only these two. And the set is minimally functionally complete
in that neither of these connectives can be defined by the other (so, as we
say, they are both independent relative to each other.) The
symbol can be viewed as representing a constant truth function
(either unary or binary) that returns the truth value 0 for any input or
inputs. Or it can be regarded as a constant, which means that it is a zero=ary
(zero-input) function, a degenerate function, which refers to the truth value
0. Although not using, as Grice does, Peanos terminology, Peirce takes the
second option. This set has cardinality 2 (it has exactly 2 members) but it is
not the best we can do. Peirces discovery of what we have called the Sheffer
functions or strokes (anachronistically and unfairly to Peirce, as Grice notes,
but bowing to convention) shows that we can have a set of cardinality 1 (a
one-member set or a so-called singleton) that is minimally functionally
complete with respect to the definable connectives of two-valued propositional
logic. Thus, either one of the following sets can do. The sets are functionally
complete and, because they have only one member each, we say that the
connectives themselves have the property of functional completeness. / is the
symbol of Sheffers stroke or nand and /is the symbol of the Peirce Arrow
or nor. Grice stipulates as such, even though he does not introduce his grammar
formally. It is important to show ow these functions can define other
functions. Algebraically approached, this is a matter of functional
composition In case one wonders why the satisfaction with defining the
connectives of the set that comprises the symbols for negation, inclusive
disjunction, and conjunction, there is an explanation. There is an easy,
although informal, way to show that this set is functionally complete. It is
not minimally functionally complete because nor and nand are
inter-definable. But it is functionally complete. Thus, showing that one can
define these functions suffices for achieving functional completeness.
Definability should be thought as logical equivalence. One connective can be
defined by means of others if and only if the formulae in the definition (what
is defined and what is doing the defining) are logically equivalent. Presuppose
the truth-tabular definitions of the connectives. Grice enjoyed that.
Meanwhile, at Corpus, Grice is involved in serious philosophical studies under
the tutelage of Hardie. While his philosophical socialising is limited, having
been born on the wrong side of the tracks, first at Corpus, and then at
Merton, and ending at St. Johns, Grice fails to attend the seminal meetings at
All Souls held on Thursday evenings by the play group of the seven (Austin,
Ayer, Berlin, Hampshire, MacDermott, MacNabb, and Woozley). Three of them will
join Grice in the new play group after the war: Austin, Hampshire, and Woozley.
But at St. Johns Grice tutors Strawson, and learns all about the linguistic
botany methodology on his return from the navy. Indeed, his being appointed
Strawson as his tutee starts a life-long friendship and collaboration. There
are separate entries for the connectives: conjunction, disjunction, and
conditional. Abdicatum
-- double negation. 1 The principle, also called the law of double negation,
that every proposition is logically equivalent to its double negation. Thus,
the proposition that Roger is a rabbit is equivalent to the proposition that
Roger is not not a rabbit. The law holds in classical logic but not for certain
non-classical concepts of negation. In intuitionist logic, for example, a
proposition implies, but need not be implied by, its double negation. 2 The rule
of inference, also called the rule of double negation, that permits one to
infer the double negation of A from A, and vice versa. Refs.:
Allusions to negation are scattered, notably in Essay 4 in WoW, but also in
“Method in philosophical psychology,” and “Prejudices and predilections” (repr.
in “Conception”), and under semantics and syntax. There are specific essays of
different dates, in s. V, in two separate folders, in BANC.
abductum: an implicatum is abductum, i. e., it is not something that
it is inductum or deductum. It is indeed a demonstratum, an argumentum, but qua
abductum. As
opposed to in-duction and de-duction, abduction refers to canons of reasoning
for the discovery, as opposed to the justification, of scientific hypotheses or
theories. Reichenbach distinguished the context of justification and the
context of discovery, arguing that philosophy legitimately is concerned only
with the former, which concerns verification and confirmation, whereas the
latter is a matter for psychology. Thus he and other logical positivists
claimed there are inductive logics of justification but not logics for
discovery. Both hypotheticodeductive and Bayesian or other probabilistic
inductive logics of justification have been proposed. Close examination of actual
scientific practice increasingly reveals justificatory arguments and procedures
that call into question the adequacy of such logics. N. R. Hanson distinguishes
the reasons for accepting a specific hypothesis from the reasons for suggesting
that the correct hypothesis will be of a particular kind. For the latter he
attempted to develop logics of retroductive or abductive reasoning that
stressed analogical reasoning, but did not succeed in convincing many that
these logics were different in kind from logics of justification. Today few
regard the search for rigorous formal logics of discovery as promising. Rather,
the search has turned to looking for “logics” in some weaker sense. Heuristic
procedures, strategies for discovery, and the like are explored. Others have
focused on investigating rationality in the growth of scientific knowledge,
say, by exploring conditions under which research traditions or programs are
progressive or degenerating. Some have explored recourse to techniques from
cognitive science or artificial intelligence. Claims of success generally are
controversial.
abélard:
Grice thought there was a good testimony to consider “Abailard” as a
proto-Griceian. pierre abailard, philosopher whose writings, particularly
Theologia Christiana, constitute one of the more impressive attempts of the
medieval period to use logical techniques to explicate Christian dogmas. He was
born of a minor noble family in Brittany and studied logic and theology under
some of the most notable teachers of the early twelfth century, including
Roscelin, William of Champeaux, and Anselm of Laon. He rapidly eclipsed his
teachers in logic and attracted students from all over Europe. His forays into
theology were less enthusiastically received. Twice his views on the Trinity
were condemned as heretical. Abelard led a dramatic life punctuated by bitter
disputes with his opponents and a dangerous and celebrated love affair with
Héloïse. Much of this story is told in his autobiographical work, Historia
calamitatum. Abelard’s two most important Griceian works in logic are his
“Logica ingredientibus” and his “Dialectica.” In these treatises and others he
is the first medieval Scholastic to make full use of Aristotle’s “De
interpretation” and Boethius’s commentaries on it to produce a sophisticated
theory of the signification of words and sentences. The theory distinguishes
the signification of an expression both from what the expression names and the
idea in the mind of the emissor associated with the expression. Abélard allows
a role for mental images in thinking, but he carefully avoids claiming that
these are what words signify. In this he is very much aware of the pitfalls of
subjectivist theories of meaning. His positive doctrines on what words signify
tie in closely with his views on the signification of propositions and
universals. For Abelard propositions are sentences that are either true or
false; what they say their dicta is what they signify and these dicta are the
primary bearers of truth and falsity. Abelard developed a genuinely
propositional logic, the first since the Stoics. A universal, on the other
hand, is a common noun or adjective, and what it means is what the verb phrase
part of a proposition signifies. This is a sort of truncated dictum, which
Abelard variously called a status, nature, or property. Neither status nor
dicta are things, Abelard said, but they are mind-independent objects of
thought. Abelard was particularly devastating in his attacks on realist
theories of universals, but his view that universals are words was not meant to
deny the objectivity of our knowledge of the world. Abelard’s theories in logic
and ontology went far beyond the traditional ideas that had been handed down
from Aristotle through the mediation of the late ancient commentators, Boethius
in particular. They could have formed the basis of a fundamentally new
synthesis in Western logic, but when more of the Aristotelian corpus became
available in Western Europe during the twelfth century, concentration shifted
to assimilating this already fully elaborated system of ideas. Consequently,
Abelard’s influence on later Scholastic thought, though noticeable, is not
nearly as great as one might expect, given the acuteness and originality of his
insights.
absolutum: If we say, emissor E communicates that p, what is its
relatum? Nothing. The theory of communication NEEDS to be relative. To search
for the absolute in the theory of communication is otiose, for in communication
there is an unavoidable relatum, which is the emissor himself. Now Grice is
interested in an emissor that communicates that p is absolute. So we need
absolute and meta-absolute. I.e. if the emissor can communicate that ‘p’ is
absolute, he has more ground to exert his authority into inducing in his
addressee that the addressee believe what he is intended to believe.
The
absolutum is one, unlike Grice’s absoluta, or absolutes. Trust Grice to
pluralise Bradley’s absolute. While it is practical to restore the root of
‘axis’ for Grice’s value (validum, optimum), it is not easy to find a
grecianism for the absolutum absolute. Lewis and Short have “absolvere,” which
they render as
‘to loosen from, to make loose, set free, detach, untie (usu. trop., the fig.
being derived from fetters, qs. a vinculis solvere, like “vinculis exsolvere,”
Plaut. Truc. 3, 4, 10). So that makes sense. Lewis and Short also have “absolutum,” which they render as“absolute, unrestricted,
unconditional,” – as in Cicero: “hoc mihi videor videre, esse quasdam cum
adjunctione necessitudines, quasdam simplices et absolutas” (Inv. 2, 57, 170). Grice
repatedly uses the plural ‘abosolutes,’ and occasionally the singular. Obviously,
Grice has in mind the absolute-relative distinction, not wanting to be seen as
relativist, unless it is a constructionist relativist. Grice refers to Bradley in ‘Prolegomena,’ and has an essay
on the ‘absolutes.’ It is all back to when German philosopher F. Schiller, of
Corpus, publishes “Mind!” Its frontispiece is a portrait of the absolute, “very
much like the Bellman’s completely blank map in The hunting of the snark.” The
absolutum is the sum of all being, an emblem of idealism. Idealism dominates
Oxford for part of Grice’s career. The realist mission, headed by Wilson, is to
clean up philosophy’s act Bradley’s Appearance and reality, mirrors the point of
the snark. Bradley uses the example of a lump of sugar. It all begins to
crumble, In Oxonian parlance, the absolute is a boo-jum, you see. Bradley is
clear here, to irritate Ayer: the absolutum is, put simply, a higher unity, pure
spirit. “It can never and it enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution
and progress.” Especially at Corpus, tutees are aware of Hartmann’s absolutum.
Barnes thinks he can destroy with his emotivism. Hartmann, otherwise a
naturalist, is claims that this or that value exists, not in the realm (Reich)
of nature, but as an ideal essence of a thing, but in a realm which is not
less, but more real than nature. For Hartmann, if a value exists, it is not
relative, but absolute, objective, and rational, and so is a value judgment. Like
Grice, for Hartmann, the relativity dissolves upon conceiving and constructing
a value as an absolutum, not a relativum. The essence of a thing need not
reduce to a contingence. To conceive the essence of a table is to conceive what
the métier of a table. Like Hartmann, Grice is very ‘systematik’ axiologist, and
uses ‘relative’ variously. Already in the Oxford Philosophical Society, Grice
conceives of an utterer’s meaning and his communicatum is notoriously relative.
It is an act of communication relative to an agent. For Grice, there is hardly
a realm of un-constructed reality, so his construction of value as an absolutum
comes as no surprise. Grice is especially irritated by Julie Andrews in Noël
Coward’s “Relative values” and this Oxonian cavalier attitude he perceives in Barnes
and Hare, a pinko simplistic attitude against any absolute. Unlike
Hartmann, Grice adopts not so much a neo-Kantian as an Ariskantian tenet. The
ratiocinative part of the soul of a personal being is designated the proper
judge in the power structure of the soul. Whatever is relative to this
particular creature successfully attains, ipso facto, absolute value. The term’The
absolute,’ used by idealists to describe the one independent reality of which
all things are an expression. Kant used the adjective ‘absolute’ to
characterize what is unconditionally valid. He claimed that pure reason
searched for absolute grounds of the understanding that were ideals only, but
that practical reason postulated the real existence of such grounds as
necessary for morality. This apparent inconsistency led his successors to
attempt to systematize his view of reason. To do this, Schelling introduced the
term ‘the Absolute’ for the unconditioned ground and hence identity of subject and
object. Schelling was criticized by Hegel, who defined the Absolute as spirit:
the logical necessity that embodies itself in the world in order to achieve
self-knowledge and freedom during the course of history. Many prominent
nineteenthcentury British and idealists,
including Bosanquet, Royce, and Bradley, defended the existence of a
quasi-Hegelian absolute. Refs.: For a good overview of emotivism in Oxford v.
Urmson’s The emotive theory of ethics. Grice, “Values, morals, absolutes, and
the metaphysical,” The H. P. Grice Papers, Series V (Topical), c 9-f. 24, BANC
MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
abstractum: In an emissor draws a skull to communicate that there
is danger, the addressee comes to think that there is danger, in the air. Let’s
formalise that proposition as “The air is dangerous.” Is that abstract? It is:
it involves two predicates which may be said to denote two abstracta: the
property of being air, and the property of being dangerous. So abstracta are
unavoidable in a communicatum, that reaches the sophistication of requiring a
‘that’-clause. The usual phrase in Grice
is ‘abstract’ as adjective and applied to ‘entity’ as anything troublesome to
nominalism. At Oxford, Grice belongs to the class for members whose class have
no members. If class C and class C have the same
members, they are the same. A class xx is a set just in case there is a
class yy such that x∈yx∈y. A
class which is not a set is an improper, not a proper class, or a well-ordered
one, as Burali-Forti puts it in ‘Sulle classi ben ordinate.’ Grice reads Cantor's essay and finds an antinomy on the
third page. He mmediately writes his uncle “I am reading Cantor and find an antinomy.”
The antinomy is obvious and concerns the class of all classes that are not
members of themselves. This obviously leads to a pragmatic contradiction, to
echo Moore, since this class must be and not be a member of itself and not a
member of itself. Grice had access to the Correspondence of Zermelo and re-wrote
the antinomy.Which leads Grice to Austin. For Austin thinks he can lead a
class, and that Saturday morning is a good time for a class of members whose
classes have no members, almost an insult. Grice is hardly attached to
canonicals, not even first-order predicate logic with identity and class
theory. Grice sees extensionalism asa a position imbued with the spirit of nominalism
yet dear to the philosopher particularly impressed by the power of class
theory. But Grice is having in mind the concretum-abstractum distinction, and
as an Aristotelian, he wants to defend a category as an abstractum or
universalium. Lewis and Short have ‘concrescere,’ rendered as ‘to grow together;
hence with the prevailing idea of uniting, and generally of soft or liquid
substances which thicken; to harden, condense, curdle, stiffen, congeal, etc.
(very freq., and class. in prose and poetry).’ For ‘abstractum,’ they have
‘abstrăhere, which they render as ‘to draw away from a place or person, to drag
or pull away.’ The ability to see a horse (hippos) without seeing horseness
(hippotes), as Plato remarks, is a matter of stupidity. Yet, perhaps bue to the
commentary by his editors, Grice feels defensive about proposition. Expanding
on an essay on the propositional complexum,’ the idea is that if we construct a
complexum step by step, in class-theoretical terms, one may not committed to an
‘abstract entity.’ But how unabstract is class theory? Grice hardly attaches to
the canonicals of first-order predicate calculus with identity together with
class theory. An item i is a universalium and 'abstractum' iff i fails to
occupy a region in space and time. This raises a few questions. It is
conceivable that an items that is standardly regarded as an 'abstractum' may
nonetheless occupy a volumes of space and time. The school of latter-day
nominalism is for ever criticised at Oxford, and Grice is no exception. The
topic of the abstractum was already present in Grice’s previous generation, as
in the essay by Ryle on the systematically misleading expression, and the
category reprinted in Flew. For it to be, a particular concretum individuum or
prima substantia has to be something, which is what an abstractum universaium
provides. A universal is part of the ‘essentia’ of the particular. Ariskants
motivation for for coining “to katholou” is doxastic. Aristotle claims that to
have a ‘doxa’ requires there to be an abstract universalium, not apart from (“para”),
but holding of (“kata”) a concretum individuum. Within the “this” (“tode”)
there is an aspect of “something” (“ti.”). Aristotle uses the “hêi” (“qua”) locution,
which plays a crucial role in perceiving. Ariskant’s remark that a particular
horse is always a horse (with a species and a genus) may strike the
non-philosopher as trivial. Grice strongly denies that its triviality is
unenlightening, and he loves to quote from Plato. Liddell and Scott have
“ἱππότης,” rendered as “horse-nature, the concept of horse,” Antisth. et Pl.
ap. Simp.in Cat. 208.30,32, Sch. Arist Id.p.167F. Then there is the ‘commensurate
universal,’ the major premise is a universal proposition. Grice provides a
logical construction of such lexemes as “abstractum” and “universalium,” and
“concretum” and “individuum,” or “atomon” in terms of two relations, “izzing”
and “hazzing.” x is an individuum or atomon iff nothing other than x izzes x. Austin
is Austin, and Strawson is Strawson. Now, x is a primum individuum, proton
atomon, or prima substantia, iff x is an individuum, and nothing hazzes x. One needs to distinguish between a singular
individuum and a particular (“to kathekaston,” particulare) simpliciter. Short
and Lewis have “partĭcŭlāris, e, adj.” which they render, unhelpfully, as
“particular,” but also as “of or concerning a part, partial, particular.”
“Propositiones aliae universales, aliae particulares, ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 35,
34: partĭcŭlārĭter is particularly,
ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 33, 32; opp. “generaliter,” Firm. Math. 1, 5 fin.; opp.
“universaliter,” Aug. Retract. 1, 5 fin. Cf. Strawson, “Particular and
general,” crediting Grice twice; the second time about a fine point of
denotatum: ‘the tallest man that ever lived, lives, or will live.” To define a
‘particular,’ you need to introduce, as Ariskant does, the idea of predication.
(∀x)(x
is an individuum)≡◻(∀y)(y izzes x)⊃(x izzes y). (∀x)(x izz a particulare(≡◻(∀y)(x
izzes predicable of y)⊃(x
izzes y Λ y izzes x). Once we have defined a ‘particular,’ we can go
and define a ‘singulare,’ a ‘tode ti,’ a ‘this what.” (∀x)(x izzes singulare)⊃(x izzes an individuum). There’s
further implicate to come. (∀x)(x izzes a particulare)⊃(x izzes an individuum)). The concern by Grice
with the abstractum as a “universalium in re” can be traced back to his reading
of Aristotle’s Categoriæ, for his Lit. Hum., and later with Austin and
Strawson. Anything but a ‘prima substantia,’ ‒ viz. essence, accident, attribute,
etc. ‒ may be said to belong in the realm of the abstractum or
universalium qua predicable. As such, an abstractum and univeralium is not a
spatio-temporal continuant. However, a category shift or
‘subjectification,’ by Grice allows a universalium as subject. The topic is
approached formally by means of the notion of order. First-order predicate
calculus ranges over this or that spatio-temporal continuant individual, in
Strawson’s use of the term. A higher-order predicate calculus ranges over this
or that abstractum, a feature, and beyond. An abstractum universalium is only referred
to in a second-order predicate calculus. This is Grice’s attempt to approach
Aristkant in pragmatic key. In his exploration of the abstractum, Grice is
challenging extensionalism, so fashionable in the New World within The School
of Latter-Day Nominalists. Grice is careful here since he is well aware that
Bennett has called him a meaning-nominalist. Strictly, in Griceian parlance, an
‘abstractum is an entity object lacking spatiotemporal properties, but supposed
to have being, to exist, or in medieval Scholastic terminology to subsist.
Abstracta, sometimes collected under the category of universals, include
mathematical objects, such as numbers, sets, and geometrical figures,
propositions, properties, and relations. Abstract entities are said to be
abstracted from particulars. The abstract triangle has only the properties
common to all triangles, and none peculiar to any particular triangles; it has
no definite color, size, or specific type, such as isosceles or scalene.
Abstracta are admitted to an ontology by Quine’s criterion if they must be
supposed to exist or subsist in order to make the propositions of an accepted theory
true. Properties and relations may be needed to account for resemblances among
particulars, such as the redness shared by all red things. Propositions as the
abstract contents or meanings of thoughts and expressions of thought are
sometimes said to be necessary to explain translation between languages, and
other semantic properties and relations. Historically, abstract entities are
associated with Plato’s realist ontology of Ideas or Forms. For Plato, these
are the abstract and only real entities, instantiated or participated in by
spatiotemporal objects in the world of appearance or empirical phenomena.
Aristotle denied the independent existence of abstract entities, and redefined
a diluted sense of Plato’s Forms as the secondary substances that inhere in
primary substances or spatiotemporal particulars as the only genuine existents.
The dispute persisted in medieval philosophy between realist metaphysicians,
including Augustine and Aquinas, who accepted the existence of abstracta, and
nominalists, such as Ockham, who maintained that similar objects may simply be
referred to by the same name without participating in an abstract form. In
modern philosophy, the problem of abstracta has been a point of contention
between rationalism, which is generally committed to the existence of abstract
entities, and empiricism, which rejects abstracta because they cannot be
experienced by the senses. Berkeley and Hume argued against Locke’s theory of
abstract ideas by observing that introspection shows all ideas to be particular,
from which they concluded that we can have no adequate concept of an abstract
entity; instead, when we reason about what we call abstracta we are actually
thinking about particular ideas delegated by the mind to represent an entire
class of resemblant particulars, from which we may freely substitute others if
we mistakenly draw conclusions peculiar to the example chosen. Abstract
propositions were defended by Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century as
the meanings of thought in language and logic. Dispute persists about the need
for and nature of abstract entities, but many philosophers believe they are
indispensable in metaphysics. Refs.: For
pre-play group reflections see Ryle’s Categories and Systematically misleading
expressions. Explorations by other members of Grice’s playgroup are Strawson,
‘Particular and general’ and Warnock, ‘Metaphysics in logic,’ The main work by
Grice at Oxford on the ‘abstractum’ is with Austin (f. 15) and later with
Strawson (f.23). Grice, “Aristotle’s Categoriae,” The H. P. Grice Papers, S.
II, c. 6-f. 15 and c. 6, f. 23, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The
University of California, Berkeley.
acceptabilitas: Grice generalizes his desirability and credibility
functions into a single acceptability. Acceptability has obviously degrees.
Grice is thinking of ‘scales’ alla: must, optimal acceptability (for both
modalities), should (medium acceptability), and ought (defeasible
acceptability). He develops the views in The John Locke lectures, having
introduced ‘accept,’ in his BA lecture on ‘Intention and Uncertainty.’ In fact,
much as in “Causal Theory” he has an excursus on ‘Implication,’ here he has,
also in italics, an excursus on “acceptance.” It seems that a degree of analogy
between intending and believing has to be admitted; likewise the presence of a
factual commitment in the case of an expression of intention. We can now use
the term ‘acceptance’ to express a generic concept applying both to cases of
intention and to cases of belief. He who intends to do A and he who believes
that he will do A can both be said to accept (or to accept it as being the
case) that he will do A. We could now attempt to renovate the three-pronged
analysis discussed in Section I, replacing references in that analysis to being
sure or certain that one will do A by references to accepting that one will do
A. We might reasonably hope thereby to escape the objections raised in Section
I, since these objections seemingly centred on special features of the notion of
certainty which would NOT attach to the generic notion of acceptance. Hope that
the renovated analysis will enable us to meet the sceptic will not immediately
be realised, for the sceptic can still as (a) why some cases of acceptance
should be specially dispensed from the need for evidential backing, and (b) if
certain cases are exempt from evidential justification but not from
justification, what sort of justification is here required. Some progress might
be achieved by adopting a different analysis of intention in terms of acceptance.
We might suggest that ‘Grice intends to go to Harborne’ is very roughly equivalent
to the conjunction of ‘Grice accepts-1 that he will go to Harborne’ and ‘Grice
accepts-2 that his going to Harborne will result from the effect of his
acceptance-1 that he will go to Harborne. The idea is that when a case of acceptance
is also a case of belief, the accepter does NOT regard his acceptance as
contributing towards the realisation of the state of affairs the future the
existence of which he accepts; whereas when a case of acceptance is not a case
of belief but a case of intention, he does regard the acceptance as so
contributing. Such an analysis clearly enables us to deal with the sceptic with
regard to this question (a), viz. why some cases of acceptance (those which are
cases of intention) should be specially exempt from the need of evidential
backing. For if my going to Harborne is to depend causally on my acceptance
that I shall-c go, the possession of satisfactory evidence that I shall-c go
will involve possession of the information that I accept that I shall-c go.
Obviously, then, I cannot (though others can) come to accept that I shall-c go
on the basis of satisfactory evidence, for to have such evidence I should have
already to have accepted that I shall-c go. I cannot decide whether or not to
accept-1 that I shall-c go on the strength of evidence which includes as a
datum that I do accept-1 that I shall-c go. Grice grants that we are still
unable to deal with the sceptic as regards question (b), viz. what sort of
justification is available for those cases of acceptance which require
non-evidential justification even though they involve a factual commitment.
Though it is clear that, on this analysis, one must not expect the intender to
rely on evidence for his statements of what he will in fact do, we have not
provided any account of the nature of the non-evidential considerations which
may be adduced to justify such a statement, nor (a fortiori) of the reasons why
such considerations might legitimately thought to succeed in justifying such a
statement. Refs.: Grice, “Intention and uncertainty,” The British Academy, and
BANC, MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library.
acceptum: As a meta-ethicist, like Hare, Grice is interested in
providing criteria for acceptability. He proposes three formal
universalizability, conceptual universalizability, and applicational
universalizability. This is Grice’s Golden Rule, which is Biblical in nature. Grice
needs a past participle for a ‘that’-clause of something ‘thought’. He has
‘creditum’ for what is believed, and ‘desideratum’ for what is desired. So
he uses ‘acceptum’ for what is accepted, a neutral form to cover both the
desideratum and the creditum. Short and Lewis have ‘accipio,’ f.
‘capio.’ Grice uses the abbreviation “Acc” for this. As he puts it in the
Locke lectures: "An idea I want to
explore is that we represent the sentences ‘Smith should be recovering his health by now’ and ‘Smith should join
the cricket club’ as having the
following structures. First, a common "rationality" operator
'Acc', to be heard as "it is reasonable that", "it is
acceptABLE that", "it ought to be that", "it
should be that", or in some other similar way.Next, one or other of
two mode operators, which in the case of the first are to be written as '⊢' and in the case of the second are to be
written as '!.’ Finally a 'radical', to be represented by 'r' or some other
lower-case letter. The structure for the second is ‘Acc + ⊢ + r. For the second, ‘Acc + ! + r,’
with each symbol falling within the scope of its predecessor. Grice is not a
psychologist, but he speaks of the ‘soul.’ He was a philosopher engaged in
philosophical psychology. The psychological theory which Grice envisages would
be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision
for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools
for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests e. g. on the part of one
creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to
another creature because of a concern for the other creature. Within such a
theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the
creatures Subjects to the theory against the abandonment of the central
concepts of the theory and so of the theory itself, motivations which the
creatures would or should regard as justified.
Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, I think, can
matters of evaluation, and so, of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be
raised at all. If I conjecture aright, then, the entrenched system contains the
materials needed to justify its own entrenchment; whereas no rival system
contains a basis for the justification of anything at all. We should recall
that the first rendering that Liddell and Scott give for “ψυχή” is “life;” the
tripartite division of “ψ., οἱ δὲ περὶ Πλάτωνα καὶ Ἀρχύτας καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ
Πυθαγόρειοι τὴν ψ. τριμερῆ ἀποφαίνονται, διαιροῦντες εἰς λογισμὸν καὶ θυμὸν καὶ
ἐπιθυμίαν,” Pl.R.439e sqq.; in Arist. “ἡ ψ. τούτοις ὥρισται, θρεπτικῷ,
αἰσθητικῷ, διανοητικῷ, κινήσει: πότερον δὲ τοὔτων ἕκαστόν ἐστι ψ. ἢ ψυχῆς
μόριον;” de An.413b11, cf. PA641b4; “ἡ θρεπτικὴ ψ.” Id.de An.434a22,
al.; And Aristotle also has Grice’s favourite, ‘psychic,’ ψυχικός , ή, όν,
“of the soul or life, spiritual, opp. “σωματικός, ἡδοναί” Arist.EN1117b28. The
compound “psichiologia” is first used in "Psichiologia de ratione animae
humanae," (in Bozicevic-Natalis, Vita Marci Maruli Spalatensis). A
footnote in “Method,” repr. in “Conception” dates Grice’s lectures at Princeton.
Grice is forever grateful to Carnap for having coined ‘pirot,’ or having
thought to have coined. Apparently, someone had used the expression before him
to mean some sort of exotic fish. He starts by listing this or that a focal
problem. The first problem is circularity. He refers to the dispositional
behaviouristic analysis by Ryle. The second focal problem is the alleged
analytic status of a psychological law. One problem concerns some respect for
Grice’s own privileged access to this or that state and this or that avowal of
this or that state being incorrigible. The fourth problem concerns the
law-selection. He refers to pessimism. He talks of folk-science. D and C are is
each predicate-constant in some law L in some psychological theory θ. This
or that instantiable of D or C may well be a set or a property or neither.
Grices way of Ramseyified naming: There is just one predicate D, such that
nomological generalization L introducing D via implicit definition in
theory θ obtains. Uniqueness is essential since D is assigned to a
names for a particular instantiable (One can dispense with uniqueness by way of
Ramseyified description discussed under ‘ramseyified description.’) Grice
trusts he is not overstretching Ramsey’s original intention. He applies
Ramsey-naming and Ramsey-describing to pain. He who hollers is in pain. Or
rather, He who is in pain hollers. (Sufficient but not necessary). He rejects
disjunctional physicalism on it sounding harsh, as Berkeley puts it, to say
that Smiths brains being in such and such a state is a case of, say, judging
something to be true on insufficient evidence. He criticises the body-soul
identity thesis on dismissing =s main purpose, to license predicate
transfers. Grice wasnt sure what his presidential address to the American
Philosophical Association will be about. He chose the banal (i.e. the
ordinary-language counterpart of something like a need we ascribe to a squirrel
to gobble nuts) and the bizarre: the philosophers construction of need and
other psychological, now theoretical terms. In the proceedings, Grice
creates the discipline of Pology. He cares to mention philosophers Aristotle,
Lewis, Myro, Witters, Ramsey, Ryle, and a few others. The essay became popular
when, of all people, Block, cited it as a programme in functionalism,
which it is Grices method in functionalist philosophical psychology. Introduces
Pology as a creature-construction discipline. Repr. in “Conception,” it
reached a wider audience. The essay is highly subdivided, and covers a lot of
ground. Grice starts by noting that, contra Ryle, he wants to see psychological
predicates as theoretical concepts. The kind of theory he is having in mind is
folksy. The first creature he introduces to apply his method is Toby, a
squarrel, that is a reconstructed squirrel. Grice gives some principles of
Pirotology. Maxims of rational behaviour compound to form what he calls an
immanuel, of which The Conversational Immanuel is a part. Grice concludes with
a warning against the Devil of Scientism, but acknowledges perhaps he was
giving much too credit to Myros influence on this! “Method”
in “Conception,” philosophical psychology, Pirotology. The Immanuel
section is perhaps the most important from the point of view of conversation as
rational cooperation. For he identifies three types of generality: formal,
applicational, and content-based. Also, he allows for there being different
types of imannuels. Surely one should be the conversational immanuel. Ryle
would say that one can have a manual, yet now know how to use it! And theres
also the Witters-type problem. How do we say that the conversationalist is
following the immanuel? Perhaps the statement is too strong – cf. following a
rule – and Grices problems with resultant and basic procedures, and how the
former derive from the latter! This connects with Chomsky, and in general with
Grices antipathy towards constitutive rules! In “Uncertainty,” Grice warns that
his interpretation of Prichards willing that as a state should not preclude a
physicalist analysis, but in Method it is all against physicalism. In Method, from the mundane to the recondite, he is
playful enough to say that primacy is no big deal, and that, if properly
motivated, he might give a reductive analysis of the buletic in terms of the
doxastic. But his reductive analysis of the doxastic in terms of the buletic
runs as follows: P judges that p iff P wills as follows: given any situation in
which P wills some end E and here are two non-empty classes K1 and
K2 of action types, such that: the performance by P of an
action-type belonging to K1 realises E1 just in
case p obtains, and the performance by the P of an action type belonging to of
K2 will realise E just in case p does not obtain, and here is
no third non-empty class K3 of action types such that the
performance by the P of an action type belonging to will realise E
whether p is true or p is false, in such situation, the P is to will that the P
performs some action type belonging to K1. Creature construction
allows for an account of freedom that will metaphysically justify absolute
value. Frankfurt has become famous for his second-order and
higher-order desires. Grice is exploring similar grounds in what comes out as
his “Method” (originally APA presidential address, now repr. in “Conception”).
Refs.: The obvious source is his “Method,” repr. in “Conception,” but the
keyword: “philosophical psychology” is useful in the Grice papers. There is a
specific essay on the power structure of the soul, The H. P. Grice Collection,
BANC.
accidens: accidentia, if there is accidentia, there is
‘essentia.’ If the Grecians felt like using the prefix ‘syn-‘ for this, why
didn’t the Romans use the affix ‘cum-’? There are two: coincidentia, and
concomitantia. For Grice, even English is vague here – to the point like he
felt that ‘have,’ as in ‘have a property’ seems more of a proper translation of
Aristotle’s ‘accidentia.’ Anything else falls under the ‘izz,’ not the ‘hazz.’
Because if the property is not accidental, the subject-item would just cease to
exist, so the essential property is something the subject item IZZ, not HAZZ. One
philosophical mistake: what is essential is not also accidental. Grice follows
Kripke in the account of existence and essence. If Grice’s essence is his
rational nature, if Grice becomes irrational, he ceases to exist. Not so for
any property that Grice has which is NOT essential. An essential property is
the first predicable, in that it is not one of this or that genus that is
redundant. So Grice applies ‘accidental,’ like ‘essential’ to ‘attribute,’ and
to attribute is to predicate. An essential attribute is manifested by an
essential predicate. A non-essential predicate is an accidental attribute.
There is the ‘idea’ of the ‘proprium,’ idion, with which Grice has to struggle
a little. For what is the implicatum of a ‘proprium’ ascripition? “Man is a
laughing animal.” Why would someone say such an idiocy in the first place?!
Strictly, from a Griceian point of view, an ‘accidens’ is feature or property
of a substance e.g., an organism or an artifact without which the substance
could still exist. According to a common essentialist view of persons,
Socrates’ size, color, and integrity are among his accidents, while his
humanity is not. For Descartes, thinking is the essence of the soul, while any
particular thought a soul entertains is an accident. According to a common
theology, God has no accidents, since all truths about him flow by necessity
from his nature. These examples suggest the diversity of traditional uses of
the notion of accident. There is no uniform conception; but the Cartesian view,
according to which the accidents are modes of ways of specifying the essence of
a substance, is representative. An important ambiguity concerns the identity of
accidents: if Plato and Aristotle have the same weight, is that weight one
accident say, the property of weighing precisely 70 kilograms or two one
accident for Plato, one for Aristotle? Different theorists give different
answers and some have changed their minds. Issues about accidents have become
peripheral in this century because of the decline of traditional concerns about
substance. But the more general questions about necessity and contingency are
very much alive. While not one of the labours of Grice, Accidentailism is
regarded by Grice as the metaphysical thesis that the occurrence of some events
is either not necessitated or not causally determined or not predictable. Many
determinists have maintained that although all events are caused, some
nevertheless occur accidentally, if only because the causal laws determining
them might have been different. Some philosophers have argued that even if
determinism is true, some events, such as a discovery, could not have been
predicted, on grounds that to predict a discovery is to make the discovery. The
term may also designate a theory of individuation: that individuals of the same
kind or species are numerically distinct in virtue of possessing some different
accidental properties. Two horses are the same in essence but numerically
distinct because one of them is black, e.g., while the other is white.
Accidentalism presupposes the identity of indiscernibles but goes beyond it by
claiming that accidental properties account for numerical diversity within a
species. Peter Abelard criticized a version of accidentalism espoused by his
teacher, William of Champeaux, on the ground that accidental properties depend
for their existence on the distinct individuals in which they inhere, and so
the properties cannot account for the distinctness of the individuals.
accidie
also acedia, apathy, listlessness, or ennui. This condition is problematic for
the internalist thesis that, necessarily, any belief that one morally ought to
do something is conceptually sufficient for having motivation to do it. Grice
gives the example of Ann. Ann has long believed that she ought, morally, to
assist her ailing mother, and she has dutifully acted accordingly. Seemingly,
she may continue to believe this, even though, owing to a recent personal
tragedy, she now suffers from accidie and is wholly lacking in motivation to
assist her mother.
ackrillism –
after J. L. Ackrill, London-born, Oxford-educated tutee of Grice’s. Grice cites
him in “Some reflections on ends and happiness.” The reference is to Ackrill’s
exploration on Aristotle on happiness. Ackrill was Grice’s tutee at St. John’s
where he read, as he should, for the Lit. Hum. (Phil.). Grice instilled on him
a love for Aristotle, which had been instilled on Grice by Scots philosopher
Hardie, Grice’s tutee at THE place to study Lit. Hum., Corpus. Grice regretted
that Ackrill had to *translate* Aristotle. “Of course at Clifton and Corpus,
Hardie never asked me so!” Grice thought that Aristotle was almost being
‘murdered,’ literally, by Ackrill. That’s why Grice would always quote Aristotle
in the Grecian vernacular. An “ackrillism,” then, as Grice used it, is a way to
turn Aristotle from one vernacular to another, “usually with an Ackrillian
effect.”
actum.
Grice’s theory is action-oriented. He often used ‘pragmatic’ to that effect.
This is most evident in his account of meaning. In the phrastic, “The door is
closed, please,” the ultimate intention is that the recipient performs the
action of closing the door. Grice saw action theory as the study of the
ontological structure of human action, the process by which it originates, and
the ways in which it is explained. Most human actions are acts of commission:
they constitute a class of events in which a subject the agent brings about
some change or changes. Thus, in moving one’s finger, one brings it about that
one’s finger moves. When the change brought about is an ongoing process e.g.,
the continuing appearance of words on a , the behavior is called an activity
writing. An action of omission occurs when an agent refrains from performing an
action of commission. Since actions of commission are events, the question of
their ontology is in part a matter of the general ontology of change. An
important issue here is whether what occurs when an action is performed should
be viewed as abstract or concrete. On the first approach, actions are
understood either as proposition-like entities e.g., Booth’s moving a finger,
or as a species of universal namely, an
act-type moving a finger. What “occurred” when Booth moved his finger in Ford’sTheater
on April 14, 1865, is held to be the abstract entity in question, and the
entity is viewed as repeatable: that is, precisely the same entity is held to
have occurred on every other occasion of Booth’s moving his finger. When
actions are viewed as concrete, on the other hand, Booth’s moving his finger in
Ford’s Theater is understood to be a non-repeatable particular, accidental
property action theory 6 4065A- 6 and
the movement of the finger counts as an acttoken, which instantiates the
corresponding acttype. Concrete actions are time-bound: each belongs to a
single behavioral episode, and other instantiations of the same act-type count
as distinct events. A second important ontological issue concerns the fact that
by moving his finger, Booth also fired a gun, and killed Lincoln. It is common
for more than one thing to be accomplished in a single exercise of agency, and
how such doings are related is a matter of debate. If actions are understood as
abstract entities, the answer is essentially foregone: there must be as many
different actions on Booth’s part as there are types exemplified. But if
actions are viewed as particulars the same token can count as an instance of
more than one type, and identity claims become possible. Here there is
disagreement. Fine-grained theories of act individuation tend to confine
identity claims to actions that differ only in ways describable through
different modifications of the same main verb
e.g., where Placido both sings and sings loudly. Otherwise, different
types are held to require different tokens: Booth’s action of moving his finger
is held to have generated or given rise to distinct actions of firing the gun
and killing Lincoln, by virtue of having had as causal consequences the gun’s
discharge and Lincoln’s death. The opposite, coarse-grained theory, however,
views these causal relations as grounds for claiming Booth’s acts were
precisely identical. On this view, for Booth to kill Lincoln was simply for him
to do something that caused Lincoln’s death
which was in fact nothing more than to move his finger and similarly for his firing the gun. There
is also a compromise account, on which Booth’s actions are related as part to
whole, each consisting in a longer segment of the causal chain that terminates
with Lincoln’s death. The action of killing Lincoln consisted, on this view, in
the entire sequence; but that of firing the gun terminated with the gun’s
discharge, and that of moving the finger with the finger’s motion. When, as in
Booth’s case, more than one thing is accomplished in a single exercise of
agency, some are done by doing others. But if all actions were performed by
performing others, an infinite regress would result. There must, then, be a
class of basic actions i.e., actions
fundamental to the performance of all others, but not themselves done by doing
something else. There is disagreement, however, on which actions are basic.
Some theories treat bodily movements, such as Booth’s moving his finger, as
basic. Others point out that it is possible to engage in action but to
accomplish less than a bodily movement, as when one tries to move a limb that
is restrained or paralyzed, and fails. According to these accounts, bodily
actions arise out of a still more basic mental activity, usually called
volition or willing, which is held to constitute the standard means for
performing all overt actions. The question of how bodily actions originate is
closely associated with that of what distinguishes them from involuntary and
reflex bodily events, as well as from events in the inanimate world. There is
general agreement that the crucial difference concerns the mental states that
attend action, and in particular the fact that voluntary actions typically
arise out of states of intending on the part of the agent. But the nature of
the relation is difficult, and there is the complicating factor that intention
is sometimes held to reduce to other mental states, such as the agent’s desires
and beliefs. That issue aside, it would appear that unintentional actions arise
out of more basic actions that are intentional, as when one unintentionally
breaks a shoelace by intentionally tugging on it. But how intention is first
tr. into action is much more problematic, especially when bodily movements are
viewed as basic actions. One cannot, e.g., count Booth’s moving his finger as
an intentional action simply because he intended to do so, or even on the
ground if it is true that his intention caused his finger to move. The latter
might have occurred through a strictly autonomic response had Booth been
nervous enough, and then the moving of the finger would not have counted as an
action at all, much less as intentional. Avoiding such “wayward causal chains”
requires accounting for the agent’s voluntary control over what occurs in
genuinely intentional action a difficult
task when bodily actions are held to be basic. Volitional accounts have greater
success here, since they can hold that movements are intentional only when the
agent’s intention is executed through volitional activity. But they must
sidestep another threatened regress: if we call for an activity of willing to
explain why Booth’s moving his finger counts as intentional action, we cannot
do the same for willing itself. Yet on most accounts volition does have the
characteristics of intentional behavior. Volitional theories of action must,
then, provide an alternative account of how mental activity can be intentional.
Actions are explained by invoking the agent’s reasons for performing them.
Characteristically, a reason may be understood to consist in a positive
attitude of the agent toward one or another action theory action theory 7
4065A- 7 outcome, and a belief to the
effect that the outcome may be achieved by performing the action in question.
Thus Emily might spend the summer in France out of a desire to learn , and a
belief that spending time in France is the best way to do so. Disputed
questions about reasons include how confident the agent must be that the action
selected will in fact lead to the envisioned outcome, and whether obligation
represents a source of motivation that can operate independently of the agent’s
desires. Frequently, more than one course of action is available to an agent.
Deliberation is the process of searching out and weighing the reasons for and
against such alternatives. When successfully concluded, deliberation usually
issues in a decision, by which an intention to undertake one of the
contemplated actions is formed. The intention is then carried out when the time
for action comes. Much debate has centered on the question of how reasons are
related to decisions and actions. As with intention, an agent’s simply having a
reason is not enough for the reason to explain her behavior: her desire to
learn notwithstanding, Emily might have
gone to France simply because she was transferred there. Only when an agent
does something for a reason does the reason explain what is done. It is
frequently claimed that this bespeaks a causal relation between the agent’s
strongest reason and her decision or action. This, however, suggests a
determinist stance on the free will problem, leading some philosophers to balk.
An alternative is to treat reason explanations as teleological explanations,
wherein an action is held to be reasonable or justified in virtue of the goals
toward which it was directed. But positions that treat reason explanations as
non-causal require an alternative account of what it is to decide or act for
one reason rather than another. Grice
would often wonder about the pervasiveness of the intentiona idiom in the
description of action. He would use the phrase ‘action verb,’ i. e. a verb
applied to an agent and describing an activity, an action, or an attempt at or
a culmination of an action. Verbs applying to agents may be distinguished in
two basic ways: by whether they can take the progressive continuous form and by
whether or not there is a specific moment of occurrence/completion of the
action named by the verb. An activity verb is one describing something that
goes on for a time but with no inherent endpoint, such as ‘drive’, ‘laugh’, or
‘meditate’. One can stop doing such a thing but one cannot complete doing it.
Indeed, one can be said to have done it as soon as one has begun doing it. An
accomplishment verb is one describing something that goes on for a time toward
an inherent endpoint, such as ‘paint’ a fence, ‘solve’ a problem, or ‘climb’ a
mountain. Such a thing takes a certain time to do, and one cannot be said to
have done it until it has been completed. An achievement verb is one describing
either the culmination of an activity, such as ‘finish’ a job or ‘reach’ a
goal; the effecting of a change, such as ‘fire’ an employee or ‘drop’ an egg;
or undergoing a change, such as ‘hear’ an explosion or ‘forget’ a name. An
achievement does not go on for a period of time but may be the culmination of
something that does. Ryle singled out achievement verbs and state verbs see
below partly in order to disabuse philosophers of the idea that what
psychological verbs name must invariably be inner acts or activities modeled on
bodily actions or activities. A task verb is an activity verb that implies
attempting to do something named by an achievement verb. For example, to seek
is to attempt to find, to sniff is to attempt to smell, and to treat is to
attempt to cure. A state verb is a verb not an action verb describing a
condition, disposition, or habit rather than something that goes on or takes
place. Examples include ‘own’, ‘weigh’, ‘want’, ‘hate’, ‘frequent’, and
‘teetotal’. These differences were articulated by Zeno Vendler in Linguistics
and Philosophy 7. Taking them into account, linguists have classified verbs and
verb phrases into four main aspectual classes, which they distinguish in
respect to the availability and interpretation of the simple present tense, of
the perfect tenses, of the progressive construction, and of various temporal
adverbials, such as adverbs like ‘yesterday’, ‘finally’, and ‘often’, and
prepositional phrases like ‘for a long time’ and ‘in a while’. Many verbs
belong to more than one category by virtue of having several related uses. For
example, ‘run’ is both an activity and an accomplishment verb, and ‘weigh’ is
both a state and an accomplishment verb. Linguists single out a class of
causative verbs, such as ‘force’, ‘inspire’, and ‘persuade’, some of which are
achievement and some accomplishment verbs. Such causative verbs as ‘break’,
‘burn’, and ‘improve’ have a correlative intransitive use, so that, e.g., to
break something is to cause it to break. Grice denies the idea of an ‘act’ of
the soul. In this way, it is interesting to contrast his views to those
philosophers, even at Oxford, like Occam or Geach, who speak of an act of the
soul. And then there’s act-content-object psychology, or ‘act-object
psychology,’ for short, a philosophical theory that identifies in every
psychological state a mental act, a lived-through phenomenological content,
such as a mental image or description of properties, and an intended object
that the mental act is about or toward which it is directed by virtue of its
content. The distinction between the act, content, and object of thought
originated with Alois Höfler’s Logik 0, written in collaboration with Meinong.
But the theory is historically most often associated with its development in
Kazimierz Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellung “On
the Content and Object of Presentations,” 4, despite Twardowski’s
acknowledgment of his debt to Höfler. Act-object psychology arose as a reaction
to Franz Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis in his influential
Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt “Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint,” 1874, in which Brentano maintains that intentionality is “the mark
of the mental,” by contrast with purely physical phenomena. Brentano requires
that intended objects belong immanently to the mental acts that intend
them a philosophical commitment that
laid Brentano open to charges of epistemological idealism and psychologism. Yet
Brentano’s followers, who accepted the intentionality of thought but resisted
what they came to see as its detachable idealism and psychologism, responded by
distinguishing the act-immanent phenomenological content of a psychological
state from its act-transcendent intended object, arguing that Brentano had
wrongly and unnecessarily conflated mental content with the external objects of
thought. Twardowski goes so far as to claim that content and object can never
be identical, an exclusion in turn that is vigorously challenged by Husserl in
his Logische Untersuchungen “Logical Investigations,” 3, 2, and by others in
the phenomenological tradition who acknowledge the possibility that a
self-reflexive thought can sometimes be about its own content as intended
object, in which content and object are indistinguishable. Act-object psychology
continues to be of interest to contemporary philosophy because of its relation
to ongoing projects in phenomenology, and as a result of a resurgence of study
of the concept of intentionality and qualia in philosophy of mind, cognitive
psychology, and Gegenstandstheorie, or existent and non-existent intended
object theory, in philosophical logic and semantics. Grice was fascinated by the metaphysically
wrong theory of agent-causation. He would make fun of it. His example, “The
cause of the death of Charles I is decapitation; therefore, decapitation willed
the death of Charles I. Grice would refer to transeunt causation in “Actions
and events.” In Grice’s terms, agent causation is the convoluted idea that the
primary cause of an event is a substance; more specifically, causation by a
substance, as opposed to an event. Thus a brick a substance may be said to be
the cause of the breaking of the glass. The expression is also used more
narrowly by Reid and others for the view that an action or event is caused by
an exertion of power by some agent endowed with will and understanding. Thus, a
person may be said to be the cause of her action of opening the door. In this
restricted sense Reid called it “the strict and proper sense”, an agent-cause
must have the power to cause the action or event and the power not to cause it.
Moreover, it must be “up to” the agent whether to cause the event or not to
cause it. It is not “up to” the brick whether to cause or not to cause the
breaking of the glass. The restricted sense of agent causation developed by
Reid is closely tied to the view that the agent possesses free will. Medieval
philosophers distinguished the internal activity of the agent from the external
event produced by that activity. The former was called “immanent causation” and
the latter “transeunt causation.” These terms have been adapted by Chisholm and
others to mark the difference between agent causation and event causation. The
idea is that the internal activity is agentcaused by the person whose activity it
is; whereas the external event is event-caused by the internal activity of the
agent. His “Death of Charles I” example
is meant as a reductio ad sbsurdum of ‘agent causation.’ The philosopher cannot
possibly be meaning to communicate such absurdity.
Actus – potentia --
energeia, Grecian term coined by Aristotle and often tr. as ‘activity’,
‘actuality’, and even ‘act’, but more literally rendered ‘a state of
functioning’. Since for Aristotle the function of an object is its telos or
aim, energeia can also be described as an entelecheia or realization another
coined term he uses interchangeably with energeia. So understood, it can denote
either a something’s being functional, though not in use at the moment, and b
something’s actually functioning, which Aristotle describes as a “first
realization” and “second realization” respectively On the Soul II.5. In
general, every energeia is correlative to some dunamis, a capability or power
to function in a certain way, and in the central books of the Metaphysics Aristotle
uses the linkage between these two concepts to explain the relation of form to
matter. He also distinguishes between energeia and kinesis change or motion
Metaphysics IX.6; Nicomachean Ethics X.4. A kinesis is defined by reference to
its terminus e.g., learning how to multiply and is thus incomplete at any point
before reaching its conclusion. An energeia, in contrast, is a state complete
in itself e.g., seeing. Thus, Aristotle says that at any time that I am seeing,
it is also true that I have seen; but it is not true that at any time I am
learning that I have learned. In Grecian, this difference is not so much one of
tense as of encrateia energeia 264 264
aspect: the perfect tense marks a “perfect” or complete state, and not
necessarily prior activity.
energeticism, also called energetism or energism, the doctrine that
energy is the fundamental substance underlying all change. Its most prominent
champion was the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald 18532. In his address “Die
Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus” “The Conquest of Scientific
Materialism”, delivered at Lübeck in 5, Ostwald chastised the atomic-kinetic
theory as lacking progress and claimed that a unified science, energetics,
could be based solely on the concept of energy. Many of Ostwald’s criticisms of
materialism and mechanistic reductionism derived from Mach. Ostwald’s attempts
to deduce the fundamental equations of thermodynamics and mechanics from the
principles of energy conservation and transformation were indebted to the
writings of Georg Helm 18749, especially Die Lehre von Energie “The Laws of
Energy,” 7 and Die Energetik “Energetics,” 8. Ostwald defended Helm’s
factorization thesis that all changes in energy can be analyzed as a product of
intensity and capacity factors. The factorization thesis and the attempt to
derive mechanics and thermodynamics from the principles of energetics were
subjected to devastating criticisms by Boltzmann and Max Planck. Boltzmann also
criticized the dogmatism of Ostwald’s rejection of the atomickinetic theory.
Ostwald’s program to unify the sciences under the banner of energetics withered
in
adelard
of bath: Grice found inspiration on Adelard’s “On the same
and the different,” and he was pleased that he had been educated not far from Bath,
at Clifton! Adelard is Benedictine monk notable for his contributions to the
introduction of Arabic science in the West. After studying at Tours, he taught
at Laon, then spent seven years traveling in Italy, possibly Spain, and Cilicia
and Syria, before returning to England. In his dialogue On the Same and the
Different, he remarks, concerning universals, that the names of individuals,
species, and genera are imposed on the same essence regarded in different
respects. He also wrote Seventy-six Questions on Nature, based on Arabic
learning; works on the use of the abacus and the astrolabe; a work on falconry;
and translations of Abu Ma’shar’s Arabic active euthanasia Adelard of Bath 9
4065A- 9 Shorter Introduction to
Astronomy, al-Khwarizmi’s fl. c.830 astronomical tables, and Euclid’s Elements.
additum: f. addo ,
dĭdi, dĭtum, 3, v. a. 2. do (addues for addideris, Paul. ex Fest. p. 27 Müll.),addition.
Strawson Wiggins p. 520. The utterer implies something more or different from
what he explicitly conveys. Cfr. Disimplicatum, ‘less’ under ‘different from’
How seriously are we taking the ‘more.’ Not used by Grice. They seem
cross-categorial. If emissor draws a skull and then a cross he means that there
is danger and death in the offing. He crosses the cross, so it means death is
avoidable. Urmson says that Warnock went to bed and took off his boots. He
implicates in that order. So he means MORE than the ‘ampersand.” The “and” is
expanded into “and then.” But in not every case things are so easy that it’s a
matter of adding stuff. Cf. summatum, conjunctum.
additive implicature: By uttering
‘and,’ Russell means the Boolean adition. Whitehead means ‘and then’.
Whithead’s implicatum is ADDITIVE, as opposed to diaphoron. Grice considers the
conceptual possibilities here: One may explicitly convey that p, and implicitly
convey q, where q ADDS to p (e. g. ‘and’ implicates ‘and then’). Sometimes it
does not, “He is a fine fine,” (or a ‘nice fellow,’ Lecture IV) implying, “He
is a scoundrel.” Sometimes it has nothing to do with it, “The weather has been
nice” implying, “you committed a gaffe.” With disimplicatum, you implicate LESS
than you explicitly convey. When did you last see your father? “Yesterday
night, in my drams.” Grice sums this up with the phrase, “more or other.” By
explicitly conveying that p, the emissor implicates MORE OR OTHER than he
explicitly conveys.
adornoian
implicatum.
Grice enjoyed Adorno’s explorations on the natural/non-natural distinction;
adorno, t. w. a philosopher of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of
critical theory. With Horkheimer, Adorno gave philosophical direction to the
Frankfurt School and its research projects in its Institute for Social
Research. An accomplished musician and composer, Adorno first focused on the
theory of culture and art, working to develop a non-reductionist but materialist
theory of art and music in many essays. Under the influence of Walter Benjamin,
he turned toward developing a “micrological” account of cultural artifacts,
viewing them as “constellations” of social and historical forces. As his
collaboration with Horkheimer increased, Adorno turned to the problem of a self-defeating
dialectic of modern reason and freedom. Under the influence of the seemingly
imminent victory of the Nazis in Europe, this analysis focused on the
“entwinement of myth and Enlightenment.” The Dialectic of Enlightenment argues
that instrumental reason promises the subject autonomy from the forces of
nature only to enslave it again by its own repression of its impulses and
inclinations. The only way around this self-domination is “non-identity
thinking,” found in the unifying tendencies of a non-repressive reason. This
self-defeating dialectic is represented by the striking image of Ulysses tied
to the mast to survive his encounter with the Sirens. Adorno initially hoped
for a positive analysis of the Enlightenment to overcome this genealogy of
modern reason, but it is never developed. Instead, he turned to an increasingly
pessimistic analysis of the growing reification of modern life and of the
possibility of a “totally administered society.” Adorno held that “autonomous
art” can open up established reality and negate the experience of reification.
Aesthetic Theory develops this idea of autonomous art in terms of aesthetic
form, or the capacity of the internal organization of art to restructure
existing patterns of meaning. Authentic works of art have a “truth-value” in
their capacity to bring to awareness social contradictions and antinomies. In
Negative Dialectics 6 Adorno provides a more general account of social
criticism under the “fragmenting” conditions of modern rationalization and
domination. These and other writings have had a large impact on cultural
criticism, particularly through Adorno’s analysis of popular culture and the
“culture industry.”
aequipollence, term used
by Sextus Empiricus to express the view that there are arguments of equal
strength on all sides of any question and that therefore we should suspend
judgment on every question that can be raised.
aequiprobable, having the
same probability. Sometimes used in the same way as ‘equipossible’, the term is
associated with Laplace’s the “classical” interpretation of probability, where
the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of equipossibilities
favorable to the event to the total number of equipossibilities. For example,
the probability of rolling an even number with a “fair” six-sided die is ½ there being three equipossibilities 2, 4, 6
favorable to even, and six equipossibilities 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in all and 3 /6 %
½. The concept is now generally thought not to be widely applicable to the
interpretation of probability, since natural equipossibilities are not always
at hand as in assessing the probability of a thermonuclear war tomorrow.
aequivalence, mutual
inferability. The following are main kinds: two statements are materially
equivalent provided they have the same truthvalue, and logically equivalent
provided each can be deduced from the other; two sentences or words are
equivalent in meaning provided they can be substituted for each other in any context
without altering the meaning of that context. In truth-functional logic, two
statements are logically equivalent if they can never have truthvalues
different from each other. In this sense of ‘logically equivalent’ all
tautologies are equivalent to each other and all contradictions are equivalent
to each other. Similarly, in extensional set theory, two classes are equivalent
provided they have the same numbers, so that all empty classes are regarded as
equivalent. In a non-extensional set theory, classes would be equivalent only
if their conditions of membership were logically equivalent or equivalent in
meaning.
Grice’s aequi-vocality
thesis -- aequivocation, the use of an expression in two or more different
senses in a single context. For example, in ‘The end of anything is its
perfection. But the end of life is death; so death is the perfection of life’,
the expression ‘end’ is first used in the sense of ‘goal or purpose,’ but in
its second occurrence ‘end’ means ‘termination.’ The use of the two senses in
this context is an equivocation. Where the context in which the expression used
is an argument, the fallacy of equivocation may be committed.
aestheticum:
Grice is well aware that ‘aesthetica,’ qua discipline, was meant to refer to
the ‘sensibile,’ as opposed to the ‘intellectus.’ With F. N. Sibley (who
credits Grice profusely), Grice explored the ‘second-order’ quality of the
so-called ‘aesthetic properties.’ It influenced Scruton. The aesthetic attitude
is the appropriate attitude or frame of mind for approaching art or nature or
other objects or events so that one might both appreciate its intrinsic
perceptual qualities, and as a result have an aesthetic experience. The
aesthetic attitude has been construed in many ways: 1 as disinterested, so that
one’s experience of the work is not affected by any interest in its possible
practical uses, 2 as a “distancing” of oneself from one’s own personal
concerns, 3 as the contemplation of an object, purely as an object of
sensation, as it is in itself, for its own sake, in a way unaffected by any
cognition or knowledge one may have of it. These different notions of aesthetic
attitude have at times been combined within a single theory. There is
considerable doubt about whether there is such a thing as an aesthetic
attitude. There is neither any special kind of action nor any special way of
performing an ordinary action that ensures that we see a work as it “really
is,” and that results in our having an aesthetic experience. Furthermore, there
are no purely sensory experiences, divorced from any cognitive content
whatsoever. Criticisms of the notion of aesthetic attitude have reinforced
attacks on aesthetics as a separate field of study within philosophy. On the
other hand, there’s aesthetic formalism, non-iconic, the view that in our
interactions with works of art, form should be given primacy. Rather than
taking ‘formalism’ as the name of one specific theory in the arts, it is better
and more typical to take it to name that type of theory which emphasizes the form
of the artwork. Or, since emphasis on form is something that comes in degrees,
it is best to think of theories of art as ranged on a continuum of more
formalist and less formalist. It should be added that theories of art are
typically complex, including definitions of art, recommendations concerning
what we should attend to in art, analyses of the nature of the aesthetic,
recommendations concerning the making of aesthetic evaluations, etc.; and each
of these components may be more formalist or less so. Those who use the concept
of form mainly wish to contrast the artifact itself with its relations to
entities outside itself with its
representing various things, its symbolizing various things, its being
expressive of various things, its being the product of various intentions of
the artist, its evoking various states in beholders, its standing in various
relations of influence and similarity to preceding, succeeding, and
contemporary works, etc. There have been some, however, who in emphasizing form
have meant to emphasize not just the artifact but the perceptible form or
design of the artifact. Kant, e.g., in his theory of aesthetic excellence, not
only insisted that the only thing relevant to determining the beauty of an
object is its appearance, but within the appearance, the form, the design: in
visual art, not the colors but the design that the colors compose; in music,
not the timbre of the individual sounds but the formal relationships among
them. It comes as no surprise that theories of music have tended to be much
more formalist than theories of literature and drama, with theories of the
visual arts located in between. While Austin’s favourite aesthetic property is
‘dumpty,’ Grice is more open minded, and allows for more of a property or
quality such as being dainty, garish, graceful, balanced, charming, majestic,
trite, elegant, lifeless, ugly, or beautiful. By contrast, non-aesthetic
properties are properties that require no special sensitivity or perceptiveness
to perceive such as a painting’s being
predominantly blue, its having a small red square in a corner or a kneeling
figure in the foreground, or that the music becomes louder at a given point.
Sometimes it is argued that a special perceptiveness or taste is needed to
perceive a work’s aesthetic qualities, and that this is a defining feature of a
property’s being aesthetic. A corollary of this view is that aesthetic
qualities cannot be defined in terms of non-aesthetic qualities, though some
have held that aesthetic qualities supervene on non-aesthetic qualities. As a
systematic philosopher, Grice goes back to the etymological root of the
aesthetic as the philosophy of the sensible. He would make fun of the
specialization. “If at the philosophy department I am introduced to Mr. Puddle,
our man in nineteenth-century continental aesthetics, I can grasp he is either
underdescribed or not good at nineteenth-century continental aesthetics!’ The
branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our
adventitious ideas and experience of art and of the natural environment. It
emerged as a separate field of philosophical inquiry during the eighteenth
century in England and on the Continent. Recognition of aesthetics as a
separate branch of philosophy coincided with the development of theories of art
that grouped together painting, poetry, sculpture, music, and dance and often
landscape gardening as the same kind of thing, les beaux arts, or the fine
arts. Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry 1735
as the name for one of the two branches of the study of knowledge, i.e., for
the study of sensory experience coupled with feeling, which he argued provided
a different type of knowledge from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by
“logic.” He derived it from the ancient Grecian aisthanomai ‘to perceive’, and
“the aesthetic” has always been intimately connected with sensory experience
and the kinds of feelings it arouses. Questions specific to the field of
aesthetics are: Is there a special attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we
should take toward works of art and the natural environment, and what is it
like? Is there a distinctive type of experience, an aesthetic experience, and
what is it? Is there a special object of attention that we can call the aesthetic
object? Finally, is there a distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with
moral, epistemic, and religious values? Some questions overlap with those in
the philosophy of art, such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and
whether there is a faculty of taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic
character and value of natural objects or works of art. Aesthetics also
encompasses the philosophy of art. The most central issue in the philosophy of
art has been how to define ‘art’. Not all cultures have, or have had, a concept
of art that coincides with the one that emerged in Western Europe during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What justifies our applying our concept
to the things people in these other cultures have produced? There are also many
pictures including paintings, songs, buildings, and bits of writing, that are
not art. What distinguishes those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art
from those that are not? Various answers have been proposed that identify the
distinguishing features of art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of
the maker, and social roles or uses of the object. Since the eighteenth century
there have been debates about what kinds of things count as “art.” Some have
argued that architecture and ceramics are not art because their functions are
primarily utilitarian, and novels were for a long time not listed among the
“fine arts” because they are not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates
continue to arise over new media and what may be new art forms, such as film,
video, photography, performance art, found art, furniture, posters, earthworks,
and computer and electronic art. Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt,
feces, or various discarded and mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze.
There is often an explicit rejection of craft and technique by
twentieth-century artists, and the subject matter has expanded to include the
banal and everyday, and not merely mythological, historical, and religious
subjects as in years past. All of these developments raise questions about the
relevance of the category of “fine” or “high” art. Another set of issues in
philosophy of art concerns how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and
understood. Some views emphasize that artworks are products of individual
efforts, so that a work should be understood in light of the producer’s
knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others see the meaning of a work as
established by social conventions and practices of the artist’s own time, but
which may not be known or understood by the producer. Still others see meaning
as established by the practices of the users, even if they were not in effect
when the work was produced. Are there objective criteria or standards for
evaluating individual artworks? There has been much disagreement over whether
value judgments have universal validity, or whether there can be no disputing
about taste, if value judgments are relative to the tastes and interests of
each individual or to some group of individuals who share the same tastes and
interests. A judgment such as “This is good” certainly seems to make a claim
about the work itself, though such a claim is often based on the sort of
feeling, understanding, or experience a person has obtained from the work. A
work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally distinguished from simply
liking it. But is it possible to establish what sorts of knowledge or
experiences any given work should provide to any suitably prepared perceiver,
and what would it be to be suitably prepared? It is a matter of contention
whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of its moral,
political, or epistemic stance or impact. Philosophy of art has also dealt with
the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, repreaesthetics aesthetics
12 4065A- 12 sentation, expression, and
expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or truth; the nature
of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the ontological status of
artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to art. Work in the
field has always been influenced by philosophical theories of language or
meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and continues to be heavily
influenced by psychological and cultural theory, including versions of
semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism. Some
theorists in the late twentieth century have denied that the aesthetic and the
“fine arts” can legitimately be separated out and understood as separate,
autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that these conceptual categories
themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of cultural attitudes and power
relationships. These theorists urge that aesthetics can and should be
eliminated as a separate field of study, and that “the aesthetic” should not be
conceived as a special kind of value. They favor instead a critique of the
roles that images not only painting, but film, photography, and advertising,
sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional constructions have in expressing and
shaping human attitudes and experiences.
a
fortiori argument: According to Grice, an argument that
moves from the premises that everything which possesses a certain
characteristics will possess some further characteristics and that certain
things possess the relevant characteristics to an eminent degree to the
conclusion that a fortiori even more so these things will possess the further
characteristics. The second premise is often left implicit – or implicated, as
Grice prefers, so a fortiori arguments are often enthymemes. A favourite
illustration by Grice of an a fortiori argument can be found in Plato’s Crito. We
owe gratitude and respect to our parents and so should do nothing to harm them.
However, athenians owe even greater gratitude and respect to the laws of
Athens. Therefore, a fortiori, Athenians should do nothing to harm those
laws.
agape:
Grice would often contrast ‘self-love’ with ‘agape’ and ‘benevolence.’
Strictly, agape, “a lovely Grecian word,” is best rendered as the unselfish
love for all persons. An ethical theory according to which such love is the
chief virtue, and actions are good to the extent that they express it, is
sometimes called agapism. Agape is the Grecian word most often used for love in
the New Testament, and is often used in modern languages to signify whatever
sort of love the writer takes to be idealized there. In New Testament Grecian,
however, it was probably a quite general word for love, so that any ethical
ideal must be found in the text’s substantive claims, rather than in the
linguistic meaning of the word. R.M.A. agathon, Grecian word meaning ‘a good’
or ‘the good’. From Socrates onward, agathon was taken to be a central object
of philosophical inquiry; it has frequently been assumed to be the goal of all
rational action. Plato in the simile of the sun in the Republic identified it
with the Form of the Good, the source of reality, truth, and intelligibility.
Aristotle saw it as eudaimonia, intellectual or practical virtue, a view that
found its way, via Stoicism and Neoplatonism, into Christianity. Modern
theories of utility can be seen as concerned with essentially the same Socratic
question.
agitation: a Byzantine feeling is a Ryleian
agitation. If Grice were to advance the not
wholly plausible thesis that ‘to feel Byzantine’ is just to have a an
anti-rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that Grice is or might
*be* Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticise Grice on the grounds
that Grice saddles himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to
modes of feeling. And why? Well, because, alla Parsons, if a quantifier is
covertly involved at all, it will only be a universal quantifier which in such
a case as this is more than adequately handled by a substitutional account of
quantification. Grice’s situation vis-a-vis the ‘proposition’ is in no way
different. In
the idiolect of Ryle, “a serious student of Grecian philosophy,” as Grice puts
it, ‘emotion’ designates at least three or four different kinds of things,
which Ryle calls an ‘inclination, or ‘motive,’ a ‘mood’, an ‘agitation,’ or a ‘commotion,’
and a ‘feeling.’ An inclination or a mood, including an agitation, is not
occurrences and doest not therefore take place either publicly or privately. It
is a propensity, not an act or state. An inclination is, however, a propensity
of this or that kind, and the kind is important. A feeling, on the other hand,
IS an occurrence, but the place that mention of it should take in a description
of human behaviour is very different from that which the standard theories
accord to it. A susceptibility to a specific agitation is on the same general
footing with an inclination, viz. that each is a general propensity and not an
occurrence. An agitation is not a motive. But an agitation does presuppose a
motive, or rather an agitataion presupposes a behaviour trend of which a motive
is for us the most interesting sort.
There
is however a matter of expression which is the source of some confusion, even
among Oxonian Wilde readers, and that did confuse philosophical psychologists
of the ability of G. F. Stout. An expression may signify both an inclination
and an agitation. But an expression may signify anything but an agitations.
Again, some other expression may signify anything but an inclination. An
expression like ‘uneasy’, ‘anxious’, ‘distressed’, ‘excited’, ‘startled’ always
signifies an agitations. An expression like ‘fond of fishing’, ‘keen on
gardening’, ‘bent on becoming a bishop’ never signifies an agitation. But an
expression like ‘love’, ‘want’, ‘desire’, ‘proud’, ‘eager,’ or many others, stands
sometimes for a simple inclination and sometimes for an agitations which is
resultant upon the inclinations and interferences with the exercise of it. Thus
‘hungry’ for ‘having a good appetite’ means roughly ‘is eating or would eat
heartily and without sauces, etc..’ This is different from ‘hungry’ in which a
person might be said to be ‘too hungry to concentrate on his work’. Hunger in
this second expression is a distress, and requires for its existence the
conjunction of an appetite with the inability to eat. Similarly the way in
which a boy is proud of his school is different from the way in which he is
speechless with pride on being unexpectedly given a place in a school team. To
remove a possible misapprehension, it must be pointed out that an agitation may
be quite agreeable. A man may voluntarily subject himself to suspense, fatigue,
uncertainty, perplexity, fear and surprise in such practices as angling,
rowing, travelling, crossword puzzles, rock-climbing and joking. That a thing
like a thrill, a rapture, a surprise, an amusement and an relief is an
agitation is shown by the fact that we can say that someone is too much
thrilled, amused or relieved to act, think or talk coherently. It
is helpful to notice that, anyhow commonly, the expression which completes ‘pang of . . .’ or ‘chill of . . .’ denotes an
agitation. A feeling, such as a man feeling Byzantine, is intrinsically
connected with an agitation. But a feeling, e. g. of a man who is feeling
Byzantine, is not intrinsically connected with an inclination, save in so far
as the inclination is a factor in the agitation. This is no novel psychological
hypothesis; It is part of the logic of our descriptions of a feeling that a
feeling (such as a man feeling Byzantine) is a sign of an agitation and is not
an exercise of an inclination. A feeling, such as a man feeling Byzantine, in
other words, is not a thing of which it makes sense to ask from what motive it
issues. The same is true, for the same reasons, of any sign of any agitation. This
point shows why we were right to suggest above that a feeling (like a man
feeling Byzantine) does not belong directly to a simple inclination. An
inclination is a certain sort of proneness or readiness to do certain sorts of
things on purpose. These things are therefore describable as being done from
that motive. They are the exercises of the disposition that we call ‘a motive’.
A feeling (such as a man feeling Byzantine) is not from a motive and is
therefore not among the possible exercise of such a propensiy. The widespread
theory that a motive such as vanity, or affection, is in the first instance a
disposition to experience certain specific feeling is therefore absurd. There
may be, of course, a tendency to have a feeling, such as feeling Byzantine;
being vertiginous and rheumatic are such tendencies. But we do not try to
modify a tendency of these kinds by a sermon. What a feeling, such as being
Byzantine, does causally belong to is the agitation. A feeling (such as feeling
Byzantine) is a sign of an agitation in the same sort of way as a stomach-ache
is a sign of indigestion. Roughly, we do not, as the prevalent theory holds,
act purposively because we experience a feeling (such as feeling Byzantine); we
experience a feeling (such as feeling Byzantine), as we wince and shudder,
because we are inhibited from acting purposively.
A
sentimentalist is a man who indulges in this or that induced feeling (such as
feeling Byzantine) without acknowledging the fictitiousness of his agitation.
It seems to be generally supposed that ‘pleasure’ or ‘desire’ is always used to
signify a feeling. And there certainly are feelings which can be described as a
feeling of pleasure or desire. Some thrills, shocks, glows and ticklings are
feelings of delight, surprise, relief and amusement; and things like a
hankering, an itche, a gnawing and a yearning is a sign that something is both
wanted and missed. But the transports, surprises, reliefs and distresses of
which such a feeling is diagnosed, or mis-diagnosed, as a sign is not itself a
feeling. It is an agitation or a mood, just as are the transports and
distresses which a child betrays by his skips and his whimpers. Nostalgia is an
agitation and one which can be called a ‘desire’; but it is not merely a feeling
or series of feelings. There is the sense of ‘pleasure’ in which it is commonly
replaced by such expressions as ‘delight’, ‘transport’, ‘rapture’, ‘exultation’
and ‘joy’. These are expressions of this or that mood signifying this or that
agitation. There are two quite different usages of ‘emotion’, in which we
explain people’s behaviour by reference to emotions. In the first usage of
‘emotion,’ we are referring to the motives or inclinations from which more or
less intelligent actions are done. In a second usage we are referring to a
mood, including the agitation or perturbation of which some aimless movement
may be a sign. In neither of these usages are we asserting or implicating that
the overt behaviour is the effect of a felt turbulence in the agent’s stream of
consciousness. In a third usage of ‘emotion’, pangs and twinges are feelings or
emotions, but they are not, save per accidens, things by reference to which we
explain behaviour. They are things for which diagnoses are required, not things
required for the diagnoses of behaviour. Since a convulsion of merriment is not
the state of mind of the sober experimentalist, the enjoyment of a joke is also
not an introspectible happening. States of mind such as these more or less
violent agitations can be examined only in retrospect. Yet nothing disastrous
follows from this restriction. We are not shorter of information about panic or
amusement than about other states of mind. If retrospection can give us the
data we need for our knowledge of some states of mind, there is no reason why
it should not do so for all. And this is just what seems to be suggested by the
popular phrase ‘to catch oneself doing so and so’. We catch, as we pursue and
overtake, what is already running away from us. I catch myself daydreaming
about a mountain walk after, perhaps very shortly after, I have begun the
daydream; or I catch myself humming a particular air only when the first few
notes have already been hummed. Retrospection, prompt or delayed, is a genuine
process and one which is exempt from the troubles ensuing from the assumption
of multiply divided attention; it is also exempt from the troubles ensuing from
the assumption that violent agitations could be the objects of cool,
contemporary scrutiny. One may be aware that he is whistling ‘Tipperary’ and
not know that he is whistling it in order to give tte appearance of a
sang-froid which he does not feel. Or, again, he may be aware that he is
shamming sang-froid without knowing that the tremors which he is trying to hide
derive from the agitation of a guilty conscience.
agnoiologicum:
Grice loved a negative prefix. He was proud that he was never vulgar in
publishing, like some of his tutees – and that the number of his unpublications
by far exceed the number of his publications. To refute Hampshire with this
intention and certainty, he regaled the British Academy with the annual
philosophical lecture on intention and Uncertainty. While Grice thought that
‘knowledge’ was overreated at Oxford (“Surely an examinee can be said to know
that date of the battle of Waterloo”) he could be agnoiological at times. From
Grecian agnoia, ‘ignorance’, the study of ignorance, its quality, and its
conditions. And then there’s ‘agnosticism,’ from Grecian a-, ‘not’, and
gnastos, ‘known’, term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 to denote the
philosophical and religious attitude of those who claim that metaphysical ideas
can be neither proved nor disproved. Huxley wrote, “I neither affirm nor deny
the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but on the other
hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objection to the
doctrine.” Agnosticism is a form of skepticism applied to metaphysics,
especially theism. The position is sometimes attributed to Kant, who held that
we cannot have knowledge of God or immortality but must be content with faith.
Agnosticism should not be confused with atheism, the belief that no god exists.
aitia:
while Grice would prefer ‘cause,’ he thought that the etymology of Grecian
‘aitia,’ in a legal context, was interesting. On top, he was dissatisfied that
Foucault never realised that ‘les mots et les choses,’ etymologically, means,
‘motus et causae.’ Grecian, cause. Originally referring to responsibility for a
crime, this Grecian term came to be used by philosophers to signify causality
in a somewhat broader sense than the English ‘cause’ the traditional rendering of aitia can convey. An aitia is any answer to a why-question.
According to Aristotle, how such questions ought to be answered is a
philosophical issue addressed differently by different philosophers. He himself
distinguishes four types of answers, and thus four aitiai, by distinguishing
different types of questions: 1 Why is the statue heavy? Because it is made of
bronze material aitia. 2 Why did Persians invade Athens? Because the Athenians
had raided their territory moving or efficient aitia. 3 Why are the angles of a
triangle equal to two right angles? Because of the triangle’s nature formal
aitia. 4 Why did someone walk after dinner? Because or for the sake of his
health final aitia. Only the second of these would typically be called a cause
in English. Though some render aitia as ‘explanatory principle’ or ‘reason’,
these expressions inaptly suggest a merely mental existence; instead, an aitia
is a thing or aspect of a thing.
albertus
de saxonia: Like Grice, a terminist logician, from lower Saxony
who taught in the arts faculty at Paris. Under the influence of Buridan and
Nicholas of Oresme, he turned to playful dialectics. He was a founder of the
“Universitas Vienna” and was bishop of Halberstadt. His works on logic include
Logic, Questions on the Posterior Analytics, Sophismata, Treatise on
Obligations, and Insolubilia. He also wrote questions on Aristotle’s physical
works and on John of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera, and short treatises on squaring
the circle and on the ratio of the diameter to the side of a square. His work
is competent but rarely original. Grice read most of them, and was surprised
that Albertus never coined ‘implicature’!
albertus
magnus: Dominican Griceian philosopher. As a Parisian master
of theology, he served on a commission that condemned the Talmud. He left Paris
to found the first Dominican studium generale at Cologne. Albert was repeatedly
asked to be an arbiter and peacemaker. After serving briefly as bishop of
Regensburg, he was ordered to preach the crusade. He spent his last years
writing in Cologne. Albert contributed to philosophy chiefly as a commentator
on Aristotle, although he occasionally reached different conclusions from
Aristotle. Primarily, Albert was a theologian, as is evident from his extensive
commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and his commentaries on the Old and New
Testaments. As a theologian, he customarily developed his thought by commenting
on traditional texts. For Albert, Aristotle offered knowledge ascertainable
using reason, just as Scripture, based on God’s word, tells of the
supernatural. Albert saw Aristotle’s works, many newly available, as an
encyclopedic compendium of information on the natural universe; included here
is the study of social and political conditions and ethical obligations, for
Aristotelian “natural knowledge” deals with human nature as well as natural
history. Aristotle is the Philosopher; however, unlike Holy Scripture, he must
be corrected in places. Like Holy Scripture, though, Aristotle is occasionally
obscure. To rectify these shortcomings one must rely on other authorities: in
the case of Holy Scripture, reference is to the church fathers and established
interpreters; in the case of Aristotle, to the Peripatetics. The term
‘Peripatetics’ extends to modern as well as ancient authors al-Farabi, Avicenna Ibn-Sina, and Averroes
Ibn-Rushd, as well as Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias; even Seneca, Maimonides,
and “our” Boethius are included. For the most part, Albert saw Plato through
the eyes of Aristotle and Averroes, since apart from the Timaeus very little of
Plato’s work was available in Latin. Albert considered the Liber de causis a
work of Aristotle, supplemented by alFarabi, Avicenna, and al-Ghazali and tr.
into Latin. When he commented on the Liber de causis, Albert was not aware that
this Neoplatonic work which speaks of
the world emanating from the One as from a first cause was based on Proclus and ultimately on
Plotinus. But Albert’s student, Aquinas, who had better translations of
Aristotle, recognized that the Liber de causis was not an Aristotelian work.
Albert’s metaphysics, which is expounded in his commentaries on Aristotle’s
Metaphysics on the Liber de causis, contains profoundly contradictory elements.
His inclination to synthesis led him to attempt to reconcile these
elements as on social and ecclesiastical
questions he often sought peace through compromise. In his Metaphysics and
Physics and in his On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle
presented the world as ever-changing and taught that an unmoved mover “thought
thinking itself” maintained everything in movement and animation by allowing
its spiritual nature to be seen in all its cold, unapproachable beauty. The
Liber de causis, on the other hand, develops the theory that the world emanates
from the One, causing everything in the world in its pantheistic creativity, so
that the caused world returns in mystic harmony to the One. Thus Albert’s
Aristotelian commentaries culminated with his commentary on a work whose
pseudo-Aristotelian character he was unable to recognize. Nevertheless, the
Christian Neoplatonism that Albert placed on an Aristotelian basis was to exert
an influence for centuries. In natural philosophy, Albert often arrived at
views independent of Aristotle. According to Aristotle’s Physics, motion
belongs to no single category; it is incomplete being. Following Avicenna and
Averroes, Albert asks whether “becoming black,” e.g. which ceases when change ceases and blackness
is finally achieved differs from
blackness essentially essentia or only in its being esse. Albert establishes,
contrary to Avicenna, that the distinction is only one of being. In his
discussions of place and space, stimulated by Avicenna, Albert also makes an
original contribution. Only two dimensions
width and breadth are essential
to place, so that a fluid in a bottle is framed by the inner surface of the
bottle. According to Albert, the significance of the third dimension, depth, is
more modest, but nonetheless important. Consider a bucket of water: its base is
the essential part, but its round walls maintain the cohesion of the water. For
Aristotle, time’s material foundation is distinct from its formal definition.
Materially, the movement of the fixed stars is basic, although time itself is
neither movement nor change. Rather, just as before and after are continuous in
space and there are earlier and later moments in movement as it proceeds
through space, so time being the number
of motion has earlier and later moments
or “nows.” The material of time consists of the uninterrupted flow of the
indivisible nows, while time’s form and essential expression is number.
Following al-Farabi and Avicenna, Albert’s interpretation of these doctrines
emphasizes not only the uninterrupted continuity of the flow of “nows,” but
also the quantity of time, i.e., the series of discrete, separate, and clearly
distinct numbers. Albert’s treatment of time did not lend itself well to later
consideration of time as a dimension; his concept of time is therefore not well
suited to accommodate our unified concept of space-time. The use of the
pseudo-Aristotelian De proprietatibus elementorum in De causis proprietatum
elementorum gave Albert’s worldview a strong astrological flavor. At issue here
is how the planets influence the earth and mankind. Particularly important is
the influence of Jupiter and Saturn on fire and the seas; when increased, it
could produce fiery conflagrations, and when circumscribed, floods. Albert was
encyclopedic: a scientist and scholar as well as a philosopher and theologian.
In addition to the works mentioned, he produced commentaries on
Pseudo-Dionysius, a Summa de creaturis, a Summa Theologica, and many other
treatises. Unlike other commentators, his exposition was continuous, an
extensive paraphrase; he provided a complete Latin and Christian philosophy.
Even in his lifetime, he was a named authority; according to Roger Bacon, his
views were often given as much weight as those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and
Averroes. His students or followers include Aquinas, Ulrich of Strassburg,
Theodoric of Freiberg, Giles of Lessines, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler,
Henry Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck, and H. P. Grice.
alethic:
Grice
could not find a good word for ‘verum,’ and so he borrowed ‘alethic’ from, but
never returned it to, von Wright. Under the alethic modalities, Grice, as
historically, included the four central ways or modes in which a given
proposition might be true or false: necessity, contingency, possibility, and
impossibility. The term ‘alethic’ derives from Grecian aletheia, ‘truth’. These
modalities, and their logical interconnectedness, can be characterized as
follows. A proposition that is true but possibly false is contingently true
e.g., that Aristotle taught Alexander; one that is true and not-possibly i.e.,
“impossibly” false is necessarily true e.g., that red things are colored.
Likewise, a proposition that is false but possibly true is contingently false
e.g., that there are no tigers; and one that is false and not-possibly true is
necessarily false e.g., that seven and five are fourteen. Though any one of the
four modalities can be defined in terms of any other, necessity and possibility
are generally taken to be the more fundamental notions, and most systems of
alethic modal logic take one or the other as basic. Distinct modal systems
differ chiefly in regard to their treatment of iterated modalities, as in the
proposition It is necessarily true that it is possibly true that it is possibly
true that there are no tigers. In the weakest of the most common systems,
usually called T, every iterated modality is distinct from every other. In the
stronger system S4, iterations of any given modality are redundant. So, e.g.,
the above proposition is equivalent to It is necessarily true that it is
possibly true that there are no tigers. In the strongest and most widely
accepted system S5, all iteration is redundant. Thus, the two propositions
above are both equivalent simply to It is possibly true that there are no
tigers.
Alexander,
Samuel – what Grice called “A Balliol hegelian,” philosopher, tuteed at Balliol
by A. C. Bradley, Oxford, and taught for most of his career at the of Manchester. His aim, which he most fully
realized in Space, Time, and Deity 0, was to provide a realistic account of the
place of mind in nature. He described nature as a series of levels of existence
where irreducible higher-level qualities emerge inexplicably when lower levels
become sufficiently complex. At its lowest level reality consists of
space-time, a process wherein points of space are redistributed at instants of
time and which might also be called pure motion. From complexities in
space-time matter arises, followed by secondary qualities, life, and mind.
Alexander thought that the still-higher quality of deity, which characterizes
the whole universe while satisfying religious sentiments, is now in the process
of emerging from mind.
Alexander
de Aphrodisias: Grecian philosopher, one of the foremost
commentators on Aristotle in late antiquity. He exercised considerable
influence on later Grecian and Roman philosophy through to the Renaissance. On
the problem of universals, Alexander endorses a brand of conceptualism:
although several particulars may share a single, common nature, this nature
does not exist as a universal except while abstracted in thought from the
circumstances that accompany its particular instantiations. Regarding
Aristotle’s notorious distinction between the “agent” and “patient” intellects
in On the Soul III.5, Alexander identifies the agent intellect with God, who,
as the most intelligible entity, makes everything else intelligible. As its own
self-subsistent object, this intellect alone is imperishable; the human
intellect, in contrast, perishes at death. Of Alexander’s many commentaries,
only those on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Ad, Prior Analytics I, Topics, On the
Senses, and Meterologics are extant. We also have two polemical treatises, On
Fate and On Mixture, directed against the Stoics; a psychological treatise, the
De anima based on Aristotle’s; as well as an assortment of essays including the
De intellectu and his Problems and Solutions. Nothing is known of Alexander’s life
apart from his appointment by the emperor Severus to a chair in Aristotelian
philosophy between and 209.
Alexander
of Hales: English Franciscan theologian, known as the Doctor
Irrefragabilis. The first to teach theology by lecturing on the Sentences of
Peter Lombard, Alexander’s emphasis on speculative theology initiated the
golden age of Scholasticism. Alexander wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the
Gospels; his chief works include his Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum,
Quaestiones disputatatae antequam esset frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales.
Alexander did not complete the Summa fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV
ordered the Franciscans to complete the Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of
theology in 1222, Alexander played an important role in the history of Paris,
writing parts of Gregory IX’s Parens scientiarum 1231. He also helped negotiate
the peace between England and France. He gave up his position as canon of
Lichfield and archdeacon of Coventry to become a Franciscan, the first Franciscan
master of theology; his was the original Franciscan chair of theology at Paris.
Among the Franciscans, his most prominent disciples include St. Bonaventure,
Richard Rufus of Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he resigned his
chair in theology near the end of his life.
algorithm:
Grice’s term for ‘decision procedure,’ a clerical or effective procedure that
can be applied to any of a class of certain symbolic inputs and that will in a
finite time and number of steps eventuate in a result in a corresponding
symbolic output. A function for which an algorithm sometimes more than one can
be given is an algorithmic function. The following are common examples: a given
n, finding the nth prime number; b differentiating a polynomial; c finding the
greatest common divisor of x and y the Euclidean algorithm; and d given two
numbers x, y, deciding whether x is a multiple of y. When an algorithm is used
to calculate values of a numerical function, as in a, b, and c, the function
can also be described as algorithmically computable, effectively computable, or
just computable. Algorithms are generally agreed to have the following
properties which made them essential to
the theory of computation and the development of the Church-Turing thesis i an algorithm can be given by a finite
string of instructions, ii a computation device or agent can carry out or
compute in accordance with the instructions, iii there will be provisions for
computing, storing, and recalling steps in a computation, iv computations can be
carried out in a discrete and stepwise fashion in, say, a digital computer, and
v computations can be carried out in a deterministic fashion in, say, a
deterministic version of a Turing machine.
Allais’s
paradox: a puzzle about rationality, discussed by H. P.
Grice, “Aspects of reason,” devised by Maurice Allais b. 1. Leonard Savage 771
advanced the sure-thing principle, which states that a rational agent’s ranking
of a pair of gambles having the same consequence in a state S agrees with her
ranking of any other pair of gambles the same as the first pair except for
having some other common consequence in S. Allais devised an apparent
counterexample with four gambles involving a 100-ticket lottery. The table
lists prizes in units of $100,000. Ticket Numbers Gambles 1 2 11 12
100 A 5 5 5 B 0 25 5 C 5 5 0 D 0 25 0 Changing A’s and B’s common
consequence for tickets 12100 from 5 to 0 yields C and D respectively. Hence
the sure-thing principle prohibits simultaneously preferring A to B, and D to
C. Yet most people have these preferences, which seem coherent. This conflict
generates the paradox. Savage presented the sure-thing principle in The
Foundations of Statistics 4. Responding to preliminary drafts of that work,
Allais formulated his counterexample in “The Foundations of a Positive Theory
of Choice Involving Risk and a Criticism of the Postulates and Axioms of
the School” 2.
alnwick -- (d.
1333), English Franciscan theologian. William studied under Duns Scotus at
Paris, and wrote the Reportatio Parisiensia, a central source for Duns Scotus’s
teaching. In his own works, William opposed Scotus on the univocity of being
and haecceitas. Some of his views were attacked by Ockham. See also DUNS
SCOTUS, HAECCEITY
alston:
w. p. cites H. P. Grice as ideationist. Philosopher widely acknowledged as one
of the most important contemporary epistemologists and one of the most
important philosophers of religion of the twentieth century. He is particularly
known for his argument that putative perception of God is epistemologically on
all fours with putative perception of everyday material objects. Alston
graduated from Centenary and the U.S. Army. A fine musician, he had to choose
between philosophy and music. Philosophy won out; he received his Ph.D. from
the of Chicago and began his
philosophical career at the of Michigan,
where he taught for twenty-two years. Since 0 he has taught at Syracuse .
Although his dissertation and some of his early work were on Whitehead, he soon
turned to philosophy of language Philosophy of Language, 4. Since the early 0s
Alston has concentrated on epistemology and philosophy of religion. In
epistemology he has defended foundationalism although not classical
foundationalism, investigated epistemic justification with unusual depth and
penetration, and called attention to important levels distinctions. His chief
works here are Epistemic Justification, a collection of essays; and The
Reliability of Sense Perception. His chief work in philosophy of religion is
Divine Nature and Human Language, a collection of essays on metaphysical and
epistemological topics; and Perceiving God. The latter is a magisterial
argument for the conclusion that experiential awareness of God, more
specifically perception of God, makes an important contribution to the grounds
of religious belief. In addition to this scholarly work, Alston was a founder
of the Society of Christian Philosophers, a professional society with more than
1,100 members, and the founding editor of Faith and Philosophy.
althusser:
a philosopher Grice called a ‘hegelian’. LouisL Marxist philosopher whose
publication in 5 of two collections of essays, Pour Marx “For Marx” and Lire le
Capital “Reading Capital”, made him a sensation in intellectual circles and attracted a large
international readership. The English translations of these texts in 9 and 0,
respectively, helped shape the development of Marxist thought in the
English-speaking world throughout the 0s. Drawing on the work of
non-positivist historians and
philosophers of science, especially Bachelard, Althusser proclaimed the
existence of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, occurring in the
mid-1840s. What preceded this break was, in Althusser’s view, a prescientific
theoretical humanism derived from Feuerbach and ultimately from Hegel. What
followed it, Althusser maintained, was a science of history a
all-things-considered reason Althusser, Louis 23 4065A- 23 development as monumental, potentially,
as the rise of the new sciences of nature in the seventh century. Althusser
argued that the nature and even the existence of this new kind of science had
yet to be acknowledged, even by Marx himself. It therefore had to be
reconstructed from Marx’s writings, Das Kapital especially, and also discerned
in the political practice of Lenin and other like-minded revolutionaries who
implicitly understood what Marx intended. Althusser did little, however, to
elaborate the content of this new science. Rather, he tirelessly defended it
programmatically against rival construals of Marxism. In so doing, he took
particular aim at neo-Hegelian and “humanistic” currents in the larger Marxist
culture and implicitly in the Communist
Party, to which he belonged throughout his adult life. After 8, Althusser’s
influence in France faded. But he continued to teach at l’École Normale
Superieure and to write, making important contributions to political theory and
to understandings of “ideology” and related concepts. He also faced
increasingly severe bouts of mania and depression. In 0, in what the courts deemed an episode of “temporary
insanity,” he strangled his wife. Althusser avoided prison, but spent much of
the 0s in mental institutions. During this period he wrote two extraordinary
memoirs, L’avenir dure longtemps “The Future Lasts Forever” and Les faits “The
Facts”, published posthumously in 2.
altogether nice girl: Or Grice’s altogether nice girl. Grice
quotes from the music-hall ditty, “Every [sic] nice girl loves a sailor”
(WoW:33). He uses this for his account of multiple quantification. There is a
reading where the emissor may implicate that every nice girl is such that he
loves one sailor, viz. Grice. But if the existential quantifier is not made
dominant, the uniqueness is disimplicated. Grice admits that not every
nominalist will be contented with the ‘metaphysical’ status of ‘the altogether
nice girl.’ The ‘one-at-a-time sailor’ is her counterpart. And they inhabit the
class of LOVE.
ambrosius, Saint – on
altruism. known as Ambrose of Milan c.33997, Roman church leader and
theologian. While bishop of Milan, he not only led the struggle against the
Arian heresy and its political manifestations, but offered new models for
preaching, for Scriptural exegesis, and for hymnody. His works also contributed
to medieval Latin philosophy. Ambrose’s appropriation of Neoplatonic doctrines
was noteworthy in itself, and it worked powerfully on and through Augustine.
Ambrose’s commentary on the account of creation in Genesis, his Hexaemeron,
preserved for medieval readers many pieces of ancient natural history and even
some altruism Ambrose, Saint 24 4065A-
24 elements of physical explanation. Perhaps most importantly, Ambrose
engaged ancient philosophical ethics in the search for moral lessons that marks
his exegesis of Scripture; he also reworked Cicero’s De officiis as a treatise
on the virtues and duties of Christian living.
Amicus -- philia and eros
– Grice on Aristotle’s aporia of friendship -- Eros, the Grecian god of erotic
love. Eros came to be symbolic of various aspects of love, first appearing in
Hesiod in opposition to reason. In general, however, Eros was seen by Grecians
e.g., Parmenides as a unifying force. In Empedocles, it is one of two external
forces explaining the history of the cosmos, the other being Strife. These
forces resemble the “hidden harmony” of Heraclitus. The Symposium of Plato is
the best-known ancient discussion of Eros, containing speeches from various
standpoints mythical, sophistic, etc.
Socrates says he has learned from the priestess Diotima of a nobler form of
Eros in which sexual desire can be developed into the pursuit of understanding
the Form of beauty. The contrast between agape and Eros is found first in
Democritus. This became important in Christian accounts of love. In
Neoplatonism, Eros referred to the mystical union with Being sought by
philosophers. Eros has become important recently in the work of Continental
writers.
ammonius saccas early
third century A.D., Platonist philosopher. He apparently served early in the
century as the teacher of the philosopher Origen. He attracted the attention of
Plotinus, who came to the city in 232 in search of philosophical enlightenment
Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3. Ammonius the epithet ‘Saccas’ seems to mean ‘the
bagman’ was undoubtedly a charismatic figure, but it is not at all clear what,
if any, were his distinctive doctrines, though he seems to have been influenced
by Numenius. He wrote nothing, and may be thought of, in E. R. Dodds’s words,
as the Socrates of Neoplatonism.
analyticum -- analysis,
the process of breaking up a concept, proposition, linguistic complex, or fact
into its simple or ultimate constituents. That on which the analysis is done is
called the analysandum, and that which does the analysis is called the
analysans. A number of the most important philosophers of the twentieth
century, including Russell, Moore, and the early Vitters, have argued that
philosophical analysis is the proper method of philosophy. But the
practitioners of analytic philosophy have disagreed about what kind of thing is
to be analyzed. For example, Moore tried to analyze sense-data into their
constituent parts. Here the analysandum is a complex psychological fact, the
having of a sense-datum. More commonly, analytic philosophers have tried to
analyze concepts or propositions. This is conceptual analysis. Still others
have seen it as their task to give an analysis of various kinds of
sentences e.g., those involving proper
names or definite descriptions. This is linguistic analysis. Each of these
kinds of analysis faces a version of a puzzle that has come to be called the
paradox of analysis. For linguistic analyses, the paradox can be expressed as
follows: for an analysis to be adequate, the analysans must be synonymous with
the analysandum; e.g., if ‘male sibling’ is to analyze ‘brother’, they must
mean the same; but if they are synonymous, then ‘a brother is a male sibling’
is synonymous with ‘a brother is a brother’; but the two sentences do not seem
synonymous. Expressed as a dilemma, the paradox is that any proposed analysis
would seem to be either inadequate because the analysans and the analysandum
are not synonymous or uninformative because they are synonymous. Analytic philosophy is an umbrella term
currently used to cover a diverse assortment of philosophical techniques and
tendencies. As in the case of chicken-sexing, it is relatively easy to identify
analytic philosophy and philosophers, though difficult to say with any
precision what the criteria are. Analytic philosophy is sometimes called Oxford
philosophy or linguistic philosophy, but these labels are, at least,
misleading. Whatever else it is, analytic philosophy is manifestly not a
school, doctrine, or body of accepted propositions. At Cambridge, analytic
philosophers are the intellectual heirs of Russell, Moore, and Vitters, philosophers
who self-consciously pursued “philosophical analysis” in the early part of the
twentieth century. Analysis, as practiced by Russell and Moore, concerned not
language per se, but concepts and propositions. In their eyes, while it did not
exhaust the domain of philosophy, analysis provided a vital tool for laying
bare the logical form of reality. Vitters, in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, contended, though obliquely, that the structure of
language reveals the structure of the world; every meaningful sentence is
analyzable into atomic constituents that designate the finegrained constituents
of reality. This “Tractarian” view was one Vitters was to renounce in his later
work, but it had considerable influence within the Vienna Circle in the 0s, and
in the subsequent development of logical positivism in the 0s and 0s. Carnap
and Ayer, both exponents of positivism, held that the task of philosophy was
not to uncover elusive metaphysical truths, but to provide analyses of
scientific sentences. Other sentences, those in ethics, for instance, were
thought to lack “cognitive significance.” Their model was Russell’s theory of
descriptions, which provided a technique for analyzing away apparent
commitments to suspicious entities. Meanwhile, a number of former proponents of
analysis, influenced by Vitters, had taken up what came to be called ordinary
language philosophy. Philosophers of this persuasion focused on the role of
words in the lives of ordinary speakers, hoping thereby to escape long-standing
philosophical muddles. These muddles resulted, they thought, from a natural
tendency, when pursuing philosophical theses, to be misled by the grammatical
form of sentences in which those questions were posed. A classic illustration
might be Heidegger’s supposition that ‘nothing’ must designate something,
though a very peculiar something. Today, it is difficult to find much unanimity
in the ranks of analytic philosophers. There is, perhaps, an implicit respect
for argument and clarity, an evolving though informal agreement as to what
problems are and are not tractable, and a conviction that philosophy is in some
sense continuous with science. The practice of analytic philosophers to address
one another rather than the broader public has led some to decry philosophy’s
“professionalization” and to call for a return to a pluralistic,
community-oriented style of philosophizing. Analytic philosophers respond by
pointing out that analytic techniques and standards have been well represented
in the history of philosophy. Analyticity. H. P. Grice, “In defence of a
dogma,” in Studies in the way of words. the analyticsynthetic distinction, the
distinction, made famous by Kant, according to which an affirmative
subject-predicate statement proposition, judgment is called analytic if the
predicate concept is contained in the subject concept, and synthetic otherwise.
The statement ‘All red roses are red’ is analytic, since the concept ‘red’ is
contained in the concept ‘red roses’. ‘All roses are red’ is synthetic, since
the concept ‘red’ is not contained in the concept ‘roses’. The denial of an
affirmative subject-predicate statement entails a contradiction if it is
analytic. E.g., ‘Not all red roses are red’ entails ‘Some roses are both red
and not red’. One concept may be contained in another, in Kant’s sense, even
though the terms used to express them are not related as part to whole. Since
‘biped’ means ‘two-footed animal’, the concept ‘two-footed’ is contained in the
concept ‘biped’. It is accordingly analytic that all bipeds are two-footed. The
same analytic statement is expressed by the synonymous sentences ‘All bipeds
are two-footed’ and ‘All two-footed animals are two-footed’. Unlike statements,
sentences cannot be classified as analytic or synthetic except relative to an interpretation.
analytical jurisprudence analyticsynthetic distinction 26 4065A- 26 Witness ‘All Russian teachers are
Russian’, which in one sense expresses the analytic statement ‘All teachers
that are Russian are Russian’, and in another the synthetic statement ‘All
teachers of Russian are Russian’. Kant’s innovation over Leibniz and Hume lay
in separating the logicosemantic analyticsynthetic distinction from the
epistemological a prioria posteriori distinction and from the modalmetaphysical
necessarycontingent distinction. It seems evident that any analytic statement
is a priori knowable without empirical evidence and necessary something that
could not be false. The converse is highly controversial. Kant and his
rationalist followers maintain that some a priori and necessary statements are
synthetic, citing examples from logic ‘Contradictions are impossible’, ‘The
identity relation is transitive’, mathematics ‘The sum of 7 and 5 is 12’, ‘The
straight line between two points is the shortest’, and metaphysics ‘Every event
is caused’. Empiricists like J. S. Mill, Carnap, Ayer, and C. I. Lewis argue
that such examples are either synthetic a posteriori or analytic a priori.
Philosophers since Kant have tried to clarify the analyticsynthetic
distinction, and generalize it to all statements. On one definition, a sentence
is analytic on a given interpretation provided it is “true solely in virtue of
the meaning or definition of its terms.” The truth of any sentence depends in
part on the meanings of its terms. `All emeralds are green’ would be false,
e.g., if ‘emerald’ meant ‘ruby’. What makes the sentence synthetic, it is
claimed, is that its truth also depends on the properties of emeralds, namely,
their being green. But the same holds for analytic sentences: the truth of ‘All
red roses are red’ depends on the properties of red roses, namely, their being
red. Neither is true solely in virtue of meaning. A more adequate
generalization defines an analytic statement as a formal logical truth: one
“true in virtue of its logical form,” so that all statements with the same form
are true. In terms of sentences under an interpretation, an analytic truth is
an explicit logical truth one whose surface structure represents its logical
form or one that becomes an explicit logical truth when synonyms are
substituted. The negative statement that tomorrow is not both Sunday and not
Sunday is analytic by this definition, because all statements of the form : p
& - p are true. Kant’s definition is obtained as a special case by stipulating
that the predicate of an affirmative subjectpredicate statement is contained in
the subject provided the statement is logically true. On a third
generalization, ‘analytic’ denotes any statement whose denial entails a
contradiction. Subject S contains predicate P provided being S entails being P.
Whether this is broader or narrower than the second generalization depends on
how ‘entailment’, ‘logical form’, and ‘contradiction’ are defined. On some
construals, ‘Red is a color’ counts as analytic on the third generalization its
denial entails ‘Something is and is not a color’ but not on the second ‘red’
and ‘colored’ are logically unstructured, while the rulings are reversed for a
counterfactual conditional like ‘If this were a red rose it would be red’. Following
Quine, many have denied any distinction between analytic and synthetic
statements. Some arguments presume the problematic “true by meaning”
definition. Others are that: 1 the distinction cannot be defined without using
related notions like ‘meaning’, ‘concept’, and ‘statement’, which are neither
extensional nor definable in terms of behavior; 2 some statements like ‘All
cats are animals’ are hard to classify as analytic or synthetic; and 3 no
statement allegedly is immune from rejection in the face of new empirical
evidence. If these arguments were sound, however, the distinction between
logical truths and others would seem equally dubious, a conclusion seldom
embraced. Some describe a priori truths, both synthetic and analytic, as
conceptual truths, on the theory that they are all true in virtue of the nature
of the concepts they contain. Conceptual truths are said to have no “factual
content” because they are about concepts rather than things in the actual
world. While it is natural to classify a priori truths together, the proffered
theory is questionable. As indicated above, all truths hold in part because of
the identity of their concepts, and in part because of the nature of the
objects they are about. It is a fact that all emeralds are emeralds, and this
proposition is about emeralds, not concepts.
analytic a priori: R.
A. Wollheim. London-born philosopher, BPhil Oxon, Balliol (under D. Marcus) and
All Souls. Examined by H. P. Grice.
“What’s two times two?” Wollheim treasured that examination. It was in the
context of a discussion of J. S. Mill and I. Kant, for whom addition and
multiplication are ‘synthetic’ – a priori for Kant, a posteriori for Mill.
Grice was trying to provide a counterexample to Mill’s thesis that all comes
via deduction or induction.
ananke: when feeling very
Grecian, Grice would use ‘ananke,’ instead of ‘must,’ which he thought too
English! Grecian, necessity. The term was used by early Grecian philosophers
for a constraining or moving natural force. In Parmenides frg. 8, line 30
ananke encompasses reality in limiting bonds; according to Diogenes Laertius,
Democrianamnesis ananke 27 4065A- 27
tus calls the vortex that generates the cosmos ananke; Plato Timaeus 47e ff.
refers to ananke as the irrational element in nature, which reason orders in
creating the physical world. As used by Aristotle Metaphysics V.5, the basic
meaning of ‘necessary’ is ‘that which cannot be otherwise’, a sense that
includes logical necessity. He also distinguishes Physics II.9 between simple
and hypothetical necessity conditions that must hold if something is to
occur.
anaxagoras: Grecian and
pre-Griceian philosopher who was the first of the pre-Socratics to teach in
Athens c.480450, where he influenced leading intellectuals such as Pericles and
Euripides. He left Athens when he was prosecuted for impiety. Writing in
response to Parmenides, he elaborated a theory of matter according to which
nothing comes into being or perishes. The ultimate realities are stuffs such as
water and earth, flesh and bone, but so are contraries such as hot and cold,
likewise treated as stuffs. Every phenomenal substance has a portion of every
elemental stuff, and there are no minimal parts of anything, but matter takes
on the phenomenal properties of whatever predominates in the mixture.
Anaxagoras posits an indefinite number of elemental stuffs, in contrast to his
contemporary Empedocles, who requires only four elements; but Anaxagoras
follows Parmenides more rigorously, allowing no properties or substances to
emerge that were not already present in the cosmos as its constituents. Thus
there is no ultimate gap between appearance and reality: everything we perceive
is real. In Anaxagoras’s cosmogony, an initial chaos of complete mixture gives
way to an ordered world when noûs mind begins a vortex motion that separates
cosmic masses of ether the bright upper air, air, water, and earth. Mind is
finer than the stuffs and is found in living things, but it does not mix with
stuffs. Anaxagoras’s theory of mind provides the first hint of a mindmatter
dualism. Plato and Aristotle thought his assigning a cosmic role to mind made
him sound like “a sober man” among his contemporaries, but they were
disappointed that he did not exploit his idea to provide teleological
explanations of natural phenomena.
anaximander: Grecian and
pre-Griceian philosopher and cosmologist, reputedly the student and successor
of Thales in the Milesian school. He described the cosmos as originating from
apeiron the boundless by a process of separating off; a disk-shaped earth was
formed, surrounded by concentric heavenly rings of fire enclosed in air. At
“breathing holes” in the air we see jets of fire, which are the stars, moon,
and sun. The earth stays in place because there is no reason for it to tend one
way or another. The seasons arise from alternating periods where hot and dry or
wet and anaphor Anaximander 28 4065A-
28 cold powers predominate, governed by a temporal process figuratively
portrayed as the judgment of Time. Anaximander drew a map of the world and
explained winds, rain, and lightning by naturalistic hypotheses. He also
described the emergence of life in a way that prefigures the theory of
evolution. Anaximander’s interest in cosmology and cosmogony and his brilliant
conjectures set the major questions for later preSocratics.
anaximenes of Miletus:
Grecian and pre-Griceian philosopher, a
pre-Socratic who, following in the tradition of the Milesians Thales and
Anaximander, speculated about cosmology and meteorology. The source arche of
the cosmos is air aer, originally mist, which by a process of rarefaction
becomes fire, and by a process of condensation becomes wind, clouds, water,
earth, and stones. Air is divine and causes life. The earth is flat and rides
on a cushion of air, while a heavenly firmament revolves about it like a felt
cap. Anaximenes also explained meteorological phenomena and earthquakes.
Although less innovative than his predecessor Anaximander, he made progress in
naturalistic explanations by appealing to a quantitative process of rarefaction
and condensation rather than to mythical processes involving quasi-personal
agents.
ancestral: Studied by H.
P. Grice. Of a given relation R, the relation also called the transitive
closure of R that relates one given individual to a second if and only if the
first can be “reached” from the second by repeated “applications” of the given
relation R. The “ancestor” relation is the ancestral of the parent relation
since one person is an ancestor of a second if the first is a parent of the
second or the first is a parent of a parent of the second or the first is a
parent of a parent of a parent of the second, and so on. Frege discovered a
simple method of giving a materially adequate and formally correct definition
of the ancestral of a given relation in terms of the relation itself plus
logical concepts. This method is informally illustrated as follows. In order
for one person A to be an ancestor of a second person B it is necessary and
sufficient for A to have every property that belongs to every parent of B and
that belongs to every parent of any person to whom it belongs. This and other
similar methods made possible the reduction of all numerical concepts to those
of zero and successor, which Frege then attempted to reduce to concepts of pure
logic. Frege’s definition of the ancestral has become a paradigm in modern
analytic philosophy as well as a historical benchmark of the watershed between
traditional logic and modern logic. It demonstrates the exactness of modern
logical analysis and, in comparison, the narrowness of traditional logic.
Andronicus, first century
B.C., Grecian philosopher, a leading member of the Lyceum who was largely
responsible for establishing the canon of Aristotle’s works still read today.
He also edited the works of Theophrastus. At the time, Aristotle was known
primarily for his philosophical dialogues, only fragments of which now survive;
his more methodical treatises had stopped circulating soon after his death. By
producing the first systematic edition of Aristotle’s corpus, Andronicus
revived study of the treatises, and the resulting critical debates dramatically
affected the course of philosophy. Little is recorded about Andronicus’s
labors; but besides editing the texts and discussing titles, arrangement, and
authenticity, he sought to explicate and assess Aristotle’s thought. In so
doing, he and his colleagues initiated the exegetical tradition of Aristotelian
commentaries. Nothing he wrote survives; a summary account of emotions formerly
ascribed to him is spurious.
angst: Grice discusses
this as an ‘implicatural emotion.’ G. term for a special form of anxiety, an
emotion seen by existentialists as both constituting and revealing the human
condition. Angst plays a key role in the writings of Heidegger, whose concept
is closely related to Kierkegaard’s angest and Sartre’s angoisse. The concept
is first treated in this distinctive way in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of
Anxiety 1844, where anxiety is described as “the dizziness of freedom.” Anxiety
here represents freedom’s self-awareness; it is the psychological precondition
for the individual’s attempt to become autonomous, a possibility that is seen
as both alluring and disturbing.
animal:
pirotese. Durrell’s Family Conversations. Durrelly’s family conversation. When H. P. Grice was presented with
an ‘overview’ of his oeuvre for PGRICE (Grandy and Warner, 1986), he soon found
out. “There’s something missing.” Indeed, there is a very infamous objection,
Grice thought, which is not mentioned by ‘Richards,’ as he abbreviates Richard
Grandy and Richard Warner’s majestically plural ‘overview,’ which seems to
Grice to be one to which Grice must respond. And he shall! The objection Grice
states as follows. One of the leading strands in Grice’s reductive analysis of
the circumstances or scenario in which an emissor (E) communicates that p is
that the scenario, call it “C,” is not to be regarded exclusively, “or even
primarily,” as a ‘feature’ of an E that is using what philosophers of language (since
Plato’s “Cratylus”) have been calling ‘language’ (glossa, la lingua latina, la
lingua italiana, la langue française, the English tongue, de nederlands taal,
die Deutsche Sprache, etc.). The emissum (e) may be an ‘utterance’ which is not
‘linguistic.’ Grice finds the issue crucial after discussing the topic with his
colleague at Berkeley, Davidson. For Davidson reminds Grice: “[t]here
is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many
philosophers […] have supposed” (Davidson, 1986: 174). “I’m happy you say
‘many,’ Davidson,” Grice commented. Grice continues formulating what he obviously found to be an
insidious, fastidious, objection. There are many instances of “NOTABLY NON-‘linguistic’”
vehicles or devices of communication, within a communication-system, even a
one-off system, which fulfil this or that communication-function. I am using
‘communication-function’ alla Grice (1961:138, repr. 1989:235). These vehicles or devices are mostly
syntactically un-structured or amorphous – Grice’s favourite example being a
‘sort of hand-wave’ meaning that it is not the case that the emissor knows the
route or that the emissor is about to leave his addressee (1967:VI, repr. 1989:126).
Sometimes, a device may exhibit at least “some rudimentary
syntactic” structure – as Grice puts it, giving a nod to Morris’s tripartite
semiotics -- in that we may perhaps distinguish and identify a ‘totum’ or
complexum (say, Plato’s ‘logos’) from a pars or simplex (say, Plato’s ‘onoma’
and ‘rhema’). Grice’s intention-based reductive analysis of a communicatum,
based on Aristotle, Locke, and Peirce, is designed, indeed its very raison d'être being, to allow for the possibility that a non-“linguistic,” and,
further, indeed a non-“conventional” 'utterance,’ perhaps unrepeatable token,
not even manifesting any degree of syntactic structure, but a block of an
amorphous signal, be within the ‘repertoire’ of ‘procedures,’ perhaps
unrepeatable ones, of this or that organism, or creature, or agent, even if not
relying on any apparatus for communication of the kind that that we may label
‘linguistic’ or otherwise ‘conventional,’ will count as an emissor E ‘doing’
this or that ‘thing,’ thereby ‘communicating’ that p. To provide for this
conceptual scenario, it is plainly necessary, Grice grants, that the key
ingredient in any representation or conceptualization, or reductive analysis of
‘communicating,’ viz. intending that p, for Grice, should be a ‘state’ of the
emissor’s “soul” (Grice is translating Grecian ψυχή the capacity for which does not
require what we may label the ‘possession’ of, shall we say, ‘faculty,’ of what
philosophers since Cratylus have been calling ‘γλῶσσα Ἑλληνίδα,’
‘lingua latina,’ ‘lingua italiana,’ ‘langue française,’ ‘English tongue,’
‘Nederlands taal,’ ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’ (Grice always congratulated Kant for never distinguishing
between ‘die Deutsche Sprache’ and ‘Sprache’ as ‘eine Fakultät.’). Now a philosopher, relying on this
or that neo-Prichardian reductive analysis of ‘intending that p,’ (Oxonian
Grice will quote Oxonian if he can) may not be willing to allow the possibility
of such, shall we grant, pre-linguistic intending that p, or non-linguistic
intending that p. Surely, if the emissor E realizes that his addressee or
recipient R does not ‘share’ say, what the Germans call ‘die Deutsche Sprache,”
E may still communicate, by doing so-and-so, that such-and-such, viz. p. E may
make this sort of hand wave communicating that E knows the route or that E is
about to leave R. Against that objection, Grice surely wins the day. There’s
nothing in Prichard account of ‘willing that p,’ itself a borrowing from
William James (“I will that the distant table slides over the floor toward me.
It does not.”) which is about ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’ But Grice hastens to declare that
winning ‘the’ day may not be winning ‘all’ day. And that is because of Oxonian
philosophy being what it is. Because, as far as Grice’s Oxonian explorations on
communication go, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves – ending with
a a clause which closes the succession o-- designed to thwart this or that
scenario, later deemed illegitimate, involving two rational agents where the
emissor E relies on an ‘inference-element’ that it is not the case that E
intends his recipient R will recogise – Grice is led to narrow the ‘intending’ the
reductive analysis of ‘Emissor E communicates that p’ to C-intending. Grice expects that whatever may be the case in general with
regard to ‘intending,’ C-intending seems for some reason to Grice to be
unsophisticatedly, viz. plainly, too sophisticated a ‘state’ of a soul (or ψυχή)
to be found in an organism, ‘pirot,’ creature, that we may not want to deem
‘rational,’ or as the Germans would say, a creature that is plainly destitute
of “Die Deutsche Sprache.” We seem to be needing a pirot to be “very
intelligent, indeed rational.” (Who other than Grice would genially combine
Locke with Carnap?). Some may regret, Grice admits, that his unavoidable rear-guard
action just undermines the raison d'etre of his campaign. However, Grice goes on to provide an
admittedly brief reply which will have to suffice under the circumstances.
There is SOME limit for Oxonian debate! A full treatment that would satisfy
Grice requires delving deep into crucial problems about the boundary between vicious
and virtuous conceptual circularity. Which is promising. It is not something
UNATTAINABLE a priori – and there is nothing wrong with leaving it for the
morrow. It reduces to the philosopher trying to show himself virtuously
circular, if not, like Lear, spherical. But why need the circle be virtuous.
Well, as August would put it, unless a ‘circulus’ is not ‘virtuosus,’ one would
hardly deem it a ‘circulus’ in the first place. A circle is virtuous
if it is not a bad circle. One may even say, with The Carpenter, that, like a
cabbage or a king, if a circle is not virtuous is not even a circle! (Grice
2001:35). In this case, to borrow from former Oxonian student S. R. Schiffer, we
need the ‘virtuous circle’ because we are dealing with ‘a loop’ (Schiffer, 1988:v)
-- a ‘conceptual loop,’ that is. Schiffer is not interested in ‘communicating;’
only ‘meaning,’ but his point can be easily transliterated. Schiffer is saying
that ‘U,’ or utterer, our ‘E,’ means that p’ surely relies on ‘U intends that
p,’ but mind the loop: ‘U intends that p’ may rely on ‘U means that p.’In
Grice’s most generic, third-person terms, we have a creature, call it a pirot,
P1, that, by doing thing D1, communicates that p. We are talking of Grice qua
ethologist, who OBSERVES the scenario. As it happens, Grice’s favourite pirot
is the parrot, and call Grice a snob, but his favourite parrot was Prince
Maurice’s Parrot. Prince Maurice’s Parrot. Grice reads Locke, and adapts it
slightly. “Since I think I may be confident,
that, whoever should see a CREATURE of his own shape or make, though it had no
more reason all its life than a PARROT, would call him still A MAN; or whoever
should hear a parrot discourse, reason, and philosophise, would call or think
it nothing but a PARROT; and say, the one was A DULL IRRATIONAL MAN, and the
other A VERY INTELLIGENT RATIONAL PARROT. “A relation we have in an author of
great note, is sufficient to countenance the supposition of A RATIONAL PARROT. “The
author’s words are as follows.”““I had a mind to know, from Prince Maurice's
own mouth, the account of a common, but much credited story, that I had heard
so often from many others, of a parrot he has, that speaks, and asks, and
answers common questions, like A REASONABLE CREATURE.””““So that those of his
train there generally conclude it to be witchery or possession; and one of his
chaplains, would never from that time endure A PARROT, but says all PARROTS
have a devil in them.””““I had heard many particulars of this story, and as
severed by people hard to be discredited, which made me ask Prince Maurice what
there is of it.””““Prince Maurice says, with his usual plainness and dryness in
talk, there is something true, but a great deal false of what is reported.””““I
desired to know of him what there was of the first. Prince Maurice tells me
short and coldly, that he had HEARD of such A PARROT; and though he believes
nothing of it, and it was a good way off, yet he had so much curiosity as to
send for the parrot: that it was a very great parrot; and when the parrot comes
first into the room where Prince Maurice is, with a great many men about him,
the parrot says presently, ‘What a nice company is here.’”” ““ One of the men
asks the parrot, ‘What thinkest thou that man is?,’ ostending his finger, and
pointing to Prince Maurice.”“The parrot answers, ‘Some general -- or other.’
When the man brings the parrot close to Prince Maurice, Prince Maurice asks the
parrot, ‘D'ou venez-vous?’”““The parrot answers, ‘De Marinnan.’ Then Prince
Maurice goes on, and poses a second question to the parrot.””““‘A qui
estes-vous?’ The Parrot answers: ‘A un Portugais.’”““Prince Maurice then asks a
third question: ‘Que fais-tu la?’““The parrot answers: “Je garde les poulles.’ Prince
Maurice smiles, which pleases the Parrot.”““Prince Maurice, violating a
Griceian maxim, and being just informed that p, asks whether p. This is
incidentally the Prince’s fourth question to the parrot – the first idiotic
one. ‘Vous gardez les poulles?’”” ““The Parrot answers, ‘Oui, moi; et
je scai bien faire.’ Then the parrott appeals to Peirce’s iconic system and makes
the chuck four or five times that a man uses to make to chickens when a man
calls them. I set down the words of this worthy dialogue in French, just as
Prince Maurice said them to me. I ask Prince Maurice in what ‘tongue’ the
parrot speaks.””““Prince Maurice says that the parrot speaks in the Brazilian
tongue.””““ I ask Prince William whether he understands the Brazilian tongue.””
““Prince Maurice says: No, but he has taken care to have TWO interpreters by
him, the one a Dutchman that spoke the Brazilian tongue, and the other a
Brazilian that spoke the Dutch tongue; that Prince Maurice asked them
separately and privately, and both of them AGREED in telling Prince Maurice
just the same thing that the parrot had said.””““I could not but tell this ODD
story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the first hand, and what
may pass for a good one; for I dare say Prince Maurice at least believed
himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest and pious
man.””““I leave it to naturalists to reason, and to other men to believe, as
they please upon it. However, it is not, perhaps, amiss to relieve or enliven a
busy scene sometimes with such digressions, whether to the purpose or no.””Locke
takes care “that the reader should have the story at large in the author's own
words, because he seems to me not to have thought it incredible.”“For it cannot
be imagined that so able a man as he, who had sufficiency enough to warrant all
the testimonies he gives of himself, should take so much pains, in a place
where it had nothing to do, to pin so close, not only on a man whom he mentions
as his friend, but on a prince in whom he acknowledges very great honesty and
piety, a story which, if he himself thought incredible, he could not but also
think RIDICULOUS.”“Prince Maurice, it is plain, who vouches this story, and our
author, who relates it from him, both of them call this talker A PARROT.”Locke
asks “any one else who thinks such a story fit to be told, whether, if this
PARROT, and all of its kind, had always talked, as we have a prince's word for
it this one did,- whether, I say, they would not have passed for a race of
RATIONAL ANIMALS; but yet, whether, for all that, they would have been allowed
to be MEN, and not PARROTS?”“For I presume it is not the idea of A THINKING OR
RATIONAL BEING alone that makes the idea of A MAN in most people's sense: but
of A BODY, so and so shaped, joined to it: and if that be the idea of a MAN,
the same successive body not shifted all at once, must, as well as THE SAME IMMATERIAL
SPIRIT, go to the making of the same MAN.”So
back to Grice’s pirotology, or Pirotologia. But first a precis Grice needs a
dossier with a précis, so that he can insert the parrot’s conversational
implicata – and Prince Maurice’s. PARROT: What a nice company is here.MAN
(pointing to Prince Maurice): What thinkest thou that man is?PARROT: Some
general -- or other. Grice’s gloss: The he parrot displays what Grice calls
‘up-take.’ The parrot recognizes the man’s c-intention. So far is ability to
display uptake.PRINCE MAURICE: D'ou venez-vous?PARROT: De Marinnan.PRINCE
MAURICE: A qui estes-vous?PARROT: A un Portugais.PRINCE MAURICE: Que fais-tu
la?PARROT: Je garde les poulles.PRINCE MAURICE SMILES and flouts a Griceian
maxim: Vous gardez les poulles?PARROT (losing patience, and grasping the
Prince’s implicature that he doubts it): Oui, moi. Et je scai bien
faire.Grice’s gloss: The Parrott appeals to Peirce’s iconic system and makes
the chuck five times that a man uses to make to chickens when a man calls them.According
to his “most recent speculations” about communication, Grice goes on in his
‘Reply to Richards,’ one should distinguish, as he engages in a bit of
legalese, between two sides of the scenario under conceptual reduction, E
communicates that p. One side is the ‘de facto’ side, a side which, as in name
implies, in fact contains any communication-relevant feature which obtains or
is present in the circumstances. But then there is a ‘de jure’ side to the
scenario, viz. the nested C-intending which is only deemed to be present, as a
vicious circle with good intentions may become a virtuous one. By the ‘nesting,’
Grice means the three sub-intentions, involved in a scenario where Emissor E
communicates that (psi*) p, reducible to the Emissor E c-intending that A recognises
that E psi-s that p.First, there is the ‘exhibitive’ intention, C1. Emissor E
intends A to recognise that A psi-s that p.Second, there is the ‘reflexive’
intention, C2.Emissor intends that A recognise C1 by A recognising C2Third,
there is the ‘openness’ intention, C3. There is no inference-element which is
C-constitutive such that Emissor relies on it and yet does not intend A to
recognise.The “de jure” side to the state of affairs involves self-reference But
since this self-referential circle, a mere ‘loop,’ is meant to BLOCK an utterly
vicious circle of a regressus ad infinitum (or ‘ho eis apeiron ekballon,’ if
you must), the self-referential circle may well be deemed virtuous. The ‘de
jure’ side to the scenario is trying to save state of affairs which in, in
Grice’s words, “infinitely complex,” and such that no reasonable philosopher
should expect to be realised ‘de facto.’ “In which case,” Grice remarks, “it seems
to serve little, if any, purpose” to assume that this very INCONCEIVABLE ‘de
facto’ instantiation of a ‘de jure’ ascription of an emissor communicating that
p would only be detectable, as it isn’t, by appeal to something like ‘die
Deutsche Sprache’!“At its most meagre,” to use Grice’s idiom, the ‘de facto’
side should consist, merely, in any pre-rational ‘counterpart’ to the state of
affairs describable by having an Emissor E communicating that p,This might
amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance – our doing D1 -- in
order thereby to get some recipient creature R, our second pirot, P2, to think
or want some particular thing, our p. This meagre condition hardly involves
reference to anything like ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’Let’s reformulate the
condition.It’s just a pirot, at a ‘pre-rational’ level. The pirot does a thing
T IN ORDER THEREBY to get some other pirot to think or do some particular
thing. To echo Hare,Die Tur ist geschlossen, ja.Die Tur ist geschlossen,
bitte.Grice continues as a corollary: “Maybe in a less straightforward instance
of “Emissor E communicates that p” there is actually present the C-intention
whose feasibility as an ‘intention’ suggests some ability to use ‘die Deutsche
Sprache.’And if it does, Grice adds, it looks like anything like ‘die Deutsche
Sprache’ ends up being an aid to the conceptualizing about communication, not
communication itself! ReferencesDavidson, Donald
1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs, in Grandy and Warner, pp. 157-74.Durrell,
My family and other animals. Grandy, R. E. and R. O. Warner. 1986.
Philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Oxford, at
the Clarendon Press. Grice, H. P. 1986. Reply to Richards, in Grandy and
Warner, pp. 45-106Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. London and
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Grice, H. P. 2001. Aspects of
reason. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. Locke, J. 1690. An essay concerning
humane [sic] understanding. Oxford: The Bodleian. Schiffer, S. R. 1988.
Meaning. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
animatum: Grice thinks of communication as what he
calls ‘soul-to-soul transfer.’ Very Aristotelian. Grice was interested in what he called the
‘rational soul’ (psyche logike). In an act of communication, Emissor
communicates that p, there is a psi involved, therefore a soul, therefore what
the Romans called an ‘anima,’ and the Greeks called the ‘psyche.’ For surely
there can be no psi-transmission without a psi. Grice loved to abbreviate this
as the psi, since Lady Asquith, who was a soul, would not have desired any less
from Grice. Grice, like Plato and Aristotle, holds a tripartite theory of the
soul. Where, ‘part’ (Aristotelian ‘meros’) is taken very seriously. Anything
thought. From ‘psyche,’ anima. Grice uses the symbol of the letter psi here
which he renders as ‘animatum.’ Why Grice prefers ‘soul’ to mind. The
immortality of a the chicken soul. By Shropshire. Shropshire claims that the immortality of the soul is proved by
the fact that, if you cut off a chicken's head, the chicken will run round the
yard for a quarter of an hour before dropping. Grice has an an 'expansion' of
Shropshire's ingenious argument.If the soul is not dependent on the body, it is
immortal. If the soul is dependent on the body, it is dependent on that part of
the body in which it is located. If the soul is located in the body, it is
located in the head. If the chicken's soul were located in its head, the
chicken's soul would be destroyed if the head were rendered inoperative by
removal from the body. The chicken runs round the yard after head-removal. It
could do this only if animated, and controlled by its soul. So the chicken's
soul is not located in, and not dependent on, the chicken's head. So the
chicken's soul is not dependent on the chicken's body. So the chicken's soul is
immortal. end p.11 If the chicken's soul is immortal, a fortiori the human soul
is immortal. So the soul is immortal. The question I now ask myself is this:
why is it that I should be quite prepared to believe that the Harvard students
ascribed their expansion of Botvinnik's proof, or at least some part of it, to
Botvinnik (as what he had in mind), whereas I have no inclination at all to
ascribe any part of my expansion to Shropshire? Considerations which at once
strike me as being likely to be relevant are: (1) that Botvinnik's proof
without doubt contained more steps than Shropshire's claim; (2) that the
expansion of Botvinnik's proof probably imported, as extra premisses, only
propositions which are true, and indeed certain; whereas my expansion imports
premisses which are false or dubious; (3) that Botvinnik was highly intelligent
and an accomplished logician; whereas Shropshire was neither very intelligent
nor very accomplished as a philosopher. No doubt these considerations are
relevant, though one wonders whether one would be much readier to accord
Shropshire's production the title of 'reasoning' if it had contained some
further striking 'deductions', such as that since the soul is immortal moral
principles have absolute validity; and one might also ask whether the effect of
(3) does not nullify that of (2), since, if Shropshire was stupid, why should
not one ascribe to him a reconstructed argument containing plainly unacceptable
premisses? But, mainly, I would like some further light on the following
question: if such considerations as those which I have just mentioned are
relevant, why are they relevant? I should say a word about avowals. The
following contention might be advanced. If you want to know whether someone R,
who has produced what may be an incomplete piece of reasoning, has a particular
completion in mind, the direct way to find out is to ask him. That would settle
the matter. If, however, you are unable to ask him, then indirect methods will
have to be used, which may well be indecisive. Indeterminacy springs merely
from having to rely on indirect methods. I have two comments to make. First: it
end p.12 is far from clear to what extent avowals do settle the matter. Anyone
who has taught philosophy is familiar with the situation in which, under
pressure to expand an argument they have advanced, students, particularly
beginners, make statements which, one is inclined to say, misrepresent their
position. This phenomenon is perhaps accounted for by my much more important
second point: that avowals in this kind of context generally do not have the
character which one might without reflection suppose them to have; they are not
so much reportive as constructive. If I ask someone if he thinks that so-and-so
is a consequence of such-and-such, what I shall receive will be primarily a
defence of this supposition, not a report on what, historically, he had in mind
in making it. We are in general much more interested in whether an inferential
step is a good one to make than we are in what a particular person had in mind
at the actual moment at which he made the step. One might perhaps see an
analogy between avowals in this area and the specification of plans. If someone
has propounded a plan for achieving a certain objective, and I ask him what he
proposes to do in such-and-such a contingency, I expect him to do the best he
can to specify for me a way of meeting that contingency, rather than to give a
historically correct account of what thoughts he had been entertaining. This
feature of what I might call inferential avowals is one for which we shall have
to account.Let us take stock. The thesis which we proposed for examination has
needed emendation twice, once in the face of the possibility of bad reasoning,
and once to allow for informal and incomplete reasoning. The reformulation
needed to accommodate the latter is proving difficult to reach. Let us take s
and s′ to be sequences consisting of a set of premisses and a conclusion (or,
perhaps it would be better to say, a set of propositions and a further
proposition), or a sequence (sorites) of such sequences. (This is not fully
accurate, but will serve.) Let us suppose that x has produced s (in speech or
in thought). Let "formally cogent" mean "having true premisses,
and being such that steps from premisses to conclusions are formally valid".
(1) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by x" as "x
thinks s to be formally cogent", because if s is an incomplete piece of
reasoning s is not, and could not reasonably be thought by x to be, formally
cogent. end p.13 (2) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by
x" as "(∃s′)
(s′ is an expansion of s and s′ is formally cogent)" because (a) it does
not get in the idea that x thinks s′ formally cogent and (b) it would exclude
bad reasoning. (3) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by x"
as "x thinks that (∃s′)
(s′ is an expansion of s and s′ is formally cogent)", for this is too
weak, and would allow as reasoning any case in which x believed (for whatever
reason, or lack of reason) that an informal sequence had some formally cogent
expansion or other. (Compare perhaps Shropshire.).” In Latin indeed, ‘animus’
and ‘anima’ make a world of a difference, as Shropshire well knows. Psyche
transliterates as ‘anima’ only; ‘animus’ the Greeks never felt the need for. Of
course a chicken is an animal, as in man. “Homo animalis rationalis.” Grice
prefers ‘human,’ but sometimes he uses ‘animal,’ as opposed to ‘vegetal,
sometimes, when considering stages of freedom. A stone (mineral) displays a
‘free’ fall, which is metabolical. And then, a vegetable is less free than an
animal, which can move, and a non-human animal (that Grice calls ‘a beast’) is
less free than man, who is a rational animal. Grice notes that back in the day,
when the prince came from a hunt, “I brought some animals,” since these were
‘deer,’ ‘deer’ was taken as meaning ‘animal,’ when the implicatum was very much
cancellable. The Anglo-Saxons soon dropped the ‘deer’ and adopted the Latinate
‘animal.’ They narrowed the use of ‘deer’ for the ‘cervus cervus.’ But not
across the North Sea where the zoo is still called a ‘deer-garden.’ When
Aelfric studied philosophy he once thought man was a rational deer.
Annullability:
a synonym for ‘cancellability,’ used in “Causal.” Perhaps clear than ‘cancel.’
The etymology seems clear, because it involves the negative – “Cancel” seems
like a soft sophisticated way of annulling, render something nix. Short and
Lewis has ‘nullus’ as ne-ullus, not any,
none, no. which is indeed a diminutive for ‘unus,’ [for unulus, dim. of
unus], any, any one (usu. in neg. sentences;
corresp. with aliquis in affirmations).
Anniceris, Grecian and
pre-Griceian philosopher, vide. H. P. Grice, “Pleasure.” A pupil of Antipater,
he established a separate branch of the Cyrenaic school known as the
Anniceraioi. He subscribed to typical Cyrenaic hedonism, arguing that the end
of each action should be one’s own pleasure, since we can know nothing of
others’ experiences. He tempered the implications of hedonism with the claim
that a wise man attaches weight to respect for parents, patriotism, gratitude,
and friendship, perhaps influencing Epicurus in this regard. Anniceris also
played down the Cyrenaic stress on the intellect’s role in hedonistic practical
rationality, taking the Aristotelian view that cultivation of the right habits
is indispensable.
anscombe: H. P. Grice, “Reply to G. E. M. Anscombe.” Anscombe:
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret, Irish philosopher who has held positions at Oxford
and Cambridge, best known for her work in the philosophy of mind and for her
editions and translations of Vitters’s later writings. Anscombe studied
philosophy with Vitters and became closely associated with him, writing An
Introduction to Vitters’s Tractatus 9. She is married to Peter Geach.
Anscombe’s first major work was Intention 7. She argues that the concept of
intention is central to our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. The
basic case is that of the intentions with which we act. These are identified by
the reasons we give in answer to why-questions concerning our actions. Such
reasons usually form a hierarchy that constitutes a practical syllogism of
which action itself is the conclusion. Hence our intentions are a form of
active practical knowledge that normally leads to action. Anscombe compares the
direction of fit of this kind of knowledge with a shopping list’s relation to
one’s purchases, and contrasts it with the direction of fit characteristic of a
list of these purchases drawn up by an observer of the shopper. She maintains
that the deep mistake of modern i.e., post-medieval philosophy has been to
think that all knowledge is of this latter, observational, type. This
conception of active knowledge expressed through an agent’s intentions
conflicts with the passive conception of rationality characteristic of Hume and
his followers, and Anscombe develops this challenge in papers critical of the
isought distinction of Hume and his modern successors. In a famous paper,
“Modern Moral Philosophy” 8, she also argues that ought-statements make sense
only in the context of a moral theology that grounds morality in divine
commands. Since our culture rejects this theology, it is no surprise that
“modern moral philosophers” cannot find much sense in them. We should therefore
abandon them and return to the older conceptions of practical rationality and virtue.
These conceptions, and the associated conception of natural law, provide the
background to an uncompromising defense of traditional Catholic morality
concerning sexuality, war, and the importance of the distinction between
intention and foresight. Anscombe has never been afraid of unpopular
positions philosophical and ethical. Her
three volumes of Collected Papers 1 include a defense of singular causation, an
attack on the very idea of a subject of thought, and a critique of pacifism.
She is one of the most original and distinctive English philosophers of her
generation.
anselmus: Saint, called Anselm of Canterbury,
philosopher theologian. A Benedictine monk and the second Norman archbishop of
Canterbury, he is best known for his distinctive method fides quaerens intellectum; his “ontological”
argument for the existence of God in his treatise Proslogion; and his classic
formulation of the satisfaction theory of the Atonement in the Cur Deus homo.
Like Augustine before him, Anselm is a Christian Platonist in metaphysics. He
argues that the most accessible proofs of the existence of God are through
value theory: in his treatise Monologion, he deploys a cosmological argument,
showing the existence of a source of all goods, which is the Good per se and hence
supremely good; that same thing exists per se and is the Supreme Being. In the
Proslogion, Anselm begins with his conception of a being a greater than which
cannot be conceived, and mounts his ontological argument that a being a greater
than which cannot be conceived exists in the intellect, because even the fool
understands the phrase when he hears it; but if it existed in the intellect
alone, a greater could be conceived that existed in reality. This supremely
valuable object is essentially whatever it is
other things being equal that is
better to be than not to be, and hence living, wise, powerful, true, just,
blessed, immaterial, immutable, and eternal per se; even the paradigm of
sensory goods Beauty, Harmony,
Sweetness, and Pleasant Texture, in its own ineffable manner. Nevertheless, God
is supremely simple, not compounded of a plurality of excellences, but “omne et
unum, totum et solum bonum,” a being a more delectable than which cannot be
conceived. Everything other than God has its being and its well-being through
God as efficient cause. Moreover, God is the paradigm of all created natures,
the latter ranking as better to the extent that they more perfectly resemble
God. Thus, it is better to be human than to be horse, to be horse than to be wood,
even though in comparison with God everything else is “almost nothing.” For
every created nature, there is a that-for-which-it-ismade ad quod factum est.
On the one hand, Anselm thinks of such teleology as part of the internal
structure of the natures themselves: a creature of type F is a true F only
insofar as it is/does/exemplifies that for which F’s were made; a defective F,
to the extent that it does not. On the other hand, for Anselm, the telos of a
created nature is that-for-which-God-made-it. Because God is personal and acts
through reason and will, Anselm infers that prior in the order of explanation
to creation, there was, in the reason of the maker, an exemplar, form,
likeness, or rule of what he was going to make. In De veritate Anselm maintains
that such teleology gives rise to obligation: since creatures owe their being
and well-being to God as their cause, so they owe their being and well-being to
God in the sense of having an obligation to praise him by being the best beings
they can. Since every creature is of some nature or other, each can be its best
by being that-for-which-God-made-it. Abstracting from impediments, non-rational
natures fulfill this obligation and “act rightly” by natural necessity;
rational creatures, when they exercise their powers of reason and will to
fulfill God’s purpose in creating them. Thus, the goodness of a creature how
good a being it is is a function of twin factors: its natural telos i.e., what
sort of imitation of divine nature it aims for, and its rightness in exercising
its natural powers to fulfill its telos. By contrast, God as absolutely
independent owes no one anything and so has no obligations to creatures. In De
casu diaboli, Anselm underlines the optimism of his ontology, reasoning that
since the Supreme Good and the Supreme Being are identical, every being is good
and every good a being. Two further conclusions follow. First, evil is a
privation of being, the absence of good in something that properly ought to
have it e.g., blindness in normally sighted animals, injustice in humans or
angels. Second, since all genuine powers are given to enable a being to fulfill
its natural telos and so to be the best being it can, all genuine
metaphysically basic powers are optimific and essentially aim at goods, so that
evils are merely incidental side effects of their operation, involving some
lack of coordination among powers or between their exercise and the surrounding
context. Thus, divine omnipotence does not, properly speaking, include
corruptibility, passibility, or the ability to lie, because the latter are
defects and/or powers in other things whose exercise obstructs the flourishing
of the corruptible, passible, or potential liar. Anselm’s distinctive action
theory begins teleologically with the observation that humans and angels were
made for a happy immortality enjoying God, and to that end were given the
powers of reason to make accurate value assessments and will to love
accordingly. Anselm regards freedom and imputability of choice as essential and
permanent features of all rational beings. But freedom cannot be defined as a
power for opposites the power to sin and the power not to sin, both because
neither God nor the good angels have any power to sin, and because sin is an
evil at which no metaphysically basic power can aim. Rather, freedom is the
power to preserve justice for its own sake. Choices and actions are imputable
to an agent only if they are spontaneous, from the agent itself. Creatures
cannot act spontaneously by the necessity of their natures, because they do not
have their natures from themselves but receive them from God. To give them the
opportunity to become just of themselves, God furnishes them with two
motivaAnselm Anselm 31 31 tional drives
toward the good: an affection for the advantageous affectio commodi or a
tendency to will things for the sake of their benefit to the agent itself; and
an affection for justice affectio justitiae or a tendency to will things
because of their own intrinsic value. Creatures are able to align these drives
by letting the latter temper the former or not. The good angels, who preserved
justice by not willing some advantage possible for them but forbidden by God
for that time, can no longer will more advantage than God wills for them,
because he wills their maximum as a reward. By contrast, creatures, who sin by
refusing to delay gratification in accordance with God’s will, lose both
uprightness of will and their affection for justice, and hence the ability to
temper their pursuit of advantage or to will the best goods. Justice will never
be restored to angels who desert it. But if animality makes human nature
weaker, it also opens the possibility of redemption. Anselm’s argument for the
necessity of the Incarnation plays out the dialectic of justice and mercy so
characteristic of his prayers. He begins with the demands of justice: humans
owe it to God to make all of their choices and actions conform to his will;
failure to render what was owed insults God’s honor and makes the offender
liable to make satisfaction; because it is worse to dishonor God than for
countless worlds to be destroyed, the satisfaction owed for any small sin is
incommensurate with any created good; it would be maximally indecent for God to
overlook such a great offense. Such calculations threaten certain ruin for the
sinner, because God alone can do/be immeasurably deserving, and depriving the
creature of its honor through the eternal frustration of its telos seems the
only way to balance the scales. Yet, justice also forbids that God’s purposes
be thwarted through created resistance, and it was divine mercy that made
humans for a beatific immortality with him. Likewise, humans come in families
by virtue of their biological nature which angels do not share, and justice
allows an offense by one family member to be compensated by another. Assuming
that all actual humans are descended from common first parents, Anselm claims
that the human race can make satisfaction for sin, if God becomes human and
renders to God what Adam’s family owes. When Anselm insists that humans were
made for beatific intimacy with God and therefore are obliged to strive into
God with all of their powers, he emphatically includes reason or intellect
along with emotion and will. God, the controlling subject matter, is in part
permanently inaccessible to us because of the ontological incommensuration
between God and creatures and our progress is further hampered by the
consequences of sin. Our powers will function best, and hence we have a duty to
follow right order in their use: by submitting first to the holistic discipline
of faith, which will focus our souls and point us in the right direction. Yet
it is also a duty not to remain passive in our appreciation of authority, but
rather for faith to seek to understand what it has believed. Anselm’s works
display a dialectical structure, full of questions, objections, and contrasting
opinions, designed to stir up the mind. His quartet of teaching dialogues De grammatico, De veritate, De libertate
arbitrii, and De casu diaboli as well as his last philosophical treatise, De
concordia, anticipate the genre of the Scholastic question quaestio so dominant
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His discussions are likewise
remarkable for their attention to modalities and proper-versus-improper
linguistic usage.
antilogismus:
an inconsistent triad of propositions, two of which are the premises of a valid
categorical syllogism and the third of which is the contradictory of the
conclusion of this valid categorical syllogism. An antilogism is a special form
of antilogy or self-contradiction.
antinomianism: as a
Kantian, Grice overused the idea of a nomos or law, and then there’s
antinominaism, the view that one is not bound by moral law; specifically, the
view that Christians are by grace set free from the need to observe moral laws.
During the Reformation, antinomianism was believed by some but not Martin
Luther to follow from the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith
alone.
Antiochus of Ascalon
c.130c.68 B.C., Grecian philosopher and the last prominent member of the New
Academy. He played the major role in ending its two centuries of Skepticism and
helped revive interest in doctrines from the Old Academy, as he called Plato,
Aristotle, and their associates. The impulse for this decisive shift came in
epistemology, where the Skeptical Academy had long agreed with Stoicism that
knowledge requires an infallible “criterion of truth” but disputed the Stoic
claim to find this criterion in “cognitive perception.” Antiochus’s teacher,
Philo of Larissa, broke with this tradition and proposed that perception need
not be cognitive to qualify as knowledge. Rejecting this concession, Antiochus
offered new arguments for the Stoic claim that some perception is cognitive,
and hence knowledge. He also proposed a similar accommodation in ethics, where
he agreed with the Stoics that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness but
insisted with Aristotle that virtue is not the only good. These and similar
attempts to mediate fundamental disputes have led some to label Antiochus an
eclectic or syncretist; but some of his proposals, especially his appeal to the
Old Academy, set the stage for Middle Platonism, which also sought to reconcile
Plato and Aristotle. No works by Antiochus survive, but his students included
many eminent Romans, most notably Cicero, who summarizes Antiochus’s
epistemology in the Academica, his critique of Stoic ethics in De finibus IV,
and his purportedly Aristotelian ethics in De finibus V.
anti-realism: If Grice
was a realist, he hated anti-realism, the rejection, in one or another form or
area of inquiry, of realism, the view that there are knowable mind-independent
facts, objects, or properties. Metaphysical realists make the general claim
that there is a world of mind-independent objects. Realists in particular areas
make more specific or limited claims. Thus moral realists hold that there are
mind-independent moral properties, mathematical realists that there are
mind-independent mathematical facts, scientific realists that scientific
inquiry reveals the existence of previously unknown and unobservable
mind-independent entities and properties. Antirealists deny either that facts
of the relevant sort are mind-independent or that knowledge of such facts is
possible. Berkeley’s subjective idealism, which claims that the world consists
only of minds and their contents, is a metaphysical anti-realism.
Constructivist anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that the world consists
only of mental phenomena, but claim that it is constituted by, or constructed
from, our evidence or beliefs. Many philosophers find constructivism
implausible or even incoherent as a metaphysical doctrine, but much more
plausible when restricted to a particular domain, such as ethics or mathematics.
Debates between realists and anti-realists have been particularly intense in
philosophy of science. Scientific realism has been rejected both by
constructivists such as Kuhn, who hold that scientific facts are constructed by
the scientific community, and by empiricists who hold that knowledge is limited
to what can be observed. A sophisticated version of the latter doctrine is Bas
van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, which allows scientists free rein in
constructing scientific models, but claims that evidence for such models
confirms only their observable implications.
apagoge: distinguished by
Grice from both ‘epagoge,’ and his favoured ‘diagoge.’ A shifting
of the basis of argument: hence of argument based on a probable or agreed
assumption, Arist.APr.69a20, cf. Anon.in SE65.35; reduction, “ἡ εἰς τὸ ἀδύνατον
ἀ.” reductio per impossibile, APr. 29b6; “ἡ ἀ. μετάβασίς ἐστιν ἀπ᾽ ἄλλου
προβλήματος ἢ θεωρήματος ἐπ᾽ ἄλλο, οὗ γνωσθέντος ἢ πορισθέντος καὶ τὸ
προκείμενον ἔσται καταφανές” Procl. in Euc.p.212F.; τῶν ἀπορουμένων
διαγραμμάτων τὴν ἀ. ποιήσασθαι ib. p.213F. b. reduction of a disputant (cf. ἀπάγω
v. 1c), “ἡ ἐπὶ τὸ ἄδηλον ἀ.” S.E.P.2.234.
apocatastasis: a branch
of Grice’s eschatology -- from Grecian, ‘reestablishment’, the restoration of
all souls, including Satan’s and his minions’, in the kingdom of God. God’s
goodness will triumph over evil, and through a process of spiritual education
souls will be brought to repentance and made fit for divine life. The theory
originates with Origen but was also held by Gregory of Nyssa. In modern times
F. D. Maurice 180572 and Karl Barth 6 8 held this position.
aporia: cf. aporetic, cognate with porosity. No
porosity, and you get an impasse. While aware of Baker’s and Deutsch’s
treatment of the ‘aporia’ in Aristotle’s account of ‘philos,’ Grice explores
‘aporia’ in Plato in the Thrasymachus on ‘legal justice’ prior to ‘moral
justice’ in Republic. in Dialectic, question for discussion, difficulty,
puzzle, “ἀπορίᾳ σχόμενος” Pl.Prt.321c; ἀ. ἣν ἀπορεῖς ib.324d; “ἡ ἀ. ἰσότης ἐναντίων
λογισμῶν” Arist. Top.145b1, al.; “ἔχει ἀπορίαν περί τινος” Id.Pol.1285b28; “αἱ
μὲν οὖν ἀ. τοιαῦταί τινες συμβαίνουσιν” Id.EN1146b6; “οὐδεμίαν ποιήσει ἀ.”
Id.Metaph.1085a27; ἀ. λύειν, διαλύειν, Id.MM 1201b1, Metaph.1062b31; “ἀπορίᾳ ἀπορίαν
λύειν” D.S.1.37.Discussion with the
Sophist Thrasymachus can
only lead to aporia.
And the more I trust you, the more I sink into an aporia of
sorts. —Aha! roared Thrasymachus to everyone's surprise. There it is!
Socratic aporia is
back! Charge! neither Socrates' company nor Socrates himself gives any
convincing answer. So, he says, finding himself in a real aporia, he
visits Thrasymachus as
well, and ... I argue that a combination of these means in form
that I call “provocative-aporetic” better accounts for the means that Plato
uses to exert a protreptic effect on readers. Aporia is a simultaneously
intellectual and affective experience, and the way that readers choose to
respond to aporia has a greater protreptic effect than either affective or
intellectual means alone. When Socrates says he can 'transfer' the use of
"just" to things related to the 'soul,' what kind of conversational
game is that? Grice took Socrates's manoeuvre very
seriously.Socrates relies on the tripartite theory of the soul. Plato, actually -- since Socrates is a drammatis persona! In "Philosophical Eschatology, Metaphysics, and Plato's
Republic," H. P. Grice's purpose is to carry out a provocative-aporetic
reading Book I Grice argues that it is a dispute between two ways of
understanding 'just' which causes the aporia when Socrates tries to analyse
'just.' Although Socrates will not argue for the complexity and
tripartition of the soul until Bk. IV, we can at least note the contrast with
Thrasymachus' “idealize user” theory.For Socrates, agents are complex, and
justice coordinates the parts of the agent.For Thrasymachus, agents are simple
“users,” and justice is a tool for use. (2 - 3) Justice makes its
possessor happy; the function (telos, metier) argument. To make the
argument that justice is an excellence (virtus, arete) of soul (psyche) that
makes its possessor happy, Socrates relies on a method for discovering the
function (ἔργον, ergon, 352e1, cf. telos, metier, causa finalis) of any object
whatsoever. Socrates begins by differentiating between an exclusive
functions and an optimal function, so that we may discover the functions in
different types of objects, i.e., natural and artificial objects. We can
say an object performs some function (ergon) if one of the following conditions
holds.If the object is the only one that can do the work in
question, or If it is the object that does that work best.Socrates
then provides examples from different part-whole complexes to make his
point. The eye's exclusive function is to see, because no other organ is
specialized so as to perform just that function. A horse's work is to
carry riders into battle. Even though this might not be a horse's
EXCLUSIVE function, it may be its “optimal” function in that the horse is best
suited or designed by God to the task. Finally, the pruning knife is best
for tending to vines, not because it cannot cut anything else, but because it
is optimally suited for that task. Socrates' use of the pruning knife of
as an example of a thing's function resembles a return to the technē model,
since a craftsman must make the knife for a gardener to Socrates asks,
“Would you define this as the function of a horse and of anything else, as that
which someone does either through that thing alone, or best?” (...τοῦτο ἄν
θείης καὶ ἵππου καὶ ἄλλου ὁτουοῦν ἔργον, ὅ ἄν ἤ μόνῳ ἐκείνῳ ποιῇ τις ἤ ἄριστα;
352e1-2) Thrasymachus agrees to this definition of function. 91 use.But his use
of the eye — a bodily organ — should dissuade us from this view. One may
use these examples to argue that Socrates is in fact offering a new method to
investigate the nature of justice: 1) Find out what the functions of such
objects are2) determine (by observation, experiment, or even thought
experiment) cases where objects of such a kind perform their functions well and
cases where they perform them poorly; and 3) finally find out the
qualities that enable them to perform such functions well (and in the absence
of which they perform poorly), and these are their virtues.A crucial difference
between this method and technē model of justice lies in the interpretation that
each assigns to the realm of human artifacts. Polemarchus and Thrasymachus
both assume that the technē is unique as a form of knowledge for the power and
control that it offers users. In Polemarchus' case, the technē of justice,
“helping friends and harming enemies,” may be interpreted as a description of a
method for gaining political power within a traditional framework of communal
life, which assumes the oikos as the basic unit of power. Those families that
help their friends and harm their enemies thrive. Thrasymachus, on the
other hand, emphasizes the ways that technai grant users the power to exploit
nature to further their own, distinctively individual ends. Thus, the
shepherd exploits the sheep to make a livelihood for himself. Socrates'
approach differs from these by re-casting “mastery” over nature as submission
to norms that structure the natural world. For example, many factors contribute
to making This points to a distinction Socrates draws in Book X between
producers and users of artifacts. He uses the example of the blacksmith
who makes a bridle and the horseman who uses the bridle to argue that
production and use correspond to two gradations of knowledge (601c). The
ultimate purpose of the example is to provide a metaphor — using the craft
analogy — for identifying gradations of knowledge on a copy-original paradigm
of the form-participant relation. the pruning knife the optimal tool for
cutting vines: the shape of the human hand, the thickness and shape of the
vines, and the metal of the blade. Likewise, in order for horses to
optimally perform their “work,” they must be "healthy" and
strong. The conditions that bring about their "health" and
strength are not up to us, however."Control” only comes about through the
recognition of natural norms. Thus technē is a type of knowledge that
coordinates structures in nature.It is not an unlimited source of
power. Socrates' inclusion of the human soul (psyche) among those things
that have a function is the more controversial aspect of function
argument.Socrates says that the functions (erga) of the soul (psyche)
are “to engage in care-taking, ruling, and deliberation” and, later,
simply that the ergon (or function) of the soul (or psyche) is “to live”
(τὸ ζῆν, "to zen," 353d6). But the difficulty seems to be this:
the functions of pruning knives, horses, and bodily organs are determined with
respect to a limited and fairly unambiguous context that is already defined for
them. But what is this context with respect to the soul (psyche) of a
human individual? One answer might be that the social world — politics —
provides the context that defines the soul's function, just as the needs of the
human organism define the context in which the eye can perform a function. But
here a challenger might reply that in aristocracies, oligarchies, and
democracies, “care-taking, ruling, and deliberation” are utilized for different
ends.In these contexts, individual souls might have different functions,
according to the “needs” that these different regimes have. Alternatively,
one might deny altogether that the human soul has a function: the distinctive
feature of human beings might be their position “outside” of nature. Thus,
even if Socrates' description of the soul's function is accurate, it is too
general to be really informative.Socrates must offer more details for the
function argument to be convincing. Nonetheless, the idea that justice is
a condition that lets the soul perform its functions is a significant departure
from the technē model of justice, and one that will remain throughout the
argument of the Republic. […] τὸ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι καὶ ἄρχειν καὶ βουλεύεσθαι
(353d3). As far as Bk. I is concerned, “justice” functions as a
place-holder for that condition of the soul which permits the soul to perform
its functions well. What that condition is, however, remains unknown.For
this reason, Plato has Socrates concludes Bk. I by likening himself to a
“glutton” (ὥσπερ οἱ λίχνοι, 354b1), who takes another dish before “moderately
enjoying the previous” serving (πρὶν τοῦ προτέρου μετρίως ἀπολαύσαι,
354b2-3). For Socrates wants to know what effects the optimal condition of
soul brings about before knowing what the condition itself is. Thus Bk. I
concludes in "aporia," but not in a way that betrays the dialogue's
lack of unity.The “separatist” thesis concerning Bk. I goes back to Hermann in
"Geschichte und System der Platonischen Philosophie." One can
argue on behalf of the “separatist” view as well. One can argue against
the separatist thesis, even granting some evidence in favour of the separatist
thesis. To the contrary, the "aporia" clearly foreshadows the
argument that Socrates makes about the soul in Bk. IV, viz. that the soul
(psyche) is a complex whole of parts -- an implicatum in the “justice is
stronger” argument -- and that 'just' is the condition that allows this complex
whole be integrated to an optimal degree. Thus, Bk. I does not conclude
negatively, but rather provides the resources for going beyond the "technē"
model of justice, which is the primary cause of Polemarchus's and
Thrasymachus's encounter with "aporia" in Bk. I. Throughout
conversation of "The Republic," Socrates does not really alter the
argument he gives for justice in Bk. I, but rather states the same argument in
a different way. My gratitude to P. N. Moore. Refs: Wise guys
and smart alecks in Republic 1 and 2; Proleptic composition in the Republic, or
why Bk. 1 was never a separate dialogue, The Classical Quarterly;
"Socrates: ironist and moral philosopher." Strictly an ‘aporia’ in
Griceian, is a ‘puzzle’,
‘question for discussion’, ‘state of perplexity’. The aporetic method the raising of puzzles without offering
solutions is typical of the elenchus in
the early Socratic dialogues of Plato. These consist in the testing of
definitions and often end with an aporia, e.g., that piety is both what is and
what is not loved by the gods. Compare the paradoxes of Zeno, e.g., that motion
is both possible and impossible. In Aristotle’s dialectic, the resolution of aporiai
discovered in the views on a subject is an important source of philosophical
understanding. The beliefs that one should love oneself most of all and that
self-love is shameful, e.g., can be resolved with the right understanding of
‘self’. The possibility of argument for two inconsistent positions was an
important factor in the development of Skepticism. In modern philosophy, the
antinomies that Kant claimed reason would arrive at in attempting to prove the
existence of objects corresponding to transcendental ideas may be seen as
aporiai.
applicatum. While Bennett uses the rather ‘abusive’
“nominalist” to refer to Grice, Grice isn’t. It’s all about the ‘applied.’
Grice thinks a rational creature – not a parrot, but a rational intelligent
pirot – can have an abstract idea. So there is this “Communication Device,”
with capital C and capital D. The emissor APPLIES it to a given occasion. Cf.
complete and incomplete. What’s the antonym of applied? Plato’s idea! applied – grice
used ‘applied’ for ‘meaning’ – but ‘applied’ can be used in other contxts too.
In ethics, the domain of ethics that includes professional ethics, such as
business ethics, engineering ethics, and medical ethics, as well as practical
ethics such as environmental ethics, which is applied, and thus practical as
opposed to theoretical, but not focused on any one discipline. One of the major
disputes among those who work in applied ethics is whether or not there is a
general and universal account of morality applicable both to the ethical issues
in the professions and to various practical problems. Some philosophers believe
that each of the professions or each field of activity develops an ethical code
for itself and that there need be no apellatio applied ethics 34 34 close relationship between e.g. business
ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics. Others hold that the same
moral system applies to all professions and fields. They claim that the
appearance of different moral systems is simply due to certain problems being
more salient for some professions and fields than for others. The former
position accepts the consequence that the ethical codes of different
professions might conflict with one another, so that a physician in business
might find that business ethics would require one action but medical ethics
another. Engineers who have been promoted to management positions sometimes
express concern over the tension between what they perceive to be their
responsibility as engineers and their responsibility as managers in a business.
Many lawyers seem to hold that there is similar tension between what common
morality requires and what they must do as lawyers. Those who accept a
universal morality hold that these tensions are all resolvable because there is
only one common morality. Underlying both positions is the pervasive but false
view of common morality as providing a unique right answer to every moral
problem. Those who hold that each profession or field has its own moral code do
not realize that common morality allows for conflicts of duties. Most of those
who put forward moral theories, e.g., utilitarians, Kantians, and
contractarians, attempt to generate a universal moral system that solves all
moral problems. This creates a situation that leads many in applied ethics to
dismiss theoretical ethics as irrelevant to their concerns. An alternative view
of a moral theory is to think of it on the model of a scientific theory,
primarily concerned to describe common morality rather than generate a new
improved version. On this model, it is clear that although morality rules out
many alternatives as unacceptable, it does not provide unique right answers to
every controversial moral question. On this model, different fields and
different professions may interpret the common moral system in somewhat
different ways. For example, although deception is always immoral if not
justified, what counts as deception is not the same in all professions. Not
informing a patient of an alternative treatment counts as deceptive for a
physician, but not telling a customer of an alternative to what she is about to
buy does not count as deceptive for a salesperson. The professions also have
considerable input into what special duties are incurred by becoming a member
of their profession. Applied ethics is thus not the mechanical application of a
common morality to a particular profession or field, but an independent
discipline that clarifies and analyzes the practices in a field or profession
so that common morality can be applied.
A priori: Grice was
fascinated by the apriori, both analytic but more so the synthetic. He would
question his children’s playmates with things like, “Can a sweater be green and
red all over? No striped allowed.” a priori, prior to or independent of
experience; contrasted with ‘a posteriori’ empirical. These two terms are
primarily used to mark a distinction between 1 two modes of epistemic
justification, together with derivative distinctions between 2 kinds of
propositions, 3 kinds of knowledge, and 4 kinds of argument. They are also used
to indicate a distinction between 5 two ways in which a concept or idea may be
acquired. 1 A belief or claim is said to be justified a priori if its epistemic
justification, the reason or warrant for thinking it to be true, does not
depend at all on sensory or introspective or other sorts of experience; whereas
if its justification does depend at least in part on such experience, it is
said to be justified a posteriori or empirically. This specific distinction has
to do only with the justification of the belief, and not at all with how the
constituent concepts are acquired; thus it is no objection to a claim of a
priori justificatory status for a particular belief that experience is required
for the acquisition of some of the constituent concepts. It is clear that the
relevant notion of experience includes sensory and introspective experience, as
well as such things as kinesthetic experience. Equally clearly, to construe
experience in the broadest possible sense of, roughly, a conscious undergoing
of any sort would be to destroy the point of the distinction, since even a
priori justification presumably involves some sort of conscious process of
awareness. The construal that is perhaps most faithful to the traditional usage
is that which construes experience as any sort of cognitive input that derives,
presumably causally, from features of the actual world that may not hold in
other possible worlds. Thus, e.g., such things as clairvoyance or telepathy, if
they were to exist, would count as forms of experience and any knowledge
resulting therefrom as a posteriori; but the intuitive apprehension of
properties or numbers or other sorts of abstract entities that are the same in
all possible worlds, would not. Understood in this way, the concept of a priori
justification is an essentially negative concept, specifying as it does what
the justification of the belief does not depend on, but saying nothing a priori
a priori 35 35 about what it does
depend on. Historically, the main positive conception was that offered by
proponents of rationalism such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz,
according to which a priori justification derives from the intuitive
apprehension of necessary facts pertaining to universals and other abstract
entities. Although Kant is often regarded as a rationalist, his restriction of
substantive a priori knowledge to the world of appearances represents a major
departure from the main rationalist tradition. In contrast, proponents of
traditional empiricism, if they do not repudiate the concept of a priori
justification altogether as does Quine, typically attempt to account for such
justification by appeal to linguistic or conceptual conventions. The most
standard formulation of this empiricist view a development of the view of Hume
that all a priori knowledge pertains to “relations of ideas” is the claim
typical of logical positivism that all a priori knowable claims or propositions
are analytic. A rationalist would claim in opposition that at least some a
priori claims or propositions are synthetic. 2 A proposition that is the
content of an a priori justified belief is often referred to as an a priori
proposition or an a priori truth. This usage is also often extended to include
any proposition that is capable of being the content of such a belief, whether
it actually has this status or not. 3 If, in addition to being justified a
priori or a posteriori, a belief is also true and satisfies whatever further
conditions may be required for it to constitute knowledge, that knowledge is
derivatively characterized as a priori or a posteriori empirical, respectively.
Though a priori justification is often regarded as by itself guaranteeing
truth, this should be regarded as a further substantive thesis, not as part of
the very concept of a priori justification. Examples of knowledge that have
been classically regarded as a priori in this sense are mathematical knowledge,
knowledge of logical truths, and knowledge of necessary entailments and
exclusions of commonsense concepts ‘Nothing can be red and green all over at
the same time’, ‘If A is later than B and B is later than C, then A is later
than C’; but many claims of metaphysics, ethics, and even theology have also
been claimed to have this status. 4 A deductively valid argument that also
satisfies the further condition that each of the premises or sometimes one or
more particularly central premises are justified a priori is referred to as an
a priori argument. This label is also sometimes applied to arguments that are
claimed to have this status, even if the correctness of this claim is in
question. 5 In addition to the uses just catalogued that derive from the
distinction between modes of justification, the terms ‘a priori’ and ‘a
posteriori’ are also employed to distinguish two ways in which a concept or
idea might be acquired by an individual person. An a posteriori or empirical
concept or idea is one that is derived from experience, via a process of
abstraction or ostensive definition. In contrast, an a priori concept or idea
is one that is not derived from experience in this way and thus presumably does
not require any particular experience to be realized though the explicit
realization of such a concept might still require experience as a “trigger”.
The main historical account of such concepts, again held mainly by
rationalists, construes them as innate, either implanted in the mind by God or,
in the more contemporary version of the claim held by Chomsky, Fodor, and
others, resulting from evolutionary development. Concepts typically regarded as
having this sort of status include the concepts of substance, causation, God,
necessity, infinity, and many others. Empiricists, in contrast, typically hold
that all concepts are derived from experience. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The
synthetic a priori.”
aquinas: while Grice,
being C. of E., would avoid Aquinas like the rats, he was aware of Aquinas’s
clever ‘intention-based semantics’ in his commentary of Aristotle’s De
Interpretatione. Saint Thomas 122574,
philosopher-theologian, the most influential thinker of the medieval
period. He produced a powerful philosophical synthesis that combined
Aristotelian and Neoplatonic elements within a Christian context in an original
and ingenious way. Life and works. Thomas was born at Aquino castle in
Roccasecca, Italy, and took early schooling at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte
Cassino. He then studied liberal arts and philosophy at the of Naples 123944 and joined the Dominican
order. While going to Paris for further studies as a Dominican, he was detained
by his family for about a year. Upon being released, he studied with the
Dominicans at Paris, perhaps privately, until 1248, when he journeyed to a
priori argument Aquinas, Saint Thomas 36
36 Cologne to work under Albertus Magnus. Thomas’s own report reportatio
of Albertus’s lectures on the Divine Names of Dionysius and his notes on
Albertus’s lectures on Aristotle’s Ethics date from this period. In 1252 Thomas
returned to Paris to lecture there as a bachelor in theology. His resulting
commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard dates from this period, as do two
philosophical treatises, On Being and Essence De ente et essentia and On the
Principles of Nature De principiis naturae. In 1256 he began lecturing as
master of theology at Paris. From this period 125659 date a series of
scriptural commentaries, the disputations On Truth De veritate, Quodlibetal
Questions VIIXI, and earlier parts of the Summa against the Gentiles Summa
contra gentiles; hereafter SCG. At different locations in Italy from 1259 to
1269, Thomas continued to write prodigiously, including, among other works, the
completion of the SCG; a commentary on the Divine Names; disputations On the
Power of God De potentia Dei and On Evil De malo; and Summa of Theology Summa
theologiae; hereafter ST, Part I. In January 1269, he resumed teaching in Paris
as regent master and wrote extensively until returning to Italy in 1272. From
this second Parisian regency date the disputations On the Soul De anima and On
Virtues De virtutibus; continuation of ST; Quodlibets IVI and XII; On the Unity
of the Intellect against the Averroists De unitate intellectus contra
Averroistas; most if not all of his commentaries on Aristotle; a commentary on
the Book of Causes Liber de causis; and On the Eternity of the World De
aeternitate mundi. In 1272 Thomas returned to Italy where he lectured on
theology at Naples and continued to write until December 6, 1273, when his
scholarly work ceased. He died three months later en route to the Second
Council of Lyons. Doctrine. Aquinas was both a philosopher and a theologian.
The greater part of his writings are theological, but there are many strictly
philosophical works within his corpus, such as On Being and Essence, On the
Principles of Nature, On the Eternity of the World, and the commentaries on Aristotle
and on the Book of Causes. Also important are large sections of strictly
philosophical writing incorporated into theological works such as the SCG, ST,
and various disputations. Aquinas clearly distinguishes between strictly
philosophical investigation and theological investigation. If philosophy is
based on the light of natural reason, theology sacra doctrina presupposes faith
in divine revelation. While the natural light of reason is insufficient to
discover things that can be made known to human beings only through revelation,
e.g., belief in the Trinity, Thomas holds that it is impossible for those
things revealed to us by God through faith to be opposed to those we can
discover by using human reason. For then one or the other would have to be false;
and since both come to us from God, God himself would be the author of falsity,
something Thomas rejects as abhorrent. Hence it is appropriate for the
theologian to use philosophical reasoning in theologizing. Aquinas also
distinguishes between the orders to be followed by the theologian and by the
philosopher. In theology one reasons from belief in God and his revelation to
the implications of this for created reality. In philosophy one begins with an
investigation of created reality insofar as this can be understood by human
reason and then seeks to arrive at some knowledge of divine reality viewed as
the cause of created reality and the end or goal of one’s philosophical inquiry
SCG II, c. 4. This means that the order Aquinas follows in his theological
Summae SCG and ST is not the same as that which he prescribes for the
philosopher cf. Prooemium to Commentary on the Metaphysics. Also underlying
much of Aquinas’s thought is his acceptance of the difference between
theoretical or speculative philosophy including natural philosophy,
mathematics, and metaphysics and practical philosophy. Being and analogy. For
Aquinas the highest part of philosophy is metaphysics, the science of being as
being. The subject of this science is not God, but being, viewed without
restriction to any given kind of being, or simply as being Prooemium to
Commentary on Metaphysics; In de trinitate, qu. 5, a. 4. The metaphysician does
not enjoy a direct vision of God in this life, but can reason to knowledge of
him by moving from created effects to awareness of him as their uncreated
cause. God is therefore not the subject of metaphysics, nor is he included in
its subject. God can be studied by the metaphysician only indirectly, as the
cause of the finite beings that fall under being as being, the subject of the
science. In order to account for the human intellect’s discovery of being as
being, in contrast with being as mobile studied by natural philosophy or being
as quantified studied by mathematics, Thomas appeals to a special kind of
intellectual operation, a negative judgment, technically named by him
“separation.” Through this operation one discovers that being, in order to be
realized as such, need not be material and changAquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Saint Thomas 37 37 ing. Only as a
result of this judgment is one justified in studying being as being. Following
Aristotle and Averroes, Thomas is convinced that the term ‘being’ is used in
various ways and with different meanings. Yet these different usages are not
unrelated and do enjoy an underlying unity sufficient for being as being to be
the subject of a single science. On the level of finite being Thomas adopts and
adapts Aristotle’s theory of unity by reference to a first order of being. For
Thomas as for Aristotle this unity is guaranteed by the primary referent in our
predication of being substance. Other
things are named being only because they are in some way ordered to and
dependent on substance, the primary instance of being. Hence being is
analogous. Since Thomas’s application of analogy to the divine names
presupposes the existence of God, we shall first examine his discussion of that
issue. The existence of God and the “five ways.” Thomas holds that unaided
human reason, i.e., philosophical reason, can demonstrate that God exists, that
he is one, etc., by reasoning from effect to cause De trinitate, qu. 2, a. 3;
SCG I, c. 4. Best-known among his many presentations of argumentation for God’s
existence are the “five ways.” Perhaps even more interesting for today’s student
of his metaphysics is a brief argument developed in one of his first writings,
On Being and Essence c.4. There he wishes to determine how essence is realized
in what he terms “separate substances,” i.e., the soul, intelligences angels of
the Christian tradition, and the first cause God. After criticizing the view
that created separate substances are composed of matter and form, Aquinas
counters that they are not entirely free from composition. They are composed of
a form or essence and an act of existing esse. He immediately develops a
complex argument: 1 We can think of an essence or quiddity without knowing
whether or not it actually exists. Therefore in such entities essence and act
of existing differ unless 2 there is a thing whose quiddity and act of existing
are identical. At best there can be only one such being, he continues, by
eliminating multiplication of such an entity either through the addition of
some difference or through the reception of its form in different instances of
matter. Hence, any such being can only be separate and unreceived esse, whereas
esse in all else is received in something else, i.e., essence. 3 Since esse in
all other entities is therefore distinct from essence or quiddity, existence is
communicated to such beings by something else, i.e., they are caused. Since
that which exists through something else must be traced back to that which
exists of itself, there must be some thing that causes the existence of
everything else and that is identical with its act of existing. Otherwise one
would regress to infinity in caused causes of existence, which Thomas here
dismisses as unacceptable. In qu. 2, a. 1 of ST I Thomas rejects the claim that
God’s existence is self-evident to us in this life, and in a. 2 maintains that
God’s existence can be demonstrated by reasoning from knowledge of an existing
effect to knowledge of God as the cause required for that effect to exist. The
first way or argument art. 3 rests upon the fact that various things in our
world of sense experience are moved. But whatever is moved is moved by
something else. To justify this, Thomas reasons that to be moved is to be
reduced from potentiality to actuality, and that nothing can reduce itself from
potency to act; for it would then have to be in potency if it is to be moved
and in act at the same time and in the same respect. This does not mean that a
mover must formally possess the act it is to communicate to something else if
it is to move the latter; it must at least possess it virtually, i.e., have the
power to communicate it. Whatever is moved, therefore, must be moved by
something else. One cannot regress to infinity with moved movers, for then
there would be no first mover and, consequently, no other mover; for second
movers do not move unless they are moved by a first mover. One must, therefore,
conclude to the existence of a first mover which is moved by nothing else, and
this “everyone understands to be God.” The second way takes as its point of
departure an ordering of efficient causes as indicated to us by our
investigation of sensible things. By this Thomas means that we perceive in the
world of sensible things that certain efficient causes cannot exercise their
causal activity unless they are also caused by something else. But nothing can
be the efficient cause of itself, since it would then have to be prior to
itself. One cannot regress to infinity in ordered efficient causes. In ordered
efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediary, and the
intermediary is the cause of the last whether the intermediary is one or many.
Hence if there were no first efficient cause, there would be no intermediary
and no last cause. Thomas concludes from this that one must acknowledge the
existence of a first efficient cause, “which everyone names God.” The third way
consists of two major parts. Some Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas
38 38 textual variants have complicated
the proper interpretation of the first part. In brief, Aquinas appeals to the
fact that certain things are subject to generation and corruption to show that
they are “possible,” i.e., capable of existing and not existing. Not all things
can be of this kind revised text, for that which has the possibility of not
existing at some time does not exist. If, therefore, all things are capable of
not existing, at some time there was nothing whatsoever. If that were so, even
now there would be nothing, since what does not exist can only begin to exist
through something else that exists. Therefore not all beings are capable of
existing and not existing. There must be some necessary being. Since such a
necessary, i.e., incorruptible, being might still be caused by something else,
Thomas adds a second part to the argument. Every necessary being either depends
on something else for its necessity or it does not. One cannot regress to
infinity in necessary beings that depend on something else for their necessity.
Therefore there must be some being that is necessary of itself and that does
not depend on another cause for its necessity, i.e., God. The statement in the
first part to the effect that what has the possibility of not existing at some
point does not exist has been subject to considerable dispute among
commentators. Moreover, even if one grants this and supposes that every
individual being is a “possible” and therefore has not existed at some point in
the past, it does not easily follow from this that the totality of existing
things will also have been nonexistent at some point in the past. Given this,
some interpreters prefer to substitute for the third way the more satisfactory
versions found in SCG I ch. 15 and SCG II ch. 15. Thomas’s fourth way is based
on the varying degrees of perfection we discover among the beings we
experience. Some are more or less good, more or less true, more or less noble,
etc., than others. But the more and less are said of different things insofar
as they approach in varying degrees something that is such to a maximum degree.
Therefore there is something that is truest and best and noblest and hence that
is also being to the maximum degree. To support this Thomas comments that those
things that are true to the maximum degree also enjoy being to the maximum
degree; in other words he appeals to the convertibility between being and truth
of being. In the second part of this argument Thomas argues that what is
supremely such in a given genus is the cause of all other things in that genus.
Therefore there is something that is the cause of being, goodness, etc., for
all other beings, and this we call God. Much discussion has centered on
Thomas’s claim that the more and less are said of different things insofar as
they approach something that is such to the maximum degree. Some find this
insufficient to justify the conclusion that a maximum must exist, and would
here insert an appeal to efficient causality and his theory of participation.
If certan entities share or participate in such a perfection only to a limited
degree, they must receive that perfection from something else. While more
satisfactory from a philosophical perspective, such an insertion seems to
change the argument of the fourth way significantly. The fifth way is based on
the way things in the universe are governed. Thomas observes that certain
things that lack the ability to know, i.e., natural bodies, act for an end.
This follows from the fact that they always or at least usually act in the same
way to attain that which is best. For Thomas this indicates that they reach
their ends by “intention” and not merely from chance. And this in turn implies
that they are directed to their ends by some knowing and intelligent being.
Hence some intelligent being exists that orders natural things to their ends.
This argument rests on final causality and should not be confused with any
based on order and design. Aquinas’s frequently repeated denial that in this
life we can know what God is should here be recalled. If we can know that God
exists and what he is not, we cannot know what he is see, e.g., SCG I, c. 30.
Even when we apply the names of pure perfections to God, we first discover such
perfections in limited fashion in creatures. What the names of such perfections
are intended to signify may indeed be free from all imperfection, but every
such name carries with it some deficiency in the way in which it signifies.
When a name such as ‘goodness’, for instance, is signified abstractly e.g.,
‘God is goodness’, this abstract way of signifying suggests that goodness does
not subsist in itself. When such a name is signified concretely e.g., ‘God is
good’, this concrete way of signifying implies some kind of composition between
God and his goodness. Hence while such names are to be affirmed of God as
regards that which they signify, the way in which they signify is to be denied
of him. This final point sets the stage for Thomas to apply his theory of
analogy to the divine names. Names of pure perfections such as ‘good’, ‘true’,
‘being’, etc., cannot be applied to God with Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Saint Thomas 39 39 exactly the same
meaning they have when affirmed of creatures univocally, nor with entirely
different meanings equivocally. Hence they are affirmed of God and of creatures
by an analogy based on the relationship that obtains between a creature viewed
as an effect and God its uncaused cause. Because some minimum degree of
similarity must obtain between any effect and its cause, Thomas is convinced
that in some way a caused perfection imitates and participates in God, its
uncaused and unparticipated source. Because no caused effect can ever be equal
to its uncreated cause, every perfection that we affirm of God is realized in
him in a way different from the way we discover it in creatures. This
dissimilarity is so great that we can never have quidditative knowledge of God
in this life know what God is. But the similarity is sufficient for us to
conclude that what we understand by a perfection such as goodness in creatures
is present in God in unrestricted fashion. Even though Thomas’s identification
of the kind of analogy to be used in predicating divine names underwent some
development, in mature works such as On the Power of God qu. 7, a. 7, SCG I
c.34, and ST I qu. 13, a. 5, he identifies this as the analogy of “one to
another,” rather than as the analogy of “many to one.” In none of these works
does he propose using the analogy of “proportionality” that he had previously
defended in On Truth qu. 2, a. 11. Theological virtues. While Aquinas is
convinced that human reason can arrive at knowledge that God exists and at
meaningful predication of the divine names, he does not think the majority of
human beings will actually succeed in such an effort SCG I, c. 4; ST IIIIae,
qu. 2, a. 4. Hence he concludes that it was fitting for God to reveal such
truths to mankind along with others that purely philosophical inquiry could
never discover even in principle. Acceptance of the truth of divine revelation
presupposes the gift of the theological virtue of faith in the believer. Faith
is an infused virtue by reason of which we accept on God’s authority what he
has revealed to us. To believe is an act of the intellect that assents to
divine truth as a result of a command on the part of the human will, a will
that itself is moved by God through grace ST II IIae, qu. 2, a. 9. For Thomas
the theological virtues, having God the ultimate end as their object, are prior
to all other virtues whether natural or infused. Because the ultimate end must
be present in the intellect before it is present to the will, and because the
ultimate end is present in the will by reason of hope and charity the other two
theological virtues, in this respect faith is prior to hope and charity. Hope
is the theological virtue through which we trust that with divine assistance we
will attain the infinite good eternal enjoyment
of God ST IIIIae, qu. 17, aa. 12. In the order of generation, hope is prior to
charity; but in the order of perfection charity is prior both to hope and
faith. While neither faith nor hope will remain in those who reach the eternal
vision of God in the life to come, charity will endure in the blessed. It is a
virtue or habitual form that is infused into the soul by God and that inclines
us to love him for his own sake. If charity is more excellent than faith or
hope ST II IIae, qu. 23, a. 6, through charity the acts of all other virtues
are ordered to God, their ultimate end qu. 23, a. 8.
Arbitrium -- Arminius,
Jacobus 15601609, Dutch theologian who, as a Dutch Reformed pastor and later
professor at the of Leiden, challenged
Calvinist orthodoxy on predestination and free will. After his death, followers
codified Arminius’s views in a document asserting that God’s grace is necessary
for salvation, but not irresistible: the divine decree depends on human free
choice. This became the basis for Arminianism, which was condemned by the Dutch
ReAristotle, commentaries on Arminius, Jacobus 51 51 formed synod but vigorously debated for
centuries among Protestant theologians of different denominations. The term
‘Arminian’ is still occasionally applied to theologians who defend a free human
response to divine grace against predestinationism.
arcesilaus: Grecian,
pre-Griceian, sceptic philosopher, founder of the Middle Academy. Influenced by
Socratic elenchus, he claimed that, unlike Socrates, he was not even certain
that he was certain of nothing. He shows the influence of Pyrrho in attacking
the Stoic doctrine that the subjective certainty of the wise is the criterion
of truth. At the theoretical level he advocated epoche, suspension of rational
judgment; at the practical, he argued that eulogon, probability, can justify
action an early version of coherentism.
His ethical views were not extreme; he held, e.g., that one should attend to
one’s own life rather than external objects. Though he wrote nothing except
verse, he led the Academy into two hundred years of Skepticism.
Archytas, Grecian,
pre-Griceian, Pythagorean philosopher from Tarentum in southern Italy. He was
elected general seven times and sent a ship to rescue Plato from Dionysius II
of Syracuse in 361. He is famous for solutions to specific mathematical
problems, such as the doubling of the cube, but little is known about his
general philosophical principles. His proof that the numbers in a
superparticular ratio have no mean proportional has relevance to music theory,
as does his work with the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means. He gave
mathematical accounts of the diatonic, enharmonic, and chromatic scales and
developed a theory of acoustics. Fragments 1 and 2 and perhaps 3 are authentic,
but most material preserved in his name is spurious.
aretaic: sometimes used by Grice for ‘virtuosum’. arete,
ancient Grecian term meaning ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence’. In philosophical
contexts, the term was used mainly of virtues of human character; in broader
contexts, arete was applicable to many different sorts of excellence. The
cardinal virtues in the classical period were courage, wisdom, temperance
sophrosune, piety, and justice. Sophists such as Protagoras claimed to teach
such virtues, and Socrates challenged their credentials for doing so. Several
early Platonic dialogues show Socrates asking after definitions of virtues, and
Socrates investigates arete in other dialogues as well. Conventional views
allowed that a person can have one virtue such as courage but lack another such
as wisdom, but Plato’s Protagoras shows Socrates defending his thesis of the
unity of arete, which implies that a person who has one arete has them all.
Platonic accounts of the cardinal virtues with the exception of piety are given
in Book IV of the Republic. Substantial parts of the Nicomachean Ethics of
Aristotle are given over to discussions of arete, which he divides into virtues
of character and virtues of intellect. This discussion is the ancestor of most
modern theories of virtue ethics.
argumentum: “I thought I saw an argument, it turned to be some soap”
(Dodgson). Term that Grice borrows from (but “never returned” to) Boethius, the
Roman philosopher. Strictly, Grice is interested in the ‘arguer.’ Say Blackburn
goes to Grice and, not knowing Grice speaks English, writes a skull. Blackburn
intends Grice to think that there is danger, somewhere, even deadly danger. So
there is arguing on Blackburn’s part. And there is INTENDED arguing on
Blackburn’s recipient, Grice, as it happens. For Grice, the truth-value of
“Blackburn communicates (to Grice) that there is danger” does not REQUIRE the
uptake.” “Why, one must just as well require that Jones GETS his job to deem
Smith having GIVEN it to him if that’s what he’s promised. The arguer is
invoked in a self-psi-transmission. For he must think P, and he must think C,
and he must think that P yields C. And this thought that C must be CAUSED by
the fact that he thinks that P yields C. -- f. argŭo , ŭi, ūtum (ŭĭtum, hence
arguiturus, Sall. Fragm. ap. Prisc. p. 882 P.), 3, v. a. cf. ἀργής, white; ἀργός,
bright; Sanscr. árgunas, bright; ragatas, white; and rag, to shine (v. argentum
and argilla); after the same analogy we have clarus, bright; and claro, to make
bright, to make evident; and the Engl. clear, adj., and to clear = to make
clear; v. Georg Curtius p. 171. I. A.. In gen., to make clear, to show,
prove, make known, declare, assert, μηνύειν: “arguo Eam me vidisse intus,”
Plaut. Mil. 2, 3, 66: “non ex auditu arguo,” id. Bacch. 3, 3, 65: “M. Valerius
Laevinus ... speculatores, non legatos, venisse arguebat,” Liv. 30, 23:
“degeneres animos timor arguit,” Verg. A. 4, 13: “amantem et languor et
silentium Arguit,” Hor. Epod. 11, 9; id. C. 1, 13, 7.—Pass., in a mid. signif.:
“apparet virtus arguiturque malis,” makes itself known, Ov. Tr. 4, 3, 80:
“laudibus arguitur vini vinosus Homerus,” betrays himself, Hor. Ep. 1, 19, 6.—
B. Esp. a. With aliquem, to attempt to show something, in one's case, against
him, to accuse, reprove, censure, charge with: Indicāsse est detulisse;
“arguisse accusāsse et convicisse,” Dig. 50, 16, 197 (cf. Fest. p. 22: Argutum
iri in discrimen vocari): tu delinquis, ego arguar pro malefactis? Enn. (as
transl. of Eurip. Iphig. Aul. 384: Εἶτ̓ ἐγὼ δίκην δῶ σῶν κακῶν ὁ μὴ σφαλείς)
ap. Rufin. § “37: servos ipsos neque accuso neque arguo neque purgo,” Cic.
Rosc. Am. 41, 120: “Pergin, sceleste, intendere hanc arguere?” Plaut. Mil. 2,
4, 27; 2, 2, 32: “hae tabellae te arguunt,” id. Bacch. 4, 6, 10: “an hunc porro
tactum sapor arguet oris?” Lucr. 4, 487: “quod adjeci, non ut arguerem, sed ne
arguerer,” Vell. 2, 53, 4: “coram aliquem arguere,” Liv. 43, 5: “apud
praefectum,” Tac. A. 14, 41: “(Deus) arguit te heri,” Vulg. Gen. 31, 42; ib.
Lev. 19, 17; ib. 2 Tim. 4, 2; ib. Apoc. 3, 19 al.— b. With the cause of
complaint in the gen.; abl. with or without de; with in with abl.; with acc.;
with a clause as object; or with ut (cf. Ramsh. p. 326; Zumpt, § 446). (α).
With gen.: “malorum facinorum,” Plaut. Ps. 2, 4, 56 (cf. infra, argutus, B.
2.): “aliquem probri, Stupri, dedecoris,” id. Am. 3, 2, 2: “viros mortuos summi
sceleris,” Cic. Rab. Perd. 9, 26: “aliquem tanti facinoris,” id. Cael. 1:
“criminis,” Tac. H. 1, 48: “furti me arguent,” Vulg. Gen. 30, 33; ib. Eccl. 11,
8: “repetundarum,” Tac. A. 3, 33: “occupandae rei publicae,” id. ib. 6, 10:
“neglegentiae,” Suet. Caes. 53: “noxae,” id. Aug. 67: “veneni in se comparati,”
id. Tib. 49: “socordiae,” id. Claud. 3: “mendacii,” id. Oth. 10: “timoris,”
Verg. A. 11, 384: “sceleris arguemur,” Vulg. 4 Reg. 7, 9; ib. Act. 19, 40 al.—
(β). With abl.: “te hoc crimine non arguo,” Cic. Verr. 2, 5, 18; Nep. Paus. 3
fin.— (γ). With de: “de eo crimine, quo de arguatur,” Cic. Inv 2, 11, 37: “de
quibus quoniam verbo arguit, etc.,” id. Rosc. Am. 29 fin.: “Quis arguet me de
peccato?” Vulg. Joan. 8, 46; 16, 8.— (δ). With in with abl. (eccl. Lat.): “non
in sacrificiis tuis arguam te,” Vulg. Psa. 49, 8.—（ε) With acc.: quid
undas Arguit et liquidam molem camposque natantīs? of what does he impeach the
waves? etc., quid being here equivalent to cujus or de quo, Lucr. 6, 405
Munro.—（ζ)
With an inf.-clause as object: “quae (mulier) me arguit Hanc domo ab se
subripuisse,” Plaut. Men. 5, 2, 62; id. Mil. 2, 4, 36: “occidisse patrem Sex.
Roscius arguitur,” Cic. Rosc. Am. 13, 37: “auctor illius injuriae fuisse
arguebatur?” Cic. Verr. 2, 1, 33: “qui sibimet vim ferro intulisse arguebatur,”
Suet. Claud. 16; id. Ner. 33; id. Galb. 7: “me Arguit incepto rerum accessisse
labori,” Ov. M. 13, 297; 15, 504.—（η) With ut, as in
Gr. ὡς (post-Aug. and rare), Suet. Ner. 7: “hunc ut dominum et tyrannum, illum
ut proditorem arguentes,” as being master and tyrant, Just. 22, 3.— II. Transf.
to the thing. 1. To accuse, censure, blame: “ea culpa, quam arguo,” Liv. 1, 28:
“peccata coram omnibus argue,” Vulg. 1 Tim. 5, 20: “tribuni plebis dum arguunt
in C. Caesare regni voluntatem,” Vell. 2, 68; Suet. Tit. 5 fin.:
“taciturnitatem pudoremque quorumdam pro tristitiā et malignitate arguens,” id.
Ner. 23; id. Caes. 75: “arguebat et perperam editos census,” he accused of
giving a false statement of property, census, id. Calig. 38: “primusque
animalia mensis Arguit imponi,” censured, taught that it was wrong, Ov. M. 15,
73: “ut non arguantur opera ejus,” Vulg. Joan. 3, 20.— 2. Trop., to denounce as
false: “quod et ipsum Fenestella arguit,” Suet. Vit. Ter. p. 292 Roth.—With
reference to the person, to refute, confute: “aliquem,” Suet. Calig. 8.—Hence,
argūtus , a, um, P. a. A. Of physical objects, clear. 1. To the sight, bright, glancing,
lively: “manus autem minus arguta, digitis subsequens verba, non exprimens,”
not too much in motion, Cic. de Or. 3, 59, 220 (cf. id. Or. 18, 59: nullae
argutiae digitorum, and Quint. 11, 3, 119-123): “manus inter agendum argutae
admodum et gestuosae,” Gell. 1, 5, 2: “et oculi nimis arguti, quem ad modum
animo affecti sumus, loquuntur,” Cic. Leg. 1, 9, 27: “ocelli,” Ov. Am. 3, 3, 9;
3, 2, 83: “argutum caput,” a head graceful in motion, Verg. G. 3, 80 (breve,
Servius, but this idea is too prosaic): aures breves et argutae, ears that move
quickly (not stiff, rigid), Pall. 4, 13, 2: “argutā in soleā,” in the neat
sandal, Cat. 68, 72.— 2. a.. To the hearing, clear, penetrating, piercing, both
of pleasant and disagreeable sounds, clear-sounding, sharp, noisy, rustling,
whizzing, rattling, clashing, etc. (mostly poet.): linguae, Naev. ap. Non. p.
9, 24: “aves,” Prop. 1, 18, 30: “hirundo,” chirping, Verg. G. 1, 377: “olores,”
tuneful, id. E. 9, 36: ilex, murmuring, rustling (as moved by the wind), id.
ib. 7, 1: “nemus,” id. ib. 8, 22 al.—Hence, a poet. epithet of the musician and
poet, clear-sounding, melodious: “Neaera,” Hor. C. 3, 14, 21: “poëtae,” id. Ep.
2, 2, 90: “fama est arguti Nemesis formosa Tibullus,” Mart. 8, 73, 7: forum,
full of bustle or din, noisy, Ov. A.A. 1, 80: “serra,” grating, Verg. G. 1,
143: “pecten,” rattling, id. ib. 1, 294; id. A. 7, 14 (cf. in Gr. κερκὶς ἀοιδός,
Aristoph. Ranae, v. 1316) al.—Hence, of rattling, prating, verbose discourse:
“sine virtute argutum civem mihi habeam pro preaeficā, etc.,” Plaut. Truc. 2,
6, 14: “[Neque mendaciloquom neque adeo argutum magis],” id. Trin. 1, 2, 163
Ritschl.— b. Trop., of written communications, rattling, wordy, verbose:
“obviam mihi litteras quam argutissimas de omnibus rebus crebro mittas,” Cic.
Att. 6, 5: vereor, ne tibi nimium arguta haec sedulitas videatur, Cael. ap.
Cic. Fam. 8, 1. —Transf. to omens, clear, distinct, conclusive, clearly
indicative, etc.: “sunt qui vel argutissima haec exta esse dicant,” Cic. Div.
2, 12 fin.: “non tibi candidus argutum sternuit omen Amor?” Prop. 2, 3, 24.— 3.
To the smell; sharp, pungent: “odor argutior,” Plin. 15, 3, 4, § 18.— 4. To the
taste; sharp, keen, pungent: “sapor,” Pall. 3, 25, 4; 4, 10, 26.— B. Of mental
qualities. 1. In a good sense, bright, acute, sagacious, witty: “quis illo (sc.
Catone) acerbior in vituperando? in sententiis argutior?” Cic. Brut. 17, 65:
“orator,” id. ib. 70, 247: “poëma facit ita festivum, ita concinnum, ita
elegans, nihil ut fieri possit argutius,” id. Pis. 29; so, “dicta argutissima,”
id. de Or. 2, 61, 250: “sententiae,” id. Opt. Gen. 2: “acumen,” Hor. A. P. 364:
“arguto ficta dolore queri,” dexterously-feigned pain, Prop. 1, 18, 26 al.— 2.
In a bad sense, sly, artful, cunning: “meretrix,” Hor. S. 1, 10, 40: calo. id.
Ep. 1, 14, 42: “milites,” Veg. Mil. 3, 6.—As a pun: ecquid argutus est? is he
cunning? Ch. Malorum facinorum saepissime (i.e. has been accused of), Plaut.
Ps. 2, 4, 56 (v. supra, I. B. a.).—Hence, adv.: argūtē (only in the signif. of
B.). a. Subtly, acutely: “respondere,” Cic. Cael. 8: “conicere,” id. Brut. 14,
53: “dicere,” id. Or. 28, 98.—Comp.: “dicere,” Cic. Brut. 11, 42.— Sup.: “de re
argutissime disputare,” Cic. de Or. 2, 4, 18.— b. Craftily: “obrepere,” Plaut. Trin.
4, 2, 132; Arn. 5, p. 181. For Grice, an argumentum is a sequence of statements
such that some of them the premises purport to give reason to accept another of
them, the conclusion. Since we speak of bad arguments and weak arguments, the
premises of an argument need not really support the conclusion, but they must
give some appearance of doing so or the term ‘argument’ is misapplied. Logic is
mainly concerned with the question of validity: whether if the premises are
true we would have reason to accept the conclusion. A valid argument with true
premises is called sound. A valid deductive argument is one such that if we
accept the premises we are logically bound to accept the conclusion and if we
reject the conclusion we are logically bound to reject one or more of the
premises. Alternatively, the premises logically entail the conclusion. A good
inductive argument some would reserve
‘valid’ for deductive arguments is one
such that if we accept the premises we are logically bound to regard the
conclusion as probable, and, in addition, as more probable than it would be if
the premises should be false. A few arguments have only one premise and/or more
than one conclusion.
ariskant: Two of Grice’s
main tutees were respectively Aristotelian and Kantian scholars: Ackrill and
Strawson. Grice, of course, read Ariskant in the vernacular. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Francis Haywood. William Pickering.
1838. critick of pure reason. (first English
translation) Critique
of Pure Reason. Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. 1855 – via Project Gutenberg.Critique of Pure Reason.
Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. 1873.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Friedrich Max Müller. The Macmillan Company.
1881. (Introduction by Ludwig Noiré)Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Palgrave Macmillan.
1929. ISBN 1-4039-1194-0. Archived from the
original on 2009-04-27.Critique
of Pure Reason. Translated by Wolfgang Schwartz. Scientia Verlag
und Antiquariat. 1982. ISBN 978-3-5110-9260-3.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S.
Pluhar. Hackett Publishing. 1996. ISBN 978-0-87220-257-3.Critique of Pure Reason, Abridged. Translated by Werner S.
Pluhar. Hackett Publishing. 1999. ISBN 978-1-6246-6605-6.Critique of Pure Reason.
Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge University
Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-5216-5729-7.Critique of Pure Reason.
Translated by Marcus Weigelt. Penguin Books. 2007. ISBN 978-0-1404-4747-7. Grice’s
favourite philosopher is Ariskant. One way to approach Grice’s meta-philosophy
is by combining teleology with deontology. Eventually, Grice embraces a
hedonistic eudaimonism, if rationally approved. Grice knows how to tutor in
philosophy: he tutor on Kant as if he is tutoring on Aristotle, and vice versa.
His tutees would say, Here come [sic] Kantotle. Grice is obsessed with
Kantotle. He would teach one or the other as an ethics requirement. Back at
Oxford, the emphasis is of course Aristotle, but he is aware of some trends to
introduce Kant in the Lit.Hum. curriculum, not with much success. Strawson does
his share with the pure reason in Kant in The bounds of sense, but White professors
of moral philosophy are usually not too keen on the critique by Kant of practical
reason. Grice is fascinated that an Irishman, back in 1873, cares to translate
(“for me”) all that Kant has to say about the eudaimonism and hedonism of
Aristotle. An Oxonian philosopher is expected to be a utilitarian, as Hare is,
or a Hegelian, and that is why Grice prefers, heterodoxical as he is, to be a
Kantian rationalist instead. But Grice cannot help being Aristotelian, Hardie
having instilled the “Eth. Nich.” on him at Corpus. While he can’t read Kant in
German, Grice uses Abbott’s Irish vernacular. Note the archaic metaphysic
sic in singular. More Kant. Since Baker can read the vernacular even
less than Grice, it may be good to review the editions. It all starts when
Abbott thinks that his fellow Irishmen are unable to tackle Kant in the
vernacular. Abbott’s thing comes out in 1873: Kant’s critique of practical
reason and other works on the theory of tthics, with Grice quipping. Oddly, I
prefer his other work! Grice collaborates with Baker mainly on work on meta-ethics
seen as an offspring, alla Kant, of philosophical psychology. Akrasia or
egkrateia is one such topic. Baker contributes to PGRICE, a festschrift for
Grice, with an essay on the purity, and alleged lack thereof, of this or that
morally evaluable motive – rhetorically put: do ones motives have to
be pure? For Grice morality cashes out in self-love, self-interest, and desire.
Baker also contributes to a volume on Grice’s honour published by
Palgrave, Meaning and analysis: essays on Grice. Baker organises of a
symposium on the thought of Grice for the APA, the proceedings of which published
in The Journal of Philosophy, with Bennett as chair, contributions by Baker and
Grandy, commented by Stalnaker andWarner. Grice explores with Baker
problems of egcrateia and the reduction of duty to self-love and interest. Aristotle: preeminent Grecian philosopher born
in Stagira, hence sometimes called the Stagirite. Aristotle came to Athens as a
teenager and remained for two decades in Plato’s Academy. Following Plato’s
death in 347, Aristotle traveled to Assos and to Lesbos, where he associated
with Theophrastus and collected a wealth of biological data, and later to
Macedonia, where he tutored Alexander the Great. In 335 he returned to Athens
and founded his own philosophical school in the Lyceum. The site’s colonnaded
walk peripatos conferred on Aristotle and his group the name ‘the
Peripatetics’. Alexander’s death in 323 unleashed antiMacedonian forces in
Athens. Charged with impiety, and mindful of the fate of Socrates, Aristotle
withdrew to Chalcis, where he died. Chiefly influenced by his association with
Plato, Aristotle also makes wide use of the preSocratics. A number of works
begin by criticizing and, ultimately, building on their views. The direction of
Plato’s influence is debated. Some scholars see Aristotle’s career as a
measured retreat from his teacher’s doctrines. For others he began as a
confirmed anti-Platonist but returned to the fold as he matured. More likely,
Aristotle early on developed a keenly independent voice that expressed enduring
puzzlement over such Platonic doctrines as the separate existence of Ideas and
the construction of physical reality from two-dimensional triangles. Such
unease was no doubt heightened by Aristotle’s appreciation for the evidential
value of observation as well as by his conviction that long-received and
well-entrenched opinion is likely to contain at least part of the truth.
Aristotle reportedly wrote a few popular works for publication, some of which
are dialogues. Of these we have only fragments and reports. Notably lost are
also his lectures on the good and on the Ideas. Ancient cataloguers also list
under Aristotle’s name some 158 constitutions of Grecian states. Of these, only
the Constitution of Athens has survived, on a papyrus discovered in 0. What
remains is an enormous body of writing on virtually every topic of
philosophical significance. Much of it consists of detailed lecture notes, working
drafts, and accounts of his lectures written by others. Although efforts may
have been under way in Aristotle’s lifetime, Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first
century B.C., is credited with giving the Aristotelian corpus its present
organization. Virtually no extant manuscripts predate the ninth century A.D.,
so the corpus has been transmitted by a complex history of manuscript
transcription. In 1831 the Berlin Academy published the first critical edition
of Aristotle’s work. Scholars still cite Aristotle by , column, and line of
this edition. Logic and language. The writings on logic and language are
concentrated in six early works: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior
Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. Known
since late antiquity as the Organon, these works share a concern with what is
now called semantics. The Categories focuses on the relation between uncombined
terms, such as ‘white’ or ‘man’, and the items they signify; On Interpretation
offers an account of how terms combine to yield simple statements; Prior
Analytics provides a systematic account of how three terms must be distributed
in two categorical statements so as to yield logically a third such statement;
Posterior Analytics specifies the conditions that categorical statements must
meet to play a role in scientific explanation. The Topics, sometimes said to
include Sophistical Refutations, is a handbook of “topics” and techniques for
dialectical arguments concerning, principally, the four predicables: accident
what may or may not belong to a subject, as sitting belongs to Socrates;
definition what signifies a subject’s essence, as rational animal is the
essence of man; proprium what is not in the essence of a subject but is unique
to or counterpredicable of it, as all and only persons are risible; and genus
what is in the essence of subjects differing in species, as animal is in the
essence of both men and oxen. Categories treats the basic kinds of things that
exist and their interrelations. Every uncombined term, says Aristotle,
signifies essentially something in one of ten categories a substance, a quantity, a quality, a
relative, a place, a time, a position, a having, a doing, or a being affected.
This doctrine underlies Aristotle’s admonition that there are as many proper or
per se senses of ‘being’ as there are categories. In order to isolate the
things that exist primarily, namely, primary substances, from all other things
and to give an account of their nature, two asymmetric relations of ontological
dependence are employed. First, substance ousia is distinguished from the
accidental categories by the fact that every accident is present in a substance
and, therefore, cannot exist without a substance in which to inhere. Second,
the category of substance itself is divided into ordinary individuals or
primary substances, such as Socrates, and secondary substances, such as the
species man and the genus animal. Secondary substances are said of primary
substances and indicate what kind of thing the subject is. A mark of this is
that both the name and the definition of the secondary substance can be
predicated of the primary substance, as both man and rational animal can be
predicated of Socrates. Universals in non-substance categories are also said of
subjects, as color is said of white. Therefore, directly or indirectly,
everything else is either present in or said of primary substances and without
them nothing would exist. And because they are neither present in a subject nor
said of a subject, primary substances depend on nothing else for their
existence. So, in the Categories, the ordinary individual is ontologically
basic. On Interpretation offers an account of those meaningful expressions that
are true or false, namely, statements or assertions. Following Plato’s Sophist,
a simple statement is composed of the semantically heterogeneous parts, name
onoma and verb rhema. In ‘Socrates runs’ the name has the strictly referential
function of signifying the subject of attribution. The verb, on the other hand,
is essentially predicative, signifying something holding of the subject. Verbs
also indicate when something is asserted to hold and so make precise the
statement’s truth conditions. Simple statements also include general
categorical statements. Since medieval times it has become customary to refer
to the basic categoricals by letters: A Every man is white, E No man is white,
I Some man is white, and O Not every man is white. On Interpretation outlines
their logical relations in what is now called the square of opposition: A &
E are contraries, A & O and E & I are contradictories, and A & I
and E & O are superimplications. That A implies I reflects the no longer
current view that Aristotle Aristotle 45
45 all affirmative statements carry existential import. One ambition of
On Interpretation is a theory of the truth conditions for all statements that
affirm or deny one thing or another. However, statements involving future
contingencies pose a special problem. Consider Aristotle’s notorious sea
battle. Either it will or it will not happen tomorrow. If the first, then the
statement ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is now true. Hence, it is now
fixed that the sea battle occur tomorrow. If the second, then it is now fixed
that the sea battle not occur tomorrow. Either way there can be no future
contingencies. Although some hold that Aristotle would embrace the determinism
they find implicit in this consequence, most argue either that he suspends the
law of excluded middle for future contingencies or that he denies the principle
of bivalence for future contingent statements. On the first option Aristotle
gives up the claim that either the sea battle will happen tomorrow or not. On
the second he keeps the claim but allows that future contingent statements are
neither true nor false. Aristotle’s evident attachment to the law of excluded
middle, perhaps, favors the second option. Prior Analytics marks the invention
of logic as a formal discipline in that the work contains the first virtually
complete system of logical inference, sometimes called syllogistic. The fact
that the first chapter of the Prior Analytics reports that there is a syllogism
whenever, certain things being stated, something else follows of necessity,
might suggest that Aristotle intended to capture a general notion of logical
consequence. However, the syllogisms that constitute the system of the Prior
Analytics are restricted to the basic categorical statements introduced in On
Interpretation. A syllogism consists of three different categorical statements:
two premises and a conclusion. The Prior Analytics tells us which pairs of
categoricals logically yield a third. The fourteen basic valid forms are
divided into three figures and, within each figure, into moods. The system is
foundational because second- and third-figure syllogisms are reducible to
first-figure syllogisms, whose validity is self-evident. Although syllogisms
are conveniently written as conditional sentences, the syllogistic proper is,
perhaps, best seen as a system of valid deductive inferences rather than as a
system of valid conditional sentences or sentence forms. Posterior Analytics
extends syllogistic to science and scientific explanation. A science is a
deductively ordered body of knowledge about a definite genus or domain of
nature. Scientific knowledge episteme consists not in knowing that, e.g., there
is thunder in the clouds, but rather in knowing why there is thunder. So the
theory of scientific knowledge is a theory of explanation and the vehicle of
explanation is the first-figure syllogism Barbara: If 1 P belongs to all M and
2 M belongs to all S, then 3 P belongs to all S. To explain, e.g., why there is
thunder, i.e., why there is noise in the clouds, we say: 3H Noise P belongs to
the clouds S because 2H Quenching of fire M belongs to the clouds S and 1H
Noise P belongs to quenching of fire M. Because what is explained in science is
invariant and holds of necessity, the premises of a scientific or demonstrative
syllogism must be necessary. In requiring that the premises be prior to and
more knowable than the conclusion, Aristotle embraces the view that explanation
is asymmetrical: knowledge of the conclusion depends on knowledge of each
premise, but each premise can be known independently of the conclusion. The
premises must also give the causes of the conclusion. To inquire why P belongs
to S is, in effect, to seek the middle term that gives the cause. Finally, the
premises must be immediate and non-demonstrable. A premise is immediate just in
case there is no middle term connecting its subject and predicate terms. Were P
to belong to M because of a new middle, M1, then there would be a new, more
basic premise, that is essential to the full explanation. Ultimately,
explanation of a received fact will consist in a chain of syllogisms
terminating in primary premises that are immediate. These serve as axioms that
define the science in question because they reflect the essential nature of the
fact to be explained as in 1H the
essence of thunder lies in the quenching of fire. Because they are immediate,
primary premises are not capable of syllogistic demonstration, yet they must be
known if syllogisms containing them are to constitute knowledge of the
conclusion. Moreover, were it necessary to know the primary premises
syllogistically, demonstration would proceed infinitely or in a circle. The
first alternative defeats the very possibility of explanation and the second
undermines its asymmetric character. Thus, the primary premises must be known
by the direct grasp of the mind noûs. This just signals the appropriate way for
the highest principles of a science to be known
even demonstrable propositions can be known directly, but they are
explained only when located within the structure of the relevant science, i.e.,
only when demonstrated syllogistically. Although all sciences exhibit the same
formal structure and use Aristotle Aristotle 46 46 certain common principles, different
sciences have different primary premises and, hence, different subject matters.
This “one genus to one science” rule legislates that each science and its
explanations be autonomous. Aristotle recognizes three kinds of intellectual
discipline. Productive disciplines, such as house building, concern the making
of something external to the agent. Practical disciplines, such as ethics,
concern the doing of something not separate from the agent, namely, action and
choice. Theoretical disciplines are concerned with truth for its own sake. As
such, they alone are sciences in the special sense of the Posterior Analytics.
The three main kinds of special science are individuated by their objects natural science by objects that are separate
but not changeless, mathematics by objects that are changeless but not
separate, and theology by separate and changeless objects. The mathematician
studies the same objects as the natural scientist but in a quite different way.
He takes an actual object, e.g. a chalk figure used in demonstration, and
abstracts from or “thinks away” those of its properties, such as definiteness
of size and imperfection of shape, that are irrelevant to its standing as a
perfect exemplar of the purely mathematical properties under investigation.
Mathematicians simply treat this abstracted circle, which is not separate from
matter, as if it were separate. In this way the theorems they prove about the
object can be taken as universal and necessary. Physics. As the science of
nature physis, physics studies those things whose principles and causes of
change and rest are internal. Aristotle’s central treatise on nature, the
Physics, analyzes the most general features of natural phenomena: cause,
change, time, place, infinity, and continuity. The doctrine of the four causes
is especially important in Aristotle’s work. A cause aitia is something like an
explanatory factor. The material cause of a house, for instance, is the matter
hyle from which it is built; the moving or efficient cause is the builder, more
exactly, the form in the builder’s soul; the formal cause is its plan or form
eidos; and the final cause is its purpose or end telos: provision of shelter.
The complete explanation of the coming to be of a house will factor in all of
these causes. In natural phenomena efficient, formal, and final causes often
coincide. The form transmitted by the father is both the efficient cause and
the form of the child, and the latter is glossed in terms of the child’s end or
complete development. This explains why Aristotle often simply contrasts matter
and form. Although its objects are compounds of both, physics gives priority to
the study of natural form. This accords with the Posterior Analytics’
insistence that explanation proceed through causes that give the essence and
reflects Aristotle’s commitment to teleology. A natural process counts
essentially as the development of, say, an oak or a man because its very
identity depends on the complete form realized at its end. As with all things
natural, the end is an internal governing principle of the process rather than
an external goal. All natural things are subject to change kinesis. Defined as
the actualization of the potential qua potential, a change is not an
ontologically basic item. There is no category for changes. Rather, they are
reductively explained in terms of more basic things substances, properties, and potentialities. A
pale man, e.g., has the potentiality to be or become tanned. If this
potentiality is utterly unactualized, no change will ensue; if completely
actualized, the change will have ended. So the potentiality must be actualized
but not, so to speak, exhausted; i.e., it must be actualized qua potentiality.
Designed for the ongoing operations of the natural world, the Physics’
definition of change does not cover the generation and corruption of
substantial items themselves. This sort of change, which involves matter and
elemental change, receives extensive treatment in On Generation and Corruption.
Aristotle rejects the atomists’ contention that the world consists of an
infinite totality of indivisible atoms in various arrangements. Rather, his
basic stuff is uniform elemental matter, any part of which is divisible into
smaller such parts. Because nothing that is actually infinite can exist, it is
only in principle that matter is always further dividable. So while
countenancing the potential infinite, Aristotle squarely denies the actual
infinite. This holds for the motions of the sublunary elemental bodies earth,
air, fire, and water as well as for the circular motions of the heavenly bodies
composed of a fifth element, aether, whose natural motion is circular. These
are discussed in On the Heavens. The four sublunary elements are further
discussed in Meteorology, the fourth book of which might be described as an
early treatise on chemical combination. Psychology. Because the soul psyche is
officially defined as the form of a body with the potentiality for life,
psychology is a subfield of natural science. In effect, Aristotle applies the
Aristotle Aristotle 47 47 apparatus of
form and matter to the traditional Grecian view of the soul as the principle
and cause of life. Although even the nutritive and reproductive powers of
plants are effects of the soul, most of his attention is focused on topics that
are psychological in the modern sense. On the Soul gives a general account of
the nature and number of the soul’s principal cognitive faculties. Subsequent
works, chiefly those collected as the Parva naturalia, apply the general theory
to a broad range of psychological phenomena from memory and recollection to
dreaming, sleeping, and waking. The soul is a complex of faculties. Faculties,
at least those distinctive of persons, are capacities for cognitively grasping
objects. Sight grasps colors, smell odors, hearing sounds, and the mind grasps
universals. An organism’s form is the particular organization of its material
parts that enable it to exercise these characteristic functions. Because an
infant, e.g., has the capacity to do geometry, Aristotle distinguishes two
varieties of capacity or potentiality dynamis and actuality entelecheia. The
infant is a geometer only in potentiality. This first potentiality comes to him
simply by belonging to the appropriate species, i.e., by coming into the world
endowed with the potential to develop into a competent geometer. By
actualizing, through experience and training, this first potentiality, he
acquires a first actualization. This actualization is also a second
potentiality, since it renders him a competent geometer able to exercise his
knowledge at will. The exercise itself is a second actualization and amounts to
active contemplation of a particular item of knowledge, e.g. the Pythagorean
theorem. So the soul is further defined as the first actualization of a complex
natural body. Faculties, like sciences, are individuated by their objects.
Objects of perception aisthesis fall into three general kinds. Special proper
sensibles, such as colors and sounds, are directly perceived by one and only
one sense and are immune to error. They demarcate the five special senses:
sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Common sensibles, such as movement and
shape, are directly perceived by more than one special sense. Both special and
common sensibles are proper objects of perception because they have a direct
causal effect on the perceptual system. By contrast, the son of Diares is an incidental
sensible because he is perceived not directly but as a consequence of directly
perceiving something else that happens to be the son of Diares e.g., a white thing. Aristotle calls the mind
noûs the place of forms because it is able to grasp objects apart from matter.
These objects are nothing like Plato’s separately existing Forms. As
Aristotelian universals, their existence is entailed by and depends on their
having instances. Thus, On the Soul’s remark that universals are “somehow in
the soul” only reflects their role in assuring the autonomy of thought. The
mind has no organ because it is not the form or first actualization of any
physical structure. So, unlike perceptual faculties, it is not strongly
dependent on the body. However, the mind thinks its objects by way of images,
which are something like internal representations, and these are physically
based. Insofar as it thus depends on imagination phantasia, the mind is weakly
dependent on the body. This would be sufficient to establish the naturalized
nature of Aristotle’s mind were it not for what some consider an incurably
dualist intrusion. In distinguishing something in the mind that makes all
things from something that becomes all things, Aristotle introduces the
notorious distinction between the active and passive intellects and may even
suggest that the first is separable from the body. Opinion on the nature of the
active intellect diverges widely, some even discounting it as an irrelevant
insertion. But unlike perception, which depends on external objects, thinking
is up to us. Therefore, it cannot simply be a matter of the mind’s being
affected. So Aristotle needs a mechanism that enables us to produce thoughts
autonomously. In light of this functional role, the question of active intellect’s
ontological status is less pressing. Biology. Aristotle’s biological writings,
which constitute about a quarter of the corpus, bring biological phenomena
under the general framework of natural science: the four causes, form and
matter, actuality and potentiality, and especially the teleological character
of natural processes. If the Physics proceeds in an a priori style, the History
of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals achieve an
extraordinary synthesis of observation, theory, and general scientific
principle. History of Animals is a comparative study of generic features of
animals, including analogous parts, activities, and dispositions. Although its
morphological and physiological descriptions show surprisingly little interest
in teleology, Parts of Animals is squarely teleological. Animal parts,
especially organs, are ultimately differentiated by function rather than
morphology. The composition of, e.g., teeth and flesh is determined by their
role in the overall functioning of the organism and, hence, requires Aristotle
Aristotle 48 48 teleology. Generation
of Animals applies the formmatter and actualitypotentiality distinctions to
animal reproduction, inheritance, and the development of accidental
characteristics. The species form governs the development of an organism and
determines what the organism is essentially. Although in the Metaphysics and
elsewhere accidental characteristics, including inherited ones, are excluded
from science, in the biological writings form has an expanded role and explains
the inheritance of non-essential characteristics, such as eye color. The more
fully the father’s form is imposed on the minimally formed matter of the
mother, the more completely the father’s traits are passed on to the offspring.
The extent to which matter resists imposition of form determines the extent to
which traits of the mother emerge, or even those of more distant ancestors.
Aristotle shared the Platonists’ interest in animal classification. Recent
scholarship suggests that this is less an interest in elaborating a
Linnean-style taxonomy of the animal kingdom than an interest in establishing
the complex differentiae and genera central to definitions of living things.
The biological works argue, moreover, that no single differentia could give the
whole essence of a species and that the differentiae that do give the essence
will fall into more than one division. If the second point rejects the method
of dichotomous division favored by Plato and the Academy, the first counters Aristotle’s
own standard view that essence can be reduced to a single final differentia.
The biological sciences are not, then, automatically accommodated by the
Posterior Analytics model of explanation, where the essence or explanatory
middle is conceived as a single causal property. A number of themes discussed
in this section are brought together in a relatively late work, Motion of
Animals. Its psychophysical account of the mechanisms of animal movement stands
at the juncture of physics, psychology, and biology. Metaphysics. In
Andronicus’s edition, the fourteen books now known as the Metaphysics were
placed after the Physics, whence comes the word ‘metaphysics’, whose literal
meaning is ‘what comes after the physics’. Aristotle himself prefers ‘first philosophy’
or ‘wisdom’ sophia. The subject is defined as the theoretical science of the
causes and principles of what is most knowable. This makes metaphysics a
limiting case of Aristotle’s broadly used distinction between what is better
known to us and what is better known by nature. The genus animal, e.g., is
better known by nature than the species man because it is further removed from
the senses and because it can be known independently of the species. The first
condition suggests that the most knowable objects would be the separately
existing and thoroughly non-sensible objects of theology and, hence, that
metaphysics is a special science. The second condition suggests that the most
knowable objects are simply the most general notions that apply to things in
general. This favors identifying metaphysics as the general science of being
qua being. Special sciences study restricted modes of being. Physics, for
instance, studies being qua having an internal principle of change and rest. A
general science of being studies the principles and causes of things that are,
simply insofar as they are. A good deal of the Metaphysics supports this
conception of metaphysics. For example, Book IV, on the principle of
non-contradiction, and Book X, on unity, similarity, and difference, treat
notions that apply to anything whatever. So, too, for the discussion of form
and actuality in the central books VII, VIII, and IX. Book XII, on the other
hand, appears to regard metaphysics as the special science of theology.
Aristotle himself attempts to reconcile these two conceptions of metaphysics.
Because it studies immovable substance, theology counts as first philosophy.
However, it is also general precisely because it is first, and so it will
include the study of being qua being. Scholars have found this solution as
perplexing as the problem. Although Book XII proves the causal necessity for
motion of an eternal substance that is an unmoved mover, this establishes no
conceptual connection between the forms of sensible compounds and the pure form
that is the unmoved mover. Yet such a connection is required, if a single
science is to encompass both. Problems of reconciliation aside, Aristotle had
to face a prior difficulty concerning the very possibility of a general science
of being. For the Posterior Analytics requires the existence of a genus for
each science but the Metaphysics twice argues that being is not a genus. The
latter claim, which Aristotle never relinquishes, is implicit in the
Categories, where being falls directly into kinds, namely, the categories.
Because these highest genera do not result from differentiation of a single
genus, no univocal sense of being covers them. Although being is, therefore,
ambiguous in as many ways as there are categories, a thread connects them. The
ontological priority accorded primary substance in the Categories is made part
of the very definition of non-substantial entities Aristotle Aristotle 49 49 in the Metaphysics: to be an accident is
by definition to be an accident of some substance. Thus, the different senses
of being all refer to the primary kind of being, substance, in the way that
exercise, diet, medicine, and climate are healthy by standing in some relation
to the single thing health. The discovery of focal meaning, as this is sometimes
called, introduces a new way of providing a subject matter with the internal
unity required for science. Accordingly, the Metaphysics modifies the strict
“one genus to one science” rule of the Posterior Analytics. A single science
may also include objects whose definitions are different so long as these
definitions are related focally to one thing. So focal meaning makes possible
the science of being qua being. Focal meaning also makes substance the central
object of investigation. The principles and causes of being in general can be
illuminated by studying the principles and causes of the primary instance of
being. Although the Categories distinguishes primary substances from other
things that are and indicates their salient characteristics e.g., their ability
to remain one and the same while taking contrary properties, it does not
explain why it is that primary substances have such characteristics. The
difficult central books of the Metaphysics
VII, VIII, and IX investigate
precisely this. In effect, they ask what, primarily, about the Categories’
primary substances explains their nature. Their target, in short, is the
substance of the primary substances of the Categories. As concrete empirical
particulars, the latter are compounds of form and matter the distinction is not
explicit in the Categories and so their substance must be sought among these
internal structural features. Thus, Metaphysics VII considers form, matter, and
the compound of form and matter, and quickly turns to form as the best candidate.
In developing a conception of form that can play the required explanatory role,
the notion of essence to ti en einai assumes center stage. The essence of a
man, e.g., is the cause of certain matter constituting a man, namely, the soul.
So form in the sense of essence is the primary substance of the Metaphysics.
This is obviously not the primary substance of the Categories and, although the
same word eidos is used, neither is this form the species of the Categories.
The latter is treated in the Metaphysics as a kind of universal compound
abstracted from particular compounds and appears to be denied substantial
status. While there is broad, though not universal, agreement that in the
Metaphysics form is primary substance, there is equally broad disagreement over
whether this is particular form, the form belonging to a single individual, or
species form, the form common to all individuals in the species. There is also
lively discussion concerning the relation of the Metaphysics doctrine of
primary substance to the earlier doctrine of the Categories. Although a few
scholars see an outright contradiction here, most take the divergence as
evidence of the development of Aristotle’s views on substance. Finally, the
role of the central books in the Metaphysics as a whole continues to be
debated. Some see them as an entirely selfcontained analysis of form, others as
preparatory to Book XII’s discussion of non-sensible form and the role of the
unmoved mover as the final cause of motion. Practical philosophy. Two of
Aristotle’s most heralded works, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, are
treatises in practical philosophy. Their aim is effective action in matters of
conduct. So they deal with what is up to us and can be otherwise because in
this domain lie choice and action. The practical nature of ethics lies mainly
in the development of a certain kind of agent. The Nicomachean Ethics was
written, Aristotle reminds us, “not in order to know what virtue is, but in
order to become good.” One becomes good by becoming a good chooser and doer.
This is not simply a matter of choosing and doing right actions but of choosing
or doing them in the right way. Aristotle assumes that, for the most part,
agents know what ought to be done the evil or vicious person is an exception.
The akratic or morally weak agent desires to do other than what he knows ought
to be done and acts on this desire against his better judgment. The enkratic or
morally strong person shares the akratic agent’s desire but acts in accordance
with his better judgment. In neither kind of choice are desire and judgment in
harmony. In the virtuous, on the other hand, desire and judgment agree. So
their choices and actions will be free of the conflict and pain that inevitably
accompany those of the akratic and enkratic agent. This is because the part of
their soul that governs choice and action is so disposed that desire and right
judgment coincide. Acquiring a stable disposition hexis of this sort amounts to
acquiring moral virtue ethike arete. The disposition is concerned with choices
as would be determined by the person of practical wisdom phronesis; these will
be actions lying between extreme alternatives. They will lie in a mean popularly called the “golden mean” relative to the talents and stores of the agent.
Choosing in this way is not easily done. It involves, for instance, feeling
anger or extending Aristotle Aristotle 50
50 generosity at the right time, toward the right people, in the right
way, and for the right reasons. Intellectual virtues, such as excellence at
mathematics, can be acquired by teaching, but moral virtue cannot. I may know
what ought to be done and even perform virtuous acts without being able to act
virtuously. Nonetheless, because moral virtue is a disposition concerning
choice, deliberate performance of virtuous acts can, ultimately, instill a
disposition to choose them in harmony and with pleasure and, hence, to act
virtuously. Aristotle rejected Plato’s transcendental Form of the Good as
irrelevant to the affairs of persons and, in general, had little sympathy with
the notion of an absolute good. The goal of choice and action is the human
good, namely, living well. This, however, is not simply a matter of possessing
the requisite practical disposition. Practical wisdom, which is necessary for
living well, involves skill at calculating the best means to achieve one’s ends
and this is an intellectual virtue. But the ends that are presupposed by
deliberation are established by moral virtue. The end of all action, the good
for man, is happiness eudaimonia. Most things, such as wealth, are valued only
as a means to a worthy end. Honor, pleasure, reason, and individual virtues,
such as courage and generosity, are deemed worthy in their own right but they
can also be sought for the sake of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia alone can be sought
only for its own sake. Eudaimonia is not a static state of the soul but a kind
of activity energeia of the soul
something like human flourishing. The happy person’s life will be
selfsufficient and complete in the highest measure. The good for man, then, is
activity in accordance with virtue or the highest virtue, should there be one.
Here ‘virtue’ means something like excellence and applies to much besides man.
The excellence of an ax lies in its cutting, that of a horse in its equestrian
qualities. In short, a thing’s excellence is a matter of how well it performs
its characteristic functions or, we might say, how well it realizes its nature.
The natural functions of persons reside in the exercise of their natural
cognitive faculties, most importantly, the faculty of reason. So human
happiness consists in activity in accordance with reason. However, persons can
exercise reason in practical or in purely theoretical matters. The first
suggests that happiness consists in the practical life of moral virtue, the
second that it consists in the life of theoretical activity. Most of the
Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to the moral virtues but the final book appears
to favor theoretical activity theoria as the highest and most choiceworthy end.
It is man’s closest approach to divine activity. Much recent scholarship is
devoted to the relation between these two conceptions of the good,
particularly, to whether they are of equal value and whether they exclude or
include one another. Ethics and politics are closely connected. Aristotle
conceives of the state as a natural entity arising among persons to serve a
natural function. This is not merely, e.g., provision for the common defense or
promotion of trade. Rather, the state of the Politics also has eudaimonia as
its goal, namely, fostering the complete and selfsufficient lives of its
citizens. Aristotle produced a complex taxonomy of constitutions but reduced
them, in effect, to three kinds: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Which
best serves the natural end of a state was, to some extent, a relative matter
for Aristotle. Although he appears to have favored democracy, in some
circumstances monarchy might be appropriate. The standard ordering of
Aristotle’s works ends with the Rhetoric and the Poetics. The Rhetoric’s
extensive discussion of oratory or the art of persuasion locates it between
politics and literary theory. The relatively short Poetics is devoted chiefly
to the analysis of tragedy. It has had an enormous historical influence on
aesthetic theory in general as well as on the writing of drama. Refs.: The obvious keyword is “Kant,” –
especially in the Series III on the doctrines, in collaboration with Baker.
There are essays on the Grundlegung, too. The keyword for “Kantotle,” and the
keywords for ‘free,’ and ‘freedom,’ and ‘practical reason,’ and ‘autonomy, are
also helpful. Some of this material in “Actions and events,” “The influence of
Kant on Aristotle,” by H. P. Grice, John Locke Scholar (failed), etc., Oxford
(Advisor: J. Dempsey). The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
arbor griceiana: When Kant
introduces the categoric imperative in terms of the ‘maxim’ he does not specify which. He just goes,
irritatingly, “Make the maxim of your conduct a law of nature.” This gave free
rein to Grice to multiply maxims as much as he wished. If he was an occamist
about senses, he certainly was an anti-occamist about maxims. The expression
Strawson and Wiggins use (p. 520) is “ramification.”So Grice needs just ONE
principle – indeed the idea of principles, in plural, is self-contradictory.
For whch ‘first’ is ‘first’? Eventually, he sticks with the principle of
conversational co-operation. And the principle of conversational co-operation,
being Ariskantian, and categoric, even if not ‘moral,’ “ramifies into” the
maxims. This is important. While an ‘ought’ cannot be derived from an ‘is,’ an
‘ought’ can yield a sub-ought. So whatever obligation the principle brings, the
maxim inherit. The maxim is also stated categoric. But it isn’t. It is a
‘counsel of prudence,’ and hypothetical in nature – So, Grice is just ‘playing
Kant,’ but not ‘being’ Kant. The principle states the GOAL (not happiness,
unless we call it ‘conversational eudaemonia’). In any case, as Hare would
agree, there is ‘deontic derivability.’ So if the principle ramifies into the
maxims, the maxims are ‘deductible’ from the principle. This deductibility is
obvious in terms of from generic to specific. The principle merely enjoins to
make the conversational move as is appropriate. Then, playing with Kant, Grice
chooses FOUR dimensions. Two correspond to the material: the quale and the
quantum. The quale relates to affirmation and negation, and Grice uses ‘false,’
which while hardly conceptually linked to ‘negation,’ it relates in common
parlance. So you have things like a prohibition to say the ‘false’ (But “it is
raining” can be false, and it’s affirmative). The quantum relates to what Grice
calls ‘informative CONTENT.’ He grants that the verb ‘inform’ already ENTAILS
the candour that quality brings. So ‘fortitude’ seems a better way to qualify
this dimension. Make the strongest conversational move. The clash with the
quality is obvious – “provided it’s not false.” The third dimension relates two
two materials. Notably the one by the previous conversationalist and your own.
If A said, “She is an old bag.” B says, “The weather’s been delightful.” By NOT
relating the ‘proposition’ “The weather has been delightful” to “She is an old
bag.” He ‘exploits’ the maxim. This is not a concept in Kant. It mocks Kant.
But yet, ‘relate!’ does follow from the principle of cooperation. So, there is
an UNDERLYING relation, as Hobbes noted, when he discussed a very distantly
related proposition concerning the history of Rome, and expecting the recipient
to “only connect.” So the ‘exploitation’ is ‘superficial,’ and applies to the
explicatum. Yet, the emissor does communicate that the weather has been
delightful. Only there is no point in informing the recipient about it, unless
he is communicating that the co-conversationalist has made a gaffe. Finally,
the category of ‘modus’ Grice restricts to the ‘forma,’ not the ‘materia.’ “Be
perspicuous” is denotically entailed by “Make your move appropriate.” This is
the desideratum of clarity. The point must be ‘explicit.’ This is Strawson and Wiggins way of putting
this. It’s a difficult issue. What the connection is between Grice’s principle
of conversational helpfulness and the attending conversational maxims. Strawson
and Wiggins state that Grice should not feel the burden to make the maxims
‘necessarily independent.’
The
image of the ramification is a good one – Grice called it ‘arbor griceiana.’
Aristotle -- Grice as an
Aristotelian commentator – in “Aristotle on the multiplicity of being,” – Grice
would comment on Aristotle profusely at Oxford. One of his favourite tutees was
J. L. Ackrill – but he regretted that, of all things Ackrill could do, he
decided “to translate Aristotle into the vernacular!” -- commentaries on
Aristotle, the term commonly used for the Grecian commentaries on Aristotle
that take up about 15,000 s in the Berlin Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 29,
still the basic edition of them. Only in the 0s did a project begin, under the
editorship of Richard Sorabji, of King’s , London, to translate at least the
most significant portions of them into English. They had remained the largest
corpus of Grecian philosophy not tr. into any modern language. Most of these
works, especially the later, Neoplatonic ones, are much more than simple commentaries
on Aristotle. They are also a mode of doing philosophy, the favored one at this
stage of intellectual history. They are therefore important not only for the
understanding of Aristotle, but also for both the study of the pre-Socratics
and the Hellenistic philosophers, particularly the Stoics, of whom they
preserve many fragments, and lastly for the study of Neoplatonism itself and, in the case of John Philoponus, for
studying the innovations he introduces in the process of trying to reconcile
Platonism with Christianity. The commentaries may be divided into three main
groups. 1 The first group of commentaries are those by Peripatetic scholars of
the second to fourth centuries A.D., most notably Alexander of Aphrodisias fl.
c.200, but also the paraphraser Themistius fl. c.360. We must not omit,
however, to note Alexander’s predecessor Aspasius, author of the earliest
surviving commentary, one on the Nicomachean Ethics a work not commented on again until the late
Byzantine period. Commentaries by Alexander survive on the Prior Analytics,
Topics, Metaphysics IV, On the Senses, and Meteorologics, and his now lost ones
on the Categories, On the Soul, and Physics had enormous influence in later
times, particularly on Simplicius. 2 By far the largest group is that of the
Neoplatonists up to the sixth century A.D. Most important of the earlier
commentators is Porphyry 232c.309, of whom only a short commentary on the
Categories survives, together with an introduction Isagoge to Aristotle’s
logical works, which provoked many commentaries itself, and proved most
influential in both the East and through Boethius in the Latin West. The
reconciling of Plato and Aristotle is largely his work. His big commentary on
the Categories was of great importance in later times, and many fragments are
preserved in that of Simplicius. His follower Iamblichus was also influential,
but his commentaries are likewise lost. The Athenian School of Syrianus
c.375437 and Proclus 41085 also commented on Aristotle, but all that survives
is a commentary of Syrianus on Books III, IV, XIII, and XIV of the Metaphysics.
It is the early sixth century, however, that produces the bulk of our surviving
commentaries, originating from the Alexandrian school of Ammonius, son of
Hermeias c.435520, but composed both in Alexandria, by the Christian John
Philoponus c.490575, and in or at least from Athens by Simplicius writing after
532. Main commentaries of Philoponus are on Categories, Prior Analytics,
Posterior Analytics, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul III, and
Physics; of Simplicius on Categories, Physics, On the Heavens, and perhaps On
the Soul. The tradition is carried on in Alexandria by Olympiodorus c.495565
and the Christians Elias fl. c.540 and David an Armenian, nicknamed the
Invincible, fl. c.575, and finally by Stephanus, who was brought by the emperor
to take the chair of philosophy in Constantinople in about 610. These scholars
comment chiefly on the Categories and other introductory material, but
Olympiodorus produced a commentary on the Meteorologics. Characteristic of the
Neoplatonists is a desire to reconcile Aristotle with Platonism arguing, e.g.,
that Aristotle was not dismissing the Platonic theory of Forms, and to
systematize his thought, thus reconciling him with himself. They are responding
to a long tradition of criticism, during which difficulties were raised about
incoherences and contradictions in Aristotle’s thought, and they are concerned
to solve these, drawing on their comprehensive knowledge of his writings. Only
Philoponus, as a Christian, dares to criticize him, in particular on the
eternity of the world, but also on the concept of infinity on which he produces
an ingenious argument, picked up, via the Arabs, by Bonaventure in the
thirteenth century. The Categories proves a particularly fruitful battleground,
and much of the later debate between realism and nominalism stems from
arguments about the proper subject matter of that work. The format of these
commentaries is mostly that adopted by scholars ever since, that of taking
command theory of law commentaries on Aristotle 159 159 one passage, or lemma, after another of
the source work and discussing it from every angle, but there are variations.
Sometimes the general subject matter is discussed first, and then details of
the text are examined; alternatively, the lemma is taken in subdivisions
without any such distinction. The commentary can also proceed explicitly by
answering problems, or aporiai, which have been raised by previous authorities.
Some commentaries, such as the short one of Porphyry on the Categories, and
that of Iamblichus’s pupil Dexippus on the same work, have a “catechetical”
form, proceeding by question and answer. In some cases as with Vitters in
modern times the commentaries are simply transcriptions by pupils of the
lectures of a teacher. This is the case, for example, with the surviving
“commentaries” of Ammonius. One may also indulge in simple paraphrase, as does
Themistius on Posterior Analysis, Physics, On the Soul, and On the Heavens, but
even here a good deal of interpretation is involved, and his works remain
interesting. An important offshoot of all this activity in the Latin West is
the figure of Boethius c.480524. It is he who first transmitted a knowledge of
Aristotelian logic to the West, to become an integral part of medieval
Scholasticism. He tr. Porphyry’s Isagoge, and the whole of Aristotle’s logical
works. He wrote a double commentary on the Isagoge, and commentaries on the
Categories and On Interpretation. He is dependent ultimately on Porphyry, but
more immediately, it would seem, on a source in the school of Proclus. 3 The
third major group of commentaries dates from the late Byzantine period, and
seems mainly to emanate from a circle of scholars grouped around the princess
Anna Comnena in the twelfth century. The most important figures here are
Eustratius c.10501120 and Michael of Ephesus originally dated c.1040, but now
fixed at c.1130. Michael in particular seems concerned to comment on areas of
Aristotle’s works that had hitherto escaped commentary. He therefore comments
widely, for example, on the biological works, but also on the Sophistical
Refutations. He and Eustratius, and perhaps others, seem to have cooperated
also on a composite commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, neglected since
Aspasius. There is also evidence of lost commentaries on the Politics and the
Rhetoric. The composite commentary on the Ethics was tr. into Latin in the next
century, in England, by Robert Grosseteste, but earlier than this translations
of the various logical commentaries had been made by James of Venice fl.
c.1130, who may have even made the acquaintance of Michael of Ephesus in
Constantinople. Later in that century other commentaries were being tr. from
Arabic versions by Gerard of Cremona d.1187. The influence of the Grecian
commentary tradition in the West thus resumed after the long break since
Boethius in the sixth century, but only now, it seems fair to say, is the full
significance of this enormous body of work becoming properly appreciated.
armstrong:
d. m. “Meaning and communication,” on H. P. Grice -- philosopher of mind and
metaphysician, and until his retirement Challis Professor of Philosophy at
Sydney, noted for his allegiance to a physicalist account of consciousness and
to a realist view of properties conceived as universals. A Materialist Theory
of the Mind 8 develops a scientifically motivated version of the view that
mental states are identical with physical states of the central nervous system.
Universals and Scientific Realism 8 and What Is a Law of Nature? argue that a
scientifically adequate ontology must include universals in order to explain
the status of natural laws. Armstrong contends that laws must be construed as
expressing relations of necessitation between universals rather than mere
regularities among particulars. However, he is only prepared to acknowledge the
existence of such universals as are required for the purposes of scientific
explanation. Moreover, he adopts an “immanent” or “Aristotelian” as opposed to
a “transcendent” or “Platonic” realism, refusing to accept the existence of
uninstantiated universals and denying that universals somehow exist “outside”
space and time. More recently, Armstrong has integrated his scientifically
inspired physicalism and property realism within the overall framework of an
ontology of states of affairs, notably in A World of States of Affairs. Here he
advocates the truthmaker principle that every truth must be made true by some
existing state of affairs and contends that states of affairs, rather than the
universals and particulars that he regards as their constituents, are the basic
building blocks of reality. Within this ontology, which in some ways resembles
that of Vitters’s Tractatus, necessity and possibility are accommodated by
appeal to combinatorial principles. As Armstrong explains in A Combinatorial
Theory of Possibility, this approach offers an ontologically economical
alternative to the realist conception of possible worlds defended by David
Lewis.
arnauld:
Grice enjoyed the “Logique de Port-Royal.” Antoine: philosopher, perhaps the
most important and best-known intellectual associated with the Jansenist
community at Port-Royal, as well as a staunch and orthodox champion of
Cartesian philosophy. His theological writings defend the Augustinian doctrine
of efficacious grace, according to which salvation is not earned by one’s own
acts, but granted by the irresistible grace of God. He also argues in favor of
a strict contritionism, whereby one’s absolution must be based on a true,
heartfelt repentance, a love of God, rather than a selfish fear of God’s
punishment. These views brought him and Port-Royal to the center of religious
controversy in seventeenth-century France, as Jansenism came to be perceived as
a subversive extension of Protestant reform. Arnauld was also constantly
engaged in philosophical disputation, and was regarded as one of the sharpest
and most philosophically acute thinkers of his time. His influence on several
major philosophers of the period resulted mainly from his penetrating criticism
of their systems. In 1641, Arnauld was asked to comment on Descartes’s
Meditations. The objections he sent
regarding, among other topics, the representational nature of ideas, the
circularity of Descartes’s proofs for the existence of God, and the apparent
irreconcilability of Descartes’s conception of material substance with the
Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation were considered by Descartes to be the most
intelligent and serious of all. Arnauld offered his objections in a
constructive spirit, and soon became an enthusiastic defender of Descartes’s
philosophy, regarding it as beneficial both to the advancement of human
learning and to Christian piety. He insists, for example, that the immortality
of the soul is well grounded in Cartesian mind body dualism. In 1662, Arnauld
composed with Pierre Nicole the Port-Royal Logic, an influential treatise on
language and reasoning. After several decades of theological polemic, during
which he fled France to the Netherlands, Arnauld resumed his public
philosophical activities with the publication in 1683 of On True and False
Ideas and in 1685 of Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New
System of Nature and Grace. These two works, opening salvos in what would
become a long debate, constitute a detailed attack on Malebranche’s theology
and its philosophical foundations. In the first, mainly philosophical treatise,
Arnauld insists that ideas, or the mental representations that mediate human
knowledge, are nothing but acts of the mind that put us in direct cognitive and
perceptual contact with things in the world. Malebranche, as Arnauld reads him,
argues that ideas are immaterial but nonmental objects in God’s understanding
that we know and perceive instead of physical things. Thus, the debate is often
characterized as between Arnauld’s direct realism and Malebranche’s
representative theory. Such mental acts also have representational content, or
what Arnauld following Descartes calls “objective reality.” This content
explains the act’s intentionality, or directedness toward an object. Arnauld
would later argue with Pierre Bayle, who came to Malebranche’s defense, over
whether all mental phenomena have intentionality, as Arnauld believes, or, as
Bayle asserts, certain events in the soul e.g., pleasures and pains are
non-intentional. This initial critique of Malebranche’s epistemology and
philosophy of mind, however, was intended by Arnauld only as a prolegomenon to
the more important attack on his theology; in particular, on Malebranche’s
claim that God always acts by general volitions and never by particular
volitions. This view, Arnauld argues, undermines the true Catholic system of
divine providence and threatens the efficacy of God’s will by removing God from
direct governance of the world. In 1686, Arnauld also entered into discussions
with Leibniz regarding the latter’s Discourse on Metaphysics. In the ensuing
correspondence, Arnauld focuses his critique on Leibniz’s concept of substance
and on his causal theory, the preestablished harmony. In this exchange, like
the one with Malebranche, Arnauld is concerned to preserve what he takes to be
the proper way to conceive of God’s freedom and providence; although his
remarks on substance in which he objects to Leibniz’s reintroduction of
“substantial forms” is also clearly motivated by his commitment to a strict
Cartesian ontology bodies are nothing
more than extension, devoid of any spiritual element. Most of his philosophical
activity in the latter half of the century, in fact, is a vigorous defense of
Cartesianism, particularly on theological grounds e.g., demonstrating the
consistency between Cartesian metaphysics and the Catholic dogma of real
presence in the Eucharist, as it became the object of condemnation in both
Catholic and Protestant circles.
atomism, the theory,
originated by Leucippus and elaborated by Democritus, that the ultimate
realities are atoms and the void. The theory was later used by Epicurus as the
foundation for a philosophy stressing ethical concerns, Epicureanism.
arrow’s
paradox – discussed by Grice in “Conversational reason.” Also
called Arrow’s impossibility theorem, a major result in social choice theory,
named for its discoverer, economist Kenneth Arrow. It is intuitive to suppose
that the preferences of individuals in a society can be expressed formally, and
then aggregated into an expression of social preferences, a social choice
function. Arrow’s paradox is that individual preferences having certain
well-behaved formalizations demonstrably cannot be aggregated into a similarly
well-behaved social choice function satisfying four plausible formal
conditions: 1 collective rationality any
set of individual orderings and alternatives must yield a social ordering; 2
Pareto optimality if all individuals
prefer one ordering to another, the social ordering must also agree; 3
non-dictatorship the social ordering
must not be identical to a particular individual’s ordering; and 4 independence
of irrelevant alternatives the social
ordering depends on no properties of the individual orderings other than the
orders themselves, and for a given set of alternatives it depends only on the
orderings of those particular alternatives. Most attempts to resolve the
paradox have focused on aspects of 1 and 4. Some argue that preferences can be
rational even if they are intransitive. Others argue that cardinal orderings,
and hence, interpersonal comparisons of preference intensity, are
relevant.
Ascriptum --
ascriptivism, the theory that to call an action voluntary is not to describe it
as caused in a certain way by the agent who did it, but to express a commitment
to hold the agent responsible for the action. Ascriptivism is thus a kind of
noncognitivism as applied to judgments about the voluntariness of acts.
Introduced by Hart in “Ascription of Rights and Responsibilities,” Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society 9, ascriptivism was given its name and attacked in
Geach’s “Ascriptivism,” Philosophical Review 0. Hart recanted in the Preface to
his Punishment and Responsibility 8.
Associationism: discussed
by Grice as an example of a propositional complexum -- the psychological
doctrine that association is the sole or primary basis of learning as well as
of intelligent thought and behavior. Association occurs when one type of
thought, idea, or behavior follows, or is contingent upon, another thought,
idea, or behavior or external event, and the second somehow bonds with the
first. If the idea of eggs is paired with the idea of ham, then the two ideas
may become associated. Associationists argue that complex states of mind and
mental processes can be analyzed into associated elements. The complex may be
novel, but the elements are products of past associations. Associationism often
is combined with hedonism. Hedonism explains why events associate or bond:
bonds are forged by pleasant experiences. If the pleasantness of eating eggs is
combined with the pleasantness of eating ham, then ideas of ham and eggs
associate. Bonding may also be explained by various non-hedonistic principles
of association, as in Hume’s theory of the association of ideas. One of these
principles is contiguity in place or time. Associationism contributes to the
componential analysis of intelligent, rational activity into non-intelligent,
non-rational, mechanical processes. People believe as they do, not because of
rational connections among beliefs, but because beliefs associatively bond.
Thus one may think of London when thinking of England, not because one
possesses an inner logic of geographic beliefs from which one infers that
London is in England. The two thoughts may co-occur because of contiguity or
other principles. Kinds of associationism occur in behaviorist models of
classical and operant conditioning. Certain associationist ideas, if not
associationism itself, appear in connectionist models of cognition, especially
the principle that contiguities breed bonding. Several philosophers and
psychologists, including Hume, Hartley, and J. S. Mill among philosophers and
E. L. Thorndike 18749 and B. F. Skinner 490 among psychologists, are
associationists.
attenuation – attenuated
cases of communication -- Borderline – case -- degenerate case, an expression
used more or less loosely to indicate an individual or class that falls outside
of a given background class to which it is otherwise very closely related,
often in virtue of an ordering of a more comprehensive class. A degenerate case
of one class is often a limiting case of a more comprehensive class. Rest zero
velocity is a degenerate case of motion positive velocity while being a
limiting case of velocity. The circle is a degenerate case of an equilateral
and equiangular polygon. In technical or scientific contexts, the conventional
term for the background class is often “stretched” to cover otherwise
degenerate cases. A figure composed of two intersecting lines is a degenerate
case of hyperbola in the sense of synthetic geometry, but it is a limiting case
of hyperbola in the sense of analytic geometry. The null set is a degenerate
case of set in an older sense but a limiting case of set in a modern sense. A
line segment is a degenerate case of rectangle when rectangles are ordered by
ratio of length to width, but it is not a limiting case under these conditions.
attribution theory, a
theory in social psychology concerned with how and why ordinary people explain
events. People explain by attributing causal powers to certain events rather
than others. The theory attempts to describe and clarify everyday commonsense
explanation, to identify criteria of explanatory success presupposed by common
sense, and to compare and contrast commonsense explanation with scientific
explanation. The heart of attribution theory is the thesis that people tend to
attribute causal power to factors personally important to them, which they
believe covary with alleged effects. For example, a woman may designate sexual
discrimination as the cause of her not being promoted in a corporation. Being
female is important to her and she believes that promotion and failure covary
with gender. Males get promoted; females don’t. Causal attributions tend to
preserve self-esteem, reduce cognitive dissonance, and diminish the
attributor’s personal responsibility for misdeeds. When attributional styles or
habits contribute to emotional ill-being, e.g. to chronic, inappropriate
feelings of depression or guilt, attribution theory offers the following
therapeutic recommendation: change attributions so as to reduce emotional
ill-being and increase well-being. Hence if the woman blames herself for the
failure, and if self-blame is part of her depressive attributional style, she
would be encouraged to look outside herself, perhaps to sexual discrimination,
for the explanation.
Augustinian semiotics --
Augustine, Saint, known as Augustine of Hippo 354430, Christian philosopher and
church father, one of the chief sources of Christian thought in the West; his
importance for medieval and modern European philosophy is impossible to
describe briefly or ever to circumscribe. Matters are made more difficult
because Augustine wrote voluminously and dialectically as a Christian
theologian, treating philosophical topics for the most part only as they were
helpful to theology or as corrected by it.
Augustine fashioned the narrative of the Confessions 397400 out of the events
of the first half of his life. He thus supplied later biographers with both a
seductive selection of biographical detail and a compelling story of his
successive conversions from adolescent sensuality, to the image-laden religion
of the Manichaeans, to a version of Neoplatonism, and then to Christianity. The
story is an unexcelled introduction to Augustine’s views of philosophy. It
shows, for instance, that Augustine received very little formal education in
philosophy. He was trained as a rhetorician, and the only philosophical work
that he mentions among his early reading is Cicero’s lost Hortensius, an
exercise in persuasion to the study of philosophy. Again, the narrative makes
plain that Augustine finally rejected Manichaeanism because he came to see it
as bad philosophy: a set of sophistical fantasies without rational coherence or
explanatory force. More importantly, Augustine’s final conversion to
Christianity was prepared by his reading in “certain books of the Platonists”
Confessions 7.9.13. These Latin translations, which seem to have been
anthologies or manuals of philosophic teaching, taught Augustine a form of
Neoplatonism that enabled him to conceive of a cosmic hierarchy descending from
an immaterial, eternal, and intelligible God. On Augustine’s judgment,
philosophy could do no more than that; it could not give him the power to order
his own life so as to live happily and in a stable relation with the
now-discovered God. Yet in his first years as a Christian, Augustine took time
to write a number of works in philosophical genres. Best known among them are a
refutation of Academic Skepticism Contra academicos, 386, a theodicy De ordine,
386, and a dialogue on the place of human choice within the providentially
ordered hierarchy created by God De libero arbitrio, 388/39. Within the decade
of his conversion, Augustine was drafted into the priesthood 391 and then
consecrated bishop 395. The thirty-five years of his life after that
consecration were consumed by labors on behalf of the church in northern Africa
and through the Latin-speaking portions of the increasingly fragmented empire.
Most of Augustine’s episcopal writing was polemical both in origin and in form;
he composed against authors or movements he judged heretical, especially the
Donatists and Pelagians. But Augustine’s sense of his authorship also led him
to write works of fundamental theology conceived on a grand scale. The most
famous of these works, beyond the Confessions, are On the Trinity 399412, 420,
On Genesis according to the Letter 40115, and On the City of God 41326. On the
Trinity elaborates in subtle detail the distinguishable “traces” of Father,
Son, and Spirit in the created world and particularly in the human soul’s triad
of memory, intellect, and will. The commentary on Genesis 13, which is meant to
be much more than a “literal” commentary in the modern sense, treats many
topics in philosophical psychology and anthropology. It also teaches such
cosmological doctrines as the “seed-reasons” rationes seminales by which
creatures are given intelligible form. The City of God begins with a critique
of the bankruptcy of pagan civic religion and its attendant philosophies, but
it ends with the depiction of human history as a combat between forces of
self-love, conceived as a diabolic city of earth, and the graced love of God,
which founds that heavenly city within which alone peace is possible.
attributive pluralism Augustine 60 60 A
number of other, discrete doctrines have been attached to Augustine, usually
without the dialectical nuances he would have considered indispensable. One
such doctrine concerns divine “illumination” of the human intellect, i.e., some
active intervention by God in ordinary processes of human understanding.
Another doctrine typically attributed to Augustine is the inability of the
human will to do morally good actions without grace. A more authentically
Augustinian teaching is that introspection or inwardness is the way of
discovering the created hierarchies by which to ascend to God. Another
authentic teaching would be that time, which is a distension of the divine
“now,” serves as the medium or narrative structure for the creation’s return to
God. But no list of doctrines or positions, however authentic or inauthentic,
can serve as a faithful representation of Augustine’s thought, which gives
itself only through the carefully wrought rhetorical forms of his texts.
Austin, J.: discussed by
Grice in his explorations on moral versus legal right. English legal philosopher
known especially for his command theory of law. His career as a lawyer was
unsuccessful but his reputation as a scholar was such that on the founding
of , London, he was offered the chair of
jurisprudence. In 1832 he published the first ten of his lectures, compressed
into six as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Although he published a
few papers, and his somewhat fragmentary Lectures on Jurisprudence 1863 was
published posthumously, it is on the Province that his reputation rests. He and
Bentham his friend, London neighbor, and fellow utilitarian were the foremost
English legal philosophers of their time, and their influence on the course of
legal philosophy endures. Austin held that the first task of legal philosophy,
one to which he bends most of his energy, is to make clear what laws are, and
if possible to explain why they are what they are: their rationale. Until those
matters are clear, legislative proposals and legal arguments can never be
clear, since irrelevant considerations will inevitably creep in. The proper
place for moral or theological considerations is in discussion of what the
positive law ought to be, not of what it is. Theological considerations reduce
to moral ones, since God can be assumed to be a good utilitarian. It is positive
laws, “that is to say the laws which are simply and strictly so called, . . .
which form the appropriate matter of general and particular jurisprudence.”
They must also be distinguished from “laws metaphorical or figurative.” A law
in its most general senseis “a rule laid down for the guidance of an
intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him.” It is a
command, however phrased. It is the commands of men to men, of political
superiors, that form the body of positive law. General or comparative
jurisprudence, the source of the rationale, if any, of particular laws, is
possible because there are commands nearly universal that may be attributed to
God or Nature, but they become positive law only when laid down by a ruler. The
general model of an Austinian analytic jurisprudence built upon a framework of
definitions has been widely followed, but cogent objections, especially by
Hart, have undermined the command theory of law.
Austin: j. l. H. P.
Grice, “The Austinian Code.” English philosopher, a leading exponent of postwar
“linguistic” philosophy. Educated primarily as a classicist at Shrewsbury and
Balliol , Oxford, he taught philosophy at Magdalen . During World War II he
served at a high level in military intelligence, which earned him the O.B.E.,
Croix de Guerre, and Legion of Merit. In 2 he became White’s Professor of Moral
Philosophy at Oxford, and in 5 and 8 he held visiting appointments at Harvard
and Berkeley, respectively. In his relatively brief career, Austin published
only a few invited papers; his influence was exerted mainly through discussion
with his colleagues, whom he dominated more by critical intelligence than by
any preconceived view of what philosophy should be. Unlike some others, Austin
did not believe that philosophical problems all arise out of aberrations from
“ordinary language,” nor did he necessarily find solutions there; he dwelt,
rather, on the authority of the vernacular as a source of nice and pregnant
distinctions, and held that it deserves much closer attention than it commonly
receives from philosophers. It is useless, he thought, to pontificate at large
about knowledge, reality, or existence, for example, without first examining in
detail how, and when, the words ‘know’, ‘real’, and ‘exist’ are employed in
daily life. In Sense and Sensibilia 2; compiled from lecture notes, the
sense-datum theory comes under withering fire for its failings in this respect.
Austin also provoked controversy with his well-known distinction between
“performative” and “constative” utterances ‘I promise’ makes a promise, whereas
‘he promised’ merely reports one; he later recast this as a threefold
differentiation of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary “forces” in
utterance, corresponding roughly to the meaning, intention, and consequences of
saying a thing, in one context or another. Though never very stable or fully
worked out, these ideas have since found a place in the still-evolving study of
speech acts.
austinian code, The: The jocular
way by Grice to refer to ‘The Master,’ whom he saw wobble on more than one
occasion. Grice has mixed feelings (“or fixed meelings, if you prefer”) about
Austin. Unlike Austin, Grice is a Midlands scholarship boy, and ends up in
Corpus. One outcome of this, as he later reminisced is that Austin never cared
to invite him to the Thursday-evenings at All Souls – “which was alright, I
suppose, in that the number was appropriately restricted to seven.” But Grice
confessed that he thought it was because “he had been born on the wrong side of
the tracks.” After the war, Grice would join what Grice, in fun, called “the
Playgroup,” which was anything BUT. Austin played the School Master, and let
the kindergarten relax in the sun! One reason Grice avoided publication was the
idea that Austin would criticise him. Austin never cared to recognise Grice’s
“Personal Identity,” or less so, “Meaning.” He never mentioned his
“Metaphysics” third programme lecture – but Austin never made it to the
programme. Grice socialized very well with who will be Austin’s custodians, in
alphabetical order, Urmson and Warnock – “two charmers.” Unlike Austin, Urmson
and Warnock were the type of person Austin would philosophise with – and he
would spend hours talking about visa with Warnock. Upon Austin’s demise, Grice
kept with the ‘play group’, which really became one! Grice makes immense
references to Austin. Austin fits Grice to a T, because of the ‘mistakes’ he
engages in. So, it is fair to say that Grice’s motivation for the coinage of
implicature was Austin (“He would too often ignore the distinction between what
a ‘communicator’ communicates and what his expression, if anything, does.”). So
Grice attempts an intention-based account of the communicator’s message. Within
this message, there is ONE aspect that can usually be regarded as being of
‘philosophical interest.’ The ‘unnecessary implicature’ is bound to be taken
Austin as part of the ‘philosophical interesting’ bit when it isn’t. So Grice
is criticizing Austin for providing the wrong analysis for the wrong analysandum.
Grice refers specifically to the essays in “Philosophical Papers,” notably
“Other Minds” and “A Plea for Excuses.” But he makes a passing reference to
“Sense and Sensibilia,” whose tone Grice dislikes, and makes a borrowing or two
from the ‘illocution,’ never calling it by that name. At most, Grice would
adapt Austin’s use of ‘act.’ But his rephrase is ‘conversational move.’ So
Grice would say that by making a conversational ‘move,’ the conversationalist
may be communicating TWO things. He spent some type finding a way to
conceptualise this. He later came with the metaphor of the FIRST-FLOOR act, the
MEZZANINE act, and the SECOND-FLOOR act. This applies to Fregeianisms like
‘aber,’ but it may well apply to Austinian-code type of utterances.
Austinianism:
Grice felt sorry for Nowell-Smith, whom he calls the ‘straight-man’ for the
comedy double act with Austin at the Play Groups. “I would say ‘on principle’”
– “I would say, ‘no, thanks.” “I don’t understand Donne.” “It’s perfectly clear
to me.” By using Nowell-Sith, Grice is implicating that Austin had little
manners in the ‘play group,’ “And I wasn’t surprised when Nowell-Smith left
Oxford for good, almost.” Not quite, of course. After some time in the
extremely fashionable Canterbury, Nowell-Smith returns to Oxford. Vide:
nowell-smithianism.
autarkia, ancient Grecian
term meaning ‘self-sufficiency’. Autarkia was widely regarded as a mark of the
human good, happiness eudaimonia. A life is self-sufficient when it is worthy
of choice and lacks nothing. What makes a life self-sufficient and thereby happy was a matter of controversy. Stoics
maintained that the mere possession of virtue would suffice; Aristotle and the
Peripatetics insisted that virtue must be exercised and even, perhaps,
accompanied by material goods. There was also a debate among later Grecian
thinkers over whether a self-sufficient life is solitary or whether only life
in a community can be self-sufficient.
avenarius, R.
philosopher: an influence on Ayer, who thinks he is following British
empiricism! Avenarius was born in Paris and educated at the of Leipzig. He became a professor at Leipzig
and succeeded Windelband at the of
Zürich in 1877. For a time he was editor of the Zeitschrift für
wissenschaftliche Philosophie. His earliest work was Über die beiden ersten
Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus 1868. His major work, Kritik der reinen
Erfahrung Critique of Pure Experience, 2 vols., 890, was followed by his last
study, Der menschliche Weltbegriffe 1. In his post-Kantian Kritik Avenarius
presented a radical positivism that sought to base philosophy on scientific
principles. This “empirio-criticism” emphasized “pure experience” and
descriptive and general definitions of experience. Metaphysical claims to
transcend experience were rejected as mere creations of the mind. Like Hume,
Avenarius denied the ontological validity of substance and causality. Seeking a
scientific empiricism, he endeavored to delineate a descriptive determination
of the form and content of pure experience. He thought that the subject-object
dichotomy, the separation of inner and outer experiences, falsified reality. If
we could avoid “introjecting” feeling, thought, and will into experience and
thereby splitting it into subject and object, we could attain the original
“natural” view of the world. Although Avenarius, in his Critique of Pure
Experience, thought that changes in brain states parallel states of
consciousness, he did not reduce sensations or states of consciousness to
physiological changes in the brain. Because his theory of pure experience
undermined dogmatic materialism, Lenin attacked his philosophy in Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism 2. His epistemology influenced Mach and his emphasis upon
pure experience had considerable influence on James.
awareness, consciousness,
a central feature of our lives that is notoriously difficult to characterize.
You experience goings-on in the world, and, turning inward “introspecting”, you
experience your experiencing. Objects of awareness can be external or internal.
Pressing your finger on the edge of a table, you can be aware of the table’s
edge, and aware of the feeling of pressure though perhaps not simultaneously.
Philosophers from Locke to Nagel have insisted that our experiences have
distinctive qualities: there is “something it is like” to have them. It would
seem important, then, to distinguish qualities of objects of which you are
aware from qualities of your awareness. Suppose you are aware of a round, red
tomato. The tomato, but not your awareness, is round and red. What then are the
qualities of your awareness? Here we encounter a deep puzzle that divides
theorists into intransigent camps. Some materialists, like Dennett, insist that
awareness lacks qualities or lacks qualities distinct from its objects: the
qualities we attribute to experiences are really those of experienced objects.
This opens the way to a dismissal of “phenomenal” qualities qualia, qualities
that seem to have no place in the material world. Others T. Nagel, Ned Block
regard such qualities as patently genuine, preferring to dismiss any theory
unable to accommodate them. Convinced that the qualities of awareness are
ineliminable and irreducible to respectable material properties, some
philosophers, following Frank Jackson, contend they are “epiphenomenal”: real
but causally inefficacious. Still others, including Searle, point to what they
regard as a fundamental distinction between the “intrinsically subjective”
character of awareness and the “objective,” “public” character of material objects,
but deny that this yields epiphenomenalism.
Axiom – referred to by
Grice in his portrayal of the formalists in their account of an ‘ideal’
language. He is thinking Peano, Whitehead, and Russell. – the axiomatic method,
originally, a method for reorganizing the accepted propositions and concepts of
an existent science in order to increase certainty in the propositions and
clarity in the concepts. Application of this method was thought to require the
identification of 1 the “universe of discourse” domain, genus of entities
constituting the primary subject matter of the science, 2 the “primitive
concepts” that can be grasped immediately without the use of definition, 3 the
“primitive propositions” or “axioms”, whose truth is knowable immediately, without
the use of deduction, 4 an immediately acceptable “primitive definition” in
terms of primitive concepts for each non-primitive concept, and 5 a deduction
constructed by chaining immediate, logically cogent inferences ultimately from
primitive propositions and definitions for each nonprimitive accepted
proposition. Prominent proponents of more or less modernized versions of the
axiomatic method, e.g. Pascal, Nicod 34, and Tarski, emphasizing the critical
and regulatory function of the axiomatic method, explicitly open the
possibility that axiomatization of an existent, preaxiomatic science may lead
to rejection or modification of propositions, concepts, and argumentations that
had previously been accepted. In many cases attempts to realize the ideal of an
axiomatic science have resulted in discovery of “smuggled premises” and other
previously unnoted presuppositions, leading in turn to recognition of the need
for new axioms. Modern axiomatizations of geometry are much richer in detail
than those produced in ancient Greece. The earliest extant axiomatic text is
based on an axiomatization of geometry due to Euclid fl. 300 B.C., which itself
was based on earlier, nolonger-extant texts. Archimedes 287212 B.C. was one of
the earliest of a succession of postEuclidean geometers, including Hilbert,
Oswald Veblen 00, and Tarski, to propose modifications of axiomatizations of
classical geometry. The traditional axiomatic method, often called the
geometric method, made several presuppositions no longer widely accepted. The
advent of non-Euclidean geometry was particularly important in this connection.
For some workers, the goal of reorganizing an existent science was joined to or
replaced by a new goal: characterizing or giving implicit definition to the
structure of the subject matter of the science. Moreover, subsequent
innovations in logic and foundations of mathematics, especially development of
syntactically precise formalized languages and effective systems of formal
deductions, have substantially increased the degree of rigor attainable. In
particular, critical axiomatic exposition of a body of scientific knowledge is
now not thought to be fully adequate, however successful it may be in realizing
the goals of the original axiomatic method, so long as it does not present the
underlying logic including language, semantics, and deduction system. For these
and other reasons the expression ‘axiomatic method’ has undergone many
“redefinitions,” some of which have only the most tenuous connection with the
original meaning.
axiom of comprehension,
also called axiom of abstraction, the axiom that for every property, there is a
corresponding set of things having that property; i.e., f DA x x 1 A È f x,
where f is a property and A is a set. The axiom was used in Frege’s formulation
of set theory and is the axiom that yields Russell’s paradox, discovered in 1.
If fx is instantiated as x 2 x, then the result that A 1 A È A 2 A is easily
obtained, which yields, in classical logic, the explicit contradiction A 1 A
& A 2 A. The paradox can be avoided by modifying the comprehension axiom
and using instead the separation axiom, f DA x x 1 A Èfx & x 1 B. This
yields only the result that A 1 A ÈA 2 A & A 1 B, which is not a
contradiction. The paradox can also be avoided by retaining the comprehension
axiom but restricting the symbolic language, so that ‘x 1 x’ is not a
meaningful formula. Russell’s type theory, presented in Principia Mathematica,
uses this approach.
axiom of consistency, an
axiom stating that a given set of sentences is consistent. Let L be a formal
language, D a deductive system for L, S any set of sentences of L, and C the
statement ‘S is consistent’ i.e., ‘No contradiction is derivable from S via D’.
For certain sets S e.g., the theorems of D it is interesting to ask: Can C be
expressed in L? If so, can C be proved in D? If C can be expressed in L but not
proved in D, can C be added consistently to D as a new axiom? Example from
Gödel: Let L and D be adequate for elementary number theory, and S be the
axioms of D; then C can be expressed in L but not proved in D, but can be added
as a new axiom to form a stronger system D’. Sometimes we can express in L an
axiom of consistency in the semantic sense i.e., ‘There is a universe in which
all the sentences in S are true’. Trivial example: suppose the only non-logical
axiom in D is ‘For any two sets B and B’, there exists the union of B and B’ ’.
Then C might be ‘There is a set U such that, for any sets B and B’ in U, there
exists in U the union of B and B’ ’.
ayer: a. j. , philosopher
of Swiss ancestry, one of the most important of the Oxford logical positivists.
He continued to occupy a dominant place in analytic philosophy as he gradually
modified his adherence to central tenets of the view. He was educated at Eton
and Oxford, and, after a brief period at the
of Vienna, became a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church in 3. After
the war he returned to Oxford as fellow and dean of Wadham . He was Grote
Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the of London 659, Wykeham Professor of Logic in
the of Oxford and a fellow of New 978, and a fellow of Wolfson , Oxford 883.
Ayer was knighted in 3 and was a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. His early
work clearly and forcefully developed the implications of the positivists’
doctrines that all cognitive statements are either analytic and a priori, or
synthetic, contingent, and a posteriori, and that empirically meaningful
statements must be verifiable must admit of confirmation or disconfirmation. In
doing so he defended reductionist analyses of the self, the external world, and
other minds. Value statements that fail the empiricist’s criterion of meaning
but defy naturalistic analysis were denied truth-value and assigned emotive
meaning. Throughout his writings he maintained a foundationalist perspective in
epistemology in which sense-data later more neutrally described occupied not
only a privileged epistemic position but constituted the subject matter of the
most basic statements to be used in reductive analyses. Although in later works
he significantly modified many of his early views and abandoned much of their
strict reductionism, he remained faithful to an empiricist’s version of
foundationalism and the basic idea behind the verifiability criterion of
meaning. His books include Language, Truth and Logic; The Foundations of
Empirical Knowledge; The Problems of Knowledge; Philosophical Essays; The
Concept of a Person; The Origins of Pragmatism; Metaphysics and Common Sense;
Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage; The Central Questions of
Philosophy; Probability and Evidence; Philosophy in the Twentieth Century;
Russell; Hume; Freedom and Morality, Ludwig Vitters; and Voltaire.
ayerism. Born of Swiss
parentage in London, “Freddie” got an Oxford educated, and though he wanted to
be a judge, he read Lit. Hum (Phil.). He spent three months in Vienna, and when
he returned, Grice called him ‘enfant terrible.’ Ayer would later cite Grice in
the Aristotelian symposium on the Causal Theory of Perception. But the type of
subtlety in conversational implicature that Grice is interested goes over
Freddie’s head. (“That,” or he was not interested.” Grice was glad that Oxford
was ready to attack Ayer on philosophical grounds, and he later lists
Positivism as a ‘monster’ on his way to the City of Eternal Truth.
“Verificationism” was anti-Oxonian, in being mainly anti-Bradleyian, who is
recognised by every Oxonian philosopher as “one of the clearest and subtlest
prosists in English, and particularly Oxonian, philosophy.” Ayer later became
the logic professor at Oxford – which is now taught no longer at the
Sub-Faculty of Philosophy, but the Department of Mathematics!
Babbage, C. Discussed by
Grice in his functionalist approach to philosophical psychology. English
applied mathematician, inventor, and expert on machinery and manufacturing. His
chief interest was in developing mechanical “engines” to compute tables of
functions. Until the invention of the electronic computer, printed tables of
functions were important aids to calculation. Babbage invented the difference
engine, a machine that consisted of a series of accumulators each of which, in
turn, transmitted its contents to its successor, which added to them to its own
contents. He built only a model, but George and Edvard Scheutz built difference
engines that were actually used. Though tables of squares and cubes could be
calculated by a difference engine, the more commonly used tables of logarithms
and of trigonometric functions could not. To calculate these and other useful
functions, Babbage conceived of the analytical engine, a machine for numerical
analysis. The analytical engine was to have a store memory and a mill
arithmetic unit. The store was to hold decimal numbers on toothed wheels, and
to transmit them to the mill and back by means of wheels and toothed bars. The
mill was to carry out the arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division mechanically, greatly extending the technology of
small calculators. The operations of the mill were to be governed by pegged
drums, derived from the music box. A desired sequence of operations would be
punched on cards, which would be strung together like the cards of a Jacquard
loom and read by the machine. The control mechanisms could branch and execute a
different sequence of cards when a designated quantity changed sign. Numbers
would be entered from punched cards and the answers punched on cards. The
answers might also be imprinted on metal sheets from which the calculated
tables would be printed, thus avoiding the errors of proofreading. Although
Babbage formulated various partial plans for the analytical engine and built a
few pieces of it, the machine was never realized. Given the limitations of
mechanical computing technology, building an analytical engine would probably
not have been an economical way to produce numerical tables. The modern
electronic computer was invented and developed completely independently of
Babbage’s pioneering work. Yet because of it, Babbage’s work has been
publicized and he has become famous.
Bachelard, G.: philosopher of applied rationalism, enjoyed
by Grice. philosopher of science and literary analyst. His philosophy of
science developed, e.g., in The New Scientific Spirit, 4, and Rational
Materialism, 3 began from reflections on the relativistic and quantum
revolutions in twentieth-century physics. Bachelard viewed science as
developing through a series of discontinuous changes epistemological breaks.
Such breaks overcome epistemological obstacles: methodological and conceptual
features of commonsense or outdated science that block the path of inquiry.
Bachelard’s emphasis on the discontinuity of scientific change strikingly
anticipated Thomas Kuhn’s focus, many years later, on revolutionary paradigm
change. However, unlike Kuhn, Bachelard held to a strong notion of scientific
progress across revolutionary discontinuities. Although each scientific
framework rejects its predecessors as fundamentally erroneous, earlier
frameworks may embody permanent achievements that will be preserved as special
cases within subsequent frameworks. Newton’s laws of motion, e.g., are special
limit-cases of relativity theory. Bachelard based his philosophy of science on
a “non-Cartesian epistemology” that rejects Descartes’s claim that knowledge must
be founded on incorrigible intuitions of first truths. All knowledge claims are
subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Similarly, he rejected a
naive realism that defines reality in terms of givens of ordinary sense
experience and ignores the ontological constructions of scientific concepts and
instrumentation. He maintained, however, that denying this sort of realism did
not entail accepting idealism, which makes only the mental ultimately real.
Instead he argued for an “applied rationalism,” which recognizes the active
role of reason in constituting objects of knowledge while admitting that any
constituting act of reason must be directed toward an antecedently given
object. 67 B 67 Although Bachelard
denied the objective reality of the perceptual and imaginative worlds, he
emphasized their subjective and poetic significance. Complementing his writings
on science are a series of books on imagination and poetic imagery e.g., The
Psychoanalysis of Fire, 8; The Poetics of Space, 7 which subtly unpack the
meaning of archetypal in Jung’s sense images. He put forward a “law of the four
elements,” according to which all images can be related to the earth, air,
fire, and water posited by Empedocles as the fundamental forms of matter.
Together with Georges Canguilhem, his successor at the Sorbonne, Bachelard had
an immense impact on several generations of
students of philosophy. He and Canguilhem offered an important
alternative to the more fashionable and widely known phenomenology and
existentialism and were major influences on among others Althusser and
Foucault.
Bacon, Francis: English
philosopher, essayist, and scientific methodologist. In politics Bacon rose to
the position of lord chancellor. In 1621 he retired to private life after
conviction for taking bribes in his official capacity as judge. Bacon
championed the new empiricism resulting from the achievements of early modern
science. He opposed alleged knowledge based on appeals to authority, and on the
barrenness of Scholasticism. He thought that what is needed is a new attitude
and methodology based strictly on scientific practices. The goal of acquiring
knowledge is the good of mankind: knowledge is power. The social order that
should result from applied science is portrayed in his New Atlantis1627. The
method of induction to be employed is worked out in detail in his Novum Organum
1620. This new logic is to replace that of Aristotle’s syllogism, as well as
induction by simple enumeration of instances. Neither of these older logics can
produce knowledge of actual natural laws. Bacon thought that we must intervene
in nature, manipulating it by means of experimental control leading to the
invention of new technology. There are well-known hindrances to acquisition of
knowledge of causal laws. Such hindrances false opinions, prejudices, which
“anticipate” nature rather than explain it, Bacon calls idols idola. Idols of
the tribe idola tribus are natural mental tendencies, among which are the idle
search for purposes in nature, and the impulse to read our own desires and
needs into nature. Idols of the cave idola specus are predispositions of
particular individuals. The individual is inclined to form opinions based on
idiosyncrasies of education, social intercourse, reading, and favored authorities.
Idols of the marketplace idola fori Bacon regards as the most potentially
dangerous of all dispositions, because they arise from common uses of language
that often result in verbal disputes. Many words, though thought to be
meaningful, stand for nonexistent things; others, although they name actual
things, are poorly defined or used in confused ways. Idols of the theater idola
theatri depend upon the influence of received theories. The only authority
possessed by such theories is that they are ingenious verbal constructions. The
aim of acquiring genuine knowledge does not depend on superior skill in the use
of words, but rather on the discovery of natural laws. Once the idols are
eliminated, the mind is free to seek knowledge of natural laws based on experimentation.
Bacon held that nothing exists in nature except bodies material objects acting
in conformity with fixed laws. These laws are “forms.” For example, Bacon
thought that the form or cause of heat is the motion of the tiny particles
making up a body. This form is that on which the existence of heat depends.
What induction seeks to show is that certain laws are perfectly general,
universal in application. In every case of heat, there is a measurable change
in the motion of the particles constituting the moving body. Bacon thought that
scientific induction proceeds as follows. First, we look for those cases where,
given certain changes, certain others invariably follow. In his example, if
certain changes in the form motion of particles take place, heat always
follows. We seek to find all of the “positive instances” of the form that give
rise to the effect of that form. Next, we investigate the “negative instances,”
cases where in the absence of the form, the qualitative change does not take
place. In the operation of these methods it is important to try to produce
experimentally “prerogative instances,” particularly striking or typical
examples of the phenomenon under investigation. Finally, in cases where the
object under study is present to some greater or lesser degree, we must be able
to take into account why these changes occur. In the example, quantitative
changes in degrees of heat will be correlated to quantitative changes in the
speed of the motion of the particles. This method implies that backward
causation Bacon, Francis 68 68 in many
cases we can invent instruments to measure changes in degree. Such inventions
are of course the hoped-for outcome of scientific inquiry, because their
possession improves the lot of human beings. Bacon’s strikingly modern but not
entirely novel empiricist methodology influenced nineteenth-century figures
e.g., Sir John Herschel and J. S. Mill who generalized his results and used
them as the basis for displaying new insights into scientific methodology.
Bacon, R., English
philosopher who earned the honorific title of Doctor Mirabilis. He was one of
the first medievals in the Latin West to lecture and comment on newly recovered
work by Aristotle in natural philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. Born in
Somerset and educated at both Oxford and
the of Paris, he became by 1273 a master
of arts at Paris, where he taught for about ten years. In 1247 he resigned his
teaching post to devote his energies to investigating and promoting topics he
considered neglected but important insofar as they would lead to knowledge of
God. The English “experimentalist” Grosseteste, the man Peter of Maricourt, who
did pioneering work on magnetism, and the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian
Secretum secretorum influenced Roger’s new perspective. By 1257, however,
partly from fatigue, Roger had put this work aside and entered the Franciscan
order in England. To his dismay, he did not receive within the order the
respect and freedom to write and teach he had expected. During the early 1260s
Roger’s views about reforming the
curriculum reached Cardinal Guy le Gos de Foulques, who, upon becoming
Pope Clement IV in 1265, demanded to see Roger’s writings. In response, Roger
produced the Opus maius 1267 an
encyclopedic work that argues, among other things, that 1 the study of Hebrew
and Grecian is indispensable for understanding the Bible, 2 the study of
mathematics encompassing geometry, astronomy, and astrology is, with
experimentation, the key to all the sciences and instrumental in theology, and
3 philosophy can serve theology by helping in the conversion of non-believers.
Roger believed that although the Bible is the basis for human knowledge, we can
use reason in the service of knowledge. It is not that rational argument can,
on his view, provide fullblown proof of anything, but rather that with the aid
of reason one can formulate hypotheses about nature that can be confirmed by
experience. According to Roger, knowledge arrived at in this way will lead to
knowledge of nature’s creator. All philosophical, scientific, and linguistic
endeavors are valuable ultimately for the service they can render to theology.
Roger summarizes and develops his views on these matters in the Opus minus and
the Opus tertium, produced within a year of the Opus maius. Roger was
altogether serious in advocating curricular change. He took every opportunity
to rail against many of his celebrated contemporaries e.g., Alexander of Hales,
Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas for not being properly trained in
philosophy and for contributing to the demise of theology by lecturing on Peter
Lombard’s Sentences instead of the Bible. He also wrote both Grecian and Hebrew
grammars, did important work in optics, and argued for calendar reform on the
basis of his admittedly derivative astronomical research. One should not,
however, think that Roger was a good mathematician or natural scientist. He
apparently never produced a single theorem or proof in mathematics, he was not
always a good judge of astronomical competence he preferred al-Bitruji to
Ptolemy, and he held alchemy in high regard, believing that base metals could
be turned into silver and gold. Some have gone so far as to claim that Roger’s
renown in the history of science is vastly overrated, based in part on his being
confusedly linked with the fourteenthcentury Oxford Calculators, who do deserve
credit for paving the way for certain developments in seventeenth-century
science. Roger’s devotion to curricular reform eventually led to his
imprisonment by Jerome of Ascoli the future Pope Nicholas IV, probably between
1277 and 1279. Roger’s teachings were said to have contained “suspect
novelties.” Judging from the date of his imprisonment, these novelties may have
been any number of propositions condemned by the bishop of Paris, Étienne
Tempier, in 1277. But his imprisonment may also have had something to do with
the anger he undoubtedly provoked by constantly abusing the members of his
order regarding their approach to education, or with his controversial
Joachimite views about the apocalypse and the imminent coming of the
Antichrist. Given Roger’s interest in educational reform and his knack for
systematization, it is not unlikely that he was abreast of and had something to
say about most of the central philosophical issues of the day. If so, his
writings could be an important source of information about thirteenth-century
Scholastic philosophy generally. In this connection, recent investigations have
revealed, e.g., that he may well have played an important role in the development
of logic and philosophy of language during the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries. In the course of challenging the views of certain people some of
whom have been tentatively identified as Richard of Cornwall, Lambert of
Auxerre, Siger of Brabant, Henry of Ghent, Boethius of Dacia, William Sherwood,
and the Magister Abstractionum on the nature of signs and how words function as
signs, Roger develops and defends views that appear to be original. The
pertinent texts include the Sumule dialectices c.1250, the De signis part of
Part III of the Opus maius, and the Compendium studii theologiae 1292. E.g., in
connection with the question whether Jesus could be called a man during the
three-day entombment and, thus, in connection with the related question whether
man can be said to be animal when no man exists, and with the sophism ‘This is
a dead man, therefore this is a man’, Roger was not content to distinguish
words from all other signs as had been the tradition. He distinguished between
signs originating from nature and from the soul, and between natural
signification and conventional ad placitum signification which results
expressly or tacitly from the imposition of meaning by one or more individuals.
He maintained that words signify existing and non-existing entities only
equivocally, because words conventionally signify only presently existing
things. On this view, therefore, ‘man’ is not used univocally when applied to
an existing man and to a dead man.
bad faith, 1 dishonest
and blameworthy instances of self-deception; 2 inauthentic and self-deceptive
refusal to admit to ourselves and others our full freedom, thereby avoiding
anxiety in making decisions and evading responsibility for actions and
attitudes Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 3; 3 hypocrisy or dishonesty in speech
and conduct, as in making a promise without intending to keep it. One
self-deceiving strategy identified by Sartre is to embrace other people’s views
in order to avoid having to form one’s own; another is to disregard options so
that one’s life appears predetermined to move in a fixed direction.
Occasionally Sartre used a narrower, fourth sense: self-deceptive beliefs held
on the basis of insincere and unreasonable interpretations of evidence, as
contrasted with the dishonesty of “sincerely” acknowledging one truth “I am
disposed to be a thief” in order to deny a deeper truth “I am free to
change”.
bain: a., philosopher and
reformer, biographer of James Mill 2 and J. S. Mill 2 and founder of the first
psychological journal, Mind 1876, to which Grice submitted his “Personal
identity.” In the development of psychology, Bain represents in England
alongside Continental thinkers such as Taine and Lotze the final step toward
the founding of psychology as a science. His significance stems from his wish
to “unite psychology and physiology,” fulfilled in The Senses and the Intellect
1855 and The Emotions and the Will 1859, abridged in one volume, Mental and
Moral Science 1868. Neither Bain’s psychology nor his physiology were particularly
original. His psychology came from English empiricism and associationism, his
physiology from Johannes Muller’s 180158 Elements of Physiology 1842. Muller
was an early advocate of the reflex, or sensorimotor, conception of the nervous
system, holding that neurons conduct sensory information to the brain or motor
commands from the brain, the brain connecting sensation with appropriate motor
response. Like Hartley before him, Bain grounded the laws of mental association
in the laws of neural connection. In opposition to faculty psychology, Bain
rejected the existence of mental powers located in different parts of the brain
On the Study of Character, 1861. By combining associationism with modern
physiology, he virtually completed the movement of philosophical psychology
toward science. In philosophy, his most important concept was his analysis of
belief as “a preparation to act.” By thus entwining conception and action, he
laid the foundation for pragmatism, and for the focus on adaptive behavior
central to modern psychology.
banez, D. philosopher known
for his disputes with Molina concerning divine grace, or grice. Against Molina
he held physical predetermination, the view that God physically determines the
secondary causes of human action. This renders grace intrinsically efficacious
and independent of human will and merits. He is also known for his
understanding of the centrality of the act of existence esse in Thomistic
metaphysics. Bañez’s most important works are his commentaries on Aquinas’s
Summa theologiae and Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption.
Barthesian semiotic:
r. post-structuralist literary critic
and essayist. Born in Cherbourg, he suffered from numerous ailments as a child
and spent much of his early life as a semiinvalid. After leaving the military,
he took up several positions teaching subjects like classics, grammar, and
philology. His interest in linguistics finally drew him to literature, and by
the mid-0s he had already published what would become a classic in structural
analysis, The Elements of Semiology. Its principal message is that words are
merely one kind of sign whose meaning lies in relations of difference between
them. This concept was later amended to include the reading subject, and the
structuring effect that the subject has on the literary work a concept expressed later in his S/Z and The
Pleasure of the Text. Barthes’s most mature contributions to the
post-structuralist movement were brilliant and witty interpretations of visual,
tactile, and aural sign systems, culminating in the publication of several
books and essays on photography, advertising, film, and cuisine.
bite off more than you can chew: To bite is the function of the FRONT teeth (incisors and
canines); the back teeth (molars) CHEW, crush, or grind. So the relation is Russellian. 1916 G. B. Shaw Pygmalion 195 The mistake we describe metaphorically as
‘biting off more than they can chew’. a1960 J.
L. Austin Sense & Sensibilia (1962) i. 1 They [sc. doctrines] all bite off more than they can chew. While the NED would not DARE define this obviousness,
the OED does not. to undertake too
much, to be too ambitious – “irrational” simpliciter for Grice (WoW).
Basilides, philosopher,
he improved on Valentinus’s doctrine of emanations, positing 365 the number of
days in a year levels of existence in the Pleroma the fullness of the Godhead,
all descending from the ineffable Father. He taught that the rival God was the
God of the Jews the God of the Old Testament, who created the material world.
Redemption consists in the coming of the first begotten of the Father, Noûs
Mind, in human form in order to release the spiritual element imprisoned within
human bodies. Like other gnostics he taught that we are saved by knowledge, not
faith. He apparently held to the idea of reincarnation before the restoration
of all things to the Pleroma.
Basis -- basing relation,
also called basis relation, the relation between a belief or item of knowledge
and a second belief or item of knowledge when the latter is the ground basis of
the first. It is clear that some knowledge is indirect, i.e., had or gained on
the basis of some evidence, as opposed to direct knowledge, which assuming
there is any is not so gained, or based. The same holds for justified belief.
In one broad sense of the term, the basing relation is just the one connecting
indirect knowledge or indirectly justified belief to the evidence: to give an
account of either of the latter is to give an account of the basing relation.
There is a narrower view of the basing relation, perhaps implicit in the first.
A person knows some proposition P on the basis of evidence or reasons only if
her belief that P is based on the evidence or reasons, or perhaps on the
possession of the evidence or reasons. The narrow basing relation is indicated
by this question: where a belief that P constitutes indirect knowledge or
justification, what is it for that belief to be based on the evidence or
reasons that support the knowledge or justification? The most widely favored
view is that the relevant belief is based on evidence or reasons only if the
belief is causally related to the belief or reasons. Proponents of this causal
view differ concerning what, beyond this causal relationship, is needed by an
account of the narrow basing relation.
Batailleian communicatum:
g., philosopher and novelist with enormous influence on post-structuralist
thought. By locating value in expenditure as opposed to accumulation, Bataille
inaugurates the era of the death of the subject. He insists that individuals must
transgress the limits imposed by subjectivity to escape isolation and
communicate. Bataille’s prewar philosophical contributions consist mainly of
short essays, the most significant of which have been collected in Visions of
Excess. These essays introduce the central idea that base matter disrupts
rational subjectivity by attesting to the continuity in which individuals lose
themselves. Inner Experience, Bataille’s first lengthy philosophical treatise,
was followed by Guilty 4 and On Nietzsche 5. Together, these three works
constitute Bataille’s Summa Atheologica, which explores the play of the
isolation and the dissolution of beings in terms of the experience of excess
laughter, tears, eroticism, death, sacrifice, poetry. The Accursed Share 9,
which he considered his most important work, is his most systematic account of
the social and economic implications of expenditure. In Erotism 7 and The Tears
of Eros 1, he focuses on the excesses of sex and death. Throughout his life,
Bataille was concerned with the question of value. He located it in the excess
that lacerates individuals and opens channels of communication.
Baumgarten: a. g. – Grice
loved his coinage of ‘aesthetics’-- Alexander Gottlieb 171462, G. philosopher.
Born in Berlin, he was educated in Halle and taught at Halle 173840 and
Frankfurt an der Oder 174062. Baumgarten was brought up in the Pietist circle
of A. H. Francke but adopted the anti-Pietist rationalism of Wolff. He wrote
textbooks in metabasic particular Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 73 73 physics Metaphysica, 1739 and ethics
Ethica Philosophica, 1740; Initia Philosophiae Practicae Prima [“First Elements
of Practical Philosophy”], 1760 on which Kant lectured. For the most part,
Baumgarten did not significantly depart from Wolff, although in metaphysics he
was both further and yet closer to Leibniz than was Wolff: unlike Leibniz, he
argued for real physical influx, but, unlike Wolff, he did not restrict
preestablished harmony to the mindbody relationship alone, but paradoxically
reextended it to include all relations of substances. Baumgarten’s claim to
fame, however, rests on his introduction of the discipline of aesthetics into
G. philosophy, and indeed on his introduction of the term ‘aesthetics’ as well.
Wolff had explained pleasure as the response to the perception of perfection by
means of the senses, in turn understood as clear but confused perception.
Baumgarten subtly but significantly departed from Wolff by redefining our
response to beauty as pleasure in the perfection of sensory perception, i.e.,
in the unique potential of sensory as opposed to merely conceptual
representation. This concept was first introduced in his dissertation
Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus “Philosophical
Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry,” 1735, which defined a poem
as a “perfect sensate discourse,” and then generalized in his twovolume but
still incomplete Aesthetica 1750 58. One might describe Baumgarten’s aesthetics
as cognitivist but no longer rationalist: while in science or logic we must
always prefer discursive clarity, in art we respond with pleasure to the
maximally dense or “confused” intimation of ideas. Baumgarten’s theory had
great influence on Lessing and Mendelssohn, on Kant’s theory of aesthetic
ideas, and even on the aesthetics of Hegel.
Bayle: p., Grice on
longitudinal history of philosophy. philosopher who also pioneered in
disinterested, critical history. A Calvinist forced into exile in 1681, Bayle
nevertheless rejected the prevailing use of history as an instrument of
partisan or sectarian interest. He achieved fame and notoriety with his
multivolume Dictionnaire historique et critique 1695. For each subject covered,
Bayle provided a biographical sketch and a dispassionate examination of the
historical record and interpretive controversies. He also repeatedly probed the
troubled and troubling boundary between reason and faith philosophy and
religion. In the article “David,” the seemingly illicit conduct of God’s
purported agent yielded reflections on the morals of the elect and the autonomy
of ethics. In “Pyrrho,” Bayle argued that self-evidence, the most plausible
candidate for the criterion of truth, is discredited by Christianity because
some self-evident principles contradict essential Christian truths and are
therefore false. Finally, provoking Leibniz’s Theodicy, Bayle argued, most
relentlessly in “Manichaeans” and “Paulicians,” that there is no defensible
rational solution to the problem of evil. Bayle portrayed himself as a Christian
skeptic, but others have seen instead an ironic critic of religion a precursor of the Enlightenment. Bayle’s purely philosophical
reflections support his self-assessment, since he consistently maintains that
philosophy achieves not comprehension and contentment, but paradox and
puzzlement. In making this case he proved to be a superb critic of
philosophical systems. Some examples are “Zeno of Elea” on space, time, and motion; “Rorarius” on mind and body and animal mechanism; and
“Spinoza” on the perils of monism.
Bayle’s skepticism concerning philosophy significantly influenced Berkeley and
Hume. His other important works include Pensées diverses de la comète de 1683
1683; Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus Christ: contrain les
d’entrer 1686; and Réponse aux questions d’un provincial1704; and an early
learned periodical, the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1684 87.
Beattie, j. Common-sense
– H. P. Grice, “The so-called English common-sense,” Beattie: j. philosopher
and poet who, in criticizing Hume, widened the latter’s audience. A member of
the Scottish school of common sense philosophy along with Oswald and Reid,
Beattie’s major work was An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth 1771,
in which he criticizes Hume for fostering skepticism and infidelity. His
positive view was that the mind possesses a common sense, i.e., a power for
perceiving self-evident truths. Common sense is instinctive, unalterable by
education; truth is what common sense determines the mind to believe. Beattie
cited Hume and then claimed that his views led to moral and religious evils.
When Beattie’s Essay was tr. into G. 1772, Kant could read Hume’s discussions
of personal identity and causation. Since these topics were not covered in
Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Beattie provided Kant access to
two issues in the Treatises of Human Nature critical to the development of
transcendental idealism.
Beccaria, c. philosopher – Referred to by H. P. Grice in
his explorations on moral versus legal right, studied in Parma and Pavia and
taught political economy in Milan. Here, he met Pietro and Alessandro Verri and
other Milanese intellectuals attempting to promote political, economical, and
judiciary reforms. His major work, Dei delitti e delle pene “On Crimes and
Punishments,” 1764, denounces the contemporary methods in the administration of
justice and the treatment of criminals. Beccaria argues that the highest good
is the greatest happiness shared by the greatest number of people; hence, actions
against the state are the most serious crimes. Crimes against individuals and
property are less serious, and crimes endangering public harmony are the least
serious. The purposes of punishment are deterrence and the protection of
society. However, the employment of torture to obtain confessions is unjust and
useless: it results in acquittal of the strong and the ruthless and conviction
of the weak and the innocent. Beccaria also rejects the death penalty as a war
of the state against the individual. He claims that the duration and certainty
of the punishment, not its intensity, most strongly affect criminals. Beccaria
was influenced by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. His major work was tr.
into many languages and set guidelines for revising the criminal and judicial
systems of several European countries.
behaviourism: referred to
by H. P. Grice in his criticism of Gilbert Ryle. Ironically, Chomsky misjudged
Grice as a behaviourist, but Chomsky’s critique was demolished by P. Suppes,
broadly, the view that behavior is fundamental in understanding mental
phenomena. The term applies both to a scientific research Beauvoir, Simone de
behaviorism 76 76 program in psychology
and to a philosophical doctrine. Accordingly, we distinguish between scientific
psychological, methodological behaviorism and philosophical logical, analytical
behaviorism. Scientific behaviorism. First propounded by the psychologist J. B. Watson who introduced the
term in 3 and further developed especially by C. L. Hull, E. C. Tolman, and B.
F. Skinner, it departed from the introspectionist tradition by redefining the
proper task of psychology as the explanation and prediction of behavior where to explain behavior is to provide a
“functional analysis” of it, i.e., to specify the independent variables stimuli
of which the behavior response is lawfully a function. It insisted that all
variables including behavior as the
dependent variable must be specifiable
by the experimental procedures of the natural sciences: merely introspectible,
internal states of consciousness are thus excluded from the proper domain of
psychology. Although some behaviorists were prepared to admit internal
neurophysiological conditions among the variables “intervening variables”,
others of more radical bent e.g. Skinner insisted on environmental variables
alone, arguing that any relevant variations in the hypothetical inner states
would themselves in general be a function of variations in past and present
environmental conditions as, e.g., thirst is a function of water deprivation.
Although some basic responses are inherited reflexes, most are learned and
integrated into complex patterns by a process of conditioning. In classical
respondent conditioning, a response already under the control of a given
stimulus will be elicited by new stimuli if these are repeatedly paired with
the old stimulus: this is how we learn to respond to new situations. In operant
conditioning, a response that has repeatedly been followed by a reinforcing
stimulus reward will occur with greater frequency and will thus be “selected”
over other possible responses: this is how we learn new responses. Conditioned
responses can also be unlearned or “extinguished” by prolonged dissociation
from the old eliciting stimuli or by repeated withholding of the reinforcing
stimuli. To show how all human behavior, including “cognitive” or intelligent
behavior, can be “shaped” by such processes of selective reinforcement and
extinction of responses was the ultimate objective of scientific behaviorism. Grave
difficulties in the way of the realization of this objective led to
increasingly radical liberalization of the distinctive features of behaviorist
methodology and eventually to its displacement by more cognitively oriented
approaches e.g. those inspired by information theory and by Chomsky’s work in
linguistics. Philosophical behaviorism. A semantic thesis about the meaning of
mentalistic expressions, it received its most sanguine formulation by the
logical positivists particularly Carnap, Hempel, and Ayer, who asserted that
statements containing mentalistic expressions have the same meaning as, and are
thus translatable into, some set of publicly verifiable confirmable, testable
statements describing behavioral and bodily processes and dispositions including
verbalbehavioral dispositions. Because of the reductivist concerns expressed by
the logical positivist thesis of physicalism and the unity of science, logical
behaviorism as some positivists preferred to call it was a corollary of the
thesis that psychology is ultimately via a behavioristic analysis reducible to
physics, and that all of its statements, like those of physics, are expressible
in a strictly extensional language. Another influential formulation of
philosophical behaviorism is due to Ryle The Concept of Mind, 9, whose classic
critique of Cartesian dualism rests on the view that mental predicates are
often used to ascribe dispositions to behave in characteristic ways: but such
ascriptions, for Ryle, have the form of conditional, lawlike statements whose
function is not to report the occurrence of inner states, physical or
non-physical, of which behavior is the causal manifestation, but to license
inferences about how the agent would behave if certain conditions obtained. To
suppose that all declarative uses of mental language have a fact-stating or
-reporting role at all is, for Ryle, to make a series of “category
mistakes” of which both Descartes and
the logical positivists were equally guilty. Unlike the behaviorism of the
positivists, Ryle’s behaviorism required no physicalistic reduction of mental
language, and relied instead on ordinary language descriptions of human
behavior. A further version of philosophical behaviorism can be traced to
Vitters Philosophical Investigations, 3, who argues that the epistemic criteria
for the applicability of mentalistic terms cannot be private, introspectively
accessible inner states but must instead be intersubjectively observable
behavior. Unlike the previously mentioned versions of philosophical behaviorism,
Vitters’s behaviorism seems to be consistent with metaphysical mindbody
dualism, and is thus also non-reductivist. behaviorism behaviorism 77 77 Philosophical behaviorism underwent
severe criticism in the 0s and 0s, especially by Chisholm, Charles Taylor,
Putnam, and Fodor. Nonetheless it still lives on in more or less attenuated
forms in the work of such diverse philosophers as Quine, Dennett, Armstrong,
David Lewis, U. T. Place, and Dummett. Though current “functionalism” is often
referred to as the natural heir to behaviorism, functionalism especially of the
Armstrong-Lewis variety crucially differs from behaviorism in insisting that
mental predicates, while definable in terms of behavior and behavioral
dispositions, nonetheless designate inner causal states states that are apt to cause certain
characteristic behaviors. -- behavior
therapy, a spectrum of behavior modification techniques applied as therapy,
such as aversion therapy, extinction, modeling, redintegration, operant
conditioning, and desensitization. Unlike psychotherapy, which probes a
client’s recollected history, behavior therapy focuses on immediate behavior,
and aims to eliminate undesired behavior and produce desired behavior through
methods derived from the experimental analysis of behavior and from
reinforcement theory. A chronic problem with psychotherapy is that the client’s
past is filtered through limited and biased recollection. Behavior therapy is
more mechanical, creating systems of reinforcement and conditioning that may
work independently of the client’s long-term memory. Collectively,
behavior-therapeutic techniques compose a motley set. Some behavior therapists
adapt techniques from psychotherapy, as in covert desensitization, where
verbally induced mental images are employed as reinforcers. A persistent
problem with behavior therapy is that it may require repeated application.
Consider aversion therapy. It consists of pairing painful or punishing stimuli
with unwelcome behavior. In the absence, after therapy, of the painful
stimulus, the behavior may recur because association between behavior and
punishment is broken. Critics charge that behavior therapy deals with immediate
disturbances and overt behavior, to the neglect of underlying problems and
irrationalities. Behaviourism. Chomsky,
a. n. – cites H. P. Grice as “A. P. Grice” -- preeminent philosopher, and political activist who has
spent his professional career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chomsky’s best-known scientific achievement is the establishment of a rigorous
and philosophically compelling foundation for the scientific study of the
grammar of natural language. With the use of tools from the study of formal
languages, he gave a far more precise and explanatory account of natural
language grammar than had previously been given Syntactic Structures, 7. He has
since developed a number of highly influential frameworks for the study of
natural language grammar e.g., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 5; Lectures on
Government and Binding, 1; The Minimalist Program, 5. Though there are
significant differences in detail, there are also common themes that underlie
these approaches. Perhaps the most central is that there is an innate set of
linguistic principles shared by all humans, and the purpose of linguistic
inquiry is to describe the initial state of the language learner, and account
for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms. On Chomsky’s
conception of linguistics, languages are structures in the brains of individual
speakers, described at a certain level of abstraction within the theory. These
structures occur within the language faculty, a hypothesized module of the
human brain. Universal Grammar is the set of principles hard-wired into the
language faculty that determine the class of possible human languages. This
conception of linguistics involves several influential and controversial
theses. First, the hypothesis of a Universal Grammar entails the existence of
innate linguistic principles. Secondly, the hypothesis of a language faculty
entails that our linguistic abilities, at least so far as grammar is concerned,
are not a product of general reasoning processes. Finally, and perhaps most
controversially, since having one of these structures is an intrinsic property
of a speaker, properties of languages so conceived are determined solely by
states of the speaker. On this individualistic conception of language, there is
no room in scientific linguistics for the social entities determined by
linguistic communities that are languages according to previous anthropological
conceptions of the discipline. Many of Chomsky’s most significant contributions
to philosophy, such as his influential rejection of behaviorism “Review of
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language, 9, stem from his elaborations and
defenses of the above consequences cf. also Cartesian Linguistics, 6;
Reflections on Language, 5; Rules and Representations, 0; Knowledge of
Language, 6. Chomsky’s philosophical writings are characterized by an adherence
to methodological naturalism, the view that the mind should be studied like any
other natural phenomenon. In recent years, he has also argued that reference,
in the sense in which it is used in the philosophy of language, plays no role
in a scientific theory of language “Language and Nature,” Mind, 5.
Beneke: F. E, Kantian
commentator beloved by Grice -- philosopher who was influenced by Herbart and
English empiricism and criticized rationalistic metaphysics. He taught at
Berlin and published some eighteen books in philosophy. His major work was
Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft 1833. He wrote a critical study
of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and another on his moral theory; other works
included Psychologie Skizzen 1825, Metaphysik und Religionphilosophie 1840, and
Die neue Psychologie 1845. The “new psychology” developed by Beneke held that
the hypostatization of “faculties” led to a mythical psychology. He proposed a
method that would yield a natural science of the soul or, in effect, an
associationist psychology. Influenced by the British empiricists, he conceived
the elements of mental life as dynamic, active processes or impulses Trieben.
These “elementary faculties,” originally activated by stimuli, generate the
substantial unity of the nature of the psychic by their persistence as traces,
as well as by their reciprocal adjustment in relation to the continuous
production of new forces. In what Beneke called “pragmatic psychology,” the
psyche is a bundle of impulses, forces, and functions. Psychological theory
should rest on inductive analyses of the facts of inner perception. This, in
turn, is the foundation of the philosophical disciplines of logic, ethics,
metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. In this regard, Beneke held a
psychologism. He agreed with Herbart that psychology must be based on inner
experience and must eschew metaphysical speculation, but rejected Hebart’s
mathematical reductionism. Beneke sought to create a “pragmatic philosophy”
based on his psychology. In his last years he contributed to pedagogic
theory.
Benthamian semiotics --
j. Engish philosopher of ethics and political-legal theory. Born in London, he
entered Queen’s, Oxford, at age 12, and after graduation entered Lincoln’s Inn
to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1767 but never practiced. He spent
his life writing, advocating changes along utilitarian lines maximal happiness
for everyone affected of the whole legal system, especially the criminal law.
He was a strong influence in changes of the British law of evidence; in abolition
of laws permitting imprisonment for indebtedness; in the belief, basic Bentham,
Jeremy 79 79 reform of Parliamentary
representation; in the formation of a civil service recruited by examination;
and in much else. His major work published during his lifetime was An
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789. He became head
of a “radical” group including James Mill and J. S. Mill, and founded the
Westminster Review and , London where
his embalmed body still reposes in a closet. He was a friend of Catherine of
Russia and John Quincy Adams, and was made a citizen of France in 1792.
Pleasure, he said, is the only good, and pain the only evil: “else the words
good and evil have no meaning.” He gives a list of examples of what he means by
‘pleasure’: pleasures of taste, smell, or touch; of acquiring property; of
learning that one has the goodwill of others; of power; of a view of the
pleasures of those one cares about. Bentham was also a psychological hedonist:
pleasures and pains determine what we do. Take pain. Your state of mind may be
painful now at the time just prior to action because it includes the
expectation of the pain say of being burned; the present pain or the
expectation of later pain Bentham is
undecided which motivates action to prevent being burned. One of a person’s
pleasures, however, may be sympathetic enjoyment of the well-being of another.
So it seems one can be motivated by the prospect of the happiness of another.
His psychology here is not incompatible with altruistic motivation. Bentham’s
critical utilitarianism lies in his claim that any action, or measure of
government, ought to be taken if and only if it tends to augment the happiness
of everyone affected not at all a novel
principle, historically. When “thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and
wrong . . . have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.” Bentham evidently
did not mean this statement as a purely linguistic point about the actual
meaning of moral terms. Neither can this principle be proved; it is a first
principle from which all proofs proceed. What kind of reason, then, can he
offer in its support? At one point he says that the principle of utility, at
least unconsciously, governs the judgment of “every thinking man . . .
unavoidably.” But his chief answer is his critique of a widely held principle
that a person properly calls an act wrong if when informed of the facts he
disapproves of it. Bentham cites other language as coming to the same thesis:
talk of a “moral sense,” or common sense, or the understanding, or the law of
nature, or right reason, or the “fitness of things.” He says that this is no
principle at all, since a “principle is something that points out some external
consideration, as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of
approbation. . . .” The alleged principle also allows for widespread
disagreement about what is moral. So far, Bentham’s proposal has not told us
exactly how to determine whether an action or social measure is right or wrong.
Bentham suggests a hedonic calculus: in comparing two actions under
consideration, we count up the pleasures or pains each will probably
produce how intense, how long-lasting,
whether near or remote, including any derivative later pleasures or pains that
may be caused, and sum them up for all persons who will be affected. Evidently
these directions can provide at best only approximate results. We are in no
position to decide whether one pleasure for one hour is greater than another
pleasure for half an hour, even when they are both pleasures of one person who
can compare them. How much more when the pleasures are of different persons?
Still, we can make judgments important for the theory of punishment: whether a
blow in the face with no lasting damage for one person is more or less painful
than fifty lashes for his assailant! Bentham has been much criticized because
he thought that two pleasures are equal in value, if they are equally intense,
enduring, etc. As he said, “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as
good as poetry.” It has been thought e.g., by J. S. Mill that some pleasures,
especially intellectual ones, are higher and deserve to count more. But it may
be replied that the so-called higher pleasures are more enduring, are less
likely to be followed by satiety, and open up new horizons of enjoyment; and
when these facts are taken into account, it is not clear that there is need to
accord higher status to intellectual pleasures as such. A major goal of
Bentham’s was to apply to the criminal law his principle of maximizing the
general utility. Bentham thought there should be no punishment of an offense if
it is not injurious to someone. So how much punishment should there be? The
least amount the effect of which will result in a greater degree of happiness,
overall. The benefit of punishment is primarily deterrence, by attaching to the
thought of a given act the thought of the painful sanction which will deter both the past and
prospective lawbreakers. The punishment, then, must be severe enough to outweigh
the benefit of the offense to the agent, making allowance, by addition, for the
uncertainty that the punishment will actually occur. There are some harmful
acts, however, that it is Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, Jeremy 80 80 not beneficial to punish. One is an act
needful to produce a greater benefit, or avoid a serious evil, for the agent.
Others are those which a penal prohibition could not deter: when the law is
unpublished or the agent is insane or an infant. In some cases society need
feel no alarm about the future actions of the agent. Thus, an act is criminal
only if intentional, and the agent is excused if he acted on the basis of
beliefs such that, were they true, the act would have caused no harm, unless
these beliefs were culpable in the sense that they would not have been held by
a person of ordinary prudence or benevolence. The propriety of punishing an act
also depends somewhat on its motive, although no motive e.g., sexual desire,
curiosity, wanting money, love of reputation
is bad in itself. Yet the propriety of punishment is affected by the
presence of some motivations that enhance public security because it is
unlikely that they e.g., sympathetic
concern or concern for reputation will
lead to bad intentional acts. When a given motive leads to a bad intention, it
is usually because of the weakness of motives like sympathy, concern for
avoiding punishment, or respect for law. In general, the sanction of moral
criticism should take lines roughly similar to those of the ideal law. But
there are some forms of behavior, e.g., imprudence or fornication, which the
law is hardly suited to punish, that can be sanctioned by morality. The
business of the moral philosopher is censorial: to say what the law, or
morality, ought to be. To say what is the law is a different matter: what it is
is the commands of the sovereign, defined as one whom the public, in general,
habitually obeys. As consisting of commands, it is imperatival. The imperatives
may be addressed to the public, as in “Let no one steal,” or to judges: “Let a
judge sentence anyone who steals to be hanged.” It may be thought that there is
a third part, an explanation, say, of what is a person’s property; but this can
be absorbed in the imperatival part, since the designations of property are just
imperatives about who is to be free to do what. Why should anyone obey the
actual laws? Bentham’s answer is that one should do so if and only if it
promises to maximize the general happiness. He eschews contract theories of
political obligation: individuals now alive never contracted, and so how are
they bound? He also opposes appeal to natural rights. If what are often
mentioned as natural rights were taken seriously, no government could survive:
it could not tax, require military service, etc. Nor does he accept appeal to
“natural law,” as if, once some law is shown to be immoral, it can be said to
be not really law. That would be absurd.
Berdyaev: N., philosopher
studied by H. P. Grice for his ‘ontological Marxism,’ he began as a “Kantian
Marxist” in epistemology, ethical theory, and philosophy of history, but soon
turned away from Marxism although he continued to accept Marx’s critique of
capitalism toward a theistic philosophy of existence stressing the values of
creativity and “meonic” freedom a freedom
allegedly prior to all being, including that of God. In exile after 2, Berdyaev
appears to have been the first to grasp clearly in the early 0s that the
Marxist view of historical time involves a morally unacceptable devaluing and
instrumentalizing of the historical present including living persons for the
sake of the remote future end of a perfected communist society. Berdyaev
rejects the Marxist position on both Christian and Kantian grounds, as a
violation of the intrinsic value of human persons. He sees the historical order
as marked by inescapable tragedy, and welcomes the “end of history” as an
“overcoming” of objective historical time by subjective “existential” time with
its free, unobjectified creativity. For Berdyaev the “world of objects” physical things, laws of nature, social
institutions, and human roles and relationships
is a pervasive threat to “free spiritual creativity.” Yet such
creativity appears to be subject to inevitable frustration, since its outward
embodiments are always “partial and fragmentary” and no “outward action” can
escape ultimate “tragic failure.” Russian Orthodox traditionalists condemned
Berdyaev for claiming that all creation is a “divine-human process” and for
denying God’s omnipotence, but such Western process theologians as Hartshorne
find Berdyaev’s position highly congenial.
bergmann, gustav:
infamous for calling H. P. Grice “one of them English futilitarians” --
philosopher, the youngest member of the Vienna Circle. Born in Vienna, he
received his doctorate in mathematics in 8 from the of Vienna. Originally influenced by logical
positivism, he became a phenomenalist who also posited mental acts irreducible
to sense-data see his The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, 4. Although he
eventually rejected phenomenalism, his ontology of material objects remained
structurally phenomenalistic. Bergmann’s world is one of momentary bare i.e.
natureless particulars exemplifying phenomenally simple Berdyaev, Nicolas
Bergmann, Gustav 81 81 universals,
relational as well as non-relational. Some of these universals are non-mental,
such as color properties and spatial relations, while others, such as the
“intentional characters” in virtue of which some particulars mental acts intend
or represent the facts that are their “objects,” are mental. Bergmann insisted
that the world is independent of both our experience of it and our thought and
discourse about it: he claimed that the connection of exemplification and even
the propositional connectives and quantifiers are mind-independent. See Meaning
and Existence, 9; Logic and Reality, 4; and Realism: A Critique of Brentano and
Meinong, 7. Such extreme realism produced many criticisms of his philosophy
that are only finally addressed in Bergmann’s recently, and posthumously, published
book, New Foundations of Ontology 2, in which he concedes that his atomistic
approach to ontology has inevitable limitations and proposes a way of squaring
this insight with his thoroughgoing realism.
bergson: h. l.: cited by
H. P. Grice in “Personal identity,” philosopher, the most influential of the
first half of the twentieth century. Born in Paris and educated at the
prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he began his teaching career at
Clermont-Ferrand in 4 and was called in 0 to the Collège de France, where his
lectures enjoyed unparalleled success until his retirement in 1. Ideally placed
in la belle époque of prewar Paris, his ideas influenced a broad spectrum of
artistic, literary, social, and political movements. In 8 he received the
Légion d’honneur and was admitted into the
Academy. From 2 through 5 he participated in the League of Nations,
presiding over the creation of what was later to become UNESCO. Forced by
crippling arthritis into virtual seclusion during his later years, Bergson was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 8. Initially a disciple of Spencer,
Bergson broke with him after a careful examination of Spencer’s concept of time
and mechanistic positivism. Following a deeply entrenched tradition in Western
thought, Spencer treats time on an analogy with space as a series of discrete
numerical units: instants, seconds, minutes. When confronted with experience,
however especially with that of our own
psychological states such concepts are,
Bergson concludes, patently inadequate. Real duration, unlike clock time, is
qualitative, dynamic, irreversible. It cannot be “spatialized” without being
deformed. It gives rise in us, moreover, to free acts, which, being qualitative
and spontaneous, cannot be predicted. Bergson’s dramatic contrast of real
duration and geometrical space, first developed in Time and Free Will 0, was
followed in 6 by the mind body theory of Matter and Memory. He argues here that
the brain is not a locale for thought but a motor organ that, receiving stimuli
from its environment, may respond with adaptive behavior. To his psychological
and metaphysical distinction between duration and space Bergson adds, in An
Introduction to Metaphysics 3, an important epistemological distinction between
intuition and analysis. Intuition probes the flow of duration in its
concreteness; analysis breaks up duration into static, fragmentary concepts. In
Creative Evolution 7, his best-known work, Bergson argues against both Lamarck
and Darwin, urging that biological evolution is impelled by a vital impetus or
élan vital that drives life to overcome the downward entropic drift of matter.
Biological organisms, unlike dice, must compete and survive as they undergo
permutations. Hence the unresolved dilemma of Darwinism. Either mutations occur
one or a few at a time in which case how can they be “saved up” to constitute
new organs? or they occur all at once in which case one has a “miracle”.
Bergson’s vitalism, popular in literary circles, was not accepted by many
scientists or philosophers. His most general contention, however that biological evolution is not consistent
with or even well served by a mechanistic philosophy was broadly appreciated and to many seemed
convincing. This aspect of Bergson’s writings influenced thinkers as diverse as
Lloyd Morgan, Alexis Carrel, Sewall Wright, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and A.
N. Whitehead. The contrasts in terms of which Bergson developed his thought
duration/space, intuition/ analysis, life/entropy are replaced in The Two
Sources of Morality and Religion 2 by a new duality, that of the “open” and the
“closed.” The Judeo-Christian tradition, he contends, if it has embraced in its
history both the open society and the closed society, exhibits in its great
saints and mystics a profound opening out of the human spirit toward all
humanity. Bergson’s distinction between the open and the closed society was
popularized by Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies. While it
has attracted serious criticism, Bergson’s philosophy has also significantly
affected subsequent thinkers. Novelists as diverse as Bergson, Henri Louis
Bergson, Henri Louis 82 82 Nikos
Kazantzakis, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner; poets as unlike as Charles
Péguy, Robert Frost, and Antonio Machado; and psychologists as dissimilar as
Pierre Janet and Jean Piaget were to profit significantly from his explorations
of duration, conceptualization, and memory. Both existentialism and process philosophy bear the imprint of his
thought.
Berkeley: g., -- H. P.
Grice thought he had found in Berkeley a good test for the Austinian code – If
something sounds harsh to Berkeley it sounds harsh. Irish philosopher and
bishop in the Anglican Church of Ireland, one of the three great British
empiricists along with Locke and Hume. He developed novel and influential views
on the visual perception of distance and size, and an idealist metaphysical
system that he defended partly on the seemingly paradoxical ground that it was
the best defense of common sense and safeguard against skepticism. Berkeley
studied at Trinity , Dublin, from which he graduated at nineteen. He was
elected to a fellowship at Trinity in 1707, and did the bulk of his
philosophical writing between that year and 1713. He was made dean of Derry in
1724, following extensive traveling on the Continent; he spent the years 172832
in Rhode Island, waiting in vain for promised Crown funds to establish a in Bermuda. He was made bishop of Cloyne,
Ireland, in 1734, and he remained there as a cleric for nearly the remainder of
his life. Berkeley’s first major publication, the Essay Towards a New Theory of
Vision 1709, is principally a work in the psychology of vision, though it has
important philosophical presuppositions and implications. Berkeley’s theory of
vision became something like the received view on the topic for nearly two
hundred years and is a landmark work in the history of psychology. The work is
devoted to three connected matters: how do we see, or visually estimate, the
distances of objects from ourselves, the situation or place at which objects
are located, and the magnitude of such objects? Earlier views, such as those of
Descartes, Malebranche, and Molyneux, are rejected on the ground that their
answers to the above questions allow that a person can see the distance of an
object without having first learned to correlate visual and other cues. This
was supposedly done by a kind of natural geometry, a computation of the
distance by determining the altitude of a triangle formed by light rays from
the object and the line extending from one retina to the other. On the
contrary, Berkeley holds that it is clear that seeing distance is something one
learns to do through trial and error, mainly by correlating cues that suggest
distance: the distinctness or confusion of the visual appearance; the feelings
received when the eyes turn; and the sensations attending the straining of the
eyes. None of these bears any necessary connection to distance. Berkeley infers
from this account that a person born blind and later given sight would not be
able to tell by sight alone the distances objects were from her, nor tell the
difference between a sphere and a cube. He also argues that in visually
estimating distance, one is really estimating which tangible ideas one would
likely experience if one were to take steps to approach the object. Not that
these tangible ideas are themselves necessarily connected to the visual
appearances. Instead, Berkeley holds that tangible and visual ideas are
entirely heterogeneous, i.e., they are numerically and specifically distinct.
The latter is a philosophical consequence of Berkeley’s theory of vision, which
is sharply at odds with a central doctrine of Locke’s Essay, namely, that some
ideas are common to both sight and touch. Locke’s doctrines also receive a great
deal of attention in the Principles of Human Knowledge 1710. Here Berkeley
considers the doctrine of abstract general ideas, which he finds in Book III of
Locke’s Essay. He argues against such ideas partly on the ground that we cannot
engage in the process of abstraction, partly on the ground that some abstract
ideas are impossible objects, and also on the ground that such ideas are not
needed for either language learning or language use. These arguments are of
fundamental importance for Berkeley, since he thinks that the doctrine of
abstract ideas helps to support metaphysical realism, absolute space, absolute
motion, and absolute time Principles, 5, 100, 11011, as well as the view that
some ideas are common to sight and touch New Theory, 123. All of these
doctrines Berkeley holds to be mistaken, and the first is in direct conflict
with his idealism. Hence, it is important for him to undermine any support
these doctrines might receive from the abstract ideas thesis. Berkeleyan
idealism is the view that the only existing entities are finite and infinite
perceivers each of which is a spirit or mental substance, and entities that are
perceived. Such a thesis implies that ordinary physical objects exist if and
only if they are perceived, something Berkeley encapsulates in the esse est
percipi principle: for all senBerkeley, George Berkeley, George 83 83 sible objects, i.e., objects capable of
being perceived, their being is to be perceived. He gives essentially two arguments
for this thesis. First, he holds that every physical object is just a
collection of sensible qualities, and that every sensible quality is an idea.
So, physical objects are just collections of sensible ideas. No idea can exist
unperceived, something everyone in the period would have granted. Hence, no
physical object can exist unperceived. The second argument is the socalled
master argument of Principles 2224. There Berkeley argues that one cannot
conceive a sensible object existing unperceived, because if one attempts to do
this one must thereby conceive that very object. He concludes from this that no
such object can exist “without the mind,” that is, wholly unperceived. Many of
Berkeley’s opponents would have held instead that a physical object is best
analyzed as a material substratum, in which some sensible qualities inhere. So
Berkeley spends some effort arguing against material substrata or what he
sometimes calls matter. His principal argument is that a sensible quality
cannot inhere in matter, because a sensible quality is an idea, and surely an
idea cannot exist except in a mind. This argument would be decisive if it were
true that each sensible quality is an idea. Unfortunately, Berkeley gives no
argument whatever for this contention in the Principles, and for that reason
Berkeleyan idealism is not there well founded. Nor does the master argument
fare much better, for there Berkeley seems to require a premise asserting that
if an object is conceived, then that object is perceived. Yet such a premise is
highly dubious. Probably Berkeley realized that his case for idealism had not
been successful, and certainly he was stung by the poor reception of the
Principles. His next book, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous 1713, is
aimed at rectifying these matters. There he argues at length for the thesis
that each sensible quality is an idea. The master argument is repeated, but it
is unnecessary if every sensible quality is an idea. In the Dialogues Berkeley
is also much concerned to combat skepticism and defend common sense. He argues
that representative realism as held by Locke leads to skepticism regarding the
external world and this, Berkeley thinks, helps to support atheism and free
thinking in religion. He also argues, more directly, that representative
realism is false. Such a thesis incorporates the claim that somesensible ideas
represent real qualities in objects, the so-called primary qualities. But
Berkeley argues that a sensible idea can be like nothing but another idea, and
so ideas cannot represent qualities in objects. In this way, Berkeley
eliminates one main support of skepticism, and to that extent helps to support
the commonsensical idea that we gain knowledge of the existence and nature of
ordinary physical objects by means of perception. Berkeley’s positive views in
epistemology are usually interpreted as a version of foundationalism. That is,
he is generally thought to have defended the view that beliefs about currently
perceived ideas are basic beliefs, beliefs that are immediately and
non-inferentially justified or that count as pieces of immediate knowledge, and
that all other justified beliefs in contingent propositions are justified by
being somehow based upon the basic beliefs. Indeed, such a foundationalist
doctrine is often taken to help define empiricism, held in common by Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume. But whatever the merits of such a view as an interpretation
of Locke or Hume, it is not Berkeley’s theory. This is because he allows that
perceivers often have immediate and noninferential justified beliefs, and knowledge,
about physical objects. Hence, Berkeley accepts a version of foundationalism
that allows for basic beliefs quite different from just beliefs about one’s
currently perceived ideas. Indeed, he goes so far as to maintain that such
physical object beliefs are often certain, something neither Locke nor Hume
would accept. In arguing against the existence of matter, Berkeley also
maintains that we literally have no coherent concept of such stuff because we
cannot have any sensible idea of it. Parity of reasoning would seem to dictate
that Berkeley should reject mental substance as well, thereby threatening his
idealism from another quarter. Berkeley is sensitive to this line of reasoning,
and replies that while we have no idea of the self, we do have some notion of
the self, that is, some lessthan-complete concept. He argues that a person
gains some immediate knowledge of the existence and nature of herself in a
reflex act; that is, when she is perceiving something she is also conscious
that something is engaging in this perception, and this is sufficient for
knowledge of that perceiving entity. To complement his idealism, Berkeley
worked out a version of scientific instrumentalism, both in the Principles and
in a later Latin work, De Motu 1721, a doctrine that anticipates the views of
Mach. In the Dialogues he tries to show how his idealism is consistent with the
biblical account of the creation, and consistent as well with common sense.
Berkeley, George Berkeley, George 84 84
Three later works of Berkeley’s gained him an enormous amount of attention.
Alciphron 1734 was written while Berkeley was in Rhode Island, and is a
philosophical defense of Christian doctrine. It also contains some additional
comments on perception, supplementing earlier work on that topic. The Analyst
1734 contains trenchant criticism of the method of fluxions in differential
calculus, and it set off a flurry of pamphlet replies to Berkeley’s criticisms,
to which Berkeley responded in his A Defense of Free Thinking in Mathematics. Siris
1744 contains a detailed account of the medicinal values of tar-water, water
boiled with the bark of certain trees. This book also contains a defense of a
sort of corpuscularian philosophy that seems to be at odds with the idealism
elaborated in the earlier works for which Berkeley is now famous. In the years
170708, the youthful Berkeley kept a series of notebooks in which he worked out
his ideas in philosophy and mathematics. These books, now known as the
Philosophical Commentaries, provide the student of Berkeley with the rare
opportunity to see a great philosopher’s thought in development. H. P. Grice was a member of the Oxford
Berkeley Society. The Bishop and The Cricketer Agree: It Does Sound Harsh! When "The Times" published a note on Grice, anonymous,
as obituaries should be, but some suspect P. F. S.) it went, "H. P. Grice,
professional philosopher and amateur cricketer."Surely P. F. S. may have
been involved, since some always preferred the commuted conjunction: "H.
P. Grice, cricketer -- and philosopher."At one time, to be a
'professional' cricketer was a no-no.At one time, to be a 'professional'
philosopher was a no-no -- witness Socrates!But you never know.It's TOTALLY
different when it comes to BISHOPS!Grice loved that phrase, "sounds harsh."
"The Austinian in the Bishop."Bishop Berkeley and H. P. Grice -- Two
Ways of Representing: Likeness Or Not.Bishop Berkeley’s views on
representation, broadly construed, relate to H. P. Grice’s views on
representation, broadly construed.In essay, “Berkeley: An
Interpretation,” Kenneth Winkler argues that Bishop Berkeley sees
representation as working in one of two ways.Representation works either in the
same way that an expression signifies an idea (Grice’s non-iconic) or by means
of resemblance (Grice’s iconic).But we need to explore that distinction.This
all relates to Bishop Berkeley’s and Grice’s views on language, their theory of
resemblance, and the role that representation plays in their philosophiesmore
widely.It is interesting to consider, of course, Berkeley’s predecessors (e.g.,
Descartes, Locke, that Grice revered in the choice of the title of his
compilation of essays, “Studies in THE WAY OF WORDS,” or WoW for short), Bishop
Berkeley’s contemporaries (e.g., William King, Anthony Collins), and subsequent
thinkers (e.g. Hume, Shepherd, and of course Grice) accepted this distinction –
and their connection to the development of both Bishoop Berkeley’s and Grice’s
thought.Some philosophers connect Bishop Berkeley and Grice to non-canonical
figures or those which defend novel interpretations of Berkeley’s or Grice’s
own thought.Which ARE Bishop Berkeley’s and Grice’s view on the connection
between representation and resemblance?Is Winkler right to attribute two types
of representation to Berkeley? Could Winkler’s observations have a bearing on
Grice?Do Bishop Berkeley’s and Grice’s contemporaries accept the distinction
between signification and representation? (Grice’s favourite example: “A
cricket team may do for England what England cannot do: engage in a game of
cricket.”)Grice explores this in the “Valediction” to his “Way of Words”:“We might we well advised,” Grice says, “to consider more
closely the nature of representation and its connection with meaning, and to do
so in the light of three perhaps not implausible suppositions.”(1) that
representation by means of verbal formulation is an artificial and noniconic
mode of representation.(2) that to replace an iconic system by a noniconic
system will be to introduce a new and more powerful extension of the original
system, one which can do everything the former system can do and more
besides.(3) that every artificial or noniconic system is based on an
antecedent NATURAL iconic system.Descriptive representation must look back to
and in part do the work of prior iconic representation.That work will consist
in the representation of objects and situations in the world in something like
the way in which a team of North Oxfordshire cricketers may represent, say
North Oxfordshire. The cricketers do on behalf of North Oxfordshire
something that North Oxfordshire cannot do for itself, namely engage in a game
of cricket.“Similarly, our representations (initially iconic but also
noniconic) enable objects and situations in the world to do something which
objects and situations cannot do for themselves, namely govern our actions and
behaviour.”Etc.Grice loved to quote the Bishop on this or that ‘sounding
harsh.’ “Surely, the Bishop would agree with me that it sounds harsh to say
that Smith’s brain’s s
being in such and such a state at noon is a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence."We hope neither will agree THIS sounds harsh, either, as
North-Oxfordshire engaging in a game of cricket does not really, either.
Berlin: “If Berlin and I have something in common is a tutor!” – H. P.
Grice. Berlin:
I. Russian-born philosopher and historian of ideas. He is widely acclaimed for
his doctrine of radical objective pluralism; his writings on liberty; his
modification, refinement, and defense of traditional liberalism against the
totalitarian doctrines of the twentieth century not least Marxism-Leninism; and
his brilliant and illuminating studies in the history of ideas from Machiavelli
and Vico to Marx and Sorel. A founding father with Austin, Ayer, and others of
Oxford philosophy in the 0s, he published several influential papers in its
general spirit, but, without abandoning its empirical approach, he came
increasingly to dissent from what seemed to him its unduly barren, doctrinaire,
and truthdenying tendencies. From the 0s onward he broke away to devote himself
principally to social and political philosophy and to the study of general
ideas. His two most important contributions in social and political theory,
brought together with two other valuable essays in Four Essays on Liberty 9,
are “Historical Inevitability” 4 and his 8 inaugural lecture as Chichele
Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, “Two Concepts of Liberty.”
The first is a bold and decisive attack on historical determinism and moral
relativism and subjectivism and a ringing endorsement of the role of free will
and responsibility in human history. The second contains Berlin’s enormously
influential attempt to distinguish clearly between “negative” and “positive”
liberty. Negative liberty, foreshadowed by such thinkers as J. S. Mill,
Constant, and above all Herzen, consists in making minimal assumptions about
the ultimate nature and needs of the subject, in ensuring a minimum of external
interference by authority of any provenance, and in leaving open as large a
field for free individual choice as is consonant with a minimum of social
organization and order. Positive liberty, associated with monist and
voluntarist thinkers of all kinds, not least Hegel, the G. Idealists, and their
historical progeny, begins with the notion of self-mastery and proceeds to make
dogmatic and far-reaching metaphysical assumptions about the essence of the
subject. It then deduces from these the proper paths to freedom, and, finally,
seeks to drive flesh-and-blood individuals down these preordained paths,
whether they wish it or not, within the framework of a tight-knit centralized
state under the irrefragable rule of rational experts, thus perverting what
begins as a legitimate human ideal, i.e. positive self-direction and
self-mastery, into a tyranny. “Two Concepts of Liberty” also sets out to
disentangle liberty in either of these senses from other ends, such as the
craving for recognition, the need to belong, or human solidarity, fraternity,
or equality. Berlin’s work in the history of ideas is of a piece with his other
writings. Vico and Herder 6 presents the emergence of that historicism and
pluralism which shook the two-thousand-yearold monist rationalist faith in a
unified body of truth regarding all questions of fact and principle in all
fields of human knowledge. From this profound intellectual overturn Berlin
traces in subsequent volumes of essays, such as Against the Current 9, The
Crooked Timber of Humanity 0, and The Sense of Reality 6, the growth of some of
the principal intellectual movements that mark our era, among them nationalism,
fascism, relativism, subjectivism, nihilism, voluntarism, and existentialism.
He also presents with persuasiveness and clarity that peculiar objective
pluralism which he identified and made his own. There is an irreducible
plurality of objective human values, many of which are incompatible with one
another; hence the ineluctable need for absolute choices by individuals and
groups, a need that confers supreme value upon, and forms one of the major
justifications of, his conception of negative liberty; Berlin, Isaiah Berlin,
Isaiah 85 85 hence, too, his insistence
that utopia, namely a world where all valid human ends and objective values are
simultaneously realized in an ultimate synthesis, is a conceptual
impossibility. While not himself founder of any definable school or movement,
Berlin’s influence as a philosopher and as a human being has been immense, not
least on a variety of distinguished thinkers such as Stuart Hampshire, Charles
Taylor, Bernard Williams, Richard Wollheim, Gerry Cohen, Steven Lukes, David
Pears, and many others. His general intellectual and moral impact on the life
of the twentieth century as writer, diplomat, patron of music and the arts, international
academic elder statesman, loved and trusted friend to the great and the humble,
and dazzling lecturer, conversationalist, and animateur des idées, will furnish
inexhaustible material to future historians.
Bernardus chartrensis. of
Chartres fl. 111426, philosopher. He was
first a teacher 111419 and later chancellor 116 of the cathedral school at
Chartres, which was then an active center of learning in the liberal arts and
philosophy. Bernard himself was renowned as a grammarian, i.e., as an expositor
of difficult texts, and as a teacher of Plato. None of his works has survived
whole, and only three fragments are preserved in works by others. He is now
best known for an image recorded both by his student, John of Salisbury, and by
William of Conches. In Bernard’s image, he and all his medieval contemporaries
were in relation to the ancient authors like “dwarfs sitting on the shoulders
of giants.” John of Salisbury takes the image to mean both that the medievals
could see more and further than the ancients, and that they could do so only
because they had been lifted up by such powerful predecessors.
Bernardus of Clairvaux,
Saint – Grice’s personal saint, seeing that St. John’s was originally a
Cistercian monastery almost burned by Henry VIII. Cistercian monk, mystic, and
religious leader. He is most noted for his doctrine of Christian humility and
his depiction of the mystical experience, which exerted considerable influence
on later Christian mystics. Educated in France, he entered the monastery at Cîteaux
in 1112, and three years later founded a daughter monastery at Clairvaux.
According to Bernard, honest self-knowledge should reveal the extent to which
we fail to be what we should be in the eyes of God. That selfknowledge should
lead us to curb our pride and so become more humble. Humility is necessary for
spiritual purification, which in turn is necessary for contemplation of God,
the highest form of which is union with God. Consistent with orthodox Christian
doctrine, Bernard maintains that mystical union does not entail identity. One
does not become God; rather, one’s will and God’s will come into complete
conformity.
Bernoulli’s theorem –
studied by Grice in his “Probability, Desirability, Credibility” -- also called
the weak law of large numbers, the principle that if a series of trials is
repeated n times where a there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1, on each
trial, b the probability p of 0 is the same on each trial, and c this
probability is independent of the outcome of other trials, then, for arbitrary
positive e, as the number n of trials is increased, the probability that the
absolute value Kr/n pK of the difference
between the relative frequency r/n of 0’s in the n trials and p is less than e
approaches 1. The first proof of this theorem was given by Jakob Bernoulli in
Part IV of his posthumously published Ars Conjectandi of 1713. Simplifications
were later constructed and his result has been generalized in a series of “weak
laws of large numbers.” Although Bernoulli’s theorem derives a conclusion about
the probability of the relative frequency r/n of 0’s for large n of trials
given the value of p, in Ars Conjectandi and correspondence with Leibniz,
Bernoulli thought it could be used to reason from information about r/n to the
value of p when the latter is unknown. Speculation persists as to whether
Bernoulli anticipated the inverse inference of Bayes, the confidence interval
estimation of Peirce, J. Neyman, and E. S. Pearson, or the fiducial argument of
R. A. Fisher.
Bertrand’s box paradox:
studied by Grice in his “Probability, Desirability, Credibility” -- a puzzle
concerning conditional probability. Imagine three boxes with two drawers
apiece. Each drawer of the first box contains a gold medal. Each drawer of the
second contains a silver medal. One drawer of the third contains a gold medal,
and the other a silver medal. At random, a box is selected and one of its
drawers is opened. If a gold medal appears, what is the probability that the
third box was selected? The probability seems to be ½, because the box is
either the first or the third, and they seem equally probable. But a gold medal
is less probable from the third box than from the first, Bernard of Chartres
Bertrand’s box paradox 86 86 so the
third box is actually less probable than the first. By Bayes’s theorem its
probability is 1 /3. Joseph Bertrand, a
mathematician, published the paradox in Calcul des probabilités Calculus
of Probabilities, 9.
Bertrand’s paradox, an
inconsistency arising from the classical definition of an event’s probability
as the number of favorable cases divided by the number of possible cases. Given
a circle, a chord is selected at random. What is the probability that the chord
is longer than a side of an equilateral triangle inscribed in the circle? The
event has these characterizations: 1 the apex angle of an isosceles triangle
inscribed in the circle and having the chord as a leg is less than 60°, 2 the
chord intersects the diameter perpendicular to it less than ½ a radius from the
circle’s center, and 3 the chord’s midpoint lies within a circle concentric
with the original and of ¼ its area. The definition thus suggests that the
event’s probability is 1 /3, 1 /2, and also ¼. Joseph Bertrand, a mathematician, published the paradox in
Calcul des probabilités 9.
Beth’s definability
theorem: Grice loved an emplicit definition. a theorem for first-order logic. A
theory defines a term t implicitly if and only if an explicit definition of the
term, on the basis of the other primitive concepts, is entailed by the theory.
A theory defines a term implicitly if any two models of the theory with the
same domain and the same extension for the other primitive terms are identical,
i.e., also have the same extension for the term. An explicit definition of a term
is a sentence that states necessary and sufficient conditions for the term’s
applicability. Beth’s theorem was implicit in a method to show independence of
a term that was first used by the
logician Alessandro Padoa. Padoa suggested, in 0, that independence of a
primitive algebraic term from the other terms occurring in a set of axioms can
be established by two true interpretations of the axioms that differ only in
the interpretation of the term whose independence has to be proven. He claimed,
without proof, that the existence of two such models is not only sufficient
for, but also implied by, independence. Tarski first gave a proof of Beth’s
theorem in 6 for the logic of the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and
Russell, but the result was only obtained for first-order logic in 3 by E.
Beth. In modern expositions Beth’s theorem is a direct implication of Craig’s
interpolation theorem. In a variation on Padoa’s method, Karel de Bouvère
described in 9 a one-model method to show indefinability: if the set of logical
consequences of a theory formulated in terms of the remaining vocabulary cannot
be extended to a model of the full theory, a term is not explicitly definable
in terms of the remaining vocabulary. In the philosophy of science literature
this is called a failure of Ramsey-eliminability of the term.
biconditional: cited by
Strawson after ‘if,’ but dismissed by Grice in
his list of ‘formal devices’ as ‘too obvious.’ -- the logical operator, usually written with a
triple-bar sign S or a doubleheaded arrow Q, used to indicate that two
propositions have the same truth-value: that either both are true or else both
are false. The term also designates a proposition having this sign, or a
natural language expression of it, as its main connective; e.g., P if and only
if Q. The truth table for the biconditional is The biconditional is so called
because its application is logically equivalent to the conjunction
‘P-conditional-Q-and-Q-conditional-P’.
According to Pears, and rightly, too, ‘if’ conversationally implicates
‘iff.’
black box – used by Grice
in his method in philosophical psychology -- a hypothetical unit specified only
by functional role, in order to explain some effect or behavior. The term may
refer to a single entity with an unknown structure, or unknown internal
organization, which realizes some known function, or to any one of a system of
such entities, whose organization and functions are inferred from the behavior
of an organism or entity of which they are constituents. Within behaviorism and
classical learning theory, the basic functions were taken to be generalized
mechanisms governing the relationship of stimulus to response, including
reinforcement, inhibition, extinction, and arousal. The organism was treated as
a black box realizing these functions. Within cybernetics, though there are no
simple inputoutput rules describing the organism, there is an emphasis on
functional organization and feedback in controlling behavior. The components
within a cybernetic system are treated as black boxes. In both cases, the
details of underlying structure, mechanism, and dynamics are either unknown or
regarded as unimportant.
Blackburn’s skull. Blackburn's
"one-off predicament" of communicating without a shared language
illustrates how Grice's theory can be applied to iconic signals such as the
drawing of a skull to wam of danger. See his Spreading the Word. III. 112.
Blindsight – studied by
Grice and Warnock, “Visa.” -- a residual visual capacity resulting from lesions
in certain areas of the brain the striate cortex, area 17. Under routine
clinical testing, persons suffering such lesions appear to be densely blind in
particular regions of the visual field. Researchers have long recognized that,
in primates, comparable lesions do not result in similar deficits. It has
seemed unlikely that this disparity could be due to differences in brain
function, however. And, indeed, when human subjects are tested in the way
non-human subjects are tested, the disparity vanishes. Although subjects report
that they can detect nothing in the blind field, when required to “guess” at
properties of items situated there, they perform remarkably well. They seem to
“know” the contents of the blind field while remaining unaware that they know,
often expressing astonishment on being told the results of testing in the blind
field.
Bloch: e., philosopher
studied by H. P. Grice for his “ontological marxism.” influenced by Marxism,
his views went beyond Marxism as he matured. He fled G.y in the 0s, but
returned after World War II to a professorship in East G.y, where his
increasingly unorthodox ideas were eventually censured by the Communist
authorities, forcing a move to West G.y in the 0s. His major work, The
Principle of Hope 459, is influenced by G. idealism, Jewish mysticism, Neoplatonism,
utopianism, and numerous other sources besides Marxism. Humans are essentially
unfinished, moved by a cosmic impulse, “hope,” a tendency in them to strive for
the as-yet-unrealized, which manifests itself as utopia, or vision of future
possibilities. Despite his atheism, Bloch wished to retrieve the sense of
self-transcending that he saw in the religious and mythical traditions of
humankind. His ideas have consequently influenced theology as well as
philosophy, e.g. the “theology of hope” of Jurgen Moltmann.
Blondel: m. cf.
Hampshire, “Thought and action,” philosopher who discovered the deist
background of human action. In his main work, Action 3, 2d rev. ed. 0, Blondel
held that action is part of the very nature of human beings and as such becomes
an object of philosophy; through philosophy, action should find its meaning,
i.e. realize itself rationally. An appropriate phenomenology of action through
phenomenological description uncovers the phenomenal level of action but points
beyond it. Such a supraphenomenal sense of action provides it a metaphysical
status. This phenomenology of action rests on an immanent dialectics of action:
a gap between the aim of the action and its realization. This gap, while
dissatisfying to the actor, also drives him toward new activities. The only
immanent solution of this dialectics and its consequences is a transcendent
one. We have to realize that we, like other humans, cannot grasp our own
activities and must accept our limitations and our finitude as well as the
insufficiency of our philosophy, which is now understood as a philosophy of
insufficiency and points toward the existence of the supernatural element in
every human act, namely God. Human activity is the outcome of divine grace.
Through action bit Blondel, Maurice 90
90 one touches the existence of God, something not possible by logical
argumentation. In the later phase of his development Blondel deserted his early
“anti-intellectualism” and stressed the close relation between thought and
action, now understood as inseparable and mutually interrelated. He came to see
philosophy as a rational instrument of understanding one’s actions as well as
one’s insufficiency.
Bodin: j., Discussed by
H. P. Grice in his exploration on legal versus moral right. -- philosopher
whose philosophy centers on the concept of sovereignty. His Six livres de la
république 1577 defines a state as constituted by common public interests,
families, and the sovereign. The sovereign is the lawgiver, who stands beyond
the absolute rights he possesses; he must, however, follow the law of God,
natural law, and the constitution. The ideal state was for Bodin a monarchy
that uses aristocratic and democratic structures of government for the sake of
the common good. In order to achieve a broader empirical picture of politics
Bodin used historical comparisons. This is methodologically reflected in his
Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem 1566. Bodin was clearly a theorist
of absolutism. As a member of the Politique group he played a practical role in
emancipating the state from the church. His thinking was influenced by his
experience of civil war. In his Heptaplomeres posthumous he pleaded for
tolerance with respect to all religions, including Islam and Judaism. As a
public prosecutor, however, he wrote a manual for judges in witchcraft trials
De la démonomanie des sorciers, 1580. By stressing the peacemaking role of a
strong state Bodin was a forerunner of Hobbes.
boehme: j. Cited by Grice
in “From Genesis to Revelations” -- protestant speculative mystic. Influenced
especially by Paracelsus, Boehme received little formal education, but was
successful enough as a shoemaker to devote himself to his writing, explicating
his religious experiences. He published little in his lifetime, though enough
to attract charges of heresy from local clergy. He did gather followers, and
his works were published after his death. His writings are elaborately symbolic
rather than argumentative, but respond deeply to fundamental problems in the
Christian worldview. He holds that the Godhead, omnipotent will, is as nothing
to us, since we can in no way grasp it. The Mysterium Magnum, the ideal world,
is conceived in God’s mind through an impulse to self-revelation. The actual
world, separate from God, is created through His will, and seeks to return to
the peace of the Godhead. The world is good, as God is, but its goodness falls
away, and is restored at the end of history, though not entirely, for some
souls are damned eternally. Human beings enjoy free will, and create themselves
through rebirth in faith. The Fall is necessary for the selfknowledge gained in
recovery from it. Recognition of one’s hidden, free self is a recognition of
God manifested in the world, so that human salvation completes God’s act of
self-revelation. It is also a recognition of evil rooted in the blind will
underlying all individual existence, without which there would be nothing
except the Godhead. Boehme’s works influenced Hegel and the later Schelling.
Boethius: Grice loved
Boethius – “He made Aristotle intelligible at Clifton!” -- Anicius Manlius
Severinus, Roman philosopher and Aristotelian translator and commentator. He
was born into a wealthy patrician family in Rome and had a distinguished
political career under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric before being arrested and
executed on charges of treason. His logic and philosophical theology contain
important contributions to the philosophy of the late classical and early
medieval periods, and his translations of and commentaries on Aristotle
profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, particularly in the medieval
Latin West. His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, composed
during his imprisonment, is a moving reflection on the nature of human
happiness and the problem of evil and contains classic discussions of
providence, fate, chance, and the apparent incompatibility of divine
foreknowledge and human free choice. He was known during his own lifetime,
however, as a brilliant scholar whose knowledge of the Grecian language and
ancient Grecian philosophy set him apart from his Latin contemporaries. He
conceived his scholarly career as devoted to preserving and making accessible
to the Latin West the great philosophical achievement of ancient Greece. To
this end he announced an ambitious plan to translate into Latin and write
commenbodily continuity Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 91 91 taries on all of Plato and Aristotle, but
it seems that he achieved this goal only for Aristotle’s Organon. His extant
translations include Porphyry’s Isagoge an introduction to Aristotle’s
Categories and Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics,
Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. He wrote two commentaries on the Isagoge
and On Interpretation and one on the Categories, and we have what appear to be
his notes for a commentary on the Prior Analytics. His translation of the
Posterior Analytics and his commentary on the Topics are lost. He also
commented on Cicero’s Topica and wrote his own treatises on logic, including De
syllogismis hypotheticis, De syllogismis categoricis, Introductio in
categoricos syllogismos, De divisione, and De topicis differentiis, in which he
elaborates and supplements Aristotelian logic. Boethius shared the common
Neoplatonist view that the Platonist and Aristotelian systems could be
harmonized by following Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy and Plato in
metaphysics and theology. This plan for harmonization rests on a distinction
between two kinds of forms: 1 forms that are conjoined with matter to
constitute bodies these, which he calls
“images” imagines, correspond to the forms in Aristotle’s hylomorphic account
of corporeal substances; and 2 forms that are pure and entirely separate from
matter, corresponding to Plato’s ontologically separate Forms. He calls these
“true forms” and “the forms themselves.” He holds that the former, “enmattered”
forms depend for their being on the latter, pure forms. Boethius takes these
three sorts of entities bodies,
enmattered forms, and separate forms to
be the respective objects of three different cognitive activities, which
constitute the three branches of speculative philosophy. Natural philosophy is
concerned with enmattered forms as enmattered, mathematics with enmattered
forms considered apart from their matter though they cannot be separated from
matter in actuality, and theology with the pure and separate forms. He thinks
that the mental abstraction characteristic of mathematics is important for
understanding the Peripatetic account of universals: the enmattered, particular
forms found in sensible things can be considered as universal when they are
considered apart from the matter in which they inhere though they cannot
actually exist apart from matter. But he stops short of endorsing this moderately
realist Aristotelian account of universals. His commitment to an ontology that
includes not just Aristotelian natural forms but also Platonist Forms existing
apart from matter implies a strong realist view of universals. With the
exception of De fide catholica, which is a straightforward credal statement,
Boethius’s theological treatises De Trinitate, Utrum Pater et Filius, Quomodo
substantiae, and Contra Euthychen et Nestorium show his commitment to using
logic and metaphysics, particularly the Aristotelian doctrines of the
categories and predicables, to clarify and resolve issues in Christian
theology. De Trinitate, e.g., includes a historically influential discussion of
the Aristotelian categories and the applicability of various kinds of predicates
to God. Running through these treatises is his view that predicates in the
category of relation are unique by virtue of not always requiring for their
applicability an ontological ground in the subjects to which they apply, a
doctrine that gave rise to the common medieval distinction between so-called
real and non-real relations. Regardless of the intrinsic significance of
Boethius’s philosophical ideas, he stands as a monumental figure in the history
of medieval philosophy rivaled in importance only by Aristotle and Augustine.
Until the recovery of the works of Aristotle in the mid-twelfth century,
medieval philosophers depended almost entirely on Boethius’s translations and
commentaries for their knowledge of pagan ancient philosophy, and his treatises
on logic continued to be influential throughout the Middle Ages. The
preoccupation of early medieval philosophers with logic and with the problem of
universals in particular is due largely to their having been tutored by
Boethius and Boethius’s Aristotle. The theological treatises also received wide
attention in the Middle Ages, giving rise to a commentary tradition extending
from the ninth century through the Renaissance and shaping discussion of
central theological doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation.
boltzmann, l., Cited by
Grice in his discussion of “Eddington’s Two Tables” -- physicist who was a
spirited advocate of the atomic theory and a pioneer in developing the kinetic
theory of gases and statistical mechanics. Boltzmann’s most famous achievements
were the transport equation, the H-theorem, and the probabilistic
interpretation of entropy. This work is summarized in his Vorlesungen über
Gastheorie “Lectures on the Theory of Gases,” 698. He held chairs in physics at
the universities of Graz, Vienna, Munich, and Leipzig before returning to
Vienna as professor of theoretical physics in 2. In 3 he succeeded Mach at
Boltzmann, Ludwig Boltzmann, Ludwig 92
92 Vienna and lectured on the philosophy of science. In the 0s the
atomic-kinetic theory was attacked by Mach and by the energeticists led by
Wilhelm Ostwald. Boltzmann’s counterattack can be found in his Populäre
Schriften “Popular Writings,” 5. Boltzmann agreed with his critics that many of
his mechanical models of gas molecules could not be true but, like Maxwell,
defended models as invaluable heuristic tools. Boltzmann also insisted that it
was futile to try to eliminate all metaphysical pictures from theories in favor
of bare equations. For Boltzmann, the goal of physics is not merely the discovery
of equations but the construction of a coherent picture of reality. Boltzmann
defended his H-theorem against the reversibility objection of Loschmidt and the
recurrence objection of Zermelo by conceding that a spontaneous decrease in
entropy was possible but extremely unlikely. Boltzmann’s views that
irreversibility depends on the probability of initial conditions and that
entropy increase determines the direction of time are defended by Reichenbach
in The Direction of Time 6.
bolzano: b., an intentionalist
philosopher considered by most as a pre-Griceian, philosopher. He studied
philosophy, mathematics, physics, and theology in Prague; received the Ph.D.;
was ordained a priest 1805; was appointed to a chair in religion at Charles in 1806; and, owing to his criticism of the
Austrian constitution, was dismissed in 1819. He composed his two main works
from 1823 through 1841: the Wissenschaftslehre 4 vols., 1837 and the posthumous
Grössenlehre. His ontology and logical semantics influenced Husserl and,
indirectly, Lukasiewicz, Tarski, and others of the Warsaw School. His
conception of ethics and social philosophy affected both the cultural life of
Bohemia and the Austrian system of education. Bolzano recognized a profound
distinction between the actual thoughts and judgments Urteile of human beings,
their linguistic expressions, and the abstract propositions Sätze an sich and
their parts which exist independently of those thoughts, judgments, and
expressions. A proposition in Bolzano’s sense is a preexistent sequence of
ideas-as-such Vorstellungen an sich. Only propositions containing finite
ideas-as-such are accessible to the mind. Real things existing concretely in
space and time have subsistence Dasein whereas abstract objects such as
propositions have only logical existence. Adherences, i.e., forces, applied to
certain concrete substances give rise to subjective ideas, thoughts, or
judgments. A subjective idea is a part of a judgment that is not itself a
judgment. The set of judgments is ordered by a causal relation. Bolzano’s
abstract world is constituted of sets, ideas-as-such, certain properties
Beschaffenheiten, and objects constructed from these. Thus, sentence shapes are
a kind of ideas-as-such, and certain complexes of ideas-as-such constitute
propositions. Ideas-as-such can be generated from expressions of a language by
postulates for the relation of being an object of something. Analogously,
properties can be generated by postulates for the relation of something being
applied to an object. Bolzano’s notion of religion is based on his distinction
between propositions and judgments. His Lehrbuch der Religionswissenschaft 4
vols., 1834 distinguishes between religion in the objective and subjective
senses. The former is a set of religious propositions, whereas the latter is
the set of religious views of a single person. Hence, a subjective religion can
contain an objective one. By defining a religious proposition as being moral
and imperatives the rules of utilitarianism, Bolzano integrated his notion of
religion within his ontology. In the Grössenlehre Bolzano intended to give a
detailed, well-founded exposition of contemporary mathematics and also to
inaugurate new domains of research. Natural numbers are defined, half a century
before Frege, as properties of “bijective” sets the members of which can be put
in one-to-one correspondence, and real numbers are conceived as properties of
sets of certain infinite sequences of rational numbers. The analysis of
infinite sets brought him to reject the Euclidean doctrine that the whole is
always greater than any of its parts and, hence, to the insight that a set is
infinite if and only if it is bijective to a proper subset of itself. This
anticipates Peirce and Dedekind. Bolzano’s extension of the linear continuum of
finite numbers by infinitesimals implies a relatively constructive approach to
nonstandard analysis. In the development of standard analysis the most
remarkable result of the Grössenlehre is the anticipation of Weirstrass’s
discovery that there exist nowhere differentiable continuous functions. The
Wissenschaftslehre was intended to lay the logical and epistemological
foundations of Bolzano’s mathematics. A theory of science in Bolzano’s sense is
a collection of rules for delimiting the set of scientific textbooks. Whether a
Bolzano, Bernard Bolzano, Bernard 93 93
class of true propositions is a worthwhile object of representation in a
scientific textbook is an ethical question decidable on utilitarian principles.
Bolzano proceeded from an expanded and standardized ordinary language through
which he could describe propositions and their parts. He defined the semantic
notion of truth and introduced the function corresponding to a “replacement”
operation on propositions. One of his major achievements was his definition of
logical derivability logische Ableitbarkeit between sets of propositions: B is
logically derivable from A if and only if all elements of the sum of A and B
are simultaneously true for some replacement of their non-logical ideas-as-such
and if all elements of B are true for any such replacement that makes all
elements of A true. In addition to this notion, which is similar to Tarski’s
concept of consequence of 6, Bolzano introduced a notion corresponding to
Gentzen’s concept of consequence. A proposition is universally valid
allgemeingültig if it is derivable from the null class. In his proof theory
Bolzano formulated counterparts to Gentzen’s cut rule. Bolzano introduced a
notion of inductive probability as a generalization of derivability in a
limited domain. This notion has the formal properties of conditional
probability. These features and Bolzano’s characterization of probability
density by the technique of variation are reminiscent of Vitters’s inductive
logic and Carnap’s theory of regular confirmation functions. The replacement of
conceptual complexes in propositions would, if applied to a formalized
language, correspond closely to a substitutionsemantic conception of
quantification. His own philosophical language was based on a kind of free
logic. In essence, Bolzano characterized a substitution-semantic notion of
consequence with a finite number of antecedents. His quantification over
individual and general concepts amounts to the introduction of a non-elementary
logic of lowest order containing a quantification theory of predicate variables
but no set-theoretical principles such as choice axioms. His conception of
universal validity and of the semantic superstructure of logic leads to a
semantically adequate extension of the predicate-logical version of Lewis’s
system S5 of modal logic without paradoxes. It is also possible to simulate
Bolzano’s theory of probability in a substitution-semantically constructed
theory of probability functions. Hence, by means of an ontologically parsimonious
superstructure without possible-worlds metaphysics, Bolzano was able to delimit
essentially the realms of classical logical truth and additive probability
spaces. In geometry Bolzano created a new foundation from a topological point
of view. He defined the notion of an isolated point of a set in a way
reminiscent of the notion of a point at which a set is well-dimensional in the
sense of Urysohn and Menger. On this basis he introduced his topological notion
of a continuum and formulated a recursive definition of the dimensionality of
non-empty subsets of the Euclidean 3-space, which is closely related to the
inductive dimension concept of Urysohn and Menger. In a remarkable paragraph of
an unfinished late manuscript on geometry he stated the celebrated curve
theorem of Jordan.
Bonaria – a church on an
Italian island – Grice sailed there during his Grand Tour to Italy and Greece.
He loved it! And he loved reading the Latin inscriptions and practicing the
Latin he had learned at Clifton.
Bonaria: H. P. Grice was
going to visit the River Plate with Noel Coward, but he got sick -- – or South
American philosophy – “Bonaria” was settled by Italians after the matron saint
of sailors, “Bonaria,” – itself settled by Ligurians, the first Italians to settle
in Buenos Aires and the Argentine area of the River Plate -- the philosophy of
South America, which is European in origin and constitutes a chapter in the
history of Western philosophy (rather than
say, Japanese – there was a strong emigration of Japanese to Buenos
Aires, but they remained mainly in the dry laundry business). Pre-Columbian
(“Indian”) indigenous cultures had developed ideas about the world that have
been interpreted by some scholars as philosophical, but there is no evidence
that any of those ideas were incorporated into the philosophy later practiced
in Latin America. It is difficult to characterize Latin American philosophy in
a way applicable to all of its 500-year history. The most one can say is that,
in contrast with European and Anglo-American philosophy, it has maintained a
strong human and social interest, has been consistently affected by Scholastic
and Catholic thought, and has significantly affected the social and political
institutions in the region. South American philosophers (especially if NOT from
Buenos Aires) tend to be active in the educational, political, and social lives
of their countries and deeply concerned with their own cultural identity
(except if they are from Buenos Aires, who have their identity well settled in
Europe, as European exiles or expatriates that that they are) The history of
philosophy in Latin America can be divided into four periods: colonial,
independentist, positivist, and contemporary. Colonial period (c.1550–c.1750).
This period was dominated by the type of Scholasticism officially practiced in
the Iberian peninsula. The texts studied were those of medieval Scholastics,
primarily Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and of their Iberian commentators, Vitoria,
Soto, Fonseca, and, above all, Suárez. The university curriculum was modeled on
that of major Iberian universities (Salamanca, Alcalá, Coimbra), and
instructors produced both systematic treatises and commentaries on classical,
medieval, and contemporary texts. The philosophical concerns in the colonies were
those prevalent in Spain and Portugal and centered on logical and metaphysical
issues inherited from the Middle Ages and on political and legal questions
raised by the discovery and colonization of America. Among the former were
issues involving the logic of terms and propositions and the problems of
universals and individuation; among the latter were questions concerning the
rights of Indians and the relations of the natives with the conquerors. The
main philosophical center during the early colonial period was Mexico; Peru
became important in the seventeenth century. Between 1700 and 1750 other
centers developed, but by that time Scholasticism had begun to decline. The
founding of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico in 1553 inaugurated
Scholastic instruction in the New World. The first teacher of philosophy at the
university was Alonso de la Vera Cruz (c.1504–84), an Augustinian and disciple
of Soto. He composed several didactic treatises on La Peyrère, Isaac Latin
American philosophy 483 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 483 logic,
metaphysics, and science, including Recognitio summularum (“Introductory
Logic,” 1554), Dialectica resolutio (“Advanced Logic,” 1554), and Physica
speculatio (“Physics,” 1557). He also wrote a theologico-legal work, the
Speculum conjugiorum (“On Marriage,” 1572), concerned with the status of
precolonial Indian marriages. Alonso’s works are eclectic and didactic and show
the influence of Aristotle, Peter of Spain, and Vitoria in particular. Another
important Scholastic figure in Mexico was the Dominican Tomás de Mercado
(c.1530–75). He produced commentaries on the logical works of Peter of Spain
and Aristotle and a treatise on international commerce, Summa de tratos y
contratos (“On Contracts,” 1569). His other sources are Porphyry and Aquinas.
Perhaps the most important figure of the period was Antonio Rubio (1548–1615),
author of the most celebrated Scholastic book written in the New World, Logica
mexicana (“Mexican Logic,” 1605). It underwent seven editions in Europe and
became a logic textbook in Alcalá. Rubio’s sources are Aristotle, Porphyry, and
Aquinas, but he presents original treatments of several logical topics. Rubio
also commented on several of Aristotle’s other works. In Peru, two authors
merit mention. Juan Pérez Menacho (1565–1626) was a prolific writer, but only a
moral treatise, Theologia et moralis tractatus (“Treatise on Theology and
Morals”), and a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae remain. The
Chilean-born Franciscan, Alfonso Briceño (c.1587–1669), worked in Nicaragua and
Venezuela, but the center of his activities was Lima. In contrast with the
Aristotelian-Thomistic flavor of the philosophy of most of his contemporaries,
Briceño was a Scotistic Augustinian. This is evident in Celebriores controversias
in primum sententiarum Scoti (“On Scotus’s First Book of the Sentences,” 1638)
and Apologia de vita et doctrina Joannis Scotti (“Apology for John Scotus,”
1642). Although Scholasticism dominated the intellectual life of colonial Latin
America, some authors were also influenced by humanism. Among the most
important in Mexico were Juan de Zumárraga (c.1468–1548); the celebrated
defender of the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566); Carlos Sigüenza y
Góngora (1645–1700); and Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1651–95). The last one is a
famous poet, now considered a precursor of the feminist movement. In Peru,
Nicolás de Olea (1635–1705) stands out. Most of these authors were trained in
Scholasticism but incorporated the concerns and ideas of humanists into their
work. Independentist period (c.1750–c.1850). Just before and immediately after
independence, leading Latin American intellectuals lost interest in Scholastic
issues and became interested in social and political questions, although they
did not completely abandon Scholastic sources. Indeed, the theories of natural
law they inherited from Vitoria and Suárez played a significant role in forming
their ideas. But they also absorbed non-Scholastic European authors. The
rationalism of Descartes and other Continental philosophers, together with the
empiricism of Locke, the social ideas of Rousseau, the ethical views of
Bentham, the skepticism of Voltaire and other Encyclopedists, the political
views of Condorcet and Montesquieu, the eclecticism of Cousin, and the ideology
of Destutt de Tracy, all contributed to the development of liberal ideas that
were a background to the independentist movement. Most of the intellectual
leaders of this movement were men of action who used ideas for practical ends,
and their views have limited theoretical value. They made reason a measure of
legitimacy in social and governmental matters, and found the justification for
revolutionary ideas in natural law. Moreover, they criticized authority; some,
regarding religion as superstitious, opposed ecclesiastical power. These ideas
paved the way for the later development of positivism. The period begins with
the weakening hold of Scholasticism on Latin American intellectuals and the
growing influence of early modern philosophy, particularly Descartes. Among the
first authors to turn to modern philosophy was Juan Benito Díaz de Gamarra y
Dávalos (1745–83) in Mexico who wrote Errores del entendimiento humano (“Errors
of Human Understanding,” 1781) and Academias filosóficas (“Philosophical
Academies,” 1774). Also in Mexico was Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–87),
author of a book on physics and a general history of Mexico. In Brazil the turn
away from Scholasticism took longer. One of the first authors to show the
influence of modern philosophy was Francisco de Mont’Alverne (1784– 1858) in
Compêndio de filosofia (1883). These first departures from Scholasticism were
followed by the more consistent efforts of those directly involved in the
independentist movement. Among these were Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), leader of
the rebellion against Spain in the Andean countries of South America, and the
Mexicans Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753– 1811), José María Morelos y Paván
(1765– 1815), and José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi Latin American philosophy
Latin American philosophy 484 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 484
(1776–1827). In Argentina, Mariano Moreno (1778–1811), Juan Crisóstomo Lafimur
(d. 1823), and Diego Alcorta (d. 1808), among others, spread the liberal ideas
that served as a background for independence. Positivist period
(c.1850–c.1910). During this time, positivism became not only the most popular
philosophy in Latin America but also the official philosophy of some countries.
After 1910, however, positivism declined drastically. Latin American positivism
was eclectic, influenced by a variety of thinkers, including Comte, Spencer,
and Haeckel. Positivists emphasized the explicative value of empirical science
while rejecting metaphysics. According to them, all knowledge is based on
experience rather than theoretical speculation, and its value lies in its
practical applications. Their motto, preserved on the Brazilian flag, was
“Order and Progress.” This positivism left little room for freedom and values;
the universe moved inexorably according to mechanistic laws. Positivism was a
natural extension of the ideas of the independentists. It was, in part, a
response to the needs of the newly liberated countries of Latin America. After
independence, the concerns of Latin American intellectuals shifted from
political liberation to order, justice, and progress. The beginning of
positivism can be traced to the time when Latin America, responding to these
concerns, turned to the views of French socialists such as Saint-Simon and
Fourier. The Argentinians Esteban Echevarría (1805–51) and Juan Bautista
Alberdi (1812–84) were influenced by them. Echevarría’s Dogma socialista
(“Socialist Dogma,” 1846) combines socialist ideas with eighteenth-century
rationalism and literary Romanticism, and Alberdi follows suit, although he
eventually turned toward Comte. Alberdi is, moreover, the first Latin American
philosopher to worry about developing a philosophy adequate to the needs of
Latin America. In Ideas (1842), he stated that philosophy in Latin America
should be compatible with the economic, political, and social requirements of
the region. Another transitional thinker, influenced by both Scottish
philosophy and British empiricism, was the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (1781–1865).
A prolific writer, he is the most important Latin American philosopher of the
nineteenth century. His Filosofía del entendimiento (“Philosophy of
Understanding,” 1881) reduces metaphysics to psychology. Bello also developed
original ideas about language and history. After 1829, he worked in Chile,
where his influence was strongly felt. The generation of Latin American
philosophers after Alberdi and Bello was mostly positivistic. Positivism’s
heyday was the second half of the nineteenth century, but two of its most
distinguished advocates, the Argentinian José Ingenieros (1877–1925) and the
Cuban Enrique José Varona (1849–1933), worked well into the twentieth century.
Both modified positivism in important ways. Ingenieros left room for
metaphysics, which, according to him, deals in the realm of the
“yet-to-be-experienced.” Among his most important books are Hacia una moral sin
dogmas (“Toward a Morality without Dogmas,” 1917), where the influence of
Emerson is evident, Principios de psicologia (“Principles of Psychology,”
1911), where he adopts a reductionist approach to psychology, and El hombre
mediocre (“The Mediocre Man,” 1913), an inspirational book popular among Latin
American youths. In Conferencias filosóficas (“Philosophical Lectures,”
1880–88), Varona went beyond the mechanistic explanations of behavior common
among positivists. In Mexico the first and leading positivist was Gabino
Barreda (1818–81), who reorganized Mexican education under President Juárez. An
ardent follower of Comte, Barreda made positivism the basis of his educational
reforms. He was followed by Justo Sierra (1848–1912), who turned toward Spencer
and Darwin and away from Comte, criticizing Barreda’s dogmatism. Positivism was
introduced in Brazil by Tobias Barreto (1839–89) and Silvio Romero (1851– 1914)
in Pernambuco, around 1869. In 1875 Benjamin Constant (1836–91) founded the
Positivist Society in Rio de Janeiro. The two most influential exponents of
positivism in the country were Miguel Lemos (1854–1916) and Raimundo Teixeira
Mendes (1855–1927), both orthodox followers of Comte. Positivism was more than
a technical philosophy in Brazil. Its ideas spread widely, as is evident from
the inclusion of positivist ideas in the first republican constitution. The
most prominent Chilean positivists were José Victorino Lastarria (1817–88) and
Valentín Letelier (1852–1919). More dogmatic adherents to the movement were the
Lagarrigue brothers, Jorge (d. 1894), Juan Enrique (d. 1927), and Luis (d.
1953), who promoted positivism in Chile well after it had died everywhere else
in Latin America. Contemporary period (c.1910–present). Contemporary Latin
American philosophy began Latin American philosophy Latin American philosophy
485 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 485 with the demise of positivism. The
first part of the period was dominated by thinkers who rebelled against
positivism. The principal figures, called the Founders by Francisco Romero,
were Alejandro Korn (1860–1936) in Argentina, Alejandro Octavio Deústua
(1849–1945) in Peru, José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) and Antonio Caso (1883–1946)
in Mexico, Enrique Molina (1871– 1964) in Chile, Carlos Vaz Ferreira
(1872–1958) in Uruguay, and Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862–1917) in Brazil. In
spite of little evidence of interaction among these philosophers, their aims
and concerns were similar. Trained as positivists, they became dissatisfied
with positivism’s dogmatic intransigence, mechanistic determinism, and emphasis
on pragmatic values. Deústua mounted a detailed criticism of positivistic
determinism in Las ideas de orden y de libertad en la historia del pensamiento
humano (“The Ideas of Order and Freedom in the History of Human Thought,”
1917–19). About the same time, Caso presented his view of man as a spiritual
reality that surpasses nature in La existencia como economía, como desinterés y
como caridad (“Existence as Economy, Disinterestedness, and Charity,” 1916).
Following in Caso’s footsteps and inspired by Pythagoras and the Neoplatonists,
Vasconcelos developed a metaphysical system with aesthetic roots in El monismo
estético (“Aesthetic Monism,” 1918). An even earlier criticism of positivism is
found in Vaz Ferreira’s Lógica viva (“Living Logic,” 1910), which contrasts the
abstract, scientific logic favored by positivists with a logic of life based on
experience, which captures reality’s dynamic character. The earliest attempt at
developing an alternative to positivism, however, is found in Farias Brito.
Between 1895 and 1905 he published a trilogy, Finalidade do mundo (“The World’s
Goal”), in which he conceived the world as an intellectual activity which he
identified with God’s thought, and thus as essentially spiritual. The intellect
unites and reflects reality but the will divides it. Positivism was superseded
by the Founders with the help of ideas imported first from France and later
from Germany. The process began with the influence of Étienne Boutroux
(1845–1921) and Bergson and of French vitalism and intuitionism, but it was
cemented when Ortega y Gasset introduced into Latin America the thought of
Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and other German philosophers during his visit to
Argentina in 1916. The influence of Bergson was present in most of the
founders, particularly Molina, who in 1916 wrote La filosofía de Bergson (“The
Philosophy of Bergson”). Korn was exceptional in turning to Kant in his search
for an alternative to positivism. In La libertad creadora (“Creative Freedom,”
1920–22), he defends a creative concept of freedom. In Axiología (“Axiology,”
1930), his most important work, he defends a subjectivist position. The impact
of German philosophy, including Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the
neo-Kantians, and of Ortega’s philosophical perspectivism and historicism, were
strongly felt in the generation after the founders. The Mexican Samuel Ramos
(1897–1959), the Argentinians Francisco Romero (1891–1962) and Carlos Astrada
(1894–1970), the Brazilian Alceu Amoroso Lima (1893–1982), the Peruvian José
Carlos Mariátegui (1895–1930), and others followed the Founders’ course,
attacking positivism and favoring, in many instances, a philosophical style
that contrasted with its scientistic emphasis. The most important of these
figures was Romero, whose Theory of Man (1952) developed a systematic
philosophical anthropology in the context of a metaphysics of transcendence.
Reality is arranged according to degrees of transcendence, the lowest of which
is the physical and the highest the spiritual. The bases of Ramos’s thought are
found in Ortega as well as in Scheler and N. Hartmann. Ramos appropriated
Ortega’s perspectivism and set out to characterize the Mexican situation in
Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1962). Some precedent existed for the
interest in the culturally idiosyncratic in Vasconcelos’s Raza cósmica (“Cosmic
Race,” 1925), but Ramos opened the doors to a philosophical awareness of Latin
American culture that has been popular ever since. Ramos’s most traditional
work, Hacia un nuevo humanismo (“Toward a New Humanism,” 1940), presents a
philosophical anthropology of Orteguean inspiration. Astrada studied in Germany
and adopted existential and phenomenological ideas in El juego existential
(“The Existential Game,” 1933), while criticizing Scheler’s axiology. Later, he
turned toward Hegel and Marx in Existencialismo y crisis de la filosofía
(“Existentialism and the Crisis of Philosophy,” 1963). Amoroso Lima worked in
the Catholic tradition and his writings show the influence of Maritain. His O
espírito e o mundo (“Spirit and World,” 1936) and Idade, sexo e tempo (“Age,
Sex, and Time,” 1938) present a spiritual view of human beings, which he
contrasted with Marxist and existentialist views. Mariátegui is the most
distinguished representative of MarxLatin American phiism in Latin America. His
Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (“Seven Essays on the
Interpretation of Peruvian Reality,” 1928) contains an important statement of
social philosophy, in which he uses Marxist ideas freely to analyze the
Peruvian sociopolitical situation. In the late 1930s and 1940s, as a
consequence of the political upheaval created by the Spanish Civil War, a
substantial group of peninsular philosophers settled in Latin America. Among
the most influential were Joaquín Xirau (1895– 1946), Eduardo Nicol (b.1907),
Luis Recaséns Siches (b.1903), Juan D. García Bacca (b.1901), and, perhaps most
of all, José Gaos (1900–69). Gaos, like Caso, was a consummate teacher,
inspiring many students. Apart from the European ideas they brought, these
immigrants introduced methodologically more sophisticated ways of doing
philosophy, including the practice of studying philosophical sources in the
original languages. Moreover, they helped to promote Pan-American
communication. The conception of hispanidad they had inherited from Unamuno and
Ortega helped the process. Their influence was felt particularly by the
generation born around 1910. With this generation, Latin American philosophy
established itself as a professional and reputable discipline, and
philosophical organizations, research centers, and journals sprang up. The core
of this generation worked in the German tradition. Risieri Frondizi (Argentina,
1910–83), Eduardo García Máynez (Mexico, b.1908), Juan Llambías de Azevedo
(Uruguay, 1907–72), and Miguel Reale (Brazil, b.1910) were all influenced by
Scheler and N. Hartmann and concerned themselves with axiology and
philosophical anthropology. Frondizi, who was also influenced by empiricist
philosophy, defended a functional view of the self in Substancia y función en
el problema del yo (“The Nature of the Self,” 1952) and of value as a Gestalt
quality in Qué son los valores? (“What is Value?” 1958). Apart from these
thinkers, there were representatives of other traditions in this generation.
Following Ramos, Leopoldo Zea (Mexico, b.1912) stimulated the study of the
history of ideas in Mexico and initiated a controversy that still rages
concerning the identity and possibility of a truly Latin American philosophy.
Representing existentialism was Vicente Ferreira da Silva (Brazil, b.1916), who
did not write much but presented a vigorous criticism of what he regarded as
Hegelian and Marxist subjectivism in Ensaios filosóficos (“Philosophical
Essays,” 1948). Before he became interested in existentialism, he had been
interested in logic, publishing the first textbook of mathematical logic
written in South America – Elementos de lógica matemática (“Elements of
Mathematical Logic,” 1940). A philosopher whose interest in mathematical logic
moved him away from phenomenology is Francisco Miró Quesada (Peru, b.1918). He
explored rationality and eventually the perspective of analytic philosophy.
Owing to the influence of Maritain, several members of this generation adopted
a NeoThomistic or Scholastic approach. The main figures to do so were Oswaldo
Robles (b.1904) in Mexico, Octavio Nicolás Derisi (b.1907) in Argentina,
Alberto Wagner de Reyna (b.1915) in Peru, and Clarence Finlayson (1913–54) in
Chile and Colombia. Even those authors who worked in this tradition addressed
issues of axiology and philosophical anthropology. There was, therefore, considerable
thematic unity in South American philosophy. The overall orientation was not
drastically different from the preceding period. The Founders vitalism against
positivism, and the following generation, with Ortega’s help, took over the
process, incorporating spiritualism and the new ideas introduced by
phenomenology and existentialism to continue in a similar direction. As a
result, the phenomenology amd existentialism dominated philosophy in South
America. To this must be added the renewed impetus of neoScholasticism. Few
philosophers worked outside these philosophical currents, and those who did had
no institutional power. Among these were sympathizers of philosophical
analysis, and those who contributed to the continuing development of Marxism. This
situation has begun to change substantially as a result of a renewed interest
in Marxism, the progressive influence of Oxford analytic philosophy (with a
number of philosophers from Buenos Aires studying usually under British-Council
scholarships, under P. F. Strawson, D. F. Pears, H. L. A. Hart, and others –
these later founded the Buenos-Aires-based Argentine Society for Philosophical
Analysis --. In Buenos Aires, English philosophy and culture in general is
rated higher than others, due to the influence of the British emigration to the
River-Plate area – The pragmatics of H. P. Grice is particularly influential in
that it brings a breath of fresh area to the more ritualistic approach as
favoured by his nemesis, J. L. Austin --. American philosophers are uually read
provided they, too, had the proper Oxonian education or background -- and the
development of a new philosophical current called the philosophy of liberation.
Moreover, the question raised by Zea concerning the identity and possibility of
a South American philosophy remains a focus of attention and controversy. And,
more recently, there has been interest in postmodernism, the theory of
communicative action, deconstructionism, neopragmatism, and feminism. Socialist
thought is not new to South America. In this century, Emilio Frugoni
(1880–1969) in Uruguay and Mariátegui in Peru, among others, adopted a Marxist
perspective, although a heterodox one. But only in the last three decades has
Marxism been taken seriously in Latin American academic circles. Indeed, until
recently Marxism was a marginal philosophical movement in Latin America. The
popularity of the Marxist perspective has made possible its increasing
institutionalization. Among its most important thinkers are Adolfo Sánchez
Vázquez (Spain, b.1915), Vicente Lombardo Toledano (b.1894) and Eli de Gortari
(b.1918) in Mexico, and Caio Prado Júnior (1909–86) in Brazil. In contrast to
Marxism, philosophical analysis arrived late in Latin America and, owing to its
technical and academic character, has not yet influenced more than a relatively
small number of philosophers – and also because in the milieu of Buenos Aires,
the influence of French culture is considered to have much more prestige in
mainstream culture than the more parochial empiricist brand coming from the
British Isles – unless it’s among the Friends of the Argentine Centre for
English Culture. German philosophy is considered rough in contrast to the
pleasing to the ear sounds of French philosophy, and Buenos Aires locals find
the very sound of the long German philosophical terms a source of amusement and
mirth. Since Buenos Aires habitants are Italians, it is logical that they do
not have much affinity for Italian philosophy, which they think it’s too local
and less extravagant than the French. There was a strong immigration of German
philosophers to Buenos Aires after the end of the Second World War, too.
Colonials from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, or the former colonies in North
America are never as welcomed in Buenos Aires as those from the very Old World.
The reason is obvious: as being New-Worlders, if they are going to be educated,
it is by Older-Worlders – Nobody in Buenos Aires would follow a New-World
philosopher or a colonial philosopher – but at most a school which originated
in the Continent of Europe. The British are regarded as by nature
unphilosophical and to follow a British philosopher in Buenos Aires is
considered an English joke! Nonetheless, and thanks in part to its high
theoretical caliber, analysis has become one of the most forceful philosophical
currents in the region. The publication of journals with an analytic bent such
as Crítica in Mexico, Análisis Filosófico in Argentina, and Manuscrito in
Brazil, the foundation of The Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF)
in Argentina and the Sociedad Filosófica Iberoamericana (SOFIA) in Mexico, and
the growth of analytic publications in high-profile journals of neutral
philosophical orientation, such as Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía,
indicate that philosophical analysis is well established in at least the most
European bit of the continent: the river Plate area of Buenos Aires. The main
centers of analytic activity are Buenos Aires, on the River Plate, and far
afterwards, the much less British-influenced centers like Mexico City, or the
provincial varsity of Campinas and São Paulo in Brazil. The interests of South
American philosophical analysts center on questions of pragmatics, rather than
semantics, -- and are generally sympathetic to Griceian developments -- ethical
and legal philosophy, the philosophy of science, and more recently cognitive
science. Among its most important proponents are Genaro R. Carrio (b.1922),
Gregorio Klimovsky (b.1922), and Tomas Moro Simpson (b.1929), E. A. Rabossi (b.
Buenos Aires), O. N. Guariglia (b. Buenos Aires), in Argentina – Strawson was a
frequent lecturer at the Argentine Society for Philosopohical Analysis, and
many other Oxonian philosophers on sabbatical leave. The Argentine Society for
Philosophical Analysis, usually in conjunction with the Belgravia-based
Anglo-Argentine Society organize seminars and symposia – when an Argentine
philosopher emigrates he ceases to be considered an Argentine philosopher –
students who earn their maximal degrees overseas are not counted either as
Argentine philosophers by Argentine (or specifically Buenos Aires) philosophers
(They called them braindrained, brainwashed!) Luis Villoro (Spain, b. 1922) in
Mexico; Francisco Miró Quesada in Peru; Roberto Torretti (Chile, b.1930) in
Puerto Rico; Mario Bunge (Argentina, b.1919), who emigrated to Canada; and
Héctor-Neri Castañeda (Guatemala, 1924–91). The philosophy of liberation is an
autochthonous Latin American movement that mixes an emphasis on Latin American
intellectual independence with Catholic and Marxist ideas. The historicist
perspective of Leopoldo Zea, the movement known as the theology of liberation,
and some elements from the national-popular Peronist ideology prepared the
ground for it. The movement started in the early 1970s with a group of
Argentinian philosophers, who, owing to the military repression of 1976–83 in
Argentina, went into exile in various countries of Latin America. This early
diaspora created permanent splits in the movement and spread its ideas
throughout the region. Although proponents of this viewpoint do not always
agree on their goals, they share the notion of liberation as a fundamental
concept: the liberation from the slavery imposed on Latin America by imported
ideologies and the development of a genuinely autochthonous thought resulting
from reflection on the South American reality. As such, their views are an
extension of the thought of Ramos and others who earlier in the century
initiated the discussion of the cultural identity of South America.
bonum: Grice makes fun of Hare n “Language of Morals.” To
what extent is Hare saying that to say ‘x is good’ means ‘I approve of x’? (Strictly:
“To say that something is good is to recommend it”). To say " I approve of x " is in part to do the same thing
as when we say " x is good " a statement of the
form " X
is good" strictly designates " I approve of X "
and suggests " Do so as well". It should be in Part II to
“Language of Morals”. Old Romans did not have an article, so for them it is
unum, bonum, verum, and pulchrum. They were trying to translate the very
articled Grecian things, ‘to agathon,’ ‘to alethes,’ and ‘to kallon.’ The three
references given by Liddell and Scott are good ones. τὸ ἀ., the good,
Epich.171.5, cf. Pl.R.506b, 508e, Arist.Metaph.1091a31, etc. The Grecian Grice
is able to return to the ‘article’. Grice has an early essay on ‘the good,’ and
he uses the same expression at Oxford for the Locke lectures when looking for a
‘desiderative’ equivalent to ‘the true.’ Hare had dedicated the full part of
his “Language of Morals” to ‘good,’ so Grice is well aware of the centrality of
the topic. He was irritated by what he called a performatory approach to the
good, where ‘x is good’ =df. ‘I approve of x.’ Surely that’s a conversational
implicatum. However, in his analysis of reasoning (the demonstratum – since he
uses the adverb ‘demonstrably’ as a marker of pretty much like ‘concusively,’
as applied to both credibility and desirability, we may focus on what Grice
sees as ‘bonum’ as one of the ‘absolutes,’ the absolute in the desirability
realm, as much as the ‘verum’ is the absolute in the credibility realm. Grice
has an excellent argument regarding ‘good.’ His example is ‘cabbage,’ but also
‘sentence.’ Grice’s argument is to turn the disimpicatum into an explicitum. To
know what a ‘cabbage,’ or a formula is, you need to know first what a ‘good’
cabbage is or a ‘well-formed formula,’ is. An ill-formed sentence is not deemed
by Grice a sentence. This means that we define ‘x’ as ‘optimum x.’ This is not
so strange, seeing that ‘optimum’ is actually the superlative of ‘bonum’ (via
the comparative). It does not require very
sharp eyes, but only the willingness to use the eyes one has, to see that our
speech and thought are permeated with the notion of purpose; to say what a
certain kind of thing is is only too frequently partly to say what it is for.
This feature applies to our talk and thought of, for example, ships, shoes,
sealing wax, and kings; and, possibly and perhaps most excitingly, it extends
even to cabbages.“There is a range of cases in which, so far from its
being the case that, typically, one first learns what it is to be a F and then,
at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good F from a F which is
less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good
F, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good
F will qualify an item as a F; if the gap between some item x and good Fs is
sufficently horrendous, x is debarred from counting as a F at all, even as a
bad F.”“In the John Locke Lectures, I called a concept which exhibits this
feature as a ‘value-paradeigmatic’ concept. One example of a
value-paradeigmatic concept is the concept of reasoning; another, I now suggest,
is that of sentence. It may well be that the existence of value-oriented
concepts (¢b ¢ 2 . • • . ¢n) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational
concepts ( ¢~, ¢~ . . . . ¢~), such that an item x qualifies for the
application of the concept ¢ 2 if and only if x satisfies a rationally-approved
form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept ¢'. We have a
(primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a
certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another. ---
bonum commune -- common good, a normative standard in Thomistic and
Neo-Thomistic ethics for evaluating the justice of social, legal, and political
arrangements, referring to those arrangements that promote the full flourishing
of everyone in the community. Every good can be regarded as both a goal to be
sought and, when achieved, a source of human fulfillment. A common good is any
good sought by and/or enjoyed by two or more persons as friendship is a good
common to the friends; the common good is the good of a “perfect” i.e.,
complete and politically organized human community a good that is the common goal of all who
promote the justice of that community, as well as the common source of
fulfillment of all who share in those just arrangements. ‘Common’ is an
analogical term referring to kinds and degrees of sharing ranging from mere
similarity to a deep ontological communion. Thus, any good that is a genuine
perfection of our common human nature is a common good, as opposed to merely
idiosyncratic or illusory goods. But goods are common in a deeper sense when
the degree of sharing is more than merely coincidental: two children engaged in
parallel play enjoy a good in common, but they realize a common good more fully
by engaging each other in one game; similarly, if each in a group watches the
same good movie alone at home, they have enjoyed a good in common but they
realize this good at a deeper level when they watch the movie together in a
theater and discuss it afterward. In short, common good includes aggregates of
private, individual goods but transcends these aggregates by the unique
fulfillment afforded by mutuality, shared activity, and communion of persons.
As to the sources in Thomistic ethics for this emphasis on what is deeply
shared over what merely coincides, the first is Aristotle’s understanding of us
as social and political animals: many aspects of human perfection, on this view,
can be achieved only through shared activities in communities, especially the
political community. The second is Christian Trinitarian theology, in which the
single Godhead involves the mysterious communion of three divine “persons,” the
very exemplar of a common good; human personhood, by analogy, is similarly
perfected only in a relationship of social communion. The achievement of such
intimately shared goods requires very complex and delicate arrangements of
coordination to prevent the exploitation and injustice that plague shared
endeavors. The establishment and maintenance of these social, legal, and
political arrangements is “the” common good of a political society, because the
enjoyment of all goods is so dependent upon the quality and the justice of
those arrangements. The common good of the political community includes, but is
not limited to, public goods: goods characterized by non-rivalry and
non-excludability and which, therefore, must generally be provided by public
institutions. By the principle of subsidiarity, the common good is best
promoted by, in addition to the state, many lower-level non-public societies,
associations, and individuals. Thus, religiously affiliated schools educating
non-religious minority chilcommission common good 161 161 dren might promote the common good
without being public goods.
Boolean algebra, 1 an
ordered triple B,†,3, where B is a set containing at least two elements and †
and 3 are unary and binary operations in B such that i a 3 b % b 3 a, ii a 3 b
3 c % a 3 b 3 c, iii a 3 † a % b 3 † b, and iv a 3 b = a if and only if a 3 † b
% a 3 † a; 2 the theboo-hurrah theory Boolean algebra 95 95 ory of such algebras. Such structures are
modern descendants of algebras published by the mathematician G. Boole in 1847
and representing the first successful algebraic treatment of logic.
Interpreting † and 3 as negation and conjunction, respectively, makes Boolean
algebra a calculus of propositions. Likewise, if B % {T,F} and † and 3 are the
truth-functions for negation and conjunction, then B,†,3 the truth table for those two
connectives forms a two-element Boolean
algebra. Picturing a Boolean algebra is simple. B,†,3 is a full subset algebra
if B is the set of all subsets of a given set and † and 3 are set complementation
and intersection, respectively. Then every finite Boolean algebra is isomorphic
to a full subset algebra, while every infinite Boolean algebra is isomorphic to
a subalgebra of such an algebra. It is for this reason that Boolean algebra is
often characterized as the calculus of classes.
bootstrap: Grice certainly didn’t have a problem with
meta-langauge paradoxes. Two of his maxims are self refuting and ‘sic’-ed: “be
perspicuous [sic]” and “be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) [sic].” The principle
introduced by Grice in “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life
and opinions of H. P. Grice,” to limit the power of the meta-language. The
weaker your metalanguage the easier you’ll be able to pull yourself by your own
bootstraps. He uses bootlaces in “Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and
Plato’s Republic.”
borderline case, in the
logical sense, a case that falls within the “gray area” or “twilight zone”
associated with a vague concept; in the pragmatic sense, a doubtful, disputed,
or arguable case. These two senses are not mutually exclusive, of course. A
moment of time near sunrise or sunset may be a borderline case of daytime or
nighttime in the logical sense, but not in the pragmatic sense. A sufficiently
freshly fertilized ovum may be a borderline case of a person in both senses.
Fermat’s hypothesis, or any of a large number of other disputed mathematical
propositions, may be a borderline case in the pragmatic sense but not in the
logical sense. A borderline case per se in either sense need not be a limiting
case or a degenerate case.
bosanquet: b.: Cited by H. P. Grice. English
philosopher, the most systematic Oxford absolute idealist and, with F. H.
Bradley, the leading Oxford defender of absolute idealism. Although he derived
his last name from Huguenot ancestors, Bosanquet was thoroughly English. Born
at Altwick and educated at Harrow and Balliol, Oxford, he was for eleven years
a fellow of University College, Oxford.
The death of his father in 0 and the resulting inheritance enabled Bosanquet to
leave Oxford for London and a career as a writer and social activist. While
writing, he taught courses for the London Ethical Society’s Center for Extension and donated time to the Charity Organization
Society. In 5 he married his coworker in the Charity Organization Society,
Helen Dendy, who was also the translator of Christoph Sigwart’s Logic.
Bosanquet was professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews from 3 to 8. He gave
the Gifford Lectures in 1 and 2. Otherwise he lived in London until his death.
Bosanquet’s most comprehensive work, his two-volume Gifford Lectures, The
Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the
Individual, covers most aspects of his philosophy. In The Principle of
Individuality and Value he argues that the search for truth proceeds by
eliminating contradictions in experience. For Bosanquet a contradiction arises
when there are incompatible interpretations of the same fact. This involves
making distinctions that harmonize the incompatible interpretations in a larger
body of knowledge. Bosanquet thought there was no way to arrest this process
short of recognizing that all human experience forms a comprehensive whole
which is reality. Bosanquet called this totality “the Absolute.” Just as conflicting
interpretations of the same fact find harmonious places in the Absolute, so
conflicting desires are also included. The Absolute thus satisfies all desires
and provides Bosanquet’s standard for evaluating other objects. This is because
in his view the value of an object is determined by its ability to satisfy
desires. From this Bosanquet concluded that human beings, as fragments of the
Absolute, acquire greater value as they realize themselves by partaking more
fully in the Absolute. In The Value and Destiny of the Individual Bosanquet
explained how human beings could do this. As finite, human beings face
obstacles they cannot overcome; yet they desire the good i.e., the Absolute
which for Bosanquet overcomes all obstacles and satisfies all desires. Humans
can best realize a desire for the good, Bosanquet thinks, by surrendering their
private desires for the sake of the good. This attitude of surrender, which
Bosanquet calls the religious consciousness, relates human beings to what is
permanently valuable in reality and increases their own value and satisfaction
accordingly. Bosanquet’s defense of this metaphysical vision rests heavily on
his first major work, Logic or the Morphology of Knowledge 8; 2d ed., 1. As the
subtitle indicates, Bosanquet took the subject matter of Logic to be the
structure of knowledge. Like Hegel, who was in many ways his inspiration,
Bosanquet thought that the nature of knowledge was defined by structures
repeated in different parts of knowledge. He called these structures forms of
judgment and tried to show that simple judgments are dependent on increasingly
complex ones and finally on an all-inclusive judgment that defines reality. For
example, the simplest element of knowledge is a demonstrative judgment like
“This is hot.” But making such a judgment presupposes understanding the
contrast between ‘this’ and ‘that’. Demonstrative judgments thus depend on
comparative judgments like “This is hotter than that.” Since these judgments
are less dependent on other judgments, they more fully embody human knowledge.
Bosanquet claimed that the series of increasingly complex judgments are not
arranged in a simple linear order but develop along different branches finally
uniting in disjunctive judgments that attribute to reality an exhaustive set of
mutually exclusive alternatives which are themselves judgments. When one
contained judgment is asserted on the basis of another, a judgment containing
both is an inference. For Bosanquet inferences are mediated judgments that
assert their conclusions based on grounds. When these grounds are made fully
explicit in a judgment containing them, that judgment embodies the nature of
inference: that one must accept the conclusion or reject the whole of
knowledge. Since for Bosanquet the difference between any judgment and the
reality it represents is that a judgment is composed of ideas that abstract
from reality, a fully comprehensive judgment includes all aspects of reality.
It is thus identical to reality. By locating all judgments within this one,
Bosanquet claimed to have described the morphology of knowledge as well as to
have shown that thought is identical to reality. Bosanquet removed an objection
to this identification in History of Aesthetics 2, where he traces the
development of the philosophy of the beautiful from its inception through
absolute idealism. According to Plato and Aristotle beauty is found in
imitations of reality, while in objective idealism it is reality in sensuous
form. Drawing heavily on Kant, Bosanquet saw this process as an overcoming of
the opposition between sense and reason by showing how a pleasurable feeling
can partake of reason. He thought that absolute idealism explained this by
showing that we experience objects as beautiful because their sensible
qualities exhibit the unifying activity of reason. Bosanquet treated the
political implications of absolute idealism in his Philosophical Theory of the
State 8; 3d ed., 0, where he argues that humans achieve their ends only in
communities. According to Bosanquet, all humans rationally will their own ends.
Because their ends differ from moment to moment, the ends they rationally will
are those that harmonize their desires at particular moments. Similarly,
because the ends of different individuals overlap and conflict, what they
rationally will are ends that harmonize their desires, which are the ends of
humans in communities. They are willed by the general will, the realization of
which is self-rule or liberty. This provides the rational ground of political
obligation, since the most comprehensive system of modern life is the state,
the end of which is the realization of the best life for its citizens.
Boscovich: An example of
minimalism, according to Grice. Roger Joseph, or Rudjer Josip Bos v kovic’,
philosopher. Born of Serbian and
parents, he was a Jesuit and polymath best known for his A Theory of
Natural Philosophy Reduced to a Single Law of the Actions Existing in Nature.
This work attempts to explain all physical phenomena in terms of the
attractions and repulsions of point particles puncta that are indistinguishable
in their intrinsic qualitative properties. According to Boscovich’s single law,
puncta at a certain distance attract, until upon approaching one another they
reach a point at which they repel, and eventually reach equilibrium. Thus,
Boscovich defends a form of dynamism, or the theory that nature is to be
understood in terms of force and not mass where forces are functions of time
and distance. By dispensing with extended substance, Boscovich avoided epistemological
difficulties facing Locke’s natural philosophy and anticipated developments in
modern physics. Among those influenced by Boscovich were Kant who defended a
version of dynamism, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin. Boscovich’s
theory has proved to be empirically inadequate to account for phenomena such as
light. A philosophical difficulty for Boscovich’s puncta, which are physical
substances, arises out of their zero-dimensionality. It is plausible that any
power must have a basis in an object’s intrinsic properties, and puncta appear
to lack such support for their powers. However, it is extensional properties
that puncta lack, and Boscovich could argue that the categorial property of
being an unextended spatial substance provides the needed basis.
Bouwsma, Oets Kolk,
philosopher, a practitioner of ordinary language philosophy and celebrated
teacher. Through work on Moore and contact with students such as Norman Malcolm
and Morris Lazerowitz, whom he sent from Nebraska to work with Moore, Bouwsma
discovered Vitters. He became known for conveying an understanding of Vitters’s
techniques of philosophical analysis through his own often humorous grasp of
sense and nonsense. Focusing on a particular pivotal sentence in an argument,
he provided imaginative surroundings for it, showing how, in the philosopher’s
mouth, the sentence lacked sense. He sometimes described this as “the method of
failure.” In connection with Descartes’s evil genius, e.g., Bouwsma invents an
elaborate story in which the evil genius tries but fails to permanently deceive
by means of a totally paper world. Our inability to imagine such a deception
undermines the sense of the evil genius argument. His writings are replete with
similar stories, analogies, and teases of sense and nonsense for such
philosophical standards as Berkeley’s idealism, Moore’s theory of sensedata,
and Anselm’s ontological argument. Bouwsma did not advocate theories nor put
forward refutations of other philosophers’ views. His talent lay rather in exposing
some central sentence in an argument as disguised nonsense. In this, he went
beyond Vitters, working out the details of the latter’s insights into language.
In addition to this appropriation of Vitters, Bouwsma also appropriated
Kierkegaard, understanding him too as one who dispelled philosophical
illusions those arising from the attempt
to understand Christianity. The ordinary language of religious philosophy was
that of scriptures. He drew upon this language in his many essays on religious
themes. His religious dimension made whole this person who gave no quarter to
traditional metaphysics. His papers are published under the titles
Philosophical Essays, Toward a New Sensibility, Without Proof or Evidence, and
Vitters Conversations 951. His philosophical notebooks are housed at the
Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.
Boyle, r.: Grice was a
closet corpularianist. a major figure in seventeenthcentury natural philosophy.
To his contemporaries he was “the restorer” in England of the mechanical philosophy.
His program was to replace the vacuous explanations characteristic of
Peripateticism the “quality of whiteness” in snow explains why it dazzles the
eyes by explanations employing the “two grand and most catholic principles of
bodies, matter and motion,” matter being composed of corpuscles, with motion
“the grand agent of all that happens in nature.” Boyle wrote influentially on
scientific methodology, emphasizing experimentation a Baconian influence,
experimental precision, and the importance of devising “good and excellent”
hypotheses. The dispute with Spinoza on the validation of explanatory
hypotheses contrasted Boyle’s experimental way with Spinoza’s way of rational
analysis. The 1670s dispute with Henry More on the ontological grounds of corporeal
activity confronted More’s “Spirit of Nature” with the “essential
modifications” motion and the “seminal principle” of activity with which Boyle
claimed God had directly endowed matter. As a champion of the corpuscularian
philosophy, Boyle was an important link in the development before Locke of the
distinction between primary and secondary qualities. A leading advocate of
natural theology, he provided in his will for the establishment of the Boyle
Lectures to defend Protestant Christianity against atheism and materialism.
Bradley: f. h., Cited by
H. P. Grice in “Prolegomena,” now repr. in “Studies in the Way of Words.” Also
in Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, “The nature of metaphysics,” -- the
most original and influential nineteenth-century British idealist. Born at
Clapham, he was the fourth son of an evangelical minister. His younger brother
A. C. Bradley was a well-known Shakespearean critic. From 1870 until his death
Bradley was a fellow of Merton , Oxford. A kidney ailment, which first occurred
in 1871, compelled him to lead a retiring life. This, combined with his
forceful literary style, his love of irony, the dedication of three of his
books to an unknown woman, and acclaim as the greatest British idealist since
Berkeley, has lent an aura of mystery to his personal life. The aim of
Bradley’s first important work, Ethical Studies 1876, is not to offer guidance
for dealing with practical moral problems Bradley condemned this as casuistry,
but rather to explain what makes morality as embodied in the consciousness of
individuals and in social institutions possible. Bradley thought it was the
fact that moral agents take morality as an end in itself which involves
identifying their wills with an ideal provided in part by their stations in
society and then transferring that ideal to reality through action. Bradley
called this process “selfrealization.” He thought that moral agents could
realize their good selves only by suppressing their bad selves, from which he
concluded that morality could never be completely realized, since realizing a
good self requires having a bad one. For this reason Bradley believed that the
moral consciousness would develop into religious consciousness which, in his
secularized version of Christianity, required dying to one’s natural self
through faith in the actual existence of the moral ideal. In Ethical Studies
Bradley admitted that a full defense of his ethics would require a metaphysical
system, something he did not then have. Much of Bradley’s remaining work was an
attempt to provide the outline of such a system by solving what he called “the
great problem of the relation between thought and reality.” He first confronted
this problem in The Principles of Logic3, which is his description of thought.
He took thought to be embodied in judgments, which are distinguished from other
mental activities by being true or false. This is made possible by the fact
that their contents, which Bradley called ideas, represent reality. A problem
arises because ideas are universals and so represent kinds of things, while the
things themselves are all individuals. Bradley solves this problem by
distinguishing between the logical and grammatical forms of a judgment and
arguing that all judgments have the logical form of conditionals. They assert
that universal connections between qualities obtain in reality. The qualities
are universals, the connections between them are conditional, while reality is
one individual whole that we have contact with in immediate experience. All
judgments, in his view, are abstractions from a diverse but non-relational
immediate experience. Since judgments are inescapably relational, they fail to
represent accurately non-relational reality and so fail to reach truth, which
is the goal of thought. From this Bradley concluded that, contrary to what some
of his more Hegelian contemporaries were saying, thought is not identical to
reality and is never more than partially true. Appearance and Reality 3 is
Bradley’s description of reality: it is experience, all of it, all at once,
blended in a harmonious way. Bradley defended this view by means of his
criterion for reality. Reality, he proclaimed, does not contradict itself;
anything that does is merely appearance. In Part I of Appearance and Reality
Bradley relied on an infinite regress argument, now called Bradley’s regress,
to contend that relations and all relational phenomena, including thought, are
contradictory. They are appearance, not reality. In Part II he claimed that
appearances are contradictory because they are abstracted by thought from the
immediate experience of which they are a part. Appearances constitute the
content of this whole, which in Bradley’s view is experience. In other words,
reality is experience in its totality. Bradley called this unified, consistent
all-inclusive reality “the Absolute.” Today Bradley is mainly remembered for
his argument against the reality of relations, and as the philosopher who
provoked Russell’s and Moore’s revolution in philosophy. He would be better
remembered as a founder of twentiethcentury philosophy who based metaphysical
conclusions on his account of the logical forms of judgments.
brandt: R. B.,-- read by
Grice for his ‘ideal observer theory” or creature construction in “Method”
moral philosopher, most closely associated with rule utilitarianism which term
he coined, earned degrees from Denison
and Cambridge , and obtained a Ph.D. from Yale in 6. He taught at
Swarthmore from 7 to 4 and at the of Michigan from 4 to 1. His six books and
nearly one hundred articles included work on philosophy of religion,
epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy,
and philosophy of law. His greatest contributions were in moral philosophy. He
first defended rule utilitarianism in his textbook Ethical Theory 9, but
greatly refined his view in the 0s in a series of articles, which were widely
discussed and reprinted and eventually collected together in Morality,
Utilitarianism, and Rights 2. Further refinements appear in his A Theory of the
Good and the Right 9 and Facts, Values, and Morality 6. Brandt famously argued
for a “reforming definition” of ‘rational person’. He proposed that we use it
to designate someone whose desires would survive exposure to all relevant
empirical facts and to correct logical reasoning. He also proposed a “reforming
definition” of ‘morally right’ that assigns it the descriptive meaning ‘would
be permitted by any moral code that all or nearly all rational people would
publicly favor for the agent’s society if they expected to spend a lifetime in
that society’. In his view, rational choice between moral codes is determined
not by prior moral commitments but by expected consequences. Brandt admitted
that different rational people may favor different codes, since different rational
people may have different levels of natural benevolence. But he also contended
that most rational people would favor a rule-utilitarian code.
Brentano, Franz:
philosopher, one of the most intellectually influential and personally
charismatic of his time. He is known especially for his distinction between
psychological and physical phenomena on the basis of intentionality or internal
object-directedness of thought, his revival of Aristotelianism and empirical
methods in philosophy and psychology, and his value theory and ethics supported
by the concept of correct pro- and anti-emotions or love and hate attitudes.
Brentano made noted contributions to the theory of metaphysical categories,
phenomenology, epistemology, syllogistic logic, and philosophy of religion. His
teaching made a profound impact on his students in Würzburg and Vienna, many of
whom became internationally respected thinkers in their fields, including
Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, and Freud.
Brentano began his study of philosophy at the Aschaffenburg Royal Bavarian
Gymnasium; in 185658 he attended the universities of Munich and Würzburg, and
then enrolled at the of Berlin, where he
undertook his first investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics under the
supervision of F. A. Trendelenburg. In 1859 60, he attended the Academy in
Münster, reading intensively in the medieval Aristotelians; in 1862 he received
the doctorate in philosophy in absentia from the of Tübingen. He was ordained a Catholic
priest in 1864, and was later involved in a controversy over the doctrine of
papal infallibility, eventually leaving the church in 1873. He taught first as
Privatdozent in the Philosophical Faculty of the of Würzburg 186674, and then accepted a
professorship at the of Vienna. In 0 he
decided to marry, temporarily resigning his position to acquire Saxon
citizenship, in order to avoid legal difficulties in Austria, where marriages
of former priests were not officially recognized. Brentano was promised
restoration of his position after his circumvention of these restrictions, but
although he was later reinstated as lecturer, his appeals for reappointment as
professor were answered only with delay and equivocation. He left Vienna in 5,
retiring to Italy, his family’s country of origin. At last he moved to Zürich,
Switzerland, shortly before Italy entered World War I. Here he remained active
both in philosophy and psychology, despite his ensuing blindness, writing and
revising numerous books and articles, frequently meeting with former students
and colleagues, and maintaining an extensive philosophical-literary
correspondence, until his death. In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt
“Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” 1874, Brentano argued that
intentionality is the mark of the mental, that every psychological experience
contains an intended object also called
an intentional object which the thought
is about or toward which the thought is directed. Thus, in desire, something is
desired. According to the immanent intentionality thesis, this means that the
desired object is literally contained within the psychological experience of
desire. Brentano claims that this is uniquely true of mental as opposed to
physical or non-psychological phenomena, so that the intentionality of the
psychological distinguishes mental from physical states. The immanent
intentionality thesis proBrentano, Franz Brentano, Franz 100 100 vides a framework in which Brentano
identifies three categories of psychological phenomena: thoughts Vorstellungen,
judgments, and emotive phenomena. He further maintains that every thought is
also self-consciously reflected back onto itself as a secondary intended object
in what he called the eigentümliche Verfleckung. From 5 through 1, with the
publication in that year of Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene,
Brentano gradually abandoned the immanent intentionality thesis in favor of his
later philosophy of reism, according to which only individuals exist, excluding
putative nonexistent irrealia, such as lacks, absences, and mere possibilities.
In the meantime, his students Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reacting
negatively to the idealism, psychologism, and related philosophical problems
apparent in the early immanent intentionality thesis, developed alternative
non-immanence approaches to intentionality, leading, in the case of Twardowski
and Meinong and his students in the Graz school of phenomenological psychology,
to the construction of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of transcendent existent
and nonexistent intended objects, and to Husserl’s later transcendental
phenomenology. The intentionality of the mental in Brentano’s revival of the
medieval Aristotelian doctrine is one of his most important contributions to
contemporary non-mechanistic theories of mind, meaning, and expression.
Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis was, however, rejected by
philosophers who otherwise agreed with his underlying claim that thought is
essentially object-directed. Brentano’s value theory Werttheorie offers a
pluralistic account of value, permitting many different kinds of things to be
valuable although, in keeping with his
later reism, he denies the existence of an abstract realm of values. Intrinsic
value is objective rather than subjective, in the sense that he believes the
pro- and anti-emotions we may have toward an act or situation are objectively
correct if they present themselves to emotional preference with the same
apodicity or unquestionable sense of rightness as other selfevident matters of non-ethical
judgment. Among the controversial consequences of Brentano’s value theory is
the conclusion that there can be no such thing as absolute evil. The
implication follows from Brentano’s observation, first, that evil requires evil
consciousness, and that consciousness of any kind, even the worst imaginable
malice or malevolent ill will, is considered merely as consciousness
intrinsically good. This means that necessarily there is always a mixture of
intrinsic good even in the most malicious possible states of mind, by virtue
alone of being consciously experienced, so that pure evil never obtains.
Brentano’s value theory admits of no defense against those who happen not to
share the same “correct” emotional attitudes toward the situations he
describes. If it is objected that to another person’s emotional preferences
only good consciousness is intrinsically good, while infinitely bad
consciousness despite being a state of consciousness appears instead to contain
no intrinsic good and is absolutely evil, there is no recourse within
Brentano’s ethics except to acknowledge that this contrary emotive attitude
toward infinitely bad consciousness may also be correct, even though it
contradicts his evaluations. Brentano’s empirical psychology and articulation
of the intentionality thesis, his moral philosophy and value theory, his
investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics at a time when Aristotelian realism
was little appreciated in the prevailing climate of post-Kantian idealism, his
epistemic theory of evident judgment, his suggestions for the reform of
syllogistic logic, his treatment of the principle of sufficient reason and
existence of God, his interpretation of a fourstage cycle of successive trends
in the history of philosophy, together with his teaching and personal moral
example, continue to inspire a variety of divergent philosophical
traditions.
broad: cited by H. P.
Grice in “Personal identity” and “Prolegomena” (re: Benjamin on Broad on
remembering). Charlie Dunbar 71, English epistemologist, metaphysician, moral
philosopher, and philosopher of science. He was educated at Trinity ,
Cambridge, taught at several universities in Scotland, and then returned to
Trinity, first as lecturer in moral science and eventually as Knightbridge
Professor of Moral Philosophy. His philosophical views are in the broadly
realist tradition of Moore and Russell, though with substantial influence also
from his teachers at Cambridge, McTaggart and W. E. Johnson. Broad wrote
voluminously and incisively on an extremely wide range of philosophical topics,
including most prominently the nature of perception, a priori knowledge and
concepts, the problem of induction, the mind Brentano’s thesis Broad, Charlie
Dunbar 101 101 body problem, the free
will problem, various topics in moral philosophy, the nature and philosophical
significance of psychical research, the nature of philosophy itself, and
various historical figures such as Leibniz, Kant, and McTaggart. Broad’s work
in the philosophy of perception centers on the nature of sense-data or sensa,
as he calls them and their relation to physical objects. He defends a rather
cautious, tentative version of the causal theory of perception. With regard to
a priori knowledge, Broad rejects the empiricist view that all such knowledge
is of analytic propositions, claiming instead that reason can intuit necessary
and universal connections between properties or characteristics; his view of
concept acquisition is that while most concepts are abstracted from experience,
some are a priori, though not necessarily innate. Broad holds that the
rationality of inductive inference depends on a further general premise about
the world, a more complicated version of the thesis that nature is uniform,
which is difficult to state precisely and even more difficult to justify.
Broad’s view of the mindbody problem is a version of dualism, though one that
places primary emphasis on individual mental events, is much more uncertain
about the existence and nature of the mind as a substance, and is quite
sympathetic to epiphenomenalism. His main contribution to the free will problem
consists in an elaborate analysis of the libertarian conception of freedom,
which he holds to be both impossible to realize and at the same time quite
possibly an essential precondition of the ordinary conception of obligation.
Broad’s work in ethics is diverse and difficult to summarize, but much of it
centers on the issue of whether ethical judgments are genuinely cognitive in
character. Broad was one of the few philosophers to take psychical research
seriously. He served as president of the Society for Psychical Research and was
an occasional observer of experiments in this area. His philosophical writings
on this subject, while not uncritical, are in the main sympathetic and are
largely concerned to defend concepts like precognition against charges of
incoherence and also to draw out their implications for more familiar
philosophical issues. As regards the nature of philosophy, Broad distinguishes
between “critical” and “speculative” philosophy. Critical philosophy is
analysis of the basic concepts of ordinary life and of science, roughly in the
tradition of Moore and Russell. A very high proportion of Broad’s own work
consists of such analyses, often amazingly detailed and meticulous in character.
But he is also sympathetic to the speculative attempt to arrive at an overall
conception of the nature of the universe and the position of human beings
therein, while at the same time expressing doubts that anything even remotely
approaching demonstration is possible in such endeavors. The foregoing catalog
of views reveals something of the range of Broad’s philosophical thought, but
it fails to bring out what is most strikingly valuable about it. Broad’s
positions on various issues do not form anything like a system he himself is
reported to have said that there is nothing that answers to the description
“Broad’s philosophy”. While his views are invariably subtle, thoughtful, and
critically penetrating, they rarely have the sort of one-sided novelty that has
come to be so highly valued in philosophy. What they do have is exceptional
clarity, dialectical insight, and even-handedness. Broad’s skill at uncovering
and displaying the precise shape of a philosophical issue, clarifying the
relevant arguments and objections, and cataloging in detail the merits and
demerits of the opposing positions has rarely been equaled. One who seeks a
clear-cut resolution of an issue is likely to be impatient and disappointed
with Broad’s careful, measured discussions, in which unusual effort is made to
accord all positions and arguments their due. But one who seeks a comprehensive
and balanced understanding of the issue in question is unlikely to find a more
trustworthy guide.
brouwer, L. E. J:
Discussed by H. P. Grice in connection with ‘intuititionist negation’ and the
elimination of negation -- philosopher and founder of the intuitionist school
in the philosophy of mathematics. Educated at the Municipal of Amsterdam, where he received his doctorate
in 7, he remained there for his entire professional career, as Privaat-Docent
912 and then professor 255. He was among the preeminent topologists of his
time, proving several important results. Philosophically, he was also unique in
his strongly held conviction that philosophical ideas and arguments concerning
the nature of mathematics ought to affect and be reflected in its practice. His
general orientation in the philosophy of mathematics was Kantian. This was
manifested in his radical critique of the role accorded to logical reasoning by
classical mathematics; a role that Brouwer, following Kant, believed to be
incompatible with the role that intuition must properly play in mathematical
reasoning. The bestknown, if not the most fundamental, part of his Brouwer,
Luitzgen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Luitzgen Egbertus Jan 102 102 critique of the role accorded to logic
by classical mathematics was his attack on the principle of the excluded middle
and related principles of classical logic. He challenged their reliability,
arguing that their unrestricted use leads to results that, intuitionistically
speaking, are not true. However, in its fundaments, Brouwer’s critique was not
so much an attack on particular principles of classical logic as a criticism of
the general role that classical mathematics grants to logical reasoning. He
believed that logical structure and hence logical inference is a product of the
linguistic representation of mathematical thought and not a feature of that
thought itself. He stated this view in the so-called First Act of Intuitionism,
which contains not only the chief critical idea of Brouwer’s position, but also
its core positive element. This positive element says, with Kant, that
mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind. Brouwer went
on to say something with which Kant would only have partially agreed: that this
activity has its origin in the perception of a move of time. The critical
element complements this by saying that mathematics is thus to be kept wholly
distinct from mathematical language and the phenomena of language described by
logic. The so-called Second Act of Intuitionism then extends the positive part
of the First Act by stating that the “self-unfolding” of the primordial
intuition of a move of time is the basis not only of the construction of the
natural numbers but also of the intuitionistic continuum. Together, these two
ideas form the basis of Brouwer’s philosophy of mathematics a philosophy that is radically at odds with
most of twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics.
bruno, giordano,
speculative philosopher. He was born in Naples, where he entered the Dominican
order in 1565. In 1576 he was suspected of heresy and abandoned his order. He
studied and taught in Geneva, but left because of difficulties with the
Calvinists. Thereafter he studied and taught in Toulouse, Paris, England,
various G. universities, and Prague. In 1591 he rashly returned to Venice, and
was arrested by the Venetian Inquisition in 1592. In 1593 he was handed over to
the Roman Inquisition, which burned him to death as a heretic. Because of his
unhappy end, his support for the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, and his
pronounced anti-Aristotelianism, Bruno has been mistakenly seen as the
proponent of a scientific worldview against medieval obscurantism. In fact, he
should be interpreted in the context of Renaissance hermetism. Indeed, Bruno
was so impressed by the hermetic corpus, a body of writings attributed to the
mythical Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, that he called for a return to the
magical religion of the Egyptians. He was also strongly influenced by Lull,
Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, an early
sixteenth-century author of an influential treatise on magic. Several of
Bruno’s works were devoted to magic, and it plays an important role in his
books on the art of memory. Techniques for improving the memory had long been a
subject of discussion, but he linked them with the notion that one could so
imprint images of the universe on the mind as to achieve special knowledge of
divine realities and the magic powers associated with such knowledge. He
emphasized the importance of the imagination as a cognitive power, since it
brings us into contact with the divine. Nonetheless, he also held that human
ideas are mere shadows of divine ideas, and that God is transcendent and hence
incomprehensible. Bruno’s best-known works are the dialogues he wrote while in England,
including the following, all published in 1584: The Ash Wednesday Supper; On
Cause, Principle and Unity; The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; and On the
Infinite Universe and Worlds. He presents a vision of the universe as a living
and infinitely extended unity containing innumerable worlds, each of which is
like a great animal with a life of its own. He maintained the unity of matter
with universal form or the World-Soul, thus suggesting a kind of pantheism
attractive to later G. idealists, such as Schelling. However, he never
identified the World-Soul with God, who remained separate from matter and form.
He combined his speculative philosophy of nature with the recommendation of a
new naturalistic ethics. Bruno’s support of Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday
Supper was related to his belief that a living earth must move, and he
specifically rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological
hypotheses. In later work he described the monad as a living version of the
Democritean atom. Despite some obvious parallels with both Spinoza and Leibniz,
he seems not to have had much direct influence on seventeenth-century thinkers.
Brunschvicg, l.: H. P.
Grice is very popular in France, and so is Brunschvicg, philosopher, an
influential professor at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure of
Paris, and a founder of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 3 and the
Société Française de Philosophie 1. In 0 he was forced by the Nazis to leave
Paris and sought refuge in the nonoccupied zone, where he died. A monistic
idealist, Brunschvicg unfolded a philosophy of mind Introduction to the Life of
the Mind, 0. His epistemology highlights judgment. Thinking is judging and
judging is acting. He defined philosophy as “the mind’s methodical
self-reflection.” Philosophy investigates man’s growing self-understanding. The
mind’s recesses, or metaphysical truth, are accessible through analysis of the
mind’s timely manifestations. His major works therefore describe the progress
of science as progress of consciousness: The Stages of Mathematical Philosophy
2, Human Experience and Physical Causality 2, The Progress of Conscience in
Western Philosophy 7, and Ages of Intelligence 4. An heir of Renouvier,
Cournot, and Revaisson, Brunschvicg advocated a moral and spiritual conception
of science and attempted to reconcile idealism and positivism.
Buber, M. G.: H. P. Grice is all about ‘I’ and ‘thou,’
as Buber is. Jewish philosopher, theologian, and political leader. Buber’s
early influences include Hasidism and neo-Kantianism. Eventually he broke with
the latter and became known as a leading religious existentialist. His chief philosophic
works include his most famous book, Ich und du “I and Thou,” 3; Moses 6;
Between Man and Man 7; and Eclipse of God 2. The crux of Buber’s thought is his
conception of two primary relationships: I-Thou and I-It. IThou is
characterized by openness, reciprocity, and a deep sense of personal
involvement. The I confronts its Thou not as something to be studied, measured,
or manipulated, but as a unique presence that responds to the I in its
individuality. I-It is characterized by the tendency to treat something as an
impersonal object governed by causal, social, or economic forces. Buber rejects
the idea that people are isolated, autonomous agents operating according to
abstract rules. Instead, reality arises between agents as they encounter and
transform each other. In a word, reality is dialogical. Buber describes God as
the ultimate Thou, the Thou who can never become an It. Thus God is reached not
by inference but by a willingness to respond to the concrete reality of the
divine presence.
Buchmanism, also called
the Moral Rearmament Movement, a non-creedal international movement that sought
to bring about universal brotherhood through a commitment to an objectivist
moral system derived largely from the Gospels. It was founded by Frank Buchman
18781, an Lutheran minister who resigned
from his church in 8 in order to expand his ministry. To promote the movement,
Buchman founded the Oxford Group at Oxford. H. P. Grice was a member.
bundle theory: Is Grice
proposing a ‘bundle theory’ of “Personal identity”: He defines “I” as an
interlinked chain of mnemonic states, a view that accepts the idea that
concrete objects consist of properties but denies the need for introducing
substrata to account for their diversity. By contrast, one traditional view of
concrete particular objects is that they are complexes consisting of two more
fundamental kinds of entities: properties that can be exemplified by many
different objects and a substratum that exemplifies those properties belonging
to a particular object. Properties account for the qualitative identity of such
objects while substrata account for their numerical diversity. The bundle
theory is usually glossed as the view that a concrete object is nothing but a
bundle of properties. This gloss, however, is inadequate. For if a “bundle” of
properties is, e.g., a set of properties, then bundles of properties differ in
significant ways from concrete objects. For sets of properties are necessary
and eternal while concrete objects are contingent and perishing. A more
adequate statement of the theory holds that a concrete object is a complex of
properties which all stand in a fundamental contingent relation, call it
co-instantiation, to one another. On this account, complexes of properties are
neither necessary nor eternal. Critics of the theory, however, maintain that
such complexes have all their properties essentially and cannot change
properties, whereas concrete objects have some of their properties accidentally
and undergo change. This objection fails to recognize that there are two
distinct problems addressed by the bundle theory: a individuation and b
identity through time. The first problem arises for all objects, both momentary
and enduring. The second, however, arises only for enduring objects. The bundle
theory typically offers two different solutions to these problems. An enduring
concrete object is analyzed as a series of momentary objects which stand in
some contingent relation R. Different versions of the theory offer differing
accounts of the relation. For example, Hume holds that the self is a series of
co-instantiated impressions and ideas, whose members are related to one another
by causation and resemblance this is his bundle theory of the self. A momentary
object, however, is analyzed as a complex of properties all of which stand in
the relation of co-instantiation to one another. Consequently, even if one
grants that a momentary complex of properties has all of its members
essentially, it does not follow that an enduring object, which contains the complex
as a temporal part, has those properties essentially unless one endorses the
controversial thesis that an enduring object has its temporal parts
essentially. Similarly, even if one grants that a momentary complex of
properties cannot change in its properties, it does not follow that an enduring
object, which consists of such complexes, cannot change its properties. Critics
of the bundle theory argue that its analysis of momentary objects is also
problematic. For it appears possible that two different momentary objects have
all properties in common, yet there cannot be two different complexes with all
properties in common. There are two responses available to a proponent of the
theory. The first is to distinguish between a strong and a weak version of the
theory. On the strong version, the thesis that a momentary object is a complex
of co-instantiated properties is a necessary truth, while on the weak version
it is a contingent truth. The possibility of two momentary objects with all
properties in common impugns only the strong version of the theory. The second
is to challenge the basis of the claim that it is possible for two momentary
objects to have all their properties in common. Although critics allege that
such a state of affairs is conceivable, proponents argue that investigation
into the nature of conceivability does not underwrite this claim.
Buridan’s ass – and the
Griceian implicature -- j. philosopher. He was born in Béthune and educated at
the of Paris. Unlike most philosophers
of his time, Buridan spent his academic career as a master in the faculty of
arts, without seeking an advanced degree in theology. He was also unusual in
being a secular cleric rather than a member of a religious order. Buridan wrote
extensively on logic and natural philosophy, although only a few of his works
have appeared in modern editions. The most important on logic are the Summulae
de dialectica “Sum of Dialectic”, an introduction to logic conceived as a
revision of, and extended commentary on, the Summulae logicales of Peter of
Spain, a widely used logic textbook of the period; and the Tractatus de
consequentiis, a treatise on modes of inference. Most of Buridan’s other
writings are short literal commentaries expositiones and longer critical
studies quaestiones of Aristotle’s works. Like most medieval nominalists,
Buridan argued that universals have no real existence, except as concepts by
which the mind “conceives of many things indifferently.” Likewise, he included
only particular substances and qualities in his basic ontology. But his
nominalist program is distinctive in its implementation. He differs, e.g., from
Ockham in his accounts of motion, time, and quantity appealing, in the latter
case, to quantitative forms to explain the impenetrability of bodies. In natural
philosophy, Buridan is best known for introducing to the West the
non-Aristotelian concept of impetus, or impressed force, to explain projectile
motion. Although asses appear often in his examples, the particular example
that has come via Spinoza and others to be known as “Buridan’s ass,” an ass
starving to death between two equidistant and equally tempting piles of hay, is
unknown in Buridan’s writings. It may, however, have originated as a caricature
of Buridan’s theory of action, which attempts to find a middle ground between
Aristotelian intellectualism and Franciscan voluntarism by arguing that the
will’s freedom to act consists primarily in its ability to defer choice in the
absence of a compelling reason to act one way or the other. Buridan’s intellectual
legacy was considerable. His works continued to be read and discussed in
universities for centuries after his death. Three of his students and
disciples, Albert of Saxony, Marsilius of Inghen, and Nicole Oresme, went on to
become distinguished philosophers in their own right.
Burke, Edmund: discussed
by H. P. Grice in his exploration on legal versus moral right, statesman and
one of the eighteenth century’s greatest political writers. Born in Dublin, he
moved to London to study law, then undertook a literary and political career.
He sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1794. In speeches and pamphlets
during these years he offered an ideological perspective on politics that
endures to this day as the fountain of conservative wisdom. The philosophical
stance that pervades Burke’s parliamentary career and writings is skepticism, a
profound distrust of political rationalism, i.e., the achievement in the
political realm of abstract and rational structures, ideals, and objectives.
Burkean skeptics are profoundly anti-ideological, detesting what they consider
the complex, mysterious, and existential givens of political life distorted,
criticized, or planned from a perspective of abstract, generalized, and
rational categories. The seminal expression of Burke’s skeptical conservatism
is found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790. The conservatism
of the Reflections was earlier displayed, however, in Burke’s response to
radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early
1780s. The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments,
when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any
foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on Procrustean beds
and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.”
Such prideful presumption required much more rational capacity than could be
found among ordinary mortals. One victim of Burke’s skepticism is the vaunted
liberal idea of the social contract. Commonwealths were neither constructed nor
ought they to be renovated according to a priori principles. The concept of an
original act of contract is just such a principle. The only contract in
politics is the agreement that binds generations past, present, and future, one
that “is but a clause in the great primeval contract of an eternal society.”
Burke rejects the voluntaristic quality of rationalist liberal contractualism.
Individuals are not free to create their own political institutions. Political
society and law are not “subject to the will of those who, by an obligation
above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that
law.” Men and groups “are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and on
their speculations of a contingent improvement” to rip apart their communities
and dissolve them into an “unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos.” Burke saw our
stock of reason as small; despite this people still fled their basic
limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to
their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative
visions. Burke devoutly wished that people would appreciate their weakness,
their “subordinate rank in the creation.” God has “subjected us to act the part
which belongs to the place assigned us.” And that place is to know the limits
of one’s rational and speculative faculties. Instead of relying on their own
meager supply of reason, politicians should avail themselves “of the general
bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Because people forget this they weave
rational schemes of reform far beyond their power to implement. Buridan’s ass
Burke, Edmund 108 108 Burke stands as
the champion of political skepticism in revolt against Enlightenment
rationalism and its “smugness of adulterated metaphysics,” which produced the
“revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma.” The sins of the were produced by the “clumsy subtlety of
their political metaphysics.” The “faith in the dogmatism of philosophers” led
them to rely on reason and abstract ideas, on speculation and a priori
principles of natural right, freedom, and equality as the basis for reforming
governments. Englishmen, like Burke, had no such illusions; they understood the
complexity and fragility of human nature and human institutions, they were not
“the converts of Rousseau . . . the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius [had] made
no progress amongst [them].”
Burley, W. H. P. Grice
preferred the spelling “Burleigh,” or “Burleighensis” if you must – “That’s how
we called him at Oxford!” -- c.1275c.1344, English philosopher who taught
philosophy at Oxford and theology at Paris. An orthodox Aristotelian and a
realist, he attacked Ockham’s logic and his interpretation of the Aristotelian
categories. Burley commented on almost of all of Aristotle’s works in logic,
natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. An early Oxford Calculator, Burley
began his work as a fellow of Merton in
1301. By 1310, he was at Paris. A student of Thomas Wilton, he probably
incepted before 1322; by 1324 he was a fellow of the Sorbonne. His commentary
on Peter Lombard’s Sentences has been lost. After leaving Paris, Burley was
associated with the household of Richard of Bury and the court of Edward III,
who sent him as an envoy to the papal curia in 1327. De vita et moribus
philosophorum “On the Life and Manners of Philosophers”, an influential,
popular account of the lives of the philosophers, has often been attributed to
Burley, but modern scholarship suggests that the attribution is incorrect. Many
of Burley’s independent works dealt with problems in natural philosophy,
notably De intensione et remissione formarum “On the Intension and Remission of
Forms”, De potentiis animae “On the Faculties of the Soul”, and De substantia
orbis. De primo et ultimo instanti “On First and Last Instants” discusses which
temporal processes have intrinsic, which extrinsic limits. In his Tractatus de
formis Burley attacks Ockham’s theory of quantity. Similarly, Burley’s theory
of motion opposed Ockham’s views. Ockham restricts the account of motion to the
thing moving, and the quality, quantity, and place acquired by motion. By
contrast, Burley emphasizes the process of motion and the quantitative
measurement of that process. Burley attacks the view that the forms successively
acquired in motion are included in the form finally acquired. He ridicules the
view that contrary qualities hot and cold could simultaneously inhere in the
same subject producing intermediate qualities warmth. Burley emphasized the
formal character of logic in his De puritate artis logicae “On the Purity of
the Art of Logic”, one of the great medieval treatises on logic. Ockham
attacked a preliminary version of De puritate in his Summa logicae; Burley
called Ockham a beginner in logic. In De puritate artis logicae, Burley makes
syllogistics a subdivision of consequences. His treatment of negation is
particularly interesting for his views on double negation and the restrictions
on the rule that notnot-p implies p. Burley distinguished between analogous
words and analogous concepts and natures. His theory of analogy deserves
detailed discussion. These views, like the views expressed in most of Burley’s
works, have seldom been carefully studied by modern philosophers.
butler: J., cited by H.
P. Grice, principle of conversational benevolence. English theologian and
Anglican bishop who made important contributions to moral philosophy, to the
understanding of moral agency, and to the development of deontological ethics.
Better known in his own time for The Analogy of Religion 1736, a defense, along
broadly empiricist lines, of orthodox, “revealed” Christian doctrine against
deist criticism, Butler’s main philosophical legacy was a series of highly
influential arguments and theses contained in a collection of Sermons 1725 and
in two “Dissertations” appended to The Analogy
one on virtue and the other on personal identity. The analytical method
of these essays “everything is what it is and not another thing” provided a model
for much of English-speaking moral philosophy to follow. For example, Butler is
often credited with refuting psychological hedonism, the view that all motives
can be reduced to the desire for pleasure or happiness. The sources of human
motivation are complex and structurally various, he argued. Appetites and
passions seek their own peculiar objects, and pleasure must itself be
understood as involving an intrinsic positive regard for a particular object.
Other philosophers had maintained, like Butler, that we can desire, e.g., the
happiness of others intrinsically, and not just as a means to our own
happiness. And others had argued that the person who aims singlemindedly at his
own happiness is unlikely to attain it. Butler’s distinctive contribution was
to demonstrate that happiness and pleasure themselves require completion by
specific objects for which we have an intrinsic positive regard. Self-love, the
desire for our own happiness, is a reflective desire for, roughly, the
satisfaction of our other desires. But self-love is not our only reflective
desire; we also have “a settled reasonable principle of benevolence.” We can
consider the goods of others and come on reflection to desire their welfare
more or less independently of particular emotional involvement such as
compassion. In morals, Butler equally opposed attempts to reduce virtue to
benevolence, even of the most universal and impartial sort. Benevolence seeks
the good or happiness of others, whereas the regulative principle of virtue is
conscience, the faculty of moral approval or disapproval of conduct and
character. Moral agency requires, he argued, the capacities to reflect
disinterestedly on action, motive, and character, to judge these in
distinctively moral terms and not just in terms of their relation to the
non-moral good of happiness, and to guide conduct by such judgments. Butler’s
views about the centrality of conscience in the moral life were important in
the development of deontological ethics as well as in the working out of an
associated account of moral agency. Along the first lines, he argued in the
“Dissertation” that what it is right for a person to do depends, not just on
the non-morally good or bad consequences of an action, but on such other
morally relevant features as the relationships the agent bears to affected
others e.g., friend or beneficiary, or whether fraud, injustice, treachery, or
violence is involved. Butler thus distinguished analytically between
distinctively moral evaluation of action and assessing an act’s relation to
such non-moral values as happiness. And he provided succeeding deontological
theorists with a litany of examples where the right thing to do is apparently
not what would have the best consequences. Butler believed God instills a
“principle of reflection” or conscience in us through which we intrinsically
disapprove of such actions as fraud and injustice. But he also believed that
God, being omniscient and benevolent, fitted us with these moral attitudes
because “He foresaw this constitution of our nature would produce more
happiness, than forming us with a temper of mere general benevolence.” This
points, however, toward a kind of anti-deontological or consequentialist view,
sometimes called indirect consequentialism, which readily acknowledges that
what it is right to do does not depend on which act will have the best
consequences. It is entirely appropriate, according to indirect
consequentialism, that conscience approve or disapprove of acts on grounds
other than a calculation of consequences precisely because its doing so has the
best consequences. Here we have a version of the sort of view later to be
found, for example, in Mill’s defense of utilitarianism against the objection
that it conflicts with justice and rights. Morality is a system of social
control that demands allegiance to considerations other than utility, e.g.,
justice and honesty. But it is justifiable only to the extent that the system
itself has utility. This sets up something of a tension. From the conscientious
perspective an agent must distinguish between the question of which action
would have the best consequences and the question of what he should do. And
from that perspective, Butler thinks, one will necessarily regard one’s answer
to the second question as authoritative for conduct. Conscience necessarily
implicitly asserts its own authority, Butler famously claimed. Thus, insofar as
agents come to regard their conscience as simply a method of social control
with good consequences, they will come to be alienated from the inherent
authority their conscience implicitly claims. A similar issue arises concerning
the relation between conscience and self-love. Butler says that both self-love
and conscience are “superior principles in the nature of man” in that an action
will be unsuitable to a person’s nature if it is contrary to either. This makes
conscience’s authority conditional on its not conflicting with self-love and
vice versa. Some scholars, moreover, read other passages as implying that no
agent could reasonably follow conscience unless doing so was in the agent’s
interest. But again, it would seem that an agent who internalized such a view
would be alienated from the authority that, if Butler is right, conscience
implicitly claims. For Butler, conscience or the principle of reflection is
uniquely the faculty of practical judgment. Unlike either self-love or
benevolence, even when these are added to the powers of inference and empirical
cognition, only conscience makes moral agency possible. Only a creature with
conscience can accord with or violate his own judgment of what he ought to do,
and thereby be a “law to himself.” This suggests a view that, like Kant’s,
seeks to link deontology to a conception of autonomous moral agency.
byzantine. This
is important since it displays Grice’s disrespect for stupid traditions. There
is Austin trying to lecture what he derogatorily called ‘philosophical hack’
(“I expect he was being ironic”) into learning through the Little Oxford
Dictionary. HARDLY Grice’s cup of tea. Austiin, or the ‘master,’ as Grice
ironically calls him, could patronize less patrician play group members, but
not him! In any case, Austin grew so tiresome, that Grice grabbed the Little
Dictionary. Austin had gave him license to go and refute Ryle on ‘feeling’.
“So, go and check with the dictionary, to see howmany things you can feel.”
Grice started with the A and got as far as the last relevant item under the
‘B,” he hoped. “And then I realised it was all hopeless. A waste. Language
botany, indeed!” At a later stage, he grew more affectionate, especially when
seeing that this was part of his armoury (as Gellner had noted): a temperament,
surely not shared by Strawson, for subtleties and nuances. How Byzantine can
Grice feel? Vide ‘agitation.’ Does feeling Byzantine entail a feeling of BEING
Byzantine? originally used of the style of art
and architecture developed there 4c.-5c. C.E.; later in reference to the
complex, devious, and intriguing character of the royal court of Constantinople
(1937). Bȳzantĭum ,
ii, n., = Βυζάντιον,I.a city in Thrace, on
the Bosphorus, opposite
the Asiatic Chalcedon, later Constantinopolis, now Constantinople; among the
Turks, Istamboul or Stamboul (i.e. εις τὴν πόλιν), Mel. 2, 2, 6; Plin. 4, 11, 18, § 46; 9, 15, 20, § 50 sq.; Nep. Paus. 2, 2; Liv. 38, 16, 3 sq.; Tac. A. 12, 63 sq.; id. H. 2. 83; 3, 47 al.—II. Derivv.A. Bȳzantĭus ,
a, um, adj., of Byzantium, Byzantine: “litora,” the Strait of
Constantinople, Ov. Tr. 1, 10, 31: “portus,” Plin. 9, 15, 20, § 51.—Subst.: Bȳ-zantĭi ,
ōrum, m., the inhabitants of
Byzantium, Cic. Prov. Cons. 3, 5; 4, 6 sq.; Cic. Verr. 2, 2, 31, § 76; Nep. Timoth. 1, 2; Liv. 32, 33, 7.—B. Bȳzantĭăcus ,
a, um, adj., of Byzantium:
“lacerti,” Stat. S. 4, 9, 13. — C. Bȳzantīnus ,
a, um, adj., the same (post-class.): “Lygos,” Aus.
Clar. Urb. 2: “frigora,” Sid.
Ep. 7, 17. Byzantine feeling -- Einfühlung G., ‘feeling into’,
empathy. In contrast to sympathy, where one’s identity is preserved in feeling
with or for the other, in empathy or Einfühlung one tends to lose oneself in
the other. The concept of Einfühlung received its classical formulation in the
work of Theodor Lipps, who characterized it as a process of involuntary, inner
imitation whereby a subject identifies through feeling with the movement of
another body, whether it be the real leap of a dancer or the illusory upward
lift of an architectural column. Complete empathy is considered to be
aesthetic, providing a non-representational access to beauty. Husserl used a
phenomenologically purified concept of Einfühlung to account for the way the
self directly recognizes the other. Husserl’s student Edith Stein described
Einfühlung as a blind egoism Einfühlung 255
255 mode of knowledge that reaches the experience of the other without
possessing it. Einfühlung is not to be equated with Verstehen or human
understanding, which, as Dilthey pointed out, requires the use of all one’s
mental powers, and cannot be reduced to a mere mode of feeling. To understand
is not to apprehend something empathetically as the projected locus of an
actual experience, but to apperceive the meaning of expressions of experience
in relation to their context. Whereas understanding is reflective, empathy is
prereflective.
cabala –
cited by Grice “Perhaps Moses brought more than the ten commandments from
Sinai.” from Hebrew qabbala, ‘tradition’, a system of Jewish mysticism and
theosophy practiced from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century; loosely, all
forms of Jewish mysticism. Believed by its adherents to be a tradition
communicated to Moses at Sinai, the main body of cabalistic writing, the Zohar,
is thought to be the work primarily of Moses de León of Guadalajara, in the
thirteenth century, though he attributed it to the second-century rabbi Simon
bar Yohai. The Zohar builds on earlier Jewish mysticism, and is replete with
gnostic and Neoplatonic themes. It offers the initiated access to the mysteries
of God’s being, human destiny, and the meaning of the commandments. The
transcendent and strictly unitary God of rabbinic Judaism here encounters ten
apparently real divine powers, called sefirot, which together represent God’s
being and appearance in the cosmos and include male and female principles. Evil
in the world is seen as a reflection of a cosmic rupture in this system, and
redemption on earth entails restoration of the divine order. Mankind can assist
in this task through knowledge, piety, and observance of the law. Isaac Luria
in the sixteenth century developed these themes with graphic descriptions of
the dramas of creation, cosmic rupture, and restoration, the latter process
requiring human assistance more than ever.
cæteris paribus: Strawson and Wiggins:
that the principle holds ceteris paribus is a necessary condition for the very
existence of the activity in question. Central. Grice technically directs his
attenetion to this in his “Method”. There, he tries to introduce “WILLING” as a
predicate, i.e. a theoretical concept which is implicitly defined by the LAW in
a THEORY that it occurs. This theory is ‘psychology,’ but understood as a ‘folk
science.’ So the conditionals are ‘ceteris paribus.’ Schiffer and Cartwright
were aware of this. Especially Cartwright who attended seminars on this with
Grice on ‘as if.’ Schiffer was well aware of the topic via Loar and others.
Griceians who were trying to come up with a theory of content without relying
on semantic stuff would involve ‘caeteris paribus’ ‘laws.’ Grice in discussion
with Davidson comes to the same conclusion, hence his “A T C,’ all things
considered and prima facie. H. L. A. Hart, with his concept of ‘defeasibility’
relates. Vide Baker. And obviously those who regard ‘implicature’ as nonmonotonic.
Caeteris paribus -- Levinon “generalised implicature as by default” default
logic, a formal system for reasoning with defaults, developed by Raymond Reiter
in 0. Reiter’s defaults have the form ‘P:MQ1 , . . . , MQn/R’, read ‘If P is
believed and Q1 . . . Qn are consistent with one’s beliefs, then R may be
believed’. Whether a proposition is consistent with one’s beliefs depends on
what defaults have already been applied. Given the defaults P:MQ/Q and
R:M-Q/-Q, and the facts P and R, applying the first default yields Q while
applying the second default yields -Q. So applying either default blocks the
other. Consequently, a default theory may have several default extensions.
Normal defaults having the form P:MQ/Q, useful for representing simple cases of
nonmonotonic reasoning, are inadequate for more complex cases. Reiter produces
a reasonably clean proof theory for normal default theories and proves that
every normal default theory has an extension.
caird, Edward 18358, Oxford Hegelian of the
type Grice saw mostly every day! philosopher, a leading absolute idealist.
Influential as both a writer and a teacher, Caird was professor of moral
philosophy at Glasgow and master of Balliol , Oxford. His aim in philosophy was
to overcome intellectual oppositions. In his main work, The Critical Philosophy
of Kant 9, he argued that Kant had done this by using reason to synthesize
rationalism and empiricism while reconciling science and religion. In Caird’s
view, Kant unfortunately treated reason as subjective, thereby retaining an
opposition between self and world. Loosely following Hegel, Caird claimed that
objective reason, or the Absolute, was a larger whole in which both self and
world were fragments. In his Evolution of Religion 3 Caird argued that religion
progressively understands God as the Absolute and hence as what reconciles self
and world. This allowed him to defend Christianity as the highest evolutionary
stage of religion without defending the literal truth of Scripture.
cajetan, original name,
-- H. P. Grice thinks that Shropshire borrowed his proof for the immortality of
the soul from Cajetan -- Tommaso de Vio, prelate and theologian. Born in Gaeta
from which he took his name, he entered the Dominican order in 1484 and studied
philosophy and theology at Naples, Bologna, and Padua. He became a cardinal in
1517; during the following two years he traveled to G.y, where he engaged in a
theological controversy with Luther. His major work is a Commentary on St.
Thomas’ Summa of Theology 1508, which promoted a renewal of interest in
Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy during the sixteenth century. In agreement
with Aquinas, Cajetan places the origin of human knowledge in sense perception.
In contrast with Aquinas, he denies that the immortality of the soul and the
existence of God as our creator can be proved. Cajetan’s work in logic was
based on traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logic but is original in its
discussion of the notion of analogy. Cajetan distinguishes three types: analogy
of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportion. Whereas he
rejected the first two types as improper, he regarded the last as the basic
type of analogy and appealed to it in explaining how humans come to know God
and how analogical reasoning applied to God and God’s creatures avoids being
equivocal.
calculus: Grice uses
‘calculus’ slightly different, in the phrase “first-order predicate calculus
with time-relative identity” -- a central branch of mathematics, originally
conceived in connection with the determination of the tangent or normal to a
curve and of the area between it and some fixed axis; but it also embraced the
calculation of volumes and of areas of curved surfaces, the lengths of curved
lines, and so on. Mathematical analysis is a still broader branch that subsumed
the calculus under its rubric see below, together with the theories of
functions and of infinite series. Still more general and/or abstract versions
of analysis have been developed during the twentieth century, with applications
to other branches of mathematics, such as probability theory. The origins of
the calculus go back to Grecian mathematics, usually in problems of determining
the slope of a tangent to a curve and the area enclosed underneath it by some
fixed axes or by a closed curve; sometimes related questions such as the length
of an arc of a curve, or the area of a curved surface, were considered. The
subject flourished in the seventeenth century when the analytical geometry of
Descartes gave algebraic means to extend the procedures. It developed further
when the problems of slope and area were seen to require the finding of new
functions, and that the pertaining processes were seen to be inverse. Newton
and Leibniz had these insights in the late seventeenth century, independently and
in different forms. In the Leibnizian differential calculus the differential dx
was proposed as an infinitesimal increment on x, and of the same dimension as
x; the slope of the tangent to a curve with y as a function of x was the ratio
dy/dx. The integral, ex, was infinitely large and of the dimension of x; thus
for linear variables x and y the area ey dx was the sum of the areas of
rectangles y high and dx wide. All these quantities were variable, and so could
admit higher-order differentials and integrals ddx, eex, and so on. This theory
was extended during the eighteenth century, especially by Euler, to functions
of several independent variables, and with the creation of the calculus of
variations. The chief motivation was to solve differential equations: they were
motivated largely by problems in mechanics, which was then the single largest
branch of mathematics. Newton’s less successful fluxional calculus used limits
in its basic definitions, thereby changing dimensions for the defined terms.
The fluxion was the rate of change of a variable quantity relative to “time”;
conversely, that variable was the “fluent” of its fluxion. These quantities
were also variable; fluxions and fluents of higher orders could be defined from
them. A third tradition was developed during the late eighteenth century by J.
L. Lagrange. For him the “derived functions” of a function fx were definable by
purely algebraic means from its Taylorian power-series expansion about any
value of x. By these means it was hoped to avoid the use of both infinitesimals
and limits, which exhibited conceptual difficulties, the former due to their
unclear ontology as values greater than zero but smaller than any orthodox
quantity, the latter because of the naive theories of their deployment. In the
early nineteenth century the Newtonian tradition died away, and Lagrange’s did
not gain general conviction; however, the LeibnizEuler line kept some of its
health, for its utility in physical applications. But all these theories
gradually became eclipsed by the mathematical analysis of A. L. Cauchy. As with
Newton’s calculus, the theory of limits was central, but they were handled in a
much more sophisticated way. He replaced the usual practice of defining the
integral as more or less automatically the inverse of the differential or
fluxion or whatever by giving independent definitions of the derivative and the
integral; thus for the first time the fundamental “theorem” of the calculus,
stating their inverse relationship, became a genuine theorem, requiring
sufficient conditions upon the function to ensure its truth. Indeed, Cauchy
pioneered the routine specification of necessary and/or sufficient conditions
for truth of theorems in analysis. His discipline also incorporated the theory
of discontinuous functions and the convergence or divergence of infinite
series. Again, general definitions were proffered and conditions sought for
properties to hold. Cauchy’s discipline was refined and extended in the second
half of the nineteenth century by K. Weierstrass and his followers at Berlin.
The study of existence theorems as for irrational numbers, and also technical
questions largely concerned with trigonometric series, led to the emergence of
set topology. In addition, special attention was given to processes involving
several variables changing in value together, and as a result the importance of
quantifiers was recognized for example,
reversing their order from ‘there is a y such that for all x . . .’ to ‘for all
x, there is a y . . .’. This developed later into general set theory, and then
to mathematical logic: Cantor was the major figure in the first aspect, while
G. Peano pioneered much for the second. Under this regime of “rigor,”
infinitesimals such as dx became unacceptable as mathematical objects. However,
they always kept an unofficial place because of their utility when applying the
calculus, and since World War II theories have been put forward in which the
established level of rigor and generality are preserved and even improved but
in which infinitesimals are reinstated. The best-known of these theories, the
non-standard analysis of A. Robinson, makes use of model theory by defining
infinitesimals as arithmetical inverses of the transfinite integers generated
by a “non-standard model” of Peano’s postulates for the natural numbers.
Calvin: j.: As C. of E.,
Grice was aware of the problems his father, a non-conformist, brought to his
High Anglican household, theologian and church reformer, a major figure in the
Protestant Reformation. He was especially important for the so-called Reformed
churches in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, G.y, Scotland, and England.
Calvin was a theologian in the humanist tradition rather than a philosopher. He
valued philosophy as “a noble gift of God” and cited philosophers especially
Plato when it suited his purposes; but he rejected philosophical speculation
about “higher things” and despised
though sometimes exploiting its resources the dominant Scholastic philosophy of his
time, to which he had been introduced at the
of Paris. His eclectic culture also included a variety of philosophical
ideas, of whose source he was often unaware, that inevitably helped to shape
his thought. His Christianae religionis institutio first ed. 1536 but
repeatedly enlarged; in English generally cited as Institutes, his theological
treatises, his massive biblical commentaries, and his letters, all of which
were tr. into most European languages, thus helped to transmit various
philosophical motifs and attitudes in an unsystematic form both to
contemporaries and to posterity. He passed on to his followers impulses derived
from both the antiqui and the moderni. From the former he inherited an
intellectualist anthropology that conceived of the personality as a hierarchy
of faculties properly subordinated to reason, which was at odds with his
evangelical theology; and, though he professed to scorn Stoicism, a moralism
often more Stoic than evangelical. He also relied occasionally on the
Scholastic quaestio, and regularly treated substantives, like the antiqui, as
real entities. These elements in his thought also found expression in
tendencies to a natural theology based on an innate and universal religious
instinct that can discern evidences of the existence and attributes of God
everywhere in nature, and a conception of the Diety as immutable and
intelligible. This side of Calvinism eventually found expression in
Unitarianism and universalism. It was, however, in uneasy tension with other
tendencies in his thought that reflect both his biblicism and a nominalist and
Scotist sense of the extreme transcendence of God. Like other humanists,
therefore, he was also profoundly skeptical about the capacity of the human
mind to grasp ultimate truth, an attitude that rested, for him, on both the
consequences of original sin and the merely conventional origins of language.
Corollaries of this were his sense of the contingency of all human intellectual
constructions and a tendency to emphasize the utility rather than the truth
even of such major elements in his theology as the doctrine of predestination.
It may well be no accident, therefore, that later skepticism and pragmatism
have been conspicuous in thinkers nurtured by later Calvinism, such as Bayle,
Hume, and James.
Cambridge change, a
non-genuine change: Grice loved the phrase seeing that, “while at Oxford we had
a minor revolution, at Cambridge, if the place counts, they didn’t. “I went to
Oxford. You went to Cambridge. He went to the London School of Economics.” If I
turn pale, I am changing, whereas your turning pale is only a Cambridge change
in me. When I acquire the property of being such that you are pale, I do not
change. In general, an object’s acquiring a new property is not a sufficient
condition for that object to change although some other object may genuinely
change. Thus also, my being such that you are pale counts only as a Cambridge
property of me, a property such that my gaining or losing it is only a
Cambridge change. Cambridge properties are a proper subclass of extrinsic
properties: being south of Chicago is considered an extrinsic property of me,
but since my moving to Canada would be a genuine change, being south of Chicago
cannot, for me, be a Cambridge property. The concept of a Cambridge change
reflects a way of thinking entrenched in common sense, but it is difficult to
clarify, and its philosophical value is controversial. Neither science nor
formal semantics, e.g., supports this viewpoint. Perhaps calculus, fluxional
Cambridge changes and properties are, for better or worse, inseparable from a
vague, intuitive metaphysics.
Oxford Aristototelians,
Cambridge Platonists: If Grice adored Aristotle, it was perhaps he hated the
Cambridge platonists so! a group of seventeenth-century philosopher-theologians
at the of Cambridge, principally
including Benjamin Whichcote 160983, often designated the father of the
Cambridge Platonists; Henry More; Ralph Cudworth 161788; and John Smith 161652.
Whichcote, Cudworth, and Smith received their
education in or were at some time fellows of Emmanuel , a stronghold of
the Calvinism in which they were nurtured and against which they rebelled under
mainly Erasmian, Arminian, and Neoplatonic influences. Other Cambridge men who
shared their ideas and attitudes to varying degrees were Nathanael Culverwel
1618?51, Peter Sterry 161372, George Rust d.1670, John Worthington 161871, and
Simon Patrick 1625 1707. As a generic label, ‘Cambridge Platonists’ is a handy
umbrella term rather than a dependable signal of doctrinal unity or
affiliation. The Cambridge Platonists were not a self-constituted group
articled to an explicit manifesto; no two of them shared quite the same set of
doctrines or values. Their Platonism was not exclusively the pristine teaching
of Plato, but was formed rather from Platonic ideas supposedly prefigured in
Hermes Trismegistus, in the Chaldean Oracles, and in Pythagoras, and which they
found in Origen and other church fathers, in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and
Proclus, and in the Florentine Neoplatonism of Ficino. They took contrasting
and changing positions on the important belief originating in Florence with
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola that Pythagoras and Plato derived their wisdom
ultimately from Moses and the cabala. They were not equally committed to
philosophical pursuits, nor were they equally versed in the new philosophies
and scientific advances of the time. The Cambridge Platonists’ concerns were
ultimately religious and theological rather than primarily philosophical. They
philosophized as theologians, making eclectic use of philosophical doctrines
whether Platonic or not for apologetic purposes. They wanted to defend “true
religion,” namely, their latitudinarian vision of Anglican Christianity,
against a variety of enemies: the Calvinist doctrine of predestination; sectarianism;
religious enthusiasm; fanaticism; the “hide-bound, strait-laced spirit” of
Interregnum Puritanism; the “narrow, persecuting spirit” that followed the
Restoration; atheism; and the impieties incipient in certain trends in
contemporary science and philosophy. Notable among the latter were the
doctrines of the mechanical philosophers, especially the materialism and
mechanical determinism of Hobbes and the mechanistic pretensions of the
Cartesians. The existence of God, the existence, immortality, and dignity of
the human soul, the existence of spirit activating the natural world, human
free will, and the primacy of reason are among the principal teachings of the
Cambridge Platonists. They emphasized the positive role of reason in all
aspects of philosophy, religion, and ethics, insisting in particular that it is
irrationality that endangers the Christian life. Human reason and understanding
was “the Candle of the Lord” Whichcote’s phrase, perhaps their most cherished
image. In Whichcote’s words, “To go against Reason, is to go against God . . .
Reason is the Divine Governor of Man’s Life; it is the very Voice of God.”
Accordingly, “there is no real clashing at all betwixt any genuine point of
Christianity and what true Philosophy and right Reason does determine or allow”
More. Reason directs us to the self-evidence of first principles, which “must
be seen in their own light, and are perceived by an inward power of nature.”
Yet in keeping with the Plotinian mystical tenor of their thought, they found
within the human soul the “Divine Sagacity” More’s term, which is the prime
cause of human reason and therefore superior to it. Denying the Calvinist
doctrine that revelation is the only source of spiritual light, they taught
that the “natural light” enables us to know God and interpret the Scriptures.
Cambridge Platonism was uncompromisingly innatist. Human reason has inherited
immutable intellectual, moral, and religious notions, “anticipations of the
soul,” which negate the claims of empiricism. The Cambridge Platonists were
skeptical with regard to certain kinds of knowledge, and recognized the role of
skepticism as a critical instrument in epistemology. But they were dismissive
of the idea that Pyrrhonism be taken seriously in the practical affairs of the
philosopher at work, and especially of the Christian soul in its quest for
divine knowledge and understanding. Truth is not compromised by our inability
to devise apodictic demonstrations. Indeed Whichcote passed a moral censure on
those who pretend “the doubtfulness and uncertainty of reason.” Innatism and
the natural light of reason shaped the Cambridge Platonists’ moral philosophy.
The unchangeable and eternal ideas of good and evil in the divine mind are the
exemplars of ethical axioms or noemata that enable the human mind to make moral
judgments. More argued for a “boniform faculty,” a faculty higher than reason
by which the soul rejoices in reason’s judgment of the good. The most
philosophically committed and systematic of the group were More, Cudworth, and
Culverwel. Smith, perhaps the most intellectually gifted and certainly the most
promising note his dates, defended Whichcote’s Christian teaching, insisting
that theology is more “a Divine Life than a Divine Science.” More exclusively
theological in their leanings were Whichcote, who wrote little of solid
philosophical interest, Rust, who followed Cudworth’s moral philosophy, and
Sterry. Only Patrick, More, and Cudworth all fellows of the Royal Society were
sufficiently attracted to the new science especially the work of Descartes to
discuss it in any detail or to turn it to philosophical and theological
advantage. Though often described as a Platonist, Culverwel was really a
neo-Aristotelian with Platonic embellishments and, like Sterry, a Calvinist. He
denied innate ideas and supported the tabula rasa doctrine, commending “the
Platonists . . . that they lookt upon the spirit of a man as the Candle of the
Lord, though they were deceived in the time when ‘twas lighted.” The Cambridge
Platonists were influential as latitudinarians, as advocates of rational
theology, as severe critics of unbridled mechanism and materialism, and as the
initiators, in England, of the intuitionist ethical tradition. In the England
of Locke they are a striking counterinstance of innatism and non-empirical
philosophy.
camera obscura: cited by
H. P. Grice and G. J. Warnock on “Seeing” – and the Causal Theory of Seeing –
“visa” -- a darkened enclosure that focuses light from an external object by a
pinpoint hole instead of a lens, creating an inverted, reversed image on the
opposite wall. The adoption of the camera obscura as a model for the eye
revolutionized the study of visual perception by rendering obsolete previous
speculative philosophical theories, in particular the emanation theory, which
explained perception as due to emanated copy-images of objects entering the
eye, and theories that located the image of perception in the lens rather than
the retina. By shifting the location of sensation to a projection on the
retina, the camera obscura doctrine helped support the distinction of primary
and secondary sense qualities, undermining the medieval realist view of
perception and moving toward the idea that consciousness is radically split off
from the world.
Campanella, Tommaso – H.
P. Grice enjoyed his philosophical poems.-
15681639, theologian,
philosopher, and poet. He joined the Dominican order in 1582. Most of the years
between 1592 and 1634 he spent in prison for heresy and for conspiring to
replace rule in southern Italy with a
utopian republic. He fled to France in 1634 and spent his last years in
freedom. Some of his best poetry was written while he was chained in a dungeon;
and during less rigorous confinement he managed to write over a hundred books,
not all of which survive. His best-known work, The City of the Sun 1602;
published 1623, describes a community governed in accordance with astrological
principles, with a priest as head of state. In later political writings,
Campanella attacked Machiavelli and called for either a universal monarchy with the pope as spiritual head or a
universal theocracy with the pope as both spiritual and temporal leader. His
first publication was Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses 1591, which supported
the theories of Telesio and initiated his lifelong attack on Aristotelianism.
He hoped to found a new Christian philosophy based on the two books of nature
and Scripture, both of which are manifestations of God. While he appealed to
sense experience, he was not a straightforward empiricist, for he saw the
natural world as alive and sentient, and he thought of magic as a tool for
utilizing natural processes. In this he was strongly influenced by Ficino.
Despite his own difficulties with Rome, he wrote in support of Galileo.
Campbell: n. r. – H. P.
Grice drew some ideas on scientific laws from Campbell -- 09, British physicist and philosopher of
science. A successful experimental physicist, Campbell with A. Wood discovered
the radioactivity of potassium. His analysis of science depended on a sharp
distinction between experimental laws and theories. Experimental laws are
generalizations established by observations. A theory has the following
structure. First, it requires a largely arbitrary hypothesis, which in itself
is untestable. To render it testable, the theory requires a “dictionary” of
propositions linking the hypothesis to scientific laws, which can be
established experimentally. But theories are not merely logical relations
between hypotheses and experimental laws; they also require concrete analogies
or models. Indeed, the models suggest the nature of the propositions in the
dictionary. The analogies are essential components of the theory, and, for
Campbell, are nearly always mechanical. His theory of science greatly
influenced Nagel’s The Structure of Science 1.
Camus, A.: H. P. Grice
said that Martin Heidegger is the greatest philosopher alive – He was aware
that he was contesting with Camus – but Grice saw Camus moer as a ‘novelist’
than a philosopher. -- philosophical novelist
and essayist who was also a prose poet and the conscience of his times. He was
born and raised in Algeria, and his experiences as a fatherless, tubercular
youth, as a young playwright and journalist in Algiers, and later in the
anti-G. resistance in Paris during World War II informed everything he wrote.
His best-known writings are not overtly political; his most famous works, the
novel The Stranger written in 0, published in 2 and his book-length essay The
Myth of Sisyphus written in 1, published in 3 explore the notion of “the
absurd,” which Camus alternatively describes as the human condition and as “a
widespread sensitivity of our times.” The absurd, briefly defined, is the
confrontation between ourselves with our
demands for rationality and justice and
an “indifferent universe.” Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to the
endless, futile task of rolling a rock up a mountain whence it would roll back
down of its own weight, thus becomes an exemplar of the human condition,
struggling hopelessly and pointlessly to achieve something. The odd antihero of
The Stranger, on the other hand, unconsciously accepts the absurdity of life.
He makes no judgments, accepts the most repulsive characters as his friends and
neighbors, and remains unmoved by the death of his mother and his own killing
of a man. Facing execution for his crime, he “opens his heart to the benign
indifference of the universe.” But such stoic acceptance is not the message of
Camus’s philosophy. Sisyphus thrives he is even “happy” by virtue of his scorn
and defiance of the gods, and by virtue of a “rebellion” that refuses to give
in to despair. This same theme motivates Camus’s later novel, The Plague7, and
his long essay The Rebel 1. In his last work, however, a novel called The Fall
published in 6, the year before he won the Nobel prize for literature, Camus
presents an unforgettably perverse character named Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who
exemplifies all the bitterness and despair rejected by his previous characters
and in his earlier essays. Clamence, like the character in The Stranger,
refuses to judge people, but whereas Meursault the “stranger” is incapable of
judgment, Clamence who was once a lawyer makes it a matter of philosophical
principle, “for who among us is innocent?” It is unclear where Camus’s thinking
was heading when he was killed in an automobile accident with his publisher,
Gallimard, who survived.
Canguilhem: g. H. P.
Grice drew some ideas on scientific laws from Canguillhem -- historian and
philosopher of science. Canguilhem succeeded Gaston Bachelard as director of
the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the of Paris. He developed and sometimes revised
Bachelard’s view of science, extending it to issues in the biological and
medical sciences, where he focused particularly on the concepts of the normal
and the pathological The Normal and the Pathological, 6. On his account norms
are not objective in the sense of being derived from value-neutral scientific
inquiry, but are rooted in the biological reality of the organisms that they
regulate. Canguilhem also introduced an important methodological distinction
between concepts and theories. Rejecting the common view that scientific
concepts are simply functions of the theories in which they are embedded, he
argued that the use of concepts to interpret data is quite distinct from the
use of theories to explain the data. Consequently, the same concepts may occur
in very different theoretical contexts. Canguilhem made particularly effective
use of this distinction in tracing the origin of the concept of reflex
action.
Cantor, G. Grice thought
that “I know there are infinitely many stars” is a stupid thing to say -- one
of a number of late nineteenthcentury philosophers including Frege, Dedekind,
Peano, Russell, and Hilbert who transformed both mathematics and the study of
its philosophical foundations. The philosophical import of Cantor’s work is
threefold. First, it was primarily Cantor who turned arbitrary collections into
objects of mathematical study, sets. Second, he created a coherent mathematical
theory of the infinite, in particular a theory of transfinite numbers. Third,
linking these, he was the first to indicate that it might be possible to
present mathematics as nothing but the theory of sets, thus making set theory
foundational for mathematics. This contributed to the Camus, Albert Cantor,
Georg 116 116 view that the foundations
of mathematics should itself become an object of mathematical study. Cantor
also held to a form of principle of plenitude, the belief that all the
infinities given in his theory of transfinite numbers are represented not just
in mathematical or “immanent” reality, but also in the “transient” reality of
God’s created world. Cantor’s main, direct achievement is his theory of transfinite
numbers and infinity. He characterized as did Frege sameness of size in terms
of one-to-one correspondence, thus accepting the paradoxical results known to
Galileo and others, e.g., that the collection of all natural numbers has the
same cardinality or size as that of all even numbers. He added to these
surprising results by showing 1874 that there is the same number of algebraic
and thus rational numbers as there are natural numbers, but that there are more
points on a continuous line than there are natural or rational or algebraic
numbers, thus revealing that there are at least two different kinds of infinity
present in ordinary mathematics, and consequently demonstrating the need for a
mathematical treatment of these infinities. This latter result is often
expressed by saying that the continuum is uncountable. Cantor’s theorem of 2 is
a generalization of part of this, for it says that the set of all subsets the
power-set of a given set must be cardinally greater than that set, thus giving
rise to the possibility of indefinitely many different infinities. The
collection of all real numbers has the same size as the power-set of natural
numbers. Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers 0 97 was his developed
mathematical theory of infinity, with the infinite cardinal numbers the F-, or
aleph-, numbers based on the infinite ordinal numbers that he introduced in 0
and 3. The F-numbers are in effect the cardinalities of infinite well-ordered
sets. The theory thus generates two famous questions, whether all sets in
particular the continuum can be well ordered, and if so which of the F-numbers
represents the cardinality of the continuum. The former question was answered
positively by Zermelo in 4, though at the expense of postulating one of the
most controversial principles in the history of mathematics, the axiom of
choice. The latter question is the celebrated continuum problem. Cantor’s
famous continuum hypothesis CH is his conjecture that the cardinality of the
continuum is represented by F1, the second aleph. CH was shown to be
independent of the usual assumptions of set theory by Gödel 8 and Cohen 3.
Extensions of Cohen’s methods show that it is consistent to assume that the
cardinality of the continuum is given by almost any of the vast array of
F-numbers. The continuum problem is now widely considered insoluble. Cantor’s
conception of set is often taken to admit the whole universe of sets as a set,
thus engendering contradiction, in particular in the form of Cantor’s paradox.
For Cantor’s theorem would say that the power-set of the universe must be
bigger than it, while, since this powerset is a set of sets, it must be
contained in the universal set, and thus can be no bigger. However, it follows
from Cantor’s early 3 considerations of what he called the “absolute infinite”
that none of the collections discovered later to be at the base of the
paradoxes can be proper sets. Moreover, correspondence with Hilbert in 7 and
Dedekind in 9 see Cantor, Gesammelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und
philosophischen Inhalts, 2 shows clearly that Cantor was well aware that
contradictions will arise if such collections are treated as ordinary sets.
captainship. Strawson calls Grice his captain. In the
inaugural lecture. . A struggle on what seems to be such a From Meaning and
Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) TRUTH AND MEANING central issue
in philosophy should have something of a Homeric quality; and a Homeric
struggle calls for gods and heroes. I can at least, though tentatively, name
some living captains and benevolent shades: on the one side, say, Grice,
Austin, and the later Wittgenstein; on the other, Chomsky, Frege, and the
earlier Wittgenstein.
H. P. Grice and The
cardinal virtues, prudence prudential (in ratione) practical wisdom, courage
(fortitude in irascibili), temperance (temperantia in concuspicibili), and
justice (iustitia in voluntate). Grice thought them oxymoronic: “Virtue is
entire, surely!” -- Medievals deemed them cardinal from Latin cardo, ‘hinge’
because of their important or pivotal role in human flourishing. In Plato’s
Republic, Socrates explains them through a doctrine of the three parts of the
soul, suggesting that a person is prudent when knowledge of how to live wisdom
informs her reason, courageous when informed reason governs her capacity for
wrath, temperate when it also governs her appetites, and just when each part
performs its proper task with informed reason in control. Development of
thought on the cardinal virtues was closely tied to the doctrine of the unity
of the virtues, i.e., that a person possessing one virtue will have them
all.
Carlyle, T.: When Grice
was feeling that his mode operators made for poor prose he would wonder, “what
Carlyle might think of this!” -- Scottish-born essayist, historian, and social
critic, one of the most popular writers and lecturers in nineteenth-century
Britain. His works include literary criticism, history, and cultural criticism.
With respect to philosophy, his views on the theory of history are his most
significant contributions. According to Carlyle, great personages are the most
important causal factor in history. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in
History 1841 asserts, “Universal History, the history of what man has
accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have
worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers,
patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men
contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in
the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and
embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the
soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the
history of these.” Carlyle’s doctrine has been challenged from many different
directions. Hegelian and Marxist philosophers maintain that the so-called great
men of history are not really the engine of history, but merely reflections of
deeper forces, such as economic ones, while contemporary historians emphasize
the priority of “history from below” the
social history of everyday people as far
more representative of the historical process.
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