conversational
game theory:
Grice: “It was Austin who made me see the philosophy of football!” -- Grice for
‘homo ludens’. In “Logic and conversation,” Grice uses the phrases, “the game
of conversation,” “conversational game,” “conversational move,” “the
conversational rules,” – so he knew he was echoing Neumann and Morgenstern. J.
Hintikka, “Grice and game theory.” the theory of the structure of, and the
rational procedures (or strategies) for performing in, games or game-like human
interactions. Although there are forerunners, game theory is virtually invented
by Neumann and Morgenstern. Its most striking feature is its compact
representation of interactions of at least two players; e. g. two players may
face two choices each, and in combination these choices produce four possible
outcomes. Actual choices are of strategies, not of outcomes, although it is
assessments of outcomes that recommend this or that procedure, maxim,
imperative, or strategy. To do well in a game, even for each player to do well,
as is often possible, generally requires taking the other player’s position, interest,
and goal, into account. Hence, to evaluate an imperative or rule or strategiy
directly, without reference to the outcomes they might produce in interaction
with others, is conspicuously perverse. It is not surprising, therefore, that
in meta-ethics, game theory has been preeminently applied to utilitarianianism.
As the numbers of players and rational procedure, guideline or strategies rise,
the complexity of the game of conversation increases geometrically. If players
have *2* strategies each and each ranks the four possible outcomes without
ties, there are already *78* strategically distinct conversations. Even minor
real-life interactions may have astronomically greater complexity. Grice once
complained to Hintikka that this makes game theory ‘useless,’ or ‘otiose.’ Alternatively,
one can note that this makes it realistic and helps us understand why real-life
choices are at least as complex as they sometimes seem. To complicate matters
further, conversationalists can choose over probabilistic combinations of their
pure rational guidelines or strategies. Hence, the original 4 outcomes in a
simple 2 $ 2 game define a continuum of potential outcomes. After noting the
structure of the game of conversation, one might then be struck by an immediate
implication of this mere description. A rational agent may be supposed to
attempt to maximize his potential or expected outcome in the game of
conversation. But as there are at least two players in the game of
conversation, in general conversationalists cannot all maximize simultaneously
over their expected outcomes while assuming that all others are doing likewise.
This is an analytical principle. In general, we cannot maximize over two
functions simultaneously. The general notion of the greatest good of the
greatest number, e. g., is incoherent. Hence, in inter-active choice contexts,
the simple notion of economic rationality is incoherent. Virtually all of early
game theory was dedicated to finding an alternative principle for resolving
conversational game interactions. There are now many of what Grice calls a
“solution theory,” most of which are about this or that outcome rather than this
or that rational guideline or strategy they stipulate which outcomes or range
of outcomes is game-theoretically “rational.” There is little consensus on how
to generalize from the ordinary rationality of merely choosing more rather than
less and of displaying consistent preferences to the general choice of
strategies in games. A pay-off in early game theory is almost always
represented in a cardinal, transferable utility. A transferable utility is an
odd notion that is evidently introduced to avoid the disdain with which
philosophers then treated interpersonal comparisons of utility. It seems to be
analogous to money. One could say that the theory is one of wealth
maximization. In the early theory, the “rationality” conditions are as follows.In
general, if the sums of the pay-offs to each players in various outcomes
differ, it is assumed that a rational player will manage to divide the largest possible
payoff with the other player. 2 No rational agent will accept a payoff below
the “security level” obtainable even if all the other player or players really form
a coalition against the individual. Sometimes it is also assumed that no group
of players will rationally accept less than it could get as its group security
level but in some games, no outcome can
meet this condition. This is an odd combination of elements. The collective
elements are plausibly thought of as merely predictive. If we individually wish
to do well, we should combine efforts to help us do best AS A CONVERSATIONAL
DYAD. But what we want is a theory that converts two individual preferences
into one collective result – Grice’s conversational shared goal of influencing
and being influenced by others. Unfortunately, to put a move doing just this in
the foundations of the theory is question-begging. Our fundamental burden is to
determine whether a theory of subjective rationality MAY produce an
inter-subjectively good result, not to stipulate that it must. In the theory
with cardinal, additive payoffs, we can divide games. There is the constant-sum
game, in which the sum of all players’ payoffs in each outcome is a constant,
and variable sum games. A zero-sum games is a special case of a constant sum
game. Two-player constant sum games are games of pure conversational
‘conflict.’ Each player’s gain is the other’s loss. In constant sum games with
more than two players and in all variable sum games, there is generally reason
for coalition formation to improve payoffs to members of the coalition. A game
without transferable utility, such as a games in which players have only
ordinal preferences, may be characterized as a game of pure conflict or of pure
co-ordination (or co-operation) when players’ preference orderings over
outcomes are, respectively, opposite or identical, or as games of mixed motive
when their orderings are partly the same and partly reversed. Grice’s nalysis
of such games is evidently less tractable than that of games with cardinal,
additive utility, and their theory is only beginning to be extensively
developed by Griceians. Despite the apparent circularity of the rationality
assumptions of early game theory, it is the game theorists’ prisoner’s dilemma
that makes clear that compelling subjectivistic principles of choice can
produce an inter-subjective deficient outcome. This game given its catchy but
inapt name. If they play it in isolation from any other interaction between
them, two players in this game can each do what seems individually best and
reach an outcome that both consider inferior to the outcome that results from
making opposite strategy choices. Even with the knowledge that this is the problem
they face, the players still have incentive to choose the strategies that
jointly produce the inferior outcome. The prisoner’s dilemma involves both
coordination (or co-operation) and conflict. It has played a central role in
discussions of Griceian conversational pragmatics. Games that predominantly
involve coordination (or cooperation), such as when we coordinate in all
driving on the right or all on the left, have a similarly central role. The
understanding of both classes of games has been read into the philosophy of
Hobbes and Hume and into “mutual advantage” theories of justice.
gassendi: philosopher who
advocates a via media to scientific knowledge about the empirically observable
material world that avoids both the dogmatism of Cartesians, who claimed to
have certain knowledge, and the skepticism of Montaigne and Charron, who
doubted that we have knowledge about anything. Gassendi presented Epicurean
atomism as a model for explaining how bodies are structured and interact. He
advanced a hypothetico-deductive method by proposing that experiments should be
used to test mechanistic hypotheses. Like the ancient Pyrrhonian Skeptics, he
did not challenge the immediate reports of our senses; but unlike them he
argued that while we cannot have knowledge of the inner essences of things, we
can develop a reliable science of the world of appearances. In this he
exemplified the mitigated skepticism of modern science that is always open to
revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Gassendi’s first book, Exercitationes
Paradoxicae Adversis Aristoteleos 1624, is an attack on Aristotle. He is best
known as the author of the fifth set of objections to Descartes’s
Meditations1641, in which Gassendi proposed that even clear and distinct ideas
may represent no objects outside our minds, a possibility that Descartes called
the objection of objections, but dismissed as destructive of all reason.
Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri 1649 contains his development of
Epicurean philosophy and science. His elaboration of the mechanistic atomic
model and his advocacy of experimental testing of hypotheses were crucially
important in the rise of modern science. Gassendi’s career as a Catholic
priest, Epicurean atomist, mitigated skeptic, and mechanistic scientist presents
a puzzle as do the careers of several
other philosopher-priests in the seventeenth century concerning his true beliefs. On the one hand,
he professed faith and set aside Christian doctrine as not open to challenge.
On the other hand, he utilized an arsenal of skeptical arguments that was
beginning to undermine and would eventually destroy the rational foundations of
the church. Gassendi thus appears to be of a type almost unknown today, a
thinker indifferent to the apparent discrepancy between his belief in Christian
doctrine and his advocacy of materialist science.
gay: j. philosopher Grice read quite a
lot, who tried to reconcile divine command theory and utilitarianism. The son
of a minister, Gay was elected a fellow of Sidney Sussex , Cambridge, where he
taught Grecian philosophy. His essay, “Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental
Principle of Virtue or Morality” argues that obligation is founded on the will
of God, which, because people are destined to be happy, directs us to act to
promote the general happiness. Gay offers an associationist psychology
according to which we pursue objects that have come to be associated with
happiness e.g. money, regardless of whether they now make us happy, and argues,
contra Hutcheson, that our moral sense is conditioned rather than natural.
Gay’s blend of utilitarianism with associationist psychology gave David Hartley
the basis for his moral psychology, which later influenced Bentham in his
formulation of classical utilitarianism.
burlæus: Burleigh’s donkey
– Grice preferred the spelling “Gualterus Burlaeus.” “One would hardly realise
it’s Irish to the backbone!” – Grice. Geach’s donkey: geach, Peter b.6, English
philosopher and logician whose main work has been in logic and philosophy of
language. A great admirer of McTaggart, he has published a sympathetic
exposition of the latter’s work Truth, Love and Immortality, 9, and has always
aimed to emulate what he sees as the clarity and rigor of the Scottish
idealist’s thought. Greatly influenced by Frege and Vitters, Geach is
particularly noted for his powerful use of what he calls “the Frege point,”
better called “the Frege-Geach point,” that the same thought may occur as
asserted or unasserted and yet retain the same truth-value. The point has been
used by Geach to refute ascriptivist theories of responsibility, and can be
employed against noncognitivist theories of ethics, which are said to face the
Frege-Geach problem of accounting for the sense of moral ascriptions in
contexts like ‘If he did wrong, he will be punished’. He is also noted for
helping to bring Frege to the English-speaking world, through co-translations
with Max Black 9 88. In logic he is known for proving, independently of Quine,
a contradiction in Frege’s way out of Russell’s paradox Mind, 6, and for his
defense of modern Fregean-Russellian logic against traditional
Aristotelian-Scholastic logic. He also has a deep admiration for the Polish
logicians. In metaphysics, Geach is known for his defense of relative identity,
the thesis that an object a can be the same F where F is a kind-term as an
object b while not being the same G, even though a and b are both G’s. His
spirited defense of the thesis has been met by equally vigorous attacks, and it
has not received wide acceptance. An obvious application of the thesis is to
the defense of the doctrine of the Trinity e.g., the Father is the same god as
the Son but not the same person, which has caught the attention of some
philosophers of religion. Geach’s main works include Mental Acts 8, which attacks
dispositional theories of mind, Reference and Generality 2, which contains much
important work on logic, and the collection Logic Matters 2. A notable defender
of Catholicism despite his animadversions against Scholastic logic, his
religious views find their greatest exposure in God and the Soul 9, Providence
and Evil 7, and The Virtues 7. He is married to the philosopher Elizabeth
Anscombe.
Grice’s
genitorial programme
– A type of ideal observer theory -- demiurge from Grecian demiourgos,
‘artisan’, ‘craftsman’, a deity who shapes the material world from the
preexisting chaos. Plato introduces the demiurge in his Timaeus. Because he is
perfectly good, the demiurge wishes to communicate his own goodness. Using the
Forms as a model, he shapes the initial chaos into the best possible image of
these eternal and immutable archetypes. The visible world is the result.
Although the demiurge is the highest god and the best of causes, he should not
be identified with the God of theism. His ontological and axiological status is
lower than that of the Forms, especially the Form of the Good. He is also
limited. The material he employs is not created by him. Furthermore, it is
disorderly and indeterminate, and thus partially resists his rational ordering.
In gnosticism, the demiurge is the ignorant, weak, and evil or else morally
limited cause of the cosmos. In the modern era the term has occasionally been
used for a deity who is limited in power or knowledge. Its first occurrence in
this sense appears to be in J. S. Mill’s Theism 1874.
gentile: g. idealist
philosopher. He taught philosophy at Pisa. Gentile rejects Hegel’s dialectics
as the process of an objectified thought. Gentile’s actualism or actual
idealism claims that only the pure act of thinking or the transcendental subject
can undergo a dialectical process. All reality, such as nature, God, good, and
evil, is immanent in the dialectics of the transcendental subject, which is
distinct from the empirical subject. Among his major works are “La teoria
generale dello spirito come atto puro” and “Sistema di logica come teoria del
conoscere.” Gentile sees conversation is a concerted act that overcomes the apparent
difficulties of inter-subjectivity and realizes a unity within two transcendental
subjects. Actualism was pretty influential. With Croce’s historicism, it
influenced two Oxonian idealists discussed by H. P. Grice: Bernard Bosanquet
and R. G. Collingwood (vide: H. P. Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, The
Nature of Metaphysics, London, Macmillan).
genus:
gender.
H. P. Grice calls Austin an artless sexist when referring to the trouser word.
We see how after Austin’s death, Grice more and more loses his reverential
attitude towards the ‘school master’ and shows Austin for what he is! Gender implicaturum
– Most languages have three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (or
epicene, or common). feminist epistemology, epistemology from a feminist
perspective. It investigates the relevance that the gender of the
inquirer/knower has to epistemic practices, including the theoretical practice
of epistemology. It is typified both by themes that are exclusively feminist in
that they could arise only from a critical attention to gender, and by themes
that are non-exclusively feminist in that they might arise from other
politicizing theoretical perspectives besides feminism. A central, exclusively
feminist theme is the relation between philosophical conceptions of reason and
cultural conceptions of masculinity. Here a historicist stance must be adopted,
so that philosophy is conceived as the product of historically and culturally
situated hence gendered authors. This stance brings certain patterns of
intellectual association into view
patterns, perhaps, of alignment between philosophical conceptions of
reason as contrasted with emotion or intuition, and cultural conceptions of
masculinity as contrasted with femininity. A central, non-exclusively feminist
theme might be called “social-ism” in epistemology. It has two main
tributaries: political philosophy, in the form of Marx’s historical
materialism; and philosophy of science, in the form of either Quinean
naturalism or Kuhnian historicism. The first has resulted in feminist
standpoint theory, which adapts and develops the Marxian idea that different
social groups have different epistemic standpoints, where the material
positioning of one of the groups is said to bestow an epistemic privilege. The
second has resulted in feminist work in philosophy of science which tries to
show that not only epistemic values but also non-epistemic e.g. gendered values
are of necessity sometimes an influence in the generation of scientific
theories. If this can be shown, then an important feminist project suggests
itself: to work out a rationale for regulating the influence of these values so
that science may be more self-transparent and more responsible. By attempting
to reveal the epistemological implications of the fact that knowers are
diversely situated in social relations of identity and power, feminist
epistemology represents a radicalizing innovation in the analytic tradition,
which has typically assumed an asocial conception of the epistemic subject, and
of the philosopher. -- feminist philosophy, a discussion of philosophical
concerns that refuses to identify the human experience with the male
experience. Writing from a variety of perspectives, feminist philosophers
challenge several areas of traditional philosophy on the grounds that they fail
1 to take seriously women’s interests, identities, and issues; and 2 to
recognize women’s ways of being, thinking, and doing as valuable as those of
men. Feminist philosophers fault traditional metaphysics for splitting the self
from the other and the mind from the body; for wondering whether “other minds”
exist and whether personal identity depends more on memories or on physical
characteristics. Because feminist philosophers reject all forms of ontological
dualism, they stress the ways in which individuals interpenetrate each other’s
psyches through empathy, and the ways in which the mind and body coconstitute
each other. Because Western culture has associated rationality with
“masculinity” and emotionality with “femininity,” traditional epistemologists
have often concluded that women are less human than men. For this reason,
feminist philosophers argue that reason and emotion are symbiotically related,
coequal sources of knowledge. Feminist philosophers also argue that Cartesian
knowledge, for all its certainty and clarity, is very limFechner’s law feminist
philosophy 305 305 ited. People want to
know more than that they exist; they want to know what other people are
thinking and feeling. Feminist philosophers also observe that traditional
philosophy of science is not as objective as it claims to be. Whereas
traditional philosophers of science often associate scientific success with
scientists’ ability to control, rule, and otherwise dominate nature, feminist
philosophers of science associate scientific success with scientists’ ability
to listen to nature’s self-revelations. Since it willingly yields abstract
theory to the testimony of concrete fact, a science that listens to what nature
says is probably more objective than one that does not. Feminist philosophers
also criticize traditional ethics and traditional social and political philosophy.
Rules and principles have dominated traditional ethics. Whether agents seek to
maximize utility for the aggregate or do their duty for the sake of duty, they
measure their conduct against a set of universal, abstract, and impersonal
norms. Feminist philosophers often call this traditional view of ethics a
“justice” perspective, contrasting it with a “care” perspective that stresses
responsibilities and relationships rather than rights and rules, and that
attends more to a moral situation’s particular features than to its general
implications. Feminist social and political philosophy focus on the political
institutions and social practices that perpetuate women’s subordination. The
goals of feminist social and political philosophy are 1 to explain why women
are suppressed, repressed, and/or oppressed in ways that men are not; and 2 to
suggest morally desirable and politically feasible ways to give women the same
justice, freedom, and equality that men have. Liberal feminists believe that
because women have the same rights as men do, society must provide women with
the same educational and occupational opportunities that men have. Marxist
feminists believe that women cannot be men’s equals until women enter the work
force en masse and domestic work and child care are socialized. Radical
feminists believe that the fundamental causes of women’s oppression are sexual.
It is women’s reproductive role and/or their sexual role that causes their
subordination. Unless women set their own reproductive goals childlessness is a
legitimate alternative to motherhood and their own sexual agendas lesbianism,
autoeroticism, and celibacy are alternatives to heterosexuality, women will
remain less than free. Psychoanalytic feminists believe that women’s
subordination is the result of earlychildhood experiences that cause them to
overdevelop their abilities to relate to other people on the one hand and to
underdevelop their abilities to assert themselves as autonomous agents on the
other. Women’s greatest strength, a capacity for deep relationships, may also
be their greatest weakness: a tendency to be controlled by the needs and wants
of others. Finally, existentialist feminists claim that the ultimate cause of
women’s subordination is ontological. Women are the Other; men are the Self.
Until women define themselves in terms of themselves, they will continue to be
defined in terms of what they are not: men. Recently, socialist feminists have
attempted to weave these distinctive strands of feminist social and political
thought into a theoretical whole. They argue that women’s condition is
overdetermined by the structures of production, reproduction and sexuality, and
the socialization of children. Women’s status and function in all of these
structures must change if they are to achieve full liberation. Furthermore,
women’s psyches must also be transformed. Only then will women be liberated
from the kind of patriarchal thoughts that undermine their self-concept and
make them always the Other. Interestingly, the socialist feminist effort to
establish a specifically feminist standpoint that represents how women see the
world has not gone without challenge. Postmodern feminists regard this effort
as an instantiation of the kind of typically male thinking that tells only one
story about reality, truth, knowledge, ethics, and politics. For postmodern
feminists, such a story is neither feasible nor desirable. It is not feasible
because women’s experiences differ across class, racial, and cultural lines. It
is not desirable because the “One” and the “True” are philosophical myths that
traditional philosophy uses to silence the voices of the many. Feminist
philosophy must be many and not One because women are many and not One. The
more feminist thoughts, the better. By refusing to center, congeal, and cement
separate thoughts into a unified and inflexible truth, feminist philosophers
can avoid the pitfalls of traditional philosophy. As attractive as the
postmodern feminist approach to philosophy may be, some feminist philosophers
worry that an overemphasis on difference and a rejection of unity may lead to
intellectual as well as political disintegration. If feminist philosophy is to
be without any standpoint whatsoever, it becomes difficult to ground claims
about what is good for women in particufeminist philosophy feminist philosophy
306 306 lar and for human beings in
general. It is a major challenge to contemporary feminist philosophy,
therefore, to reconcile the pressures for diversity and difference with those
for integration and commonality.
genus
generalissimum:
“I love a superlative: good, gooder and goodest, my favourites!” a genus that
is not a species of some higher genus; a broadest natural kind. One of the ten
Aristotelian categories, it is also called summum
genus. For Aristotle and many of his followers, the ten categories (twelve
in Kant, four in Grice) are *not* species of some higher all-inclusive
genus say, being. Otherwise, that alleged
over-arching all-inclusive genus would wholly include the differences, say,
between conversational quality, conversational quantity, conversational
relation, and conversational mode, and would be universally predicable of
conversational quality, conversational quantity, conversational relation, and
conversational mode. But no genus is predicable of its differences in this
manner. Few authors explained this reasoning clearly, but Grice did: “If I
appeal to four conversational categories, I know what I am doing. The principle
of conversational benevolence cannot float in the air: it needs four categories
– informativeness, trustworthiness, connectedness and perspicuity – to make it
applicable to our conversational realities. Grice points out that if the
difference ‘rational’ just meant ‘rational animal’, to define ‘man’ as
‘rational animal’ would be to define him as ‘rational animal animal’, which
would infringe the conversational maxims ‘be brief,’ and ‘do not be repetitive’
– “On toop, man is a rational animal animal is ill formed.” So too generally:
no genus can include its differences in this way. Thus there is no
all-inclusive genus. Grice’s four conversational categories are the most
general conversational genera.
charlier: a. k. a. gerson,
j. de, philosopher. He studied in Paris, and succeeded the nominalist Pierre
d’Ailly as chancellor of the varsity. Both d’Ailly and Gerson played a
prominent part in the work of the Council of Constance. Much of Charlier’s
influence on later thinkers arose from his conciliarism, the view that the
church is a political society and that a general council, acting on behalf of
the church, has the power to depose a pope who fails to promote the church’s
welfare, for it seemed that similar arguments could apply to other forms of
political society. Gerson’s conciliarism was not constitutionalism in the modern
sense, for he appealed to corporate and hierarchical ideas of church
government, and did not rest his case on any principle of individual rights.
His main writings dealt with mystical theology, which, he thought, brings the
believer closer to the beatific vision of God than do other forms of theology.
He was influenced by St. Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus, but especially by
Pseudo-Dionysius, whom he saw as a disciple of St. Paul and not as a Platonist.
He was thus able to adopt an anti-Platonic position in his attacks on the
mystic Ruysbroeck and on contemporary followers of Duns Scotus, such as Jean de
Ripa. In dismissing Scotist realism, he made use of nominalist positions,
particularly those that emphasized divine freedom. He warned theologians against
being misled by pride into supposing that natural reason alone could solve
metaphysical problems; and he emphasized the importance of a priest’s pastoral
duties. Despite his early prominence, he spent the last years of his life in
relative obscurity.
gersonides: a leading
Aristotelian. His oeuvre includes supercommentaries on commentaries on
Aristotle, On the Correct Syllogism, a treatise on the modal syllogism; and a
major Scholastic treatise, The Wars of the Lord. In addition, his biblical
commentaries rank among the best examples of philosophical scriptural exegesis;
especially noteworthy is his interpretation of the Song of Songs as an allegory
describing the ascent of the human intellect to the agent intellect.
Gersonides’ mentors in the Aristotelian tradition were Maimonides and Averroes.
However, more than either of them, Gersonides held philosophical truth and
revealed truth to be coextensive: he acknowledged neither the conflict that
Averroes saw between reason and revelation nor Maimonides’ critical view of the
limitations of the human intellect. Furthermore, while remaining within the
Aristotelian framework, Gersonides was not uncritical of it; his independence
can be illustrated by two of his most distinctive positions. First, against
Maimonides, Gersonides claimed that it is possible to demonstrate both the
falsity of the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world Averroes’
position and the absurdity of creation ex nihilo, the traditional rabbinic view
that Maimonides adopted, though for nondemonstrative reasons. Instead
Gersonides advocated the Platonic theory of temporal creation from primordial
matter. Second, unlike Maimonides and Averroes, who both held that the alleged
contradiction between divine foreknowledge of future contingent particulars and
human freedom is spurious, Gersonides took the dilemma to be real. In defense
of human freedom, he then argued that it is logically impossible even for God
to have knowledge of particulars as particulars, since his knowledge is only of
general laws. At the same time, by redefining ‘omniscience’ as knowing
everything that is knowable, he showed that this impossibility is no deficiency
in God’s knowledge. Although Gersonides’ biblical commentaries received wide
immediate acceptance, subsequent medieval Jewish philosophers, e.g., Hasdai
Crescas, by and large reacted negatively to his rigorously rationalistic
positions. Especially with the decline of Aristotelianism within the
philosophical world, both Jewish and Christian, he was either criticized sharply
or simply ignored.
get across – A more colloquial way for what Grice later will have as
‘soul-to-soul-transfer,’ used by Grice in Causal: Surely the truth or falsity
of Strawson having a beautiful handwriting has no bearing on the truth or falsity
of his being hopeless at philosophy (“provided that is what I intended to get
across,” implicating, ‘who cares,’ or ‘whatever’). His cavalier attitude shows
that Grice is never really concerned with the individuation of the logical form
of the implicaturum, just to note that whatever some philosopher thought was
part of the sense it ain’t! This is the Austinian in Grice. Austin suggested
that Grice analysed or consult with Holdcroft for all ‘forms of indirect
communication.’ Grice lists: mean, indicate, suggest, imply, insinuate, hint –
‘get across’.
geulincx: a. philosopher.
Born in Antwerp, he was educated at Louvain and there became professor of
philosophy and dean. He was forced out of Louvain, perhaps for his Jansenist or
Cartesian tendencies, and in 1658 he moved to Leyden and became a Protestant.
Though he taught there until his death, he never attained a regular
professorship at the varsity. His main philosophical work is his “Ethica; or, De
virtute et primis ejus proprietatibus.” Other oeuvre includes “Questiones
quodlibeticae”; later editions published as “Saturnalia,” a “Logica” 1661, and
a “Methodus inveniendi argumenta,”.”Physica vera,” “Physica peripatetica,”
“Metaphysica vera,” “Metaphysica ad mentem peripateticam,” posthumous
commentaries on Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae. Geulincx was deeply
influenced by Descartes, and had many ideas that closely resemble those of the
later Cartesians as well as those of more independent thinkers like Spinoza and
Leibniz. Though his grounds were original, like many later Cartesians, Geulincx
upholds a version of occasionalism; he argued that someone or something can
only do what it knows how to do (in terms of strict physiological laws). From
this Geulincx infers (“fallaciously,” according to Grice) from that that he
(sc. Geulincx) cannot be the genuine cause of his own bodily movement. In
discussing the mind-body relation, Geulincx used a clock analogy similar to one
Leibniz used in connection with his preestablished harmony. Geulincx also held
a view of mental and material substance reminiscent of that of Spinoza.
Finally, he proposed a system of ethics grounded in the idea of a virtuous
will. As Grice notes: “Despite the evident similarities between Geulincx’s
views and the views of his more renowned contemporaries, it is very difficult
to determine exactly what influence Geulincx may have had on them, and they may
have had on him – but then who gives?”
colonna
–
e. giles di roma, ome, original name, a member of the order of the Hermits of
St. Augustine, he studied arts at Augustinian house and theology at the varsity
in Paris 1260 72 but was censured by the theology faculty 1277 and denied a
license to teach as tutor. Owing to the intervention of Pope Honorius IV, he
later returned from Italy to Paris to teach theology, was appointed general of
his order, and became archbishop of Bourges. Colonna both defends and
criticizes views of Aquinas. He held that essence and existence are really
distinct in creatures, but described them as “things”; that prime matter cannot
exist without some substantial form; and, early in his career, that an
eternally created world is possible. He defended only one substantial form in
composites, including man. Grice adds: “Colonna supported Pope Boniface VIII in
his quarrel with Philip IV of France – and that was a bad choice.”
gilson: É., philosopher,
historian, cofounder of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, and a
major figure in Neo-Thomism. Gilson discovered medieval philosophy through his pioneering
work on Descartes’s scholastic background. Gilson argues that early modern
philosophy was incomprehensible without medieval thought, and that medieval
philosophy itself did not represent the unified theory of reality that some
Thomists had supposed. His studies of Duns Scotus, Augustine, Bernard, Aquinas,
Bonaventure, Dante, and Abelard and Héloïse explore this diversity. But in his
Gifford lectures 132, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Gilson attempts a
broad synthesis of medieval teaching on philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and
epistemology, and employed it in his critique of modern philosophy, The Unity
of Philosophical Experience 7. Most of all, Gilson attempted to reestablish
Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence in created being, as in Being
and Some Philosophers 9.
gioberti, v. philosopher, He
was imprisoned and exiled for advocating
unification, and became a central political figure during the Risorgimento.
His major political oeuvre, “Del primato morale e civile degli italiani,” argues
for a federation of the states. Gioberti’s
philosophical theory, ontologism, in contrast to Hegel’s idealism, identifies
the dialectics of Being with God’s creation. Gioberti condensed his theory in
the formula: “Being creates the existent.” “L’essere crea l’essistente.” The
dialectics of Being, which is the only necessary substance, is a “palingenesis,”
or a return to its origin, in which the existent first departs from and
imitates its creator (“mimesis”) and then returns to its creator (“methexis”). By
intuition, the human mind comes in contact with God and discovers truth by
retracing the dialectics of Being. However, knowledge of supernatural truths is
given only by God’s revelation. His oeuvre also includes “Teorica del
soprannaturale” and “Introduzione allo studio della filosofia.” Gioberti
criticized modern philosophers such as Descartes for their psychologism seeking truth from the human subject instead
of from Being itself and its revelation. His thought is very influential in
Italy.
datum: in epistemology,
the “brute fact” element to be found or postulated as a component of perceptual
experience. Some theorists who endorse the existence of a given element in
experience think that we can find this element by careful introspection of what
we experience Moore, H. H. Price. Such theorists generally distinguish between
those components of ordinary perceptual awareness that constitute what we
believe or know about the objects we perceive and those components that we
strictly perceive. For example, if we analyze introspectively what we are aware
of when we see an apple we find that what we believe of the apple is that it is
a three-dimensional object with a soft, white interior; what we see of it,
strictly speaking, is just a red-shaped expanse of one of its facing sides.
This latter is what is “given” in the intended sense. Other theorists treat the
given as postulated rather than introspectively found. For example, some
theorists treat cognition as an activity imposing form on some material given
in conscious experience. On this view, often attributed to Kant, the given and
the conceptual are interdefined and logically inseparable. Sometimes this
interdependence is seen as rendering a description of the given as impossible;
in this case the given is said to be ineffable C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World
Order. On some theories of knowledge foundationalism the first variant of the
given that which is “found” rather than
“postulated” provides the empirical
foundations of what we might know or justifiably believe. Thus, if I believe on
good evidence that there is a red apple in front of me, the evidence is the
non-cognitive part of my perceptual awareness of the red appleshaped expanse.
Epistemologies postulating the first kind of givenness thus require a single entity-type
to explain the sensorial nature of perception and to provide immediate
epistemic foundations for empirical knowledge. This requirement is now widely
regarded as impossible to satisfy; hence Wilfred Sellars describes the
discredited view as the myth of the given.
glanvill: English
philosopher who defended the Royal Society against scholasticism. Glanvill believes
that certainty is possible in the mathematical but not in the empirical realm.
In “The Vanity of Dogmatizing,” he claimed that the human corruption that
resulted from Adam’s fall precludes dogmatic knowledge of nature. Using
traditional sceptical arguments as well as an analysis of causality that
anticipate Hume, Glanvill argues that empirical belief is the probabilistic
variety acquired by piece-meal investigation. Despite his scepticism he argues
for the existence of witches in Witches and Witchcraft (“Probably he was
married to one,” Grice comments).
gnosticism:
a philosophical
movement, especially important under the leadership of Valentinus and
Basilides. They teach that matter was evil, the result of a cosmic disruption
in which an evil archon often associated with the god of the Old Testament,
Yahweh rebelled against the heavenly pleroma the complete spiritual world. In
the process divine sparks were unleashed from the pleroma and lodged in
material human bodies. Jesus was a high-ranking archon Logos sent to restore
those souls with divine sparks to the pleroma by imparting esoteric knowledge
gnosis to them. Gnosticism influenced and threatened the orthodox church from
within and without. NonChristian gnostic sects rivaled Christianity, and
Christian gnostics threatened orthodoxy by emphasizing salvation by knowledge
rather than by faith. Theologians like Clement of Alexandria and his pupil
Origen held that there were two roads to salvation, the way of faith for the
masses and the way of esoteric or mystical knowledge for the philosophers.
Gnosticism profoundly influenced the C. of E., causing it to define its
scriptural canon and to develop a set of creeds and an episcopal organization
(“My mother, Mabel Fenton Grice, was a bit of a gnostic, if I must say” –
Grice).
göckel: goclenius r.,
philosopher, after holding some minor posts elsewhere, he becomes professor at
Marburg. “Though he was well read and knowledgeable of later trends in these
disciplines,” Grice ntoes, “you could clearly see his basic sympathies
areAristotelian.” Goclenius was very well regarded by his contemporaries, who
called him “Plato marburgensis,” the Christian Aristotle, and “TheLight of
Europe,” among other things. Göckel published an unusually large number of
essays, including “Psychologia, hoc est de hominis perfection,” “Conciliator
philosophicus,” “Controversiae logicae et philosophicae,” and numerous other
works on logic, rhetoric, physics, metaphysics, and the Latin language. But his
most lasting work is his “Lexicon Philosophicum” – “very practical,” Grice
notes, “since the entries are alphabetically ordered.” -- together with its
companion, the “Lexicon Philosophicum Graecum” – “I gave a copy to Urmson,”
Grice recalls, “and the next day he was writing the “Greek Philosopical
Lexicon.” Göckel’s “Lexicon philosophicum” provides pretty obscure definitions
of the philosophical terminology of late Scholastic philosophy, and “they are
deemed so obscure that he is banned from quotation at some varsities.” – Grice.
gödel: cited by Grice.
His incompleteness theorems, two theorems formulated and proved by the Austrian
logician Kurt Gödel in his infamous “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Whiteheads und Russells ‘Principia
Mathematica’ und vervandter Systeme I,” probably the most celebrated results in
the whole of logic. They are aptly referred to as “incompleteness” theorems
since each shows, for any member of a certain class of formal systems, that
there is a sentence formulable in its language that it cannot prove, but that
it would be desirable for it to prove. In the case of the first theorem G1,
what cannot be proved is a true sentence of the language of the given theory.
G1 is thus a disappointment to any theory constructor who wants his theory to
tell the whole truth about its subject. In the case of the second theorem G2,
what cannot be proved is a sentence of the theory that “expresses” its consistency.
G2 is thus a disappointment to those who desire a straightforward execution of
Hilbert’s Program. The proofs of the incompleteness theorems can be seen as
based on three main ideas. The first is that of a Gödel numbering, i.e., an
assignment of natural numbers to each of the various objects i.e., the terms,
formulas, axioms, proofs, etc. belonging to the various syntactical categories
of the given formal system T referred to here as the “represented theory” whose
metamathematics is under consideration. The second is that of a
representational scheme. This includes i the use of the Gödel numbering to
develop number-theoretic codifications of various of the metamathematical
properties pertaining to the represented theory, and ii the selection of a
theory S hereafter, the “representing theory” and a family of formulas from
that theory the “representing formulas” in terms of which to register as
theorems various of the facts concerning the metamathematical properties of the
represented theory thus encoded. The basic result of this representational
scheme is the weak representation of the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T,
where a set L of numbers is said to be weakly represented in S by a formula
‘Lx’ of S just in case for every number n, n1 L if and only if ‘L[n]’ is a
theorem of S, where ‘[n]’ is the standard term of S that, under the intended
interpretation of S, designates the number n. Since the set of Gödel numbers of
theorems of the represented theory T will typically be recursively enumerable,
and the representing theory S must be capable of weakly representing this set,
the basic strength requirement on S is that it be capable of weakly
representing the recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers. Because basic
systems of arithmetic e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic and Peano arithmetic all have
this capacity, Gödel’s theorems are often stated using containment of a
fragment of arithmetic as the basic strength requirement governing the
capacities of the representing theory which, of course, is also often the
represented theory. More on this point below. The third main idea behind the
incompleteness theorems is that of a diagonal or fixed point construction
within S for the notion of unprovability-in-T; i.e., the formulation of a
sentence Gödel of S which, under the given Gödel numbering of T, the given
representation of T’s metamathematical notions in S, and the intended
interpretation of the language of S, says of itself that it is not
provable-in-T. Gödel is thus false if provable and unprovable if true. More
specifically, if ‘ProvTx’ is a formula of S that weakly represents the set of
Gödel numbers of theorems of T in S, then Gödel can be any formula of S that is
provably equivalent in S to the formula ‘- ProvT [Gödel]’. Given this
background, G1 can be stated as follows: If a the representing theory S is any
subtheory of the represented theory T up to and God Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems 347 347 including the
represented theory itself, b the representing theory S is consistent, c the
formula ‘ProvT x’ weakly represents the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of the
represented theory T in the representing theory S, and d Gödel is any sentence
provably equivalent in the representing theory S to ‘ProvT [Gödel]’, then
neither Gödel nor -Gödel is a theorem of the representing theory S. The proof
proceeds in two parts. In the first part it is shown that, for any representing
theory S up to and including the case where S % T , if S is consistent, then
-Gödel is not a theorem of S. To obtain this in its strongest form, we pick the
strongest subtheory S of T possible, namely S % T, and construct a reductio.
Thus, suppose that 1 -Gödel is a theorem of T. From 1 and d it follows that 2
‘ProvT[Gödel]’ is a theorem of T. And from 2 and c in the “if” direction it follows
that 3 Gödel is a theorem of T. But 1 and 3 together imply that the
representing theory T is inconsistent. Hence, if T is consistent, -Gödel cannot
be a theorem of T. In the second part of the proof it is argued that if the
representing theory S is consistent, then Gödel is not a theorem of it. Again,
to obtain the strongest result, we let S be the strongest subtheory of T
possible namely T itself and, as before, argue by reductio. Thus we suppose
that A Gödel is a theorem of S % T . From this assumption and condition d it
follows that B ‘-Provr [Gödel]’ is a theorem of S % T . By A and c in the “only
if” direction it follows that C ‘ProvT [Gödel]’ is a theorem of S % T . But
from B and C it follows that S % T is inconsistent.
Hence, Gödel is not provable in any consistent representing theory S up to and
including T itself. The above statement of G1 is, of course, not the usual one.
The usual statement suppresses the distinction stressed above between the
representing and represented theories and collaterally replaces our condition c
with a clause to the effect that T is a recursively axiomatizable extension of
some suitably weak system of arithmetic e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic, primitive
recursive arithmetic, or Peano arithmetic. This puts into a single clause what,
metamathematically speaking, are two separate conditions one pertaining to the representing theory,
the other to the represented theory. The requirement that T be an extension of
the selected weak arithmetic addresses the question of T’s adequacy as a
representing theory, since the crucial fact about extensions of the weak
arithmetic chosen is that they are capable of weakly representing all
recursively enumerable sets. This constraint on T’s capabilities as a
representing theory is in partnership with the usual requirement that, in its
capacity as a represented theory, T be recursively axiomatizable. For T’s
recursive axiomatizability ensures under ordinary choices of logic for T that its set of theorems will be recursively
enumerable and hence weakly
representable in the kind of representing theory that it itself by virtue of
its being an extension of the weak arithmetic specified is. G1 can, however, be
extended to certain theories whose sets of Gödel numbers of theorems are not
recursively enumerable. When this is done, the basic capacity required of the
representing theory is no longer merely that the recursively enumerable sets of
natural numbers be representable in it, but that it also be capable of
representing various non-recursively enumerable sets, and hence that it go
beyond the weak arithmetics mentioned earlier. G2 is a more demanding result
that G1 in that it puts significantly stronger demands on the formula ‘ProvT x’
used to express the notion of provability for the represented theory T. In
proving G1 all that is required of ‘ProvT x’ is that it weakly represent θ %
the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T; i.e., that it yield an extensionally
accurate registry of the theorems of the represented theory in the representing
theory. G2 places additional conditions on ‘ProvT x’; conditions which result
from the fact that, to prove G2, we must codify the second part of the proof of
G1 in T itself. To do this, ‘ProvT x’ must be a provability predicate for T.
That is, it must satisfy the following constraints, commonly referred to as the
Derivability Conditions for ‘ProvT x’: I If A is a theorem of the represented
theory, then ‘ProvT [A]’ must be a theorem of the representing theory. II Every
instance of the formula ‘ProvT [A P B] P ProvT [A] P ProvT [B]’ must be a
theorem of T. III Every instance of the formula ‘ProvT [A] P ProvT [ProvT [A]]’
must be a theorem of T. I, of course, is just part of the requirement that
‘ProvT [A]’ weakly represent T’s theoremset in T. So it does not go beyond what
is required for the proof of G1. II and III, however, do. They make it possible
to “formalize” the second part of the proof of G1 in T itself. II captures, in
terms of ‘ProvT X’, the modus ponens inference by which B is derived from A,
and III codiGödel’s incompleteness theorems Gödel’s incompleteness theorems
348 348 fies in T the appeal to c used
in deriving C from A. The result of this “formalization” process is a proof
within T of the formula ‘ConT P Gödel’ where ConT is a formula of the form ‘-
ProvT [#]’, with ‘ProvT x’ a provability predicate for T and ‘[#]’ the standard
numeral denoting the Gödel number # of some formula refutable in T . From this,
and the proof of the second part of G1 itself in which the first Derivability
Condition, which is just the “only if” direction of c, figures prominently, we
arrive at the following result, which is a generalized form of G2: If S is any
consistent representing theory up to and including the represented theory T
itself, ‘ProvT x’ any provability predicate for T, and ConT any formula of T of
the form ‘- ProvT [#]’, then ConT is not a theorem of S. To the extent that, in
being a provability predicate for T, ‘ProvT x’ “expresses” the notion of
provability of the represented theory T, it seems fair to say that ConT
expresses its consistency. And to the extent that this is true, it is sensible
to read G2 as saying that for any representing theory S and any represented
theory T extending S, if S is consistent, then the consistency of T is not
provable in S.
fontaines: g. philosopher.
He taught at Paris. Among his major writings are fifteen Quodlibetal Questions
and other disputations. He was strongly Aristotelian in philosophy, with
Neoplatonic influences in metaphysics. Fontaines defends the identity of essence
and existence in creatures against theories of their real or intentional
distinction, and argues for the possibility of demonstrating God’s existence
and of some quidditative knowledge of God. He admits divine ideas for species
but not for individuals within species. He makes wide applications (“and
misapplications,” Grice adds) of Aristotelian act-potency theory e.g., to the distinction between the soul and
its powers (this is discussed by Grice in “The power structure of the soul”),
to the explanation of intellection and volition, to the general theory of
substance and accident, and in unusual fashion to essence-existence
“composition” of creatures.
godwin: w. English
philosopher. “An Enquiry concerning Political Justice” arises heated debate. Godwin
argues for radical forms of determinism, anarchism, and utilitarianism. Godwin
thought that government corrupts everyone by encouraging stereotyped thinking
that prevents us from seeing each other as unique individuals. His “Caleb
Williams” portrays a good man corrupted by prejudice. Once we remove prejudice
and artificial inequality we will see that our acts are wholly determined. This
obviously makes punishment pointless. Only in a small anarchic society – such
as the one he observed outside Oxford -- can people see others as they really
are and thus come to feel a ‘sympathetic concern’ for his well-being. (In this
he influenced Edward Carpenter of “England Arise” infame). Only so can we be
virtuous, because being virtuous is acting from a ‘sympathetic’ (cf. Grice’s
principle of conversational sympathy) feeling to bring the greatest happiness
to the dyad affected. Godwin takes this principle (relabeled “the principle of
conversational sympathy” by Grice) quite literally, and accepts all its
consequences. Truthfulness has no claim on us other than the happiness it
brings. If keeping a promise causes less good than breaking it, there is no
reason (or duty) at all to keep it. If one must choose between saving the life
either of a major human benefactor or of one’s distant uncle, one must choose
the benefactor. We surely need no ‘rules’ in morals. An alleged ‘moral’ “rule”
would prevent us from seeing others properly, thereby impairing the sympathetic
feeling that constitutes virtue. Rights, too, are pointless. Sympathetic people
will act to help (or cooperate with) others. Later utilitarians like Bentham
had difficulty in separating their positions from Godwin’s notorious
views. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Godwin and
the ethics of conversation.’
Kennst
du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhn?: j.
w. v. Goethe, a ballad from Mignon that Goethe uses in Book II of his novel,
The apprentice. Grice was amused by Searle’s example – “even if it misses its
point!” An British soldier in the Second World War is captured by Italian
troops. The British soldier wishes to get the Italian troops to believe that he
is a *German* officer, in order to get them to release him. What he would like
to do is to tell them, in German, or Italian, that he is a German officer
(“Sono tedesco,” “Ich bin Deutsche”) but he does not know enough German, or
Italian, to do such a simple thing as that. So he, as it were, attempts to put
on a show of telling them that he is a German officer by reciting the only line
of German that he knows, a line he learned at Clifton, to wit: ‘Kennst du das
Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?”. The British soldier intends to produce a
certain response in his Italian captors, viz. that they should believe him to
be a German officer. He intends to produce this response by means of the
Italian troops’s recognition of his intention to produce it. Nevertheless, it
would seem false that when the British soldier utters, "Kennst du das
Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?” what he means or communicates is that he is a German officer. Searle thinks he can support
a claim that something is missing from Grice’s account of meaning. This would
(Grice think Searle thinks) be improved if it were supplemented as follows
(Grice’s conjecture): "U meant that p by x" means " U intended
to produce in A a certain effect by means of the recognition of U's intention
to produce that effect, and (if the utterance of x is the utterance of a
sentence) U intends A's recognition of U's intention (to produce the effect) to
be achieved by means of the recognition that the sentence uttered is
conventionally used to produce such an effect." Now even if Grice should
be faced with a genuine counterexample, he should be very reluctant to take the
way out which Grice suspects is being offered him. Grice finds it difficult to
tell whether this is what was being offered, since Searle is primarily
concerned with the characterization of something different, not with a general
discussion of the nature of meaning or communication. On top he is seems mainly
concerned to adapt Grice’s account of meaning to a dissimilar purpose, and
hardly, as Schiffer at least tried, to amend Grice’s analysis so as to be better
suited to its avowed end. Of course Grice would not want to deny that when the
vehicle of meaning is a sentence (or the utterance of a sentence, as in “Mary
had a little lamb” – uttered by a German officer in France to have the French
believe that he is an English officer) the utterer’s intentions are to be
recognized, in the normal case, by virtue of a knowledge of the conventional
use of the sentence (indeed Grice’s account of “conversational” or in general "non-conventional
implicaturum" depends, in some cases, on something like this idea). But
Grice treats meaning something by the utterance of a sentence as being only a
SPECIAL case of meaning or communicating that p by an utterance (in Grice’s
extended use of ‘utterance’ to include gestures and stuff), and to treat a
‘conventional’ co-relation between a sentence and a specific response as
providing only one of the ways (or modes) in which an utterance may be
correlated with a response. Is Searle’s “Kennst du das land, wo die Zitronen
bluhen?” however, a genuine counterexample? It seems to Grice that the
imaginary situation is under-described, and that there are perhaps three different
cases to be considered. First, the situation might be such that the only real
chance that the Italian soldiers would, on hearing the British soldier recite
the line from Goethe suppose him to be a German officer, would be if the Italians
were to, as they should not, argue as follows: "The British soldier has
just recited the first line from Goethe’s “Faust,” in a surprisingly
authoritative tone); He thinks we are silly enough to think he is, with the
British uniform and all, a German soldier.” If the situation was such that the
Italian soldier were likely to argue like that, and the British soldier knew
that to be so, it would be difficult to avoid attributing to him the intention,
when he recited the line from “Fuast”, that they should argue like that. One
cannot in general intend that some result should be achieved, if one knows that
there is no likelihood that it will be achieved. But if the British soldier’s
intention is as just described, he certainly would not, by Grice’s account, be
meaning that he is a German soldier.
For though he would intend the Italian soldier to believe him to be a German
soldier, he would not be intending the Italian soldier to believe this on the
basis of the Italian soldier’s recognition of his intention. And it seems to
Grice that though this is not how Searle wishes the example to be taken, it
would be much the most likely situation to have obtained. Second, Grice thinks
that Searle wants us to suppose that the British soldier hopes that the Italian
soldier will each a belief that the English soldier is a German soldier via a
belief that the line from Goethe which he uttered means other than what it
does, for why would they NOT know the land where the lemon trees bloom? They
are in it! It s not easy to see how to build up the context of utterance so as
to give the English soldier any basis for his hope that the Italian soldier
thinks that the English soldier thinks that the Italian soldier knows where the
lemon trees bloom – his native land! Now it becomes doubtful whether, after
all, it is right to say that the English solidier did not mean (unsuccessfully
communicate) that he is a German
soldier. Communication is not factive. That Geothe’s line translates as "Knowest
thou the land where the lemon trees bloom" is totally irrelevant. If the
English soldier could be said to have meant or communicated that he was a German soldier, he would
have meant that by saying the line, or by saying the line in a particularly
authoritative way. It makes a difference whether U merely intends A to think
that a particular sentence has a certain meaning which it does not in fact
have, or whether he also intends him to think of himself as supposed to make
use of his (mistaken) thought that, metabolically, the expression has this ‘meaning’
in reaching a belief about U's intentions. If A is intended to think that U
expects A to understand the sentence spoken and is intended to attribute to it,
metabolically, a ‘meaning’ which U knows it does not have, he utterer should
not be described as meaning, by his utterance, that p. Grice does not see the
force of this contention, nor indeed does he find it easy or conceptually clear
to apply the distinction which it attempts to make. The general point seems to
be as follows. Characteristically, an utterer intends his recipient to
recognize (and to think himself intended to recognize) some "crucial"
feature F, and to think of F (and to think himself intended to think of F) as
co-related in a certain way or mode with some response which the utterer
intends the audience to produce. It does not matter so far as the attribution
of the utterer’s meaning is concerned, whether F is thought by U to be *really*
co-related in that way or mode with the response or not; though of course in
the normal case U will think F to be so co-related. Suppose, however, we fill
in the detail of the English soldier case, so as to suppose he accompanies
"Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen" with gesticulations,
chest-thumping, and so forth; he might then hope to succeed in conveying to the
Italian soldier that he intends them to understand what the line ‘means’, to
learn from the particular German sentence that the English soldier intends them
to think that he is a German officer (whereas really of course the English
soldier does not expect them to learn that way, but only by assuming, on the
basis of the situation and the character of the English soldier’s performance,
that he must be trying to communicate to them, against all reasonable hopes, that he is a German officer. Perhaps in
that case, we should be disinclined to say that the English soldier means or
communicates that he is a German
officer, and ready to say only that the English soldier means, naturally and
metabolically, as it were, the Italian solider to think that he was a
German officer. Grice goes on to suggest a revised set of conditions for "
U meant something by x" (Redefinition III, Version A): Ranges of
variables: A: audiences f: features of utterance r: responses c: modes of
correlation (for example, iconic, associative, conventional) I63 H. P. GRICE
(HA) (if) (3r) (ic): U uttered x intending (i) A to think x possessesf (2) A to
think U intends (i) (3) A to think off as correlated in way c with the type to
which r belongs (4) A to think U intends (3) (5) A to think on the basis of the
fulfillment of (i) and (3) that U intends A to produce r (6) A, on the basis of
fulfillment of (5), to produce r (7) A to think U intends (6). In the case of
the "little girl" there is a single feature f (that of being an
utterance of a particular French sentence) with respect to which A has all the
first four intentions. (The only thing wrong is that this feature is not in
fact correlated conventionally with the intended responses, and this does not
disqualify the utterance from being one by which U means something.) In the
English soldier case there is no such single feature. The Italian soldier is intended
(i) to recognize, and go by, feature f1 (x's being a bit of German and being
uttered with certain gesticulations, and so. forth) but (2) to think that he is
intended to recognize x as havingf2 (as being a particular German sentence). So
intention (2) on our revised list is absent. And so we do not need the
condition previously added to eliminate this example. I think, however, that
condition (7) (the old condition [i]) is still needed, unless it can be
replaced by a general "anti-deception" clause. It may be that such
replacement is possible; it may be that the "backward-looking"
subclauses (2), (4), and (7) can be omitted, and replaced by the prohibitive
clause which figures in Redefinition II, Version B. We have then to consider
the merits of Redefinition III, Version B, the definiens of which will run as
follows: (3A) (if) (3r) (ic): (a) U uttered x intending (I) A to think x possessesf
(2) A to thinkf correlated in way c with the type to which r belongs (3) A to
think, on the basis of the fulfillment of (I) and (3) that U intends A to
produce r (4) A, on the basis of the fulfillment of (3) to produce r, and (b)
there is no inference-element E such that U intends both (I') A in his
determination of r to rely on E (2') A to think Uto intend (I') to be false. Grice
would actually often play and sing the ballad. G. writer often considered the
leading cultural figure of his age. He wrote lyric poetry, dramas, and
fictional, essayistic, and aphoristic prose as well as works in various natural
sciences, including anatomy, botany, and optics. A lawyer by training, for most
of his life Goethe was a government official at the provincial court of
Saxony-Weimar. In his numerous contributions to world literature, such as the
novels The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship,
Elective Affinities, and Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Pilgrimage, and the two-part
tragedy Faust, Goethe represented the tensions between individual and society
as well as between culture and nature, with increased recognition of their
tragic opposition and the need to cultivate a resigned self-discipline in
artistic and social matters. In his poetic and scientific treatment of nature
he was influenced by Spinoza’s pantheist identification of nature and God and
maintained that everything in nature is animate and expressive of divine
presence. In his theory and practice of science he opposed the quantitative and
experimental method and insisted on a description of the phenomena that was to
include the intuitive grasp of the archetypal forms or shapes underlying all
development in nature.
tipperary: music-hall cited
by Grice. Grice liked the song and would often accompany himself at the piano
(“in Eb always”). He especially loved to recite the three verses (“Up to
mighty London came an Irishman one day,”
“Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly-O,” and “Molly wrote a neat reply to
Irish Paddy-O”). Grice devises a possible counter-example to his account of
‘communication,’ or strictly the conditions that have to be met for the state
of affairs “Emisor E communicates that p” to hold. In Grice’s scenario, a
reminiscence shared by his father, at a musical soirée in 1912,
at Harborne, Grice’s grandfather sings "Tipperary” “in a
raucous voice” (those are Grice’s father’s words) with the intention of getting
his mother-in-law (whom he knew was never too keen on the music-hall) to leave
the drawing-room. Grice’s grandfather’s mother-in-law is supposed to recognise
(and to know that she is intended to recognise) that Grice’s grandfather wants
to get rid of his mother in law – “to put it bluntly,” as Grice’s father has
it. Grice’s grandfather, moreover, intends that his mother-in-law shall, in the
event, leave because she recognizes Grice’s grandfather’s intention that
she shall go. Grice’s grandfather’s
scheme is that his mother-in-law should, somewhat wrongly, think that Grice’s
grandfather intends his mother-in-law to think that he intends to get rid of
her by means of the recognition of his intention that she should go. In other
words, the mother-in-law is supposed to argue: "My son-in-law intends me
to *think* that he intends to get rid of me by the raucous singing of that
awful ditty complete with the three verses – starting with “Up to mighty London
came an Irishman one day” -- but of course he, rude as he is, really wants to
get rid of me by means of the recognition of his intention to get rid of me. I
am really intended to go because he wants me to go, not because I cannot stand
the singing – I suppose. I mean, I could possibly stand it, if tied up, or
something." The fact that the mother in law, while thinking she is seeing
through his son-in-law’s plans, is really *conforming* to them (a situation
that would not hold if she is known by her son-in-law to be
‘counter-suggestible’), is suggested as precluding Grice from deeming, here,
that his grandfather means by the singing in a raucuous voice the opening line
to “Tipperary” in a raucuous voice (“Up to mighty London came an Irishman one
day”) that his mother-in-law should go. However, it is clear to Grice that,
once one tries to fill in the detail of this description, the example becomes
baffling – “even if I myself designed it.” “For, how is my grandfather’s
mother-in-law sposed to reach the idea that my grandfather wants her to think
that he intends to get rid of her by singing in a raucuous voice “Up to mighty
London came an Irishman one day”?” “My father tells me that my grandfather sould
sing in a *particular nasal tone*, so common at the music-hall, which he knows *not*
necessarily to be displeasing to his mother in law (when put to use to a
respectable drawing-room ballad), though it is to most people that visit the
Grices.” Grice’s grandfather’s mother in law knows that Grice’s grandfather knows
this particular nasa tone not to be displeasing to her, but she thinks, rather
wrongly, that Grice’s grandfaather does not know that his mother-in-law knows
this (she would never display his tastes in public). The mother-in-law might
then be supposed to argue: "My son-in-law cannot want to drive me out of
the drawing-room by his singing, awful to most, since he knows that that
particularly nasal tone is not really displeasing to me. My son-in-law,
however, does not know that I know he knows this. Therefore, maybe my
son-in-law is does wantsme to think that he intends to drive me out, on the
ground of a mere cause, rather than a reason, *by* his singing." “At this
point,” Grice notes, “one would expect my grandfather’s mother-in-law to be completely
at a loss to explain my grandfather’s performance.” “I see no reason at all why
my grandfather’s mother in-law should then suppose that he *really* wants to
get rid of her in some other way.” Whether or not this example could be made to
work, its complexity is ennerving. “And the sad thing about it, is that any
attempt on my part to introduce yet further restrictions would involve more
ennerving complexities still.” “It is in general true that one cannot have
intentions to achieve results which one sees no chance of achieving; and the
success of intentions of the kind involved in communication requires he to whom
communications or near-communications is addressed to be capable in the
circumstances of having certain thoughts and drawing certain conclusions.” At
some early stage in the attempted regression the calculations required of my
grandfather’s mother-in-lawy by my grandfather will be impracticably difficult;
and I suspect the limit has now been reached (if not exceeded).” “So my
grandfather, is he is a Grice, cannot have the intentions – as reconstructed by
my father, this was way back in 1912 -- required of him in order to force the
addition of further restrictions. Not only are the calculations my grandfather
would be requiring of his mother-in-law too difficult, but it would be
impossible for him to find cues to indicate to her that the calculations should
be made, even if they were within his mother-in-law’s compass. So one is
tempted to conclude that no regress is involved.” But even should this
conclusion be correct, we seem to be left with an uncomfortable situation. For
though we may know that we do not need an infinite series of backward-looking sub-clauses,
we cannot say just how many such sub-clauses are required. “Indeed, it looks as
if the definitional expansion of "By uttering x emisor E communicates that p" might have to vary from
case to case, depending on such things as the nature of the intended response,
the circumstances in which the attempt to elicit the response is made (say, a
musical soirée at Harborne in mid-1912), and the intelligence of the utterer (in
this case my grandfather) and of the addressee (his mother in law).” It is
dubious whether such variation can be acceptable. However, Grice genially finds
out that this ennerving difficulty (of the type some of Grice’s tutees trying
to outshine him would display) is avoided if we could eliminate potential
counter-examples not by requiring the emisor to have certain additional,
backward-looking, intentions, but rather by requiring the emisor *not* to have
a certain sort of intention or complex of intentions. Potential counterexamples
of the kind involves the construction of a situation in which the emisor E
intends the sendee S, in the reflection process by which the sendee S is
supposed to reach his response, both to rely on some inference-element, i. e., ome
premise or some inferential step, E, and also to think that the emisor E
intends his sendee S not to rely on E. “What I propose, then, is to uproot such
potential counterexamples by a single clause which prohibits the emisor from
having this kind of complex intention.” We reach a redefinition: "the
emisor E means that p by uttering x" is true iff (for some sendee S and
for some response r): (a) the emisor U utters x intending (i) the sendee to
produce r (2) the sendee S to think the
emisor E to intend (i) (3) the sendee S’s fulfillment of (i) to be based on the
sendee S’s fulfillment of (2) (b) there is no inference-element E such that the
emsior E utters x intending both (i') that the sendee S’s determination of r
should rely on the inference element e and (2') that the sendee S should think
the emisor E to intend that (I') be false.”
goldman: “literally, man
of gold” – Grice. philosopher who has made notable contributions to action
theory, naturalistic and social epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive
science. He has persistently urged the relevance of cognitive and social
science to problems in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and
ethics. A Theory of Human Action proposes a Griceian causal theory of action,
describes the generative structure of basic and non-basic action, and argues
for the compatibility of free will and determinism. In “Epistemics: The
Regulative Theory of Cognition” 8, he argued that traditional epistemology
should be replaced by ‘epistemics’, which differs from traditional epistemology
in characterizing knowledge, justified belief, and rational belief in light of
empirical cognitive science. Traditional epistemology has used a coarse-grained
notion of belief, taken too restrictive a view of cognitive methods, offered
advice for ideal cognizers rather than for human beings with limited cognitive
resources, and ignored flaws in our cognitive system that must be recognized if
cognition is to be improved. Epistemologists must attend to the results of
cognitive science if they are to remedy these deficiencies in traditional
epistemology. Goldman later developed epistemics in Epistemology and Cognition
6, in which he developed a historical, reliabilist theory of knowledge and
epistemic justification and employed empirical cognitive science to
characterize knowledge, evaluate skepticism, and assess human cognitive
resources. In Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences and
in Knowledge in a Social World 9, he defended and elaborated a veritistic i.e.,
truth-oriented evaluation of communal beliefprofiles, social institutions, and
social practices e.g., the practice of restricting evidence admissible in a
jury trial. He has opposed the widely accepted view that mental states are
functional states “The Psychology of Folk Psychology,” Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 3 and defended a simulation theory of mental state attribution, on
which one attributes mental states to another by imagining what mental state
one would be in if one were in the other’s situation “In Defense of the
Simulation Theory,” 2. He has also argued that cognitive science bears on
ethics by providing information relevant to the nature of moral evaluation,
moral choice, and hedonic states associated with the good e.g., happiness “Ethics
and Cognitive Science,” 3.
bonum: good-making
characteristic, a characteristic that makes whatever is intrinsically or
inherently good, good. Hedonists hold that pleasure and conducing to pleasure
are the sole good-making characteristics. Pluralists hold that those
characteristics are only some among many other goodmaking characteristics,
which include, for instance, knowledge, friendship, beauty, and acting from a
sense of duty. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “E. F. Carritt on an alleged ambiguity of
‘good.’”
goodman: n. very New-World
philosopher who made seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, and
aesthetics. Like Quine, Goodman repudiates analyticity and kindred notions.
Goodman’s work can be read as a series of investigations into how to do
philosophy without them. A central concern is how symbols structure facts and
our understanding of them. The Structure of Appearance 2 presents Goodman’s
constructionalism. Pretheoretical beliefs are vague and mutually inconsistent.
By devising an interpreted formal system that derives them from or explicates
them in terms of suitable primitives, we bring them into logical contact,
eliminate inconsistencies, and disclose unanticipated logical and theoretical
connections. Multiple, divergent systems do justice to the same pretheoretical
beliefs. All systems satisfying our criteria of adequacy are equally acceptable.
Nothing favors any one of them over the others. Ways of Worldmaking 8 provides
a less formal treatment of the same themes. Category schemes dictate criteria
of identity for their objects. So mutually irreducible category schemes do not
treat of the same things. Since a world consists of the things it comprises,
irreducible schemes mark out different worlds. There are, Goodman concludes,
many worlds if any. Inasmuch as the categories that define identity onditions
on objects are human constructs, we make worlds. Languages of Art 8 argues that
art, like science, makes and reveals worlds. Aesthetics is the branch of
epistemology that investigates art’s cognitive functions. Goodman analyzes the
syntactic and semantic structures of symbol systems, both literal and
figurative, and shows how they advance understanding in art and elsewhere.
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast4 poses the new riddle of induction. An item is grue
if and only if it is examined before future time t and found to be green or is
not so examined and is blue. All hitherto examined emeralds are both green and
grue. What justifies our expecting future emeralds to be green, not grue?
Inductive validity, the riddle demonstrates, depends on the characterization as
well as the classification of the evidence class. ‘Green’ is preferable,
Goodman maintains, because it is entrenched in inductive practice. This does
not guarantee that inferences using ‘green’ will yield truths. Nothing
guarantees that. But entrenched predicates are pragmatically advantageous,
because they mesh with our habits of thought and other cognitive resources.
Goodman’s other works include Problems and Projects 2, Of Mind and Other
Matters 4, and Reconceptions 8, written with Catherine Z. Elgin.
gorgias: Grecian Sophist –
“never to be confused with a philosopher even if they were oh-so-much cleverer
than your average one!” – Grice. A teacher of rhetoric from Leontini in
Syracuse, Gorgias came to Athens as an ambassador from his city and caused a
sensation with his artful oratory. He is known through references and short
quotations in later writers, and through a few surviving texts two speeches and a philosophical treatise. He
taught a rhetorical style much imitated in antiquity, by delivering model
speeches to paying audiences. Unlike other Sophists he did not give formal
instruction in other topics, nor prepare a formal rhetorical manual. He was
known to have had views on language, on the nature of reality, and on virtue.
Gorgias’s style was remarkable for its use of poetic devices such as rhyme,
meter, and elegant words, as well as for its dependence on artificial
parallelism and balanced antithesis. His surviving speeches, defenses of Helen
and Palamedes, display a range of arguments that rely heavily on what the
ancients called eikos ‘likelihood’ or ‘probability’. Gorgias maintained in his
“Helen” that a speech can compel its audience to action; elsewhere he remarked
that in the theater it is wiser to be deceived than not. Gorgias’s short book
On Nature or On What Is Not survives in two paraphrases, one by Sextus
Empiricus and the other now considered more reliable in an Aristotelian work,
On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias. Gorgias argued for three theses: that
nothing exists; that even if it did, it could not be known; and that even if it
could be known, it could not be communicated. Although this may be in part a
parody, most scholars now take it to be a serious philosophical argument in its
own right. In ethics, Plato reports that Gorgias thought there were different
virtues for men and for women, a thesis Aristotle defends in the Politics.
gracian: theorist of
the baroque. Born in Belmonte, he
entered the Jesuit order in 1619 and became rector of the Jesuit at Tarragona and a favorite of King Philip
III. Gracián’s most important works are Agudeza y arte de ingenio “The Art of
Worldly Wisdom,” 164248 and El criticón “The Critic,” 165157. The first
provides philosophical support for conceptismo, a literary movement that sought to create new
concepts through the development of an elaborate style, characterized by
subtlety agudeza and ingenious literary artifices. El criticón, written in the
conceptist style, is a philosophical novel that pessimistically criticizes the
evils of civilization. Gracián anticipates Rousseau’s noble savage in claiming
that, although human beings are fundamentally good in the state of nature, they
are corrupted by civilization. Echoing a common theme of thought at the time, he attributes the
nefarious influence of civilization to the confusion it creates between
appearance and reality. But Gracián’s pessimism is tempered by faith: man has
hope in the afterlife, when reality is finally revealed. Gracián wrote several
other influential books. In El héroe “The Hero,” 1637 and El político “The
Politician,” 1640, he follows Machiavelli in discussing the attributes of the
ideal prince; El discreto “The Man of Discretion,” 1646 explores the ideal
gentleman, as judged by society. Most of
Gracián’s books were published under pseudonyms to avoid censure by his order.
Gorgias Gracián y Morales, Baltasar 351
351 Among authors outside Spain who used his ideas are Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
grammaticum: Is there a ‘grammar’ of gestures? How loose can an Oxonian
use ‘grammar’? Sometimes geography, sometimes botany – “Grammatica” the Romans
never cared to translate. Although ‘literature’ is the cognate. – For some
reasons, the Greeks were obsessed with the alphabet – It was a trivial ‘art’. Like
‘logic,’ and philosophy is NOT an art or ‘techne.’ A philosopher is not a
technician – and hardly an artist like William Morris (his ‘arts and crafts’ is
a joke since it translates in Latin to ‘ars et ars,’ and ‘techne kai techne’).
The sad thing is that at MIT, as Grice knew, Chomsky is appointed professor of
philosophy, and he mainly writes about ‘grammar’! Later, Chomsky tries to get
more philosophical, but chooses the wrong paradigm – Cartesianism, the ghost in
the machine, in Ryle’s parlance. Odly, Oxonians, who rarely go to grammar
schools, see ‘grammar’ as a divinity, and talk of the logical grammar of a
Ryleian agitation, say. It sounds high class because there is the irony that an
Oxonian philosopher is surely not a common-or-garden grammarian, involved in
the grammar of, say, “Die Deutsche Sprache.” The Oxonian is into the logical
grammar. It is more of a ‘linguistic turn’ expression than the duller
‘conceptual analysis,’ or ‘linguistic philosophy.’ cf. logical form, and
Russell, “grammar is a pretty good guide to logical form.” while philosophers
would use grammar jocularly, Chomsky didnt. The problem, as Grice notes, is
that Chomsky never tells us where grammar ends (“or begins for that matter.”)
“Consider the P, karulising elatically.” When Carnap introduces the P, he talks
syntax, not grammar. But philosophers always took semiotics more seriously than
others. So Carnap is well aware of Morriss triad of the syntactics, the
semantics, and the pragmatics. Philosophers always disliked grammar, because
back in the days of Aelfric, philosophia was supposed to embrace dialectica and
grammatica, and rhetorica. “It is all part of philosophy.” Truth-conditional
semantics and implicatura. grammar, a system of rules specifying a language. The
term has often been used synonymously with ‘syntax’, the principles governing
the construction of sentences from words perhaps also including the systems of
word derivation and inflection case
markings, verbal tense markers, and the like. In modern linguistic usage the
term more often encompasses other components of the language system such as
phonology and semantics as well as syntax. Traditional grammars that we may
have encountered in our school days, e.g., the grammars of Latin or English,
were typically fragmentary and often prescriptive basically a selective catalog of forms and
sentence patterns, together with constructions to be avoided. Contemporary
linguistic grammars, on the other hand, aim to be descriptive, and even
explanatory, i.e., embedded within a general theory that offers principled
reasons for why natural languages are the way they are. This is in accord with
the generally accepted view of linguistics as a science that regards human
language as a natural phenomenon to be understood, just as physicists attempt
to make sense of the world of physical objects. Since the publication of
Syntactic Structures 7 and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 5 by Noam Chomsky,
grammars have been almost universally conceived of as generative devices, i.e.,
precisely formulated deductive systems
commonly called generative grammars
specifying all and only the well-formed sentences of a language together
with a specification of their relevant structural properties. On this view, a
grammar of English has the character of a theory of the English language, with
the grammatical sentences and their structures as its theorems and the grammar
rules playing the role of the rules of inference. Like any empirical theory, it
is subject to disconfirmation if its predictions do not agree with the facts if, e.g., the grammar implies that ‘white or
snow the is’ is a wellformed sentence or that ‘The snow is white’ is not. The
object of this theory construction is to model the system of knowledge
possessed by those who are able to speak and understand an unlimited number of
novel sentences of the language specified. Thus, a grammar in this sense is a
psychological entity a component of the
human mind and the task of linguistics
avowedly a mentalistic discipline is to determine exactly of what this
knowledge consists. Like other mental phenomena, it is not observable directly
but only through its effects. Thus, underlying linguistic competence is to be
distinguished from actual linguistic performance, which forms part of the
evidence for the former but is not necessarily an accurate reflection of it,
containing, as it does, errors, false starts, etc. A central problem is how
this competence arises in the individual, i.e., how a grammar is inferred by a
child on the basis of a finite, variable, and imperfect sample of utterances
encountered in the course of normal development. Many sorts of observations
strongly suggest that grammars are not constructed de novo entirely on the
basis of experience, and the view is widely held that the child brings to the
task a significant, genetically determined predisposition to construct grammars
according to a well-defined pattern. If this is so, and since apparently no one
language has an advantage over any other in the learning process, this inborn
component of linguistic competence can be correctly termed a universal grammar.
It represents whatever the grammars of all natural languages, actual or
potential, necessarily have in common because of the innate linguistic
competence of human beings. The apparent diversity of natural languages has
often led to a serious underestimation of the scope of universal grammar. One
of the most influential proposals concerning the nature of universal grammar
was Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar. In this framework the
syntactic structure of a sentence is given not by a single object e.g., a parse
tree, as in phrase structure grammar, but rather by a sequence of trees
connected by operations called transformations. The initial tree in such a
sequence is specified generated by a phrase structure grammar, together with a
lexicon, and is known as the deep structure. The final tree in the sequence,
the surface structure, contains the morphemes meaningful units of the sentence
in the order in which they are written or pronounced. For example, the English
sentences ‘John hit the ball’ and its passive counterpart ‘The ball was hit by
John’ might be derived from the same deep structure in this case a tree looking
very much like the surface structure for the active sentence except that the
optional transformational rule of passivization has been applied in the
derivation of the latter sentence. This rule rearranges the constituents of the
tree in such a way that, among other changes, the direct object ‘the ball’ in
deep structure becomes the surface-structure subject of the passive sentence.
It is thus an important feature of this theory that grammatical grammar grammar
352 352 relations such as subject,
object, etc., of a sentence are not absolute but are relative to the level of
structure. This accounts for the fact that many sentences that appear
superficially similar in structure e.g., ‘John is easy to please’, ‘John is
eager to please’ are nonetheless perceived as having different underlying
deep-structure grammatical relations. Indeed, it was argued that any theory of grammar
that failed to make a deep-structure/surface-structure distinction could not be
adequate. Contemporary linguistic theories have, nonetheless, tended toward
minimizing the importance of the transformational rules with corresponding
elaboration of the role of the lexicon and the principles that govern the
operation of grammars generally. Theories such as generalized phrase-structure
grammar and lexical function grammar postulate no transformational rules at all
and capture the relatedness of pairs such as active and passive sentences in
other ways. Chomsky’s principles and parameters approach 1 reduces the
transformational component to a single general movement operation that is
controlled by the simultaneous interaction of a number of principles or subtheories:
binding, government, control, etc. The universal component of the grammar is
thus enlarged and the contribution of languagespecific rules is correspondingly
diminished. Proponents point to the advantages this would allow in language
acquisition. Presumably a considerable portion of the task of grammar
construction would consist merely in setting the values of a small number of
parameters that could be readily determined on the basis of a small number of
instances of grammatical sentences. A rather different approach that has been
influential has arisen from the work of Richard Montague, who applied to
natural languages the same techniques of model theory developed for logical
languages such as the predicate calculus. This so-called Montague grammar uses
a categorial grammar as its syntactic component. In this form of grammar,
complex lexical and phrasal categories can be of the form A/B. Typically such
categories combine by a kind of “cancellation” rule: A/B ! B P A something of
category A/B combines with something of category B to yield something of
category A. In addition, there is a close correspondence between the syntactic
category of an expression and its semantic type; e.g., common nouns such as
‘book’ and ‘girl’ are of type e/t, and their semantic values are functions from
individuals entities, or e-type things to truth-values T-type things, or
equivalently, sets of individuals. The result is an explicit, interlocking
syntax and semantics specifying not only the syntactic structure of grammatical
sentences but also their truth conditions. Montague’s work was embedded in his
own view of universal grammar, which has not, by and large, proven persuasive
to linguists. A great deal of attention has been given in recent years to
merging the undoubted virtues of Montague grammar with a linguistically more
palatable view of universal grammar. Refs.: One source is an essay on ‘grammar’ in the H. P. Grice
Papers, BANC.
gramsci: a. political
leader whose imprisonment by the Fascists for his involvement with the Communist Party had the ironical result of
sparing him from Stalinism and enabling him to better articulate his distinctive
political philosophy. He welcomes the Bolshevik Revolution as a “revolution
against Capital” rather than against capitalism: as a revolution refuting the
deterministic Marxism according to which socialism could arise only by the
gradual evolution of capitalism, and confirming the possibility of the radical
transformation of social institutions. In 1 he supported creation of the Communist Party; as its general secretary
from 4, he tried to reorganize it along more democratic lines. In 6 the
Fascists outlawed all opposition parties. Gramsci spent the rest of his life in
various prisons, where he wrote more than a thousand s of notes ranging from a
few lines to chapterlength essays. These Prison Notebooks pose a major
interpretive challenge, but they reveal a keen, insightful, and open mind
grappling with important social and political problems. The most common
interpretation stems from Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor as leader of
grammar, categorial Gramsci, Antonio 353
353 the Communists. After the
fall of Fascism and the end of World War II, Togliatti read into Gramsci the
so-called road to socialism: a strategy
for attaining the traditional Marxist goals of the classless society and the
nationalization of the means of production by cultural means, such as education
and persuasion. In contrast to Bolshevism, one had to first conquer social
institutions, and then their control would yield the desired economic and
political changes. This democratic theory of Marxist revolution was long
regarded by many as especially relevant to Western industrial societies, and so
for this and other reasons Gramsci is a key figure of Western Marxism. The same
theory is often called Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, referring to a
relationship between two political units where one dominates the other with the
consent of that other. This interpretation was a political reconstruction,
based primarily on Gramsci’s Communist involvement and on highly selective
passages from the Notebooks. It was also based on exaggerating the influence on
Gramsci of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gentile, and minimizing influences like
Croce, Mosca, Machiavelli, and Hegel. No new consensus has emerged yet; it
would have to be based on analytical and historical spadework barely begun. One
main interpretive issue is whether Gramsci, besides questioning the means, was
also led to question the ends of traditional Marxism. In one view, his
commitment to rational persuasion, political realism, methodological
fallibilism, democracy, and pluralism is much deeper than his inclinations
toward the classless society, the abolition of private property, the
bureaucratically centralized party, and the like; in particular, his pluralism
is an aspect of his commitment to the dialectic as a way of thinking, a concept
he adapted from Hegel through Croce.
green: t. h., absolute idealist and social philosopher. The
son of a clergyman, Green studied and taught at Oxford. His central concern was
to resolve what he saw as the spiritual crisis of his age by analyzing
knowledge and morality in ways inspired by Kant and Hegel. In his lengthy
introduction to Hume’s Treatise, he argued that Hume had shown knowledge and
morality to be impossible on empiricist principles. In his major work, “Prolegomena
to Ethics,” Green contended that thought imposed relations on sensory feelings
and impulses whose source was an eternal consciousness to constitute objects of
knowledge and of desire. Furthermore, in acting on desires, rational agents
seek the satisfaction of a self that is realized through their own actions.
This requires rational agents to live in harmony among themselves and hence to
act morally. In Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation Green
transformed classical liberalism by arguing that even though the state has no
intrinsic value, its intervention in society is necessary to provide the
conditions that enable rational beings to achieve self-satisfaction.
gregorius: I, Saint, called
Gregory the Great c.540604, a pope and Roman political leader. Born a
patrician, he was educated for public office and became prefect of Rome in 570.
In 579, he was appointed papal representative in Constantinople, returning to
Rome as counselor to Pope Pelagius II in 586. He was elected Pope Gregory I in
590. When the Lombards attacked Rome in 594, Gregory bought them off.
Constantinople would neither cede nor defend Italy, and Gregory stepped in as
secular ruler of what became the Papal States. He asserted the universal
jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, and claimed patriarchy of the West. His
writings include important letters; the Moralia, an exposition of the Book of
Job summarizing Christian theology; Pastoral Care, which defined the duties of
the clergy for the Middle Ages; and Dialogues, which deals chiefly with the
immortality of the soul, holding it could enter heaven immediately without
awaiting the Last Judgment. His thought, largely Augustinian, is unoriginal,
but was much quoted in the Middle Ages.
gregory
of
Nyssa, Saint, Grecian theologian and mystic who tried to reconcile Platonism
with Christianity. As bishop of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor, he championed
orthodoxy and was prominent at the First Council of Constantinople. He related
the doctrine of the Trinity to Plato’s ideas of the One and the Many. He
followed Origen in believing that man’s material great chain of being Gregory
of Nyssa 354 354 nature was due to the
fall and in believing in the Apocatastasis, the universal restoration of all
souls, including Satan’s, in the kingdom of God.
rimini: gregorio di,
philosopher, he studied in Italy, England, and France, and taught at the
universities of Bologna, Padua, Perugia, and Paris before becoming prior
general of the Hermits of St. Augustine in his native city of Rimini, about
eighteen months before he died. Gregory earned the honorific title “the
Authentic Doctor” because he was considered by many of his contemporaries to be
a faithful interpreter of Augustine, and thus a defender of tradition, in the
midst of the scepticism of Occam and his disciples regarding what could be
known in natural philosophy and theology. Thus, in his commentary on Books I
and II of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Gregory rejected the view that because of
God’s omnipotence he can do anything and is therefore unknowable in his nature
and his ways. Gregory also maintained that after Adam’s fall from
righteousness, men need, in conjunction with their free will, God’s help grace
to perform morally good actions. In non-religious matters Gregory is usually
associated with the theory of the complexe significabile, according to which
the object of knowledge acquired by scientific proof is neither an object
existing outside the mind, nor a word simplex or a proposition complexum, but
rather the complexe significabile, that which is totally and adequately
signified by the proposition expressed in the conclusion of the proof in
question.
grice: as a count noun –
“Lots of grice in the fields.” – One Scots to another -- count noun, a noun
that can occur syntactically a with quantifiers ‘each’, ‘every’, ‘many’, ‘few’,
‘several’, and numerals; b with the indefinite article, ‘an’; and c in the
plural form. The following are examples of count nouns CNs, paired with
semantically similar mass nouns MNs: ‘each dollar / silver’, ‘one composition /
music’, ‘a bed / furniture’, ‘instructions / advice’. MNs but not CNs can occur
with the quantifiers ‘much’ and ‘little’: ‘much poetry / poems’, ‘little bread
/ loaf’. Both CNs and MNs may occur with ‘all’, ‘most’, and ‘some’.
Semantically, CNs but not MNs refer distributively, providing a counting
criterion. It makes sense to ask how many CNs?: ‘How many coins / gold?’ MNs
but not CNs refer collectively. It makes sense to ask how much MN?: ‘How much
gold / coins?’ One problem is that these syntactic and semantic criteria yield
different classifications; another problem is to provide logical forms and
truth conditions for sentences containing mass nouns.
grice: English philosopher, born in
Harborne, “in the middle of nowhere,” as Strawson put it – (“He was from
London, Strawson was”) -- whose work concerns perception and philosophy of
language, and whose most influential contribution is the concept of a
conversational implicaturum and the associated theoretical machinery of
conversational ‘postulates.’ The concept of a conversational implicaturum is
first used in his ‘presentation’ on the causal theory of perception and
reference. Grice distinguishes between the ‘meaning’ of the words used in a
sentence and what is implied by the utterer’s choice of words. If someone says
“It looks as if there is a red pillar box in front of me,” the choice of words
implies that there is some doubt about the pillar box being red. But, Grice
argues, that is a matter of word choice and the sentence itself does not
‘impl’ that there is doubt. The term
‘conversational implicaturum’ was introduced in Grice’s William James lectures
published in 8 and used to defend the use of the material implication as a
logical translation of ‘if’. With Strawson “In Defence of Dogma”, Grice gives a
spirited defense of the analyticsynthetic distinction against Quine’s
criticisms. In subsequent systematic papers Grice attempts, among other things,
to give a theoretical grounding of the distinction. Grice’s oeuvre is part of
the Oxford ordinary language tradition, if formal and theoretical. He also
explores metaphysics, especially the concept of absolute value. There is the H.
P. Grice Society – Other organisations Grice-related are “The Grice Club,” “The
Grice Circle,” and “H. P. Grice’s Playgroup.”
H. P.
Grice’s playgroup:
after the death of J. L. Austin, Grice kept the routine of the Saturday morning
with a few new rules. 1. Freedom. 2. Freedom, and 3. Freedom.
Griceian. Grice disliked
the spelling “Gricean” that some people in the New World use. “Surely my
grandmother was right when she said she had become a Griceian by marrying a
Grice!”
Brown, S. author of the
Dictionary of British Philosophers (“I first thought of writing a dictionary of
English philosophers, but then I thought that Russell would be out – he was
born in Wales!.”
grice: g. r. – Welsh
philosopher who taught at Norwich. Since H. P. Grice and G. R. Grice both wrote
on the contract and morality, one has to be careful.
gricese: While Grice presented Gricese as refutation of Vitters’s
idea of a private language “I soon found out that my wife and my two children
were speaking Gricese, as was my brother Derek!” -- english, being
English or the genius of the ordinary. H. P. Grice refers to “The English
tongue.” A refusal to rise above the facts of ordinary life is characteristic
of classical Eng. Phil. from
Ireland-born Berkeley to Scotland-born Hume, Scotland-born Reid, and very
English Jeremy Bentham and New-World Phil. , whether in transcendentalism
Emerson, Thoreau or in pragmatism from James to Rorty. But this orientation did
not become truly explicit until after the linguistic turn carried out by
Vienna-born Witters, translated by C. K. Ogden, very English Brighton-born
Ryle, and especially J. L. Austin and his best companion at the Play Group, H.
P. Grice, when it was radicalized and systematized under the name of a phrase
Grice lauged at: “‘ordinary’-language philosophy.” This preponderant recourse
to the ordinary seems inseparable from certain peculiar characteristics of the
English Midlanders such as H. P. Grice, such as the gerund that often make it
difficult if not impossible to translate. It is all the more important to
emphasize this paradox because English Midlander philosopher, such as H. P.
Grice, claims to be as simple as it is universal, and it established itself as
an important philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth
century, due mainly to the efforts of H. P. Grice. English, but especially
Oxonian Phil. has a specific
relationship to ‘ordinary’ language (even though for Grice, “Greek and Latin
were always more ordinary to me – and people who came to read Eng. at Oxford
were laughed at!”), as well as to the requirements of everyday life, that is
not limited to the theories of the Phil.
of language, in which an Eng. philosopher such as H. P. Grice appears as
a pioneer. It rejects the artificial linguistic constructions of philosophical
speculation that is, Met. and always prefers to return to its original home, as
Witters puts it: the natural environment of everyday words Philosophical
Investigations. Thus we can discern a continuity between the recourse to the
ordinary in Scots Hume, Irish Berkeley, Scots Reid, and very English Jeremy
Bentham and what will become in Irish London-born G. E. Moore and Witters after
he started using English, at least orally and then J. L. Austin’s and H. P.
Grice’s ‘ordinary’-language philosophy. This continuity can be seen in several
areas. First, in the exploitation of all the resources of the language, which
is considered as a source of information and is valid in itself. Second, in the
attention given to the specificities—and even the defects, or ‘implicatura,’ as
Grice calls them —of the vernacular --
which become so many philosophical characteristics from which one can
learn. Finally, in the affirmation of the naturalness of the distinctions made
in and by ordinary language, seeking to challenge the superiority of the
technical language of Philosophy —the former being the object of an agreement
deeper than the latter. Then there’s The Variety of Modes of Action. The
passive. There are several modes of agency, and these constitute both part of
the genius of the language and a main source of its problems in tr.. Agency is
a strange intersection of points of view that makes it possible to designate
the person who is acting while at the same time concealing the actor behind the
act—and thus locating agency in the passive subject itself v. AGENCY. A classic
difficulty is illustrated by the following sentence from J. Stuart Mill’s To
gauge the naturalness of the passive construction in English, it suffices to
examine a couple of newspaper headlines. “Killer’s Car Found” On a retrouvé la
voiture du tueur, “Kennedy Jr. Feared Dead.” On craint la mort du fils Kennedy;
or the titles of a philosophical essay, “Epistemology Naturalized,”
L’Épistémologie naturalisée; Tr. J.
Largeault as L’Épistémologie devenue naturelle; a famous article by Quine that
was the origin of the naturalistic turn in American Phil. and “Consciousness Explained” La conscience
expliquée by Daniel Dennett. We might then better understand why this PASSIVE
VOICE kind of construction—which seems so awkward in Fr. compared with the active voice— is perceived
by its Eng. users as a more direct and effective way of speaking. More
generally, the ellipsis of the agent seems to be a tendency of Eng. so profound
that one can maintain that the phenomenon Lucien Tesnière called diathèse
récessive the loss of the agent has become a characteristic of the Eng.
language itself, and not only of the passive. Thus, e. g. , a Fr. reader irresistibly gains the impression that
a reflexive pronoun is lacking in the following expressions. “This book reads
well.” ce livre se lit agréablement. “His poems do not translate well.” ses
poèmes se traduisent difficilement. “The door opens.” la porte s’ouvre. “The
man will hang.” l’homme sera pendu. In reality, here again, Eng. simply does
not need to mark by means of the reflexive pronoun se the presence of an active
agent. Do, make, have Eng. has several terms to translate the single Fr. word faire, which it can render by to do, to
make, or to have, depending on the type of agency required by the context.
Because of its attenuation of the meaning of action, its value as emphasis and
repetition, the verb “to do” has become omnipresent in English, and it plays a
particularly important role in philosophical texts. We can find a couple of
examples of tr. problems in the Oxonian seminars by J. L. Austin. In Sense and
Considerations on Representative Government: “I must not be understood to say
that” p. To translate such a passive construction, Fr. is forced to resort to the impersonal pronoun
on and to put it in the position of an observer of the “I” je as if it were
considered from the outside: On ne doit pas comprendre que je dis que p. But at
the same time, the network of relations internal to the sentence is modified,
and the meaning transformed. Necessity is no longer associated with the subject
of the sentence and the author; it is made impersonal. Philosophical language
also makes frequent use of the diverse characteristics of the passive. Here we
can mention the crucial turning point in the history of linguistics represented
by Chomsky’s discovery Syntactic Structures,
of the paradigm of the active/ passive relation, which proves the
necessity of the transformational component in grammar. A passive utterance is
not always a reversal of the active and only rarely describes an undergoing, as
is shown by the example She was offered a bunch of flowers. In particular,
language makes use of the fact that this kind of construction authorizes the
ellipsis of the agent as is shown by the common expression Eng. spoken. For a
philosopher, the passive is thus the privileged form of an action when its
agent is unknown, indeterminate, unimportant, or, inversely, too obvious. Thus
without making his prose too turgid, in Sense and Sensibilia Austin can use
five passives in less than a page, and these can be translated in Fr. only by on, an indeterminate subject defined
as differentiated from moi. “It is clearly implied, that “Now this, at least if
it is taken to mean The expression is here put forward We are given, as
examples, familiar objects The expression is not further defined On sous-entend
clairement que Quant à cela, du moins si on l’entend au sens de On avance ici
l’expression On nous donne, comme exemples, des objets familiers On
n’approfondit pas la définition de l’expression . . . 1 Langage, langue,
parole: A virtual distinction. Contrary to what is too often believed, the Eng.
language does not conflate under the term language what Fr. distinguishes following Saussure with the
terms langage, langue, and parole. In reality, Eng. also has a series of three
terms whose semantic distribution makes possible exactly the same trichotomy as
Fr. : First there’s Grice’s “tongue,”which serves to designate a specific
language by opposition to another; speech, which refers more specifically to
parole but which is often translated in Fr.
by discours; and language in the sense of faculté de langage.
Nonetheless, Fr. ’s set of systematic distinctions can only remain
fundamentally virtual in English, notably because the latter refuses to
radically detach langue from parole. Thus in Chrestomathia, Bentham uses
“tongue” (Bentham’s tongue – in Chrestomathia) and language interchangeably and
sometimes uses language in the sense of langue: “Of all known languages the
Grecian [Griceian] is assuredly, in its structure, the most plastic and most
manageable. Bentham even uses speech and language as equivalents, since he
speaks of parts of speech. But on the contrary, he sometimes emphasizes
differences that he ignores here. And he proceeds exactly like Hume in his
essay Of the Standard of Taste, where we find, e. g. , But it must also be
allowed, that some part of the seeming harmony in morals may be accounted for
from the very nature of language. The word, virtue, with its equivalent in
every tongue, implies praise; as that of vice does blame. REFS.: Bentham,
Jeremy. ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith
and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, . Hume, D. . Of the Standard of Taste. In
Four Dissertations. London: Thoemmes Continuum, . First published in 175
Saussure, F. de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. by Bally and Sechehaye. Tr. R. Harris. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, . First
published in circulation among these forms. This formal continuity promotes a
great methodological inventiveness through the interplay among the various
grammatical entities that it enables.
The gerund: The form of -ing that is the most difficult to translate
Eng. is a nominalizing language. Any verb can be nominalized, and this ability
gives the Eng. philosophical language great creative power. “Nominalization,”
as Grice calls it, is in fact a substantivization without substantivization:
the verb is not substantivized in order to refer to action, to make it an
object of discourse which is possible in any language, notably in philosophical
Fr. and G. , but rather to nominalize
the verb while at the same time preserving its quality as a verb, and even to
nominalize whole clauses. Fr. can, of
course, nominalize faire, toucher, and sentir le faire, le toucher, even le
sentir, and one can do the same, in a still more systematic manner, in G. .
However, these forms will not have the naturalness of the Eng. expressions: the
making and unmaking the doing and undoing, the feeling, the feeling Byzantine,
the meaning. Above all, in these languages it is hard to construct expressions
parallel to, e. g. , the making of, the making use of, my doing wrongly, “my
meaning this,” (SIGNIFICATUM, COMMUNICATUM), his feeling pain, etc., that is,
mixtures of noun and verb having—and this is the grammatical characteristic of
the gerund — the external distribution of a nominal expression and the internal
distribution of a verbal expression. These forms are so common that they
characterize, in addition to a large proportion of book titles e. g. , The
Making of the Eng. Working Class, by E. P. Thomson; or, in Phil. , The Taming
of Chance, or The taming of the true, by I. Hacking, the language of classical
Eng. Phil. . The gerund functions as a sort of general equivalent or exchanger
between grammatical forms. In that way, it not only makes the language dynamic
by introducing into it a permanent temporal flux, but also helps create, in the
language itself, a kind of indeterminacy in the way it is parsed, which the translator
finds awkward when he understands the message without being able to retain its
lightness. Thus, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume speaks, regarding the
idea, of the manner of its being conceived, which a Fr. translator might render as sa façon d’être
conçue or perhaps, la façon dont il lui appartient d’être conçue, which is not
quite the same thing. And we v. agency and the gerund connected in a language
like that of Bentham, who minimizes the gaps between subject and object, verb
and noun: much regret has been suggested at the thoughts of its never having
yet been brought within the reach of the Eng. reader ChrestomathiTranslators
often feel obliged to render the act expressed by a gerund by the expression le
fait de, but this has a meaning almost contrary to the English. With its
gerund, Eng. avoids the discourse of fact by retaining only the event and
arguing only on that basis. The inevitable confusion suggested by Fr. when it translates the Eng. gerund is all the
more unfortunate in this case because it becomes impossible to distinguish when
Eng. uses the fact or the case from when it uses the gerund. The importance of
the event, along with the distinction between trial, case, and event, on the
one hand and happening on the other, is Sensibilia, he has criticized the claim
that we never perceive objects directly and is preparing to criticize its
negation as well: I am not going to maintain that we ought to embrace the
doctrine that we do perceive material things. Je ne vais pas soutenir que nous devons
embrasser la doctrine selon laquelle nous percevons vraiment les choses
matérielles. Finally, let us recall Austin’s first example of the performative,
which plays simultaneously on the anaphoric value of do and on its sense of
action, a duality that v.ms to be at the origin of the theory of the
performative, I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife—as uttered in
the course of the marriage ceremony Oui à savoir: je prends cette femme pour
épouse’énoncé lors d’une cérémonie de mariage; How to Do Things with Words. On
the other hand, whereas faire is colored by a causative sense, Eng. uses to
make and to have—He made Mary open her bags il lui fit ouvrir sa valise; He had
Mary pour him a drink il se fit verser un verre—with this difference: that make
can indicate, as we v., coercion, whereas have presupposes that there is no
resistance, a difference that Fr. can
only leave implicit or explain by awkward periphrases. Twentieth-century Eng.
philosophers from Austin to Geach and Anscombe have examined these differences
and their philosophical implications very closely. Thus, in A Plea for Excuses,
Austin emphasizes the elusive meaning of the expression doing something, and
the correlative difficulty of determining the limits of the concept of action—Is
to sneeze to do an action? There is indeed a vague and comforting idea that
doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements. Further, we
need to ask what is the detail of the complicated internal machinery we use in
acting. Philosophical Papers No matter how partial they may be, these opening
remarks show that there is a specific, intimate relation between ordinary
language and philosophical language in English language Phil. . This enables us
to better understand why the most Oxonian philosophers are so comfortable
resorting to idiomatic expressions cf. H. Putnam and even to clearly popular
usage: “Meanings ain’t in the head.” It ain’t necessarily so.As for the title
of Manx-ancestry Quine’s famous book From a Logical Point of View, which at
first seems austere, it is taken from a calypso song: “From a logical point of
view, Always marry women uglier than you. The Operator -ing: Properties and
Antimetaphysical Consequences -ing: A multifunctional operator Although
grammarians think it important to distinguish among the forms of -ing—present
participles, adjectives, the progressive, and the gerund—what strikes the
reader of scientific and philosophical texts is first of all the free in Phil.
, You are v.ing something Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, regarding a stick in
water; I really am perceiving the familiar objects Ayer, Foundations of
Empirical Knowledge. The passage to the form be + verb + -ing indicates, then,
not the progressiveness of the action but rather the transition into the metalanguage
peculiar to the philosophical description of phenomena of perception. The sole
exception is, curiously, to know, which is practically never used in the
progressive: even if we explore the philosophical and epistemological
literature, we do not find “I am knowing” or he was knowing, as if knowledge
could not be conceived as a process. In English, there is a great variety of
what are customarily called aspects, through which the status of the action is
marked and differentiated in a more systematic way than in Fr. or G. , once again because of the -ing
ending: he is working / he works / he worked / he has been working. Unlike what
happens in Slavic languages, aspect is marked at the outset not by a duality of
verbal forms but instead by the use of the verb to be with a verb ending in
-ing imperfect or progressive, by opposition to the simple present or past
perfect. Moreover, Grice mixes several aspects in a single expression:
iterativity, progressivity, completion, as in it cannot fail to have been
noticed Austin, How to Do Things. These are nuances, or implicate, as Labov and
then Pinker recently observed, that are not peculiar to classical or written
Eng. but also exist in certain vernaculars that appear to be familiar or
allegedly ungrammatical. The vernacular seems particularly sophisticated on
this point, distinguishing “he be working” from “he working” —that is, between
having a regular job and being engaged in working at a particular moment,
standard usage being limited to “he is working” Pinker, Language Instinct.
Whether or not the notion of aspect is used, it seems clear that in Eng. there
is a particularly subtle distinction between the different degrees of
completion, of the iterativity or development of an action, that leads Oxonian
philosophers to pay more attention to these questions and even to surprising
inventions, such as that of ‘implicaturum,’ or ‘visum,’ or ‘disimplicaturum.’
The linguistic dissolution of the idea of substance Fictive entities Thus the verb + -ing
operation simply gives the verb the temporary status of a noun while at the
same time preserving some of its syntactic and semantic properties as a verb,
that is, by avoiding substantivization. It is no accident that the
substantiality of the I think asserted by Descartes was opposed by virtually
all the Eng. philosophers of the seventeenth century. If a personal identity
can be constituted by the making our distant perceptions influence each other,
and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, it does not require positing a substance: the
substantivization of making and giving meets the need. We can also consider the
way in which Russell Analysis of Matter, ch.27 makes his reader understand far
more easily than does Bachelard, and without having to resort to the category
of an epistemological obstacle, that one can perfectly well posit an atom as a
series of events without according it the status of a substance. crucial in
discussions of probability. The very definition of probability with which Bayes
operates in An Essay towards Solving a Problem, the first great treatise on
subjective probability, is based on this status of the happening, the event
conceived not in terms of its realization or accomplishment but in terms of its
expectation: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at
which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be
computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. The progressive: Tense and aspect If we now
pass from the gerund to the progressive, another construction that uses -ing, a
new kind of problem appears: that of the aspect and temporality of actions. An
interesting case of tr. difficulty is, e. g. , the one posed by Austin precisely
when he attempts, in his presentation of performatives, to distinguish between
the sentence and the act of saying it, between statement and utterance: there
are utterances, such as the uttering of the sentence is, or is part of, the
doing of an action How to Do Things. The tr. difficulty here is caused by the
combination in the construction in -ing of the syntactical flexibility of the
gerund and a progressive meaning. Does the -ing construction indicate the act,
or the progressiveness of the act? Similarly, it is hard to choose to translate
“On Referring” P. F. Strawson as De la référence rather than as De l’action de
référer. Should one translate On Denoting Russell as De la dénotation the usual
tr. or as Du dénoter? The progressive in the strict sense—be + verb + -ing—
indicates an action at a specific moment, when it has already begun but is not
yet finished. A little farther on, Austin allows us to gauge the ease of Eng.
in the whole of these operations. “To utter the sentence is not to describe my
doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing. The Fr. tr. gives, correctly: Énoncer la phrase, ce
n’est pas décrire ce qu’il faut bien reconnaître que je suis en train de faire
en parlant ainsi, but this remains unsatisfying at best, because of the
awkwardness of en train de. Moreover, in many cases, en train de is simply not
suitable insofar as the -ing does not indicate duration: e. g. , in At last I
am v.ing . It is interesting to examine from this point of view the famous
category of verbs of perception, verbum percipiendi. It is remarkable that
these verbs v., hear can be in some cases used with the construction be + verb
+ -ing, since it is generally said even in grammar books that they can be used
only in the present or simple past and not in the progressive. This rule
probably is thought to be connected with something like the immediacy of
perception, and it can be compared with the fact that the verbs to know and to
understand are also almost always in the present or the simple past, as if the
operations of the understanding could not be presented in the progressive form
and were by definition instantaneous; or as if, on the contrary, they
transcended the course of time. In reality, there are counterexamples. “I don’t
know if I’m understanding you correctly”; You are hearing voices; and often
Oxonian Phil. , which makes their tr. particularly indigestible, especially in
Fr. , where -ismes gives a very Scholastic feel to the classifications
translated. In addition to the famous term realism, which has been the object
of so many contradictory definitions and so many debates over past decades that
it has been almost emptied of meaning, we may mention some common but
particularly obscure for anyone not familiar with the theoretical context terms:
“cognitivism,” noncognitivism, coherentism, eliminativism, consequentialism,
connectionism, etSuch terms in which moral Phil. is particularly fertile are in general
transposed into Fr. without change in a
sort of new, international philosophical language that has almost forgone tr..
More generally, in Eng. as in G. , words can be composed by joining two other
words far more easily than in Fr. —without specifying the logical connections
between the terms: toothbrush, pickpocket, lowlife, knownothing; or, for more
philosophical terms: aspect-blind, language-dependent, rule-following,
meaning-holism, observer-relative, which are translatable, of course, but not
without considerable awkwardness.
Oxonian philosophese. Oxonian
Phil. seems to establish a language that
is stylistically neutral and appears to be transparently translatable. Certain
specific problems—the tr. of compound words and constructions that are more
flexible in Eng. and omnipresent in current philosophical discourse, such as
the thesis that la thèse selon laquelle, the question whether la question de
savoir si, and my saying that le fait que je dise que—make Fr. tr.s of contemporary Eng. philosophical texts
very awkward, even when the author writes in a neutral, commonplace style. Instead,
these difficulties, along with the ease of construction peculiar to English,
tend to encourage non-Oxonian analytical philosophers to write directly in
Gricese, following the example of many of their European colleagues, or else to
make use of a technical vernacular we have noted the -isms and compounds that
is frequently heavy going and not very inventive when transRomang terms which
are usually transliterated. This situation is certainly attributable to the
paradoxical character of Gricese, which established itself as a philosophical
language in the second half of the twentieth century: it is a language that is
apparently simple and accessible and that thus claims a kind of universality
but that is structured, both linguistically and philosophically, around major
stumbling blocks to do, -ing, etthat often make it untranslatable. It is
paradoxically this untranslatability, and not its pseudo-transparency, that
plays a crucial role in the process of universalization. . IThe Austinian
Paradigm: Ordinary Language and Phil.
The proximity of ordinary language and philosophical language, which is
rooted in classical English-language Phil. , was theorized in the twentieth
century by Austin and can be summed up in the expression “‘ordinary’-language
philosophy”. Ordinary language Phil. is
interested This sort of overall preeminence in Eng. of the verbal and the
subjective over the nominal and the objective is clear in the difference in the
logic that governs the discourse of affectivity in Fr. and in English. How would something that one
is correspond to something that one has, as in the case of fear in Fr. avoir peur? It follows that a Fr. man—who
takes it for granted that fear is something that one feels or senses—cannot
feel at home with the difference that Eng. naturally makes between something
that has no objective correlative because it concerns only feeling like fear;
and what is available to sensation, implying that what is felt through it has
the status of an object. Thus in Eng. something is immediately grasped that in
Fr. v.ms a strange paradox, viz. that
passion, as Bentham notes in Deontology, is a fictive entity. Thus what sounds
in Fr. like a nominalist provocation is implicated
in the folds of the Eng. language. A symbolic theory of affectivity is thus
more easily undertaken in Eng. than in Fr. , and if an ontological conception
of affectivity had to be formulated in English, symmetrical difficulties would
be encountered. Reversible derivations
Another particularity of English, which is not without consequences in Phil. ,
is that its poverty from the point of view of inflectional morphology is
compensated for by the freedom and facility it offers for the construction of
all sorts of derivatives. Nominal derivatives based on adjectives and using suffixes
such as -ity, -hood, -ness, -y. The resulting compounds are very difficult to
differentiate in Fr. and to translate in
general, which has led, in contemporary Fr.
tr.s, to various incoherent makeshifts. To list the most common
stumbling blocks: privacy privé-ité, innerness intériorité, not in the same
sense as interiority, vagueness caractère vague, goodness bonté, in the sense
of caractère bon, rightness justesse, “sameness,” similarité, in the sense of
mêmeté, ordinariness, “appropriateness,” caractère ordinaire, approprié,
unaccountability caractère de ce dont il est impossible de rendre compte.
Adjectival derivatives based on nouns, using numerous suffixes: -ful, -ous, -y,
-ic, -ish, -al e.g., meaningful, realistic, holistic, attitudinal, behavioral.
Verbal derivatives based on nouns or adjectives, with the suffixes -ize, -ify,
-ate naturalize, mentalize, falsify, and even without suffixes when possible
e.g., the title of an article “How Not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau,” i.e., how
not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau. d. Polycategorial derivatives based on verbs,
using suffixes such as -able, -er, -age, -ismrefutable, truthmaker. The
reversibility of these nominalizations and verbalizations has the essential
result of preventing the reification of qualities or acts. The latter is more
difficult to avoid in Fr. and G. , where
nominalization hardens and freezes notions compare intériorité and innerness,
which designates more a quality, or even, paradoxically, an effect, than an
entity or a domain. But this kind of ease in making compounds has its flip
side: the proliferation of -isms in liberties with the natural uses of the
language. The philosophers ask, e. g. , how they can know that there is a real
object there, but the question How do I know? can be asked in ordinary language
only in certain contexts, that is, where it is always possible, at least in
theory, to eliminate doubt. The doubt or question But is it a real one? has
always must have a special basis, there must be some reason for suggesting that
it isn’t real, in the sense of some specific way in which it is suggested that
this experience or item may be phoney. The wile of the metaphysician consists
in asking Is it a real table? a kind of object which has no obvious way of
being phoney and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that
I feel at a loss how to prove it is a real one. It is the use of the word real
in this manner that leads us on to the supposition that real has a single
meaning the real world, material objects, and that a highly profound and
puzzling one. Austin, Philosophical Papers This analysis of real is taken up
again in Sense and Sensibilia, where Austin criticizes the notion of a sense
datum and also a certain way of raising problems supposedly on the basis of
common opinion e. g. , the common opinion that we really perceive things—but in
reality on the basis of a pure construction. To state the case in this way,
Austin says, is simply to soften up the plain man’s alleged views for the
subsequent treatment; it is preparing the way for, by practically attributing
to him, the so-called philosophers’ view. Phil. ’s frequent recourse to the
ordinary is characterized by a certain condescension toward the common man. The
error or deception consists in arguing the philosopher’s position against the
ordinary position, because if the in what we should say when. It is, in other
words, a Phil. of language, but on the
condition that we never forget that we are looking not merely at words or
‘meanings,’ whatever they may be but also at the realities we use the words to
talk about, as Austin emphasizes A Plea for Excuses, in Philosophical Papers.
During the twentieth century or more precisely, between the 1940s and the s,
there was a division of the paradigms of the Phil. of language between the logical clarification
of ordinary language, on the one hand, and the immanent examination of ordinary
language, on the other. The question of ordinary language and the type of
treatment that it should be given—a normative clarification or an internal
examination—is present in and even constitutive of the legacy of logical
positivism. Wittgenstein’s work testifies to this through the movement that it
manifests and performs, from the first task of the Phil. of language the creation of an ideal or
formal language to clarify everyday language to the second the concern to
examine the multiplicity of ordinary language’s uses. The break thus
accomplished is such that one can only agree with Rorty’s statement in his
preface to The Linguistic Turn that the only difference between Ideal Language
Philosophers and Ordinary Language Philosophers is a disagreement about which
language is ideal. In the renunciation of the idea of an ideal language, or a
norm outside language, there is a radical change in perspective that consists
in abandoning the idea of something beyond language: an idea that is
omnipresent in the whole philosophical tradition, and even in current
analytical Phil. . Critique of language and Phil. More generally, Austin criticizes traditional
Phil. for its perverse use of ordinary
language. He constantly denounces Phil. ’s abuse of ordinary language—not so
much that it forgets it, but rather that it exploits it by taking 2 A defect in
the Eng. language? Between according to Bentham Eng. philosophers are not very
inclined toward etymology—no doubt because it is often less traceable than it
is in G. or even in Fr. and discourages a certain kind of commentary.
There are, however, certain exceptions, like Jeremy Bentham’s analysis of the
words “in,” “or,” “between,” “and,” etc., -- cf. Grice on “to” and “or” – “Does
it make sense to speak of the ‘sense’ of ‘to’?” -- through which Eng.
constructs the kinds of space that belong to a very specific topiLet us take
the case of between, which Fr. can
render only by the word entre. Both the semantics and the etymology of entre
imply the number three in Fr. , since what is entre intervenes as a third term
between two others which it separates or brings closer in Lat., in-ter; in Fr.,
en tiers; as a third. This is not the case in English, which constructs between
in accord with the number two in conformity with the etymology of this word, by
tween, in pairs, to the point that it can imagine an ordering, even when it
involves three or more classes, only in the binary mode: comon between three?
relation between three?—the hue of selfcontradictoriness presents itself on the
very face of the phrase. By one of the words in it, the number of objects is
asserted to be three: by another, it is asserted to be no more than two. To the
use thus exclusively made of the word between, what could have given rise, but
a sort of general, howsoever indistinct, perception, that it is only one to one
that objects can, in any continued manner, be commodiously and effectually
compared. The Eng. language labours under a defect, which, when it is compared
in this particular with other European langues, may perhaps be found peculiar
to it. By the derivation, and thence by the inexcludible import, of the word
between i.e., by twain, the number of the objects, to which this operation is
represented as capable of being applied, is confined to two. By the Roman
inter—by its Fr. derivation entre—no
such limitation v.ms to be expressed. Chrestomathia REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy.
ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith and W. H.
Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, To my mind, experience proves amply that we do come
to an agreement on what we should say when such and such a thing, though I
grant you it is often long and difficult. I should add that too often this is
what is missing in Phil. : a preliminary datum on which one might agree at the
outset. We do not claim in this way to discover all the truth that exists
regarding everything. We discover simply the facts that those who have been
using our language for centuries have taken the trouble to notice.
Performatif-Constatif Austinian agreement is possible for two reasons: Ordinary language cannot claim to have the
last word. Only remember, it is the first word Philosophical Papers. The
exploration of language is also an exploration of the inherited experience and
acumen of many generations of men ibid..
Ordinary language is a rich treasury of differences and embodies all the
distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found
worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations. These are certainly more
subtle and solid than any that you or I are likely to think up in our
arm-chairs of an afternoon ibid.. It is this ability to indicate differences
that makes language a common instrument adequate for speaking things in the
world. Who is we? Cavell’s question It is clear that analytical Phil. ,
especially as it has developed in the United States since the 1940s, has moved
away from the Austinian paradigm and has at the same time abandoned a certain
kind of philosophical writing and linguistic subtlety. But that only makes all
the more powerful and surprising the return to Austin advocated by Stanley
Cavell and the new sense of ordinary language Phil. that is emerging in his work and in
contemporary American Phil. . What right do we have to refer to our uses? And
who is this we so crucial for Austin that it constantly recurs in his work? All
we have, as we have said, is what we say and our linguistic agreements. We
determine the meaning of a given word by its uses, and for Austin, it is
nonsensical to ask the question of meaning for instance, in a general way or
looking for an entity; v. NONSENSE. The quest for agreement is founded on
something quite different from signification or the determination of the common
meaning. The agreement Austin is talking about has nothing to do with an
intersubjective consensus; it is not founded on a convention or on actual
agreements. It is an agreement that is as objective as possible and that bears
as much on language as on reality. But what is the precise nature of this
agreement? Where does it come from, and why should so much importance be
accorded to it? That is the question Cavell asks, first in Must We Mean What We
Say? and then in The Claim of Reason: what is it that allows Austin and Witters
to say what they say about what we say? A claim is certainly involved here.
That is what Witters means by our agreement in judgments, and in language it is
based only on itself, on the latter exists, it is not on the same level. The
philosopher introduces into the opinion of the common man particular entities,
in order then to reject, amend, or explain it. The method of ordinary language:
Be your size. Small Men. Austin’s immanent method comes down to examining our
ordinary use of ordinary words that have been confiscated by Phil. , such as
‘true’ and ‘real,’ in order to raise the question of truth: Fact that is a
phrase designed for use in situations where the distinction between a true
statement and the state of affairs about which it is a truth is neglected; as
it often is with advantage in ordinary life, though seldom in Phil. . So
speaking about the fact that is a compendious way of speaking about a situation
involving both words and world. Philosophical Papers We can, of course,
maintain along with a whole trend in analytical Phil. from Frege to Quine that these are
considerations too small and too trivial from which to draw any conclusions at
all. But it is this notion of fact that Austin relies on to determine the
nature of truth and thus to indicate the pertinence of ordinary language as a
relationship to the world. This is the nature of Austin’s approach: the foot of
the letter is the foot of the ladder ibid.. For Austin, ordinary words are part
of the world: we use words, and what makes words useful objects is their
complexity, their refinement as tools ibid.: We use words to inform ourselves
about the things we talk about when we use these words. Or, if that v.ms too
naïve: we use words as a way of better understanding the situation in which we
find ourselves led to make use of words. What makes this claim possible is the
proximity of dimension, of size, between words and ordinary objects. Thus
philosophers should, instead of asking whether truth is a substance, a quality,
or a relation, take something more nearly their own size to strain at ibid..
The Fr. translators render size by
mesure, which v.ms excessively theoretical; the reference is to size in the material,
ordinary sense. One cannot know everything, so why not try something else?
Advantages of slowness and cooperation. Be your size. Small Men. Conversation
cited by Urmson in A Symposium Austin emphasizes that this technique of
examining words which he ended up calling linguistic phenomenology (and Grice
linguistic botany) is not new and that it has existed since Socrates, producing
its slow successes. But Grice is the first to make a systematic application of
such a method, which is based, on the one hand, on the manageability and familiarity
of the objects concerned and, on the other hand, on the common agreement at
which it arrives in each of its stages. The problem is how to agree on a
starting point, that is, on a given. This given or datum, for Grice, is
Gricese, not as a corpus consisting of utterances or words, but as the site of
agreement about what we should say when. Austin regards language as an
empirical datum or experimental dat -- Bayes, T. . An Essay towards Solving a
Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard Price’s Foreword and
Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. : Hafner, . First published
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published in 195 . Philosophical Investigations. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 195 we,
as Cavell says in a passage that illustrates many of the difficulties of tr. we
have discussed up to this point: We learn and teach words in certain contexts,
and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into
further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place in
particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules,
just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same
projections. That we do, on the whole, is a matter of our sharing routes of
interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and ‑of significance
and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else,
what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an
appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Witterscalls forms of
life. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more,
but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is and because it
is terrifying. Must We Mean What We Say?
The fact that our ordinary language is based only on itself is not only a
reason for concern regarding the validity of what we do and say, but also the
revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not always want to recognize:
the fact that I am the only possible source of such a validity. That is a new
understanding of the fact that language is our form of life, precisely its
ordinary form. Cavell’s originality lies in his reinvention of the nature of
ordinary language in American thought and in the connection he
establishes—notably through his reference to Emerson and Thoreau, American
thinkers of the ordinary—between this nature of language and human nature,
finitude. It is also in this sense that the question of linguistic agreements
reformulates that of the ordinary human condition and that the acceptance of
the latter goes hand in hand with the recognition of the former. In Cavell’s
Americanization of ordinary language Phil.
there thus emerges a radical form of the return to the ordinary. But
isn’t this ordinary, e. g. , that of Emerson in his Essays, precisely the one
that the whole of Eng. Phil. has been
trying to find, or rather to feel or taste, since its origins? Thus we can
compare the writing of Emerson or James, in texts like Experience or Essays in
Radical Empiricism, with that of the British empiricists when they discuss
experience, the given, and the sensible. This is no doubt one of the principal
dimensions of philosophical writing in English: always to make the meaning more
available to the senses. J.-Pierre Cléro Sandra Laugier REFS.: Austin, J. L.
How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Performatif-Constatif. In
La philosophie analytique, ed. by J.
Wahl and L. Beck. : Editions du Minuit, . Tr. in Performative-Constative. In
Phil. and Ordinary Language, ed. by E. Caton. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, . . Philosophical Papers. Ed. by
J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Sense and
SensibiliOxford: Clarendon, . Ayer, J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge.
London: Macmillan, 1940. ENTREPRENEUR 265 form the basis of the kingdom by
means of calculated plans; to the legal domain: someone who contravenes the
hierarchical order of the professions and subverts their rules; finally, to the
economic domain: someone who agrees, on the basis of a prior contract an
established price to execute a project collection of taxes, supply of an army,
a merchant expedition, construction, production, transaction, assuming the
hazards related to exchange and time. This last usage corresponds to practices
that became more and more socially prominent starting in the sixteenth century.
Let us focus on the term in economics. The engagement of the entrepreneur in
his project may be understood in various ways, and the noun entrepreneur
translated in various ways into English: by contractor if the stress is placed
on the engagement with regard to the client to execute the task according to
conditions negotiated in advance a certain time, a fixed price, firm price,
tenant farming; by undertaker now rare in this sense when we focus on the
engagement in the activity, taking charge of the project, its practical
realization, the setting in motion of the transaction; and by adventurer,
enterpriser, and projector, to emphasize the risks related to speculation. At
the end of the eighteenth century, the Fr.
word entreprise acquired the new meaning of an industrial establishment.
Entrepreneur accordingly acquired the sense of the head or direction of a
business of production superintendent, employer, manager. In France, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, the noun entrepreneur had strong political
connotations, in particular in the abundant pamphlets containing mazarinades
denouncing the entrepreneurs of tax farming. The economist Pierre de
Boisguilbert wrote the Factum de la France, the largest trial ever conducted by
pen against the big financiers, entrepreneurs of the wealth of the kingdom, who
take advantage of its good administration its political economy in the name of
the entrepreneurs of commerce and industry, who contribute to the increase in
its wealth. Boisguilbert failed in his project of reforming the tax farm, or
tax business, and it was left to a clever financier, Richard Cantillon, to
create the economic concept of the entrepreneur. Chance in Business: Risk and
Uncertainty There is no trace of Boisguilbert’s moral indignation in
Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en générale Essay on the nature of
commerce in general. Having shown that all the classes and all the men of a
State live or acquire wealth at the expense of the owners of the land bk. 1,
ch.12, he suggests that the circulation and barter of goods and merchandise,
like their production, are conducted in Europe by entrepreneurs and haphazardly
bk. 1, of ch.1 He then describes in detail what composes the uncertain aspect
of the action of an entrepreneur, in which he acts according to his ideas and
without being able to predict, in which he conceives and executes his plans
surrounded by the hazard of events. The uncertainty related to business profits
turns especially on the fact that it is dependent on the forms of consumption
of the owners, the only members of society who are independent—naturally
independent, Cantillon specified. Entrepreneurs are those who are capable of
breaking ÉNONCÉ Énoncé, from the Roman enuntiare to express, divulge; from ex
out and nuntiare to make known; a nuntius is a messenger, a nuncio, ranges over
the same type of entity as do proposition and phrase: it is a basic unit of
syntax, the relevant question being whether or not it is the bearer of truth
values. An examination of the differences among these entities, and the
networks they constitute in different languages especially in English:
sentence, statement, utterance, appears under PROPOSITION. V. also DICTUM and
LOGOS, both of which may be acceptably Tr.
énoncé. Cf. PRINCIPLE, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH, WORD especially WORD,
Box The essential feature of an énoncé
is that it is considered to be a singular occurrence and thus is paired with
its énonciation: v. SPEECH ACT; cf. ENGLISH, LANGUAGE, SENSE, SIGN,
SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, WITTICISM. v.
DISCOURSE ENTREPRENEUR FR. ENG.
adventurer, contractor, employer, enterpriser, entrepreneur, manager,
projector, undertaker, superintendent v.
ACT, AGENCY, BERUF, ECONOMY, LIBERAL, OIKONOMIA, PRAXIS, UTILITY. Refs.:
G. J. Warnock, “English philosophy,” H. P. Grice, “Gricese,” BANC.
Grice’s handwave. A sort of handwave can mean in a one-off act of
communication something. It’s the example he uses. By a sort of handwave, the
emissor communicates either that he knows the route or that he is about to
leave the addressee. Handwave signals. Code. Cfr. the Beatles’s HELP.
Explicatum: We need some body – Implicaturum: Not just Any Body. Why does this
matter to the philosopher? The thing is as follows. Grice was provoked by
Austin. To defeat Austin, Grice needs a ‘theory of communication.’ This theory
applies his early reflections on the intentional side to an act of
communication. This allows him to explain the explicatum versus the implicaturum.
By analysing each, Grice notes that there is no need to refer to linguistic
entities. So, the centrality of the handwave is an offshoot of his theory
designed to defeat Austin. Gice: “Blame Paget for my obsession with the hand.”
– Refs.: Paget, “Ta-ta: when the hands are full, use your mouth.” – H. P.
Grice, The utterer’s hand-wave.”
Grice’s
creatures: the pirots. The programme he
calls ‘creature construction.’ “I could have used the ‘grice,’ which was
extinct by the time I was born.”
Grice’s myth. Or Griceian myths – The Handbook of Griceian mythology. At
one point Grice suggests that his ‘genitorial programme’ a kind of ideal-observer
theory is meant as ‘didactic,’ and for expository purposes. It seems easier, as
, as Grice and Plato would agree, to answer a question
about the genitorial programme rather than use a first-person approach and
appeal to introspection. Grice refers to the social
contract as a ‘myth,’ which may still explain, as ‘meaning’ does. G. R. Grice
built his career on this myth. This is G. R. Grice, of the social-contract
fame. Cf. Strawson and Wiggins comparing Grice’s myth with Plato’s, and they
know what they are talking about.
Grice’s predicament. S draws a pic- "one-off predicament"). ...
Clarendon, 1976); and Simon
Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) ... But
there is an obvious way of emending the account. Grice points out. ... Blackburn helpfully
suggests that we can cut through much of this complexity by ... The above
account is intended to capture the notion of one-off meaning. Walking in a
forest, having gone some way ahead of the rest of the party, I draw an arrow at
a fork of a path, meaning that those who are following me should go straight
on. Gricean considerations
may be safely ignored. Only when trying to communicate by nonconventional means
("one-off predicament," Blackburn,
1984, chap. Blackburn's mission
is to promote the philosophy of language as a pivotal enquiry ... and
dismissed; the Gricean model
might be suitable to explain one-off acts. The Gricean mechanism
with its complex communicative intentions has a clear point in what Blackburn calls
“a one-off predicament”
- a situation in which an ...
Grice’s shaggy-dog story: While Grice would like to say that it should be in the
range of a rational creature to refer and to predicate, what about the hand
wave? By his handwave, the emissor means that _HE_ (subject) is a knower of the
road (or roate), the predicate after the copula or that he, the emissor,
subject, is (the copula) about to leave his emissee – but there is nothing IN
THE MATTER (the handwave) that can be ‘de-composed’ like that. The FORM
attaches to the communicatum directly. This is strange, but not impossible, and
shows Grice’s programme. Because his idea is that a communicatum need not a
vehicile which is syntactically structured (as “Fido is shaggy”). This is the
story that Grice tells in his lecture. He uses a ‘shaggy-dog’ story to explain
TWO main notions: that of ‘reference’ or denotatio, and that of predicatio. He
had explored that earlier when discussing, giving an illustration “Smith is
happy”, the idea of ‘value,’ as correspondence, where he adds the terms for
‘denote’ and ‘predicatio,’ or actually, ‘designatio’ and ‘indicatio’, need to
be “explained within the theory.” In the utterance ‘Smith is happy,’ the
utterer DESIGNATES an item, Smith. The utterer also INDICATES some class,
‘being happy.’ Grice introduces a shorthand, ‘assign’, or ‘assignatio,’
previous to the value-satisfaction, to involve both the ‘designatio’ and the
‘indicatio’. U assigns the item Smith to the class ‘being happy.’ U’s intention
involves A’s belief that U believes that “the item belongs to the class, or
that he ASSIGNS the item to the class. A predicate, such as
'shaggy,' in my shaggy-dog story, is a part of a bottom-up, or top-bottom, as I
prefer, analysis of this or that sentences, and a predicate, such as 'shaggy,'
is the only indispensable 'part,' or 'element,' as I prefer, since a
predicate is the only 'pars orationis,' to use the old phrase, that must
appear in every sentence. In a later lecture he ventures with ‘reference.’ Lewis
and Short have “rĕferre,” rendered as “to bear, carry, bring, draw, or give
back,” in a “transf.” usage, they render as “to make a reference, to refer
(class.),” asa in “de rebus et obscuris et incertis ad Apollinem censeo
referendum; “ad quem etiam Athenienses publice de majoribus rebus semper
rettulerunt,” Cic. Div. 1, 54, 122.” While Grice uses ‘Fido,’ he could have
used ‘Pegasus’ (Martin’s cat, as it happens) and apply Quine’s adage: we could
have appealed to the ex hypothesi unanalyzable, irreducible attribute of being
Pegasus, adopting, for its expression, the verb 'is-Pegasus', or 'pegasizes'.
And Grice could have played with ‘predicatio’ and ‘subjectio.’ Grice on
subject. Lewis and Short have “sūbĭcĭo,” (less correctly subjĭcĭo ;
post-Aug. sometimes sŭb- ), jēci, jectum, 3, v. a. sub-jacio. which they render as “to throw, lay, place,
or bring under or near (cf. subdo),” and in philosophy, “subjectum , i, n. (sc.
verbum), as “that which is spoken of, the foundation or subject of a
proposition;” “omne quicquid dicimus aut
subjectum est aut de subjecto aut in subjecto est. Subjectum est prima
substantia, quod ipsum nulli accidit alii inseparabiliter, etc.,” Mart. Cap. 4,
§ 361; App. Dogm. Plat. 3, p. 34, 4 et saep.—.” Note that for Mart. Cap. the
‘subject,’ unlike the ‘predicate’ is not a ‘syntactical category.’ “Subjectum
est prima substantia,” The subject is a prote ousia. As for correlation, Grice
ends up with a reductive analysis. By uttering utterance-token V, the
utterer U correlates predicate P1 with (and only with) each member of
P2 ≡ (∃R)(∃R') (1) U effects that (∀x)(R P1x ≡
x ∈ P1) and (2) U
intends (1), and (3) U intends that (∀y)(R'
P1y ≡ y ∈
P1), where R' P1 is an expression-type such that utterance-token V is a
sequence consisting of an expression-token p1 of expression-type P1 and an
expression-token p2 of expression-type P2, the R-co-relatum of which is a
set of which y is a member. And he is back with ‘denotare. Lewis and Short have
“dēnŏtare,” which they render as “to mark, set a mark on, with chalk, color,
etc.: “pedes venalium creta,”
It is interesting to trace Grice’s earliest investigations on this. Grice and
Strawson stage a number of joint seminars on topics related to the notions of
meaning, categories, and logical form. Grice and Strawson engage in systematic
and unsystematic philosophical exploration. From these discussions springs work
on predication and categories, one or two reflections of which are acknowledge
at two places (re: the reductive analysis of a ‘particular,’ “the tallest man
that did, does, or will exist” --) in Strawson’s “Particular and general” for
The Aristotelian Society – and “visible” as Grice puts it, but not
acknowledged, in Strawson’s “Individuals: an essay in descriptive
metaphysics.””
Grice’s theory-theory: “I am perhaps not too happy with the word ‘theory,’ as
applied to this, but that’s Ramsey for you” (WoW: 285). Grice’s theory-theory: A theory of mind concerning how we come to know
about the propositional attitudes of others. It tries to explain the nature of
ascribing certain thoughts, beliefs, or intentions to other persons in order to
explain their actions. The theory-theory holds that in ascribing beliefs to
others we are tacitly applying a theory that enables us to make inferences
about the beliefs behind the actions of others. The theory that is applied is a
set of rules embedded in folk psychology. Hence, to anticipate and predict the
behavior of others, one engages in an intellectual process moving by inference from one set of beliefs
to another. This position contrasts with another theory of mind, the simulation
theory, which holds that we need to make use of our own motivational and
emotional resources and capacities for practical reasoning in explaining
actions of others. “So called ‘theory-theorists’ maintain that the ability to
explain and predict behaviour is underpinned by a folk-psychological theory of
the structure and functioning of the mind – where the theory in question may be
innate and modularised, learned individually, or acquired through a process of
enculturation.” Carruthers and Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind. Grice
needs a theory. For those into implicatura and conversation as rational
cooperation, when introducing the implicaturum he mentions ‘pre-theoretical
adequacy’ of the model. So he is thinking of the conversational theory as a
theory in the strict sense, with ‘explanatory’ and not merely taxonomical
power. So one task is to examine in which way the conversational theory is a
theory that explains, rather than merely ad hoc ex post facto commentary. Not so much for his approach to mean. He
polemises with Rountree, of Somerville, that you dont need a thory to analyse mean.
Indeed, you cannot have a theory to analyse mean, because mean is a matter of
intuition, not a theoretical concept. But Grice appeals to theory, when dealing
with willing. He knows what willing means because he relies on a concept of
folk-science. In this folk-science, willing is a theoretical concept. Grice
arrived at this conclusion by avoiding the adjective souly, and seeing that
there is no word to describe willing other than by saying it is a psychoLOGICAL
concept, i.e. part of a law within that theory of folk-science. That law will include,
by way of ramsified naming or describing willing as a predicate-constant. Now,
this is related to metaphysics. His liberal or ecunmenical metaphysics is best
developed in terms of his ontological marxism presented just after he has
expanded on this idea of willing as a theoretical concept, within a law
involving willing (say, Grices Optimism-cum-Pesimism law), within the
folk-science of psychology that explains his behaviour. For Aristotle, a
theoria, was quite a different animal, but it had to do with contemplatio,
hence the theoretical (vita contemplativa) versus the practical (vita activa).
Grices sticking to Aristotle’srare use of theory inspires him to develop his
fascinating theory of the theory-theory.
Grice realised that there is no way to refer to things like intending
except with psychological, which he takes to mean, belonging to a pscyhological
theory. Grice was keen to theorise on theorising. He thought that
Aristotle’s first philosophy (prote philosophia) is best rendered as Theory-theory.
Grice kept using Oxonian English spelling, theorising, except when he did
not! Grice calls himself folksy: his theories, even if Subjects to various
types of Ramseyfication, are popular in kind! And ceteris
paribus! Metaphysical construction is disciplined and the best theorising
the philosopher can hope for! The way Grice conceives of his theory-theory
is interesting to revisit. A route by which Grice hopes to show the centrality
of metaphysics (as prote philosophia) involves taking seriously a few ideas. If
any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise,
its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the
possibly different types of theory. A characterisation of the nature and
range of a possible kind of theory θ is needed. Such a body of
characterisation must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and
so must itself exemplify whatever requirement it lays down for any
theory θ in general. The characterisation must itself be
expressible as a theory θ, to be called, if you like, Grice
politely puts it, theory-theory, or meta-theory, θ2. Now, the
specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed
by any theory θ, whether such account falls within the bounds of
Theory-theory, θ2 would be properly called prote philosophia (first
philosophy) and may turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as
belonging to the Subjects matter of metaphysics. It might, for example,
turn out to be establishable that any theory θ has to relate to a
certain range of this or that Subjects item, has to attribute to each item this
or that predicate or attribute, which in turn has to fall within one or another
of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead
to recognised metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of
application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of
categories. Met. , philosophical eschatology, and Platos Republic,
Thrasymachus, social justice, Socrates, along with notes on Zeno, and topics
for pursuit, repr.in Part II, Explorations in semantics and metaphysics
to WOW , metaphysics, philosophical eschatology, Platos Republic, Socrates,
Thrasymachus, justice, moral right, legal right, Athenian dialectic.
Philosophical eschatology is a sub-discipline of metaphysics concerned with
what Grice calls a category shift. Grice, having applied such a technique to
Aristotle’s aporia on philos (friend) as alter ego, uses it now to tackle
Socratess view, against Thrasymachus, that right applies primarily to morality,
and secondarily to legality. Grice has a specific reason to include this in his
WOW Grices exegesis of Plato on justice displays Grices take on the fact that
metaphysics needs to be subdivided into ontology proper and what he calls
philosophical eschatology, for the study of things like category shift and
other construction routines. The exploration of Platos Politeia thus becomes an
application of Grices philosophically eschatological approach to the item just,
as used by Socrates (morally just) and Thrasymachus (legally just). Grice has
one specific essay on Aristotle in PPQ. So he thought Plato merited his own
essay, too! Grices focus is on Plato’s exploration of dike. Grice is concerned
with a neo-Socratic (versus neo-Thrasymachean) account of moral justice as
conceptually (or axiologically) prior to legal justice. In the proceeding, he
creates philosophical eschatology as the other branch to metaphysics, along
with good ol ontology. To say that just crosses a categorial barrier (from
the moral to the legal) is to make a metaphysical, strictly eschatological,
pronouncement. The Grice Papers locate the Plato essay in s. II, the Socrates essay in s. III, and the Thrasymachus essay, under social
justice, in s. V. Grice is well aware that in his account of fairness, Rawls
makes use of his ideas on personal identity. The philosophical elucidation of
fairness is of great concern for Grice. He had been in touch with such
explorations as Nozicks and Nagels along anti-Rawlsian lines. Grices ideas on
rationality guide his exploration of social justice. Grice keeps revising the
Socrates notes. The Plato essay he actually dates. As it happens, Grices most
extensive published account of Socrates is in this commentary on Platos
Republic: an eschatological commentary, as he puts it. In an entertaining
fashion, Grice has Socrates, and neo-Socrates, exploring the logic and grammar
of just against the attack by Thrasymachus and neo-Thrasymachus. Grices point
is that, while the legal just may be conceptually prior to the moral just, the
moral just is evaluationally or axiologically prior. Refs.: There is a specific
essay on ‘theorising’ in the Grice Papers, but there are scattered sources
elsewhere, such as “Method” (repr. in “Conception”), BANC.
Grice’s
three-year-old’s guide to Russell’s theory of types, with an advice to parents
by Strawson: Grice put
forward the empirical hypothesis that a three-year old CAN understand Russell’s
theory of types. “In more than one way.” This brought confusion in the
household, with some members saying they could not – “And I trust few of your
tutees do!” Russell’s influential solution to the problem of logical paradoxes.
The theory was developed in particular to overcome Russell’s paradox, which
seemed to destroy the possibility of Frege’s logicist program of deriving
mathematics from logic. Suppose we ask whether the set of all sets which are
not members of themselves is a member of itself. If it is, then it is not, but
if it is not, then it is. The theory of types suggests classifying objects,
properties, relations, and sets into a hierarchy of types. For example, a class
of type 0 has members that are ordinary objects; type 1 has members that are
properties of objects of type 0; type 2 has members that are properties of the
properties in type 1; and so on. What can be true or false of items of one type
can not significantly be said about those of another type and is simply
nonsense. If we observe the prohibitions against classes containing members of
different types, Russell’s paradox and similar paradoxes can be avoided. The
theory of types has two variants. The simple theory of types classifies
different objects and properties, while the ramified theory of types further
sorts types into levels and adds a hierarchy of levels to that of types. By
restricting predicates to those that relate to items of lower types or lower
levels within their own type, predicates giving rise to paradox are excluded.
The simple theory of types is sufficient for solving logical paradoxes, while
the ramified theory of type is introduced to solve semantic paradoxes, that is,
paradoxes depending on notions such as reference and truth. “Any expression
containing an apparent variable is of higher type than that variable. This is
the fundamental principles of the doctrines of types.” Russell, Logic and
Knowledge. Grice’s commentary in “In defense
of a dogma,” The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
villa grice: -- Kept by Luigi Speranza -- Grice kept a nice garden in
his cottage on Banbury Road, not far from St. John’s. It was more of a villa
than his town house at Harborne. While Grice loved Academia, he also loved
non-Academia. He would socialize at the Flag and Lamb, at the Bird and Baby,
and the cricket club, at the bridge club, etc. In this way, he goes back to Plato’s
idea of an ‘academy,’ established
by Plato at his villa outside Athens near the public park and gymnasium known
by that name. Although it may not have maintained a continuous tradition, the
many and varied philosophers of the Academy all considered themselves Plato’s
successors, and all of them celebrated and studied his work. The school
survived in some form until A.D. 529, when it was dissolved, along with the
other pagan schools, by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. The history of
the Academy is divided by some authorities into that of the Old Academy Plato,
Speusippus, Xenocrates, and their followers and the New Academy the Skeptical
Academy of the third and second centuries B.C.. Others speak of five phases in
its history: Old as before, Middle Arcesilaus, New Carneades, Fourth Philo of
Larisa, and Fifth Antiochus of Ascalon. For most of its history the Academy was
devoted to elucidating doctrines associated with Plato that were not entirely
explicit in the dialogues. These “unwritten doctrines” were apparently passed
down to his immediate successors and are known to us mainly through the work of
Aristotle: there are two opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite
Dyad Great and Small; these generate Forms or Ideas which may be identified
with numbers, from which in turn come intermediate mathematicals and, at the
lowest level, perceptible things Aristotle, Metaphysics I.6. After Plato’s
death, the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus, who led the school until
his death. Although his written works have perished, his views on certain main
points, along with some quotations, were recorded by surviving authors. Under
the influence of late Pythagoreans, Speusippus anticipated Plotinus by holding
that the One transcends being, goodness, and even Intellect, and that the Dyad
which he identifies with matter is the cause of all beings. To explain the
gradations of beings, he posited gradations of matter, and this gave rise to
Aristotle’s charge that Speusippus saw the universe as a series of disjointed
episodes. Speusippus abandoned the theory of Forms as ideal numbers, and gave
heavier emphasis than other Platonists to the mathematicals. Xenocrates who
once went with Plato to Sicily, succeeded Speusippus and led the Academy till
his own death. Although he was a prolific author, Xenocrates’ works have not
survived, and he is known only through the work of other authors. He was
induced by Aristotle’s objections to reject Speusippus’s views on some points,
and he developed theories that were a major influence on Middle Platonism, as
well as on Stoicism. In Xenocrates’ theory the One is Intellect, and the Forms
are ideas in the mind of this divine principle; the One is not transcendent,
but it resides in an intellectual space above the heavens. While the One is
good, the Dyad is evil, and the sublunary world is identified with Hades.
Having taken Forms to be mathematical entities, he had no use for intermediate
mathematicals. Forms he defined further as paradigmatic causes of regular
natural phenomena, and soul as self-moving number. Polemon led the Academy, and
was chiefly known for his fine character, which set an example of self-control
for his students. The Stoics probably derived their concept of oikeiosis an
accommodation to nature from his teaching. After Polemon’s death, his colleague
Crates led the Academy until the accession of Arcesilaus. The New Academy arose
when Arcesilaus became the leader of the school and turned the dialectical
tradition of Plato to the Skeptical aim of suspending belief. The debate
between the New Academy and Stoicism dominated philosophical discussion for the
next century and a half. On the Academic side the most prominent spokesman was
Carneades. In the early years of the first century B.C., Philo of Larisa
attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy. His pupil, the former
Skeptic Antiochus of Ascalon, was enraged by this and broke away to refound the
Old Academy. This was the beginning of Middle Platonism. Antiochus’s school was
eclectic in combining elements of Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelian
philosophy, and is known to us mainly through Cicero’s Academica. Middle
Platonism revived the main themes of Speusippus and Xenocrates, but often used
Stoic or neo-Pythagorean concepts to explain them. The influence of the Stoic
Posidonius was strongly felt on the Academy in this period, and Platonism
flourished at centers other than the Academy in Athens, most notably in
Alexandria, with Eudorus and Philo of Alexandria. After the death of Philo, the
center of interest returned to Athens, where Plutarch of Chaeronia studied with
Ammonius at the Academy, although Plutarch spent most of his career at his home
in nearby Boeotia. His many philosophical treatises, which are rich sources for
the history of philosophy, are gathered under the title Moralia; his interest
in ethics and moral education led him to write the Parallel Lives paired
biographies of famous Romans and Athenians, for which he is best known. After
this period, the Academy ceased to be the name for a species of Platonic
philosophy, although the school remained a center for Platonism, and was
especially prominent under the leadership of the Neoplatonist Proclus.
griceism. Gricese. At Oxford, it was usual to refer to Austin’s
idiolect as Austinese. In analogy with Grecism, we have a Gricism, a Griceian
cliché. Cf. a ‘grice’ and ‘griceful’ in ‘philosopher’s lexicon.’ Gricese is a
Latinism, from -ese, word-forming element, from Old French -eis (Modern French -ois, -ais), from Vulgar Latin, from Latin -ensem, -ensis "belonging
to" or "originating in."
grecianism: why was Grice obsessed with Socrates’s convesations? He
does not say. But he implicates it. For the Athenian dialecticians, it is all a
matter of ta legomena. Ditto for the Oxonian dialecticians. Ta legomena becomes
ordinary language. And the task of the philosopher is to provide reductive
analysis of this or that concept in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions. Cf. Hospers. Grices review of the history of philosophy (Philosophy
is but footnotes to Zeno.). Grice enjoyed Zenos answer, What is a friend? Alter
ego, Allego. ("Only it was the other Zeno." Grice tried to apply the
Socratic method during his tutorials. "Nothing like a heartfelt dedication
to the Socratic art of mid-wifery, seeking to bring forth error and to strangle
it at birth.” μαιεύομαι (A.“μαῖα”), ‘to serve as a midwife, act a; “ἡ
Ἄρτεμις μ.” Luc. D Deor.26.2. 2. cause delivery to take place, “ἱκανὴ ἔκπληξις
μαιεύσασθαι πρὸ τῆς ὥρας” Philostr. VA1.5. 3. c. acc., bring to the birth, Marin.Procl.6;
ὄρνιθας μ. hatch chickens, Anon. ap. Suid.; αἰετὸν κάνθαρος μαιεύσομαι, prov.
of taking vengeance on a powerful enemy, Ar. Lys.695 (cf. Sch.). 4. deliver a
woman, esp. metaph. in Pl. of the Socratic method, Tht. 149b. II. Act., Poll.
4.208, Sch. OH.4.506. Pass., τὰ ὑπ᾽ ἐμοῦ μαιευθέντα brought into the world by
me, Pl. Tht. 150e, cf. Philostr.VA5.13. Refs.: the obvious references are
Grice’s allusions to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
grosseteste: Grice was a member
of the Grosseteste Society. Like Grice’s friend, G. J. Warnock, Grosseteste was
chancellor of Oxford. Only that by the time of Warnock, the monarch is the
chancellor by default, so “Warnock had to allow to be called ‘vice-chancelor’
to Elizabeth II.” “I would never have read Aristotle had it not been by this
great head that grosseteste (“Greathead” is a common surname in Suffolk).” – H.
P. Grice. English philosopher who began life on the bottom rung of feudal
society in Suffolk and became one of the most influential figures in
pre-Reformation England. He studied at Oxford, obtaining an “M. A.,” like Grice.
Sometime after this period he joined the household of William de Vere, of
Hereford. Grosseteste associated with the elite at Hereford, several of whose
members were part of an advanced philosophical tradition. It was a centre for
the study of liberal arts. This explains his interest in dialectics. After a
sojourn in Paris, he becomes the first chancellor of Oxford. He was a secular
lecturer in theology to the recently established Franciscan order at Oxford. It
was during his tenure with the Franciscans that he studied Grecian an unusual endeavour for an Oxonian schoolman
then. He later moved to Lincoln. As a
scholar, Grosseteste is an original thinker who used Aristotelian and
Augustinian theses as points of departure. Grosseteste (or “Greathead,” as he
was called by the town – if not the gown) believes, with Aristotle, that sense
is the basis of all knowledge, and that the basis for sense is our discovery of
the cause of what is experienced or revealed by experiment. He also believes,
with Augustine, that light plays an important role in creation. Thus he
maintained that God produced the world by first creating prime matter (“materia
prima”) from which issued a point of light lux, the first corporeal form or
power, one of whose manifestations is visible light. The diffusion of this
light resulted in extension or tri-dimensionality in the form of the nine
concentric celestial spheres and the four terrestrial spheres of fire, air,
water, and earth. According to Grosseteste, the diffusion of light takes place
in accordance with laws of mathematical proportionality geometry. Everything,
therefore, is a manifestation of light, and mathematics is consequently
indispensable to science and knowledge generally. The principles Grosseteste
employs to support his views are presented in, e.g., his commentary on
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, the De luce, and the De lineis, angulis et
figuris. He worked in areas as seemingly disparate as optics and angelology.
Grosseteste is one of the first to take an interest in and introduce into the
Oxford curriculum newly recovered Aristotelian texts, along with commentaries
on them. His work and interest in natural philosophy, mathematics, the Bible,
and languages profoundly influenced Roger Bacon, and the educational goals of
the Franciscan order. It also helped to stimulate work in these areas.
groot -- grotius, h., de
groot, philosopher, a founder of modern views of international law and a major
theorist of natural law. A lawyer and Latinist, Grotius developed a new view of
the law of nature in order to combat moral skepticism and to show how there
could be rational settlement of moral disputes despite religious disagreements.
He argued in The Law of War and Peace 1625 that humans are naturally both
competitive and sociable. The laws of nature show us how we can live together
despite our propensity to conflict. They can be derived from observation of our
nature and situation. These laws reflect the fact that each individual
possesses rights, which delimit the social space within which we are free to
pursue our own goals. Legitimate government arises when we give up some rights
in order to save or improve our lives. The obligations that the laws of nature
impose would bind us, Grotius notoriously said, even if God did not exist; but
he held that God does enforce the laws. They set the limits on the laws that
governments may legitimately impose. The laws of nature reflect our possession
of both precise perfect rights of justice, which can be protected by force, and
imperfect rights, which are not enforceable, nor even statable very precisely.
Grotius’s views on our combative but sociable nature, on the function of the
law of nature, and on perfect and imperfect rights were of central importance
in later discussions of morality and law.
Grice’s
grue and grellow, -- and bleen: H. P. Grice was fascinated by Goodman’s
‘grue’ paradox and kept looking for the crucial implicaturum. “The paradox is
believed to be mainly as arising within the theory of induction, but I’ve seen
Strawson struggling with gruesome consequences in his theory of deduction,
too.” According to Nelson Goodman, “a philosopher from the New World,” every
intuitively acceptable inductive argument, call it A, may be mimicked by
indefinitely many other inductive arguments
each seemingly quite analogous to A and therefore seemingly as
acceptable, yet each nonetheless intuitively *unacceptable*, and each yielding
a conclusion contradictory to that of A, given the assumption that sufficiently
many and varied of the sort of things induced upon exist as yet unexamined
which is the only circumstance in which A is of interest. “Goodman then asks us
to suppose an intuitively acceptable inductive argument.”A1 every hitherto
observed EMERALD is GREEN; therefore, every emerald is green. Now introduce the
totally unnatural colour predicate ‘grue’ – a portmanteau of blue and green –
as in Welsh ‘glas’ -- where for some given, as yet wholly future, temporal
interval T an object is ‘grue’ provided it has the property of being green and
first examined before T OR blue and NOT
first examined before T. Then consider the following inductive argument: A2 every
hitherto observed EMERALD is GRUE; therefore, every emerald is grue. The
premise is true, and A2 is formally analogous to A1. But A2 is intuitively
unacceptable. If there is an emerald UNexamined before T, he conclusion of A2
says that this emerald is blue, whereas the conclusion of A1 says that every
emerald is green! Granted, other counter-intuitive competing arguments could be
given, e.g.: A3. Every hitherto observed emerald is grellow; therefore, every
emeralds is grellow. where an object is ‘grellow’ provided it is green and
located on the earth or yellow otherwise. It would seem, therefore, that some
restriction on induction is required. “Goodman’s alleged of induction offers
two challenges. First, state the restriction
i.e., demarcate the intuitively acceptable inductions from the
unacceptable ones, in some general way, without constant appeal to intuition.”“Second,
justify our preference for the one group of inductions over the other.”“These
two parts of the paradox are, alas, often conflated.”But it is at least
conceivable that one might solve the analytical, demarcative part without
solving the justificatory part, and, perhaps, vice versa. It will not do to
rule out, a priori gruesome” variances in nature. H2O varies in its physical
state along the parameter of temperature. If so, why might not one emerald vary
in colour along the parameter of time of first examination? One approach to the
problem of restriction is to focus on the conclusions of inductive arguments
e.g., every emerald is green, every emerald is grue and to distinguish those
which may legitimately so serve called “projectible hypotheses” from those
which may not. The question then arises whether only non-gruesome hypotheses
those which do not contain gruesome predicates are projectible. Aside from the
task of defining ‘gruesome predicate’ which could be done structurally relative
to a preferred language, the answer is no. Consider the predicate ‘x is solid
and less than 0; C, or liquid and more than 0; C but less than 100; C, or
gaseous and more than 100; C.’This is gruesome on any plausible structural
account of gruesomeness. Note the similarity to the ‘grue’ equivalent: green
and first examined before T, or blue and not first examined before T.
Nevertheless, where nontransitional water is pure H2O at one atmosphere of
pressure save that which is in a transitional state, i.e., melting/freezing or
boiling/condensing, i.e., at 0°C or 100; C, we happily project the hypothesis
that all non-transitional water falls under the above gruesome predicate.
Perhaps this is because, if we rewrite the projection about non-transitional
water as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses i water at less than 0; C is solid, ii water
at more than 0; C but less than 100; C is liquid, and iii water at more than
100; C is gaseous we note that iiii are
all supported there are known positive instances; whereas if we rewrite the
gruesome projection about the emerald as a conjunction of non-gruesome
hypotheses i* every emerald first
examined before T is green, and ii* every emerald NOT first examined before T
is blue we note that ii* is as yet
unsupported. It would seem that, whereas a non-gruesome hypothesis is
projectible provided it is unviolated and supported, a gruesome hypothesis is
projectible provided it is unviolated and equivalent to a conjunction of
non-gruesome hypotheses, each of which is supported.
grundnorm: Grice knows about
the ground and the common ground – and then there’s the ground norm -- also
called basic norm, in a legal system, the norm that determines the legal validity
of all other norms. The content of such an ultimate norm may provide, e.g.,
that norms created by a legislature or by a court are legally valid. The
validity of such an ultimate norm cannot be established as a matter of social
fact such as the social fact that the norm is accepted by some group within a
society. Rather, the validity of the basic norm for any given legal system must
be presupposed by the validity of the norms that it legitimates as laws. The
idea of a basic norm is associated with the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen.
guise -- Castaneda, H.
N., analytical philosopher. Heavily influenced by his own critical reaction to
Quine, Chisholm, and his teacher Wilfrid Sellars, Castañeda published four
books and more than 175 essays. His work combines originality, rigor, and
penetration, together with an unusual comprehensiveness his network of theory and criticism reaches
into nearly every area of philosophy, including action theory; deontic logic
and practical reason; ethics; history of philosophy; metaphysics and ontology;
philosophical methodology; philosophy of language, mind, and perception; and
the theory of knowledge. His principal contributions are to metaphysics and
ontology, indexical reference, and deontic logic and practical reasoning. In
metaphysics and ontology, Castañeda’s chief work is guise theory, first
articulated in a 4 essay, a complex and global account of language, mind,
ontology, and predication. By holding that ordinary concrete individuals,
properties, and propositions all break down or separate into their various
aspects or guises, he theorizes that thinking and reference are directed toward
the latter. Each guise is a genuine item in the ontological inventory, having
properties internally and externally. In addition, guises are related by
standing in various sameness relations, only one of which is the familiar
relation of strict identity. Since every guise enjoys bona fide ontological
standing, whereas only some of these actually exist, Castañeda’s ontology and
semantics are Meinongian. With its intricate account of predication, guise
theory affords a unified treatment of a wide range of philosophical problems
concerning reference to nonexistents, negative existentials, intentional
identity, referential opacity, and other matters. Castañeda also played a
pivotal role in emphasizing the significance of indexical reference. If, e.g.,
Paul assertively utters ‘I prefer Chardonnay’, it would obviously be incorrect
for Bob to report ‘Paul says that I prefer Chardonnay’, since the last
statement expresses Bob’s speaker’s reference, not Paul’s. At the same time,
Castañeda contends, it is likewise incorrect for Bob to report Paul’s saying as
either ‘Paul says that Paul prefers Chardonnay’ or ‘Paul says that Al’s
luncheon guest prefers Chardonnay’ when Paul is Al’s only luncheon guest, since
each of these fail to represent the essentially indexical element of Paul’s
assertion. Instead, Bob may correctly report ‘Paul says that he himself prefers
Chardonnay’, where ‘he himself’ is a quasi-indicator, serving to depict Paul’s
reference to himself qua self. For Castañeda and others, quasi-indicators are a
person’s irreducible, essential means for describing the thoughts and
experiences of others. A complete account of his view of indexicals, together
with a full articulation of guise theory and his unorthodox theories of
definite descriptions and proper names, is contained in Thinking, Language, and
Experience 9. Castañeda’s main views on practical reason and deontic logic turn
on his fundamental practitionproposition distinction. A number of valuable
essays on these views, together with his important replies, are collected in
James E. Tomberlin, ed., Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World 3, and
Tomberlin, ed., Hector-Neri Castañeda 6. The latter also includes Castañeda’s
revealing intellectual autobiography. guise theory, a system developed by
Castañeda to resolve a number of issues concerning the content of thought and
experience, including reference, identity statements, intensional contexts,
predication, existential claims, perception, and fictional discourse. For
example, since i Oedipus believed that he killed the man at the crossroads, and
ii the man at the crossroads was his Oedipus’s father, it might seem that iii
Oedipus believed that he killed his father. Guise theory blocks this derivation
by taking ‘was’ in ii to express, not genuine identity, but a contingent
sameness relation betweeen the distinct referents of the descriptions. Definite
descriptions are typically treated as referential, contrary to Russell’s theory
of descriptions, and their referents are identical in both direct and indirect
discourse, contrary to Frege’s semantics. To support this solution, guise
theory offers unique accounts of predication and singular referents. The latter
are individual guises, which, like Fregean senses and Meinong’s incomplete
objects, are thinly individuated aspects or “slices” of ordinary objects at
best. Every guise is a structure c{F1 . . . , Fn} where c is an operator
expressed by ‘the’ in English
transforming a set of properties {F1, . . . , Fn} into a distinct
concrete individual, each property being an internal property of the guise.
Guises have external properties by standing in various sameness relations to
other guises that have these properties internally. There are four such
relations, besides genuine identity, each an equivalence relation in its field.
If the oldest philosopher happens to be wise, e.g., wisdom is factually
predicated of the guise ‘the oldest philosopher’ because it is consubstantiated
with ‘the oldest wise philosopher’. Other sameness relations account for
fictional predication consociation and necessary external predication
conflation. Existence is self-consubstantiation. An ordinary physical object
is, at any moment, a cluster of consubstantiated hence, existing guises, while
continuants are formed through the transubstantiation of guises within
temporally distinct clusters. There are no substrates, and while every guise
“subsists,” not all exist, e.g., the Norse God of Thunder. The position thus
permits a unified account of singular reference. One task for guise theory is
to explain how a “concretized” set of properties differs internally from a mere
set. Perhaps guises are façons de penser whose core sets are concretized if
their component properties are conceived as coinstantiated, with non-existents
analyzable in terms of the failure of the conceived properties to actually be
coinstantiated. However, it is questionable whether this approach can achieve all
that Castañeda demands of guise theory.
habermas: j. Habermas cites
Grice quite extensively,, “but as extensive as he is, the more wishy washy he
becomes” – A. M. Kemmerling. J. philosopher and social theorist, a leading
representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of critical
theory. His work has consistently returned to the problem of the normative
foundations of social criticism and critical social inquiry not supplied in
traditional Marxism and other forms of critical theory, such as postmodernism.
His habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1, is an
influential historical analysis of the emergence of the ideal of a public
sphere in the eighteenth century and its subsequent decline. Habermas turned
then to the problems of the foundations and methodology of the social sciences,
developing a criticism of positivism and his own interpretive explanatory
approach in The Logic of the Social Sciences 3 and his first major systematic
work, Knowledge and Human Interests 7. Rejecting the unity of method typical of
positivism, Habermas argues that social inquiry is guided by three distinct
interests: in control, in understanding, and in emancipation. He is especially
concerned to use emancipatory interest to overcome the limitations of the model
of inquiry based on understanding and argues against “universality of
hermeneutics” defended by hermeneuticists such as Gadamer and for the need to
supplement interpretations with explanations in the social sciences. As he came
to reject the psychoanalytic vocabulary in which he formulated the interest in
emancipation, he turned to finding the basis for understanding and social
inquiry in a theory of rationality more generally. In the next phase of his
career he developed a comprehensive social theory, culminating in his
two-volume The Theory of Communicative Action 2. The goal of this theory is to
develop a “critical theory of modernity,” on the basis of a comprehensive
theory of communicative as opposed to instrumental rationality. The first
volume develops a theory of communicative rationality based on “discourse,” or
second-order communication that takes place both in everyday interaction and in
institutionalized practices of argumentation in science, law, and criticism.
This theory of rationality emerges from a universal or “formal” pragmatics, a
speech act theory based on making explicit the rules and norms of the
competence to communicate in linguistic interaction. The second volume develops
a diagnosis of modern society as suffering from “onesided rationalization,”
leading to disruptions of the communicative lifeworld by “systems” such as
markets and bureaucracies. Finally, Habermas applies his conception of
rationality to issues of normative theory, including ethics, politics, and the
law. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Moral Justification” 2 argues for
an intersubjective notion of practical reason and discursive procedure for the
justification of universal norms. This “discourse principle” provides a
dialogical version of Kant’s idea of universalization; a norm is justified if
and only if it can meet with the reasoned agreement of all those affected.
Between Facts and Norms 2 combines his social and normative theories to give a
systematic account of law and democracy. His contribution here is an account of
deliberative democracy appropriate to the complexity of modern society. His
work in all of these phases provides a systematic defense and critique of
modern institutions and a vindication of the universal claims of public
practical reason.
bradley’s
thatness: :The investing of
the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904’ If thought
asserted the existence of any content which was not an actual or possible
object of thought—certainly that assertion in my judgment would contradict
itself. But the Other which I maintain, is not any such content, nor is it
another separated “ what,” nor in any case do I suggest that it lies outside
intelligence. Everything, all will and feeling, is an object for thought, and
must be called intelligible. This is certain; but, if so, what becomes of the
Other? If we fall back on the mere “ that,” thatness itself seems a distinction
made by thought. And we have to face this difficulty: If the Other exists, it
must be something; and if it is nothing, it certainly does not exist. There is only one way to get rid
of contradiction, and that way is by dissolution. Instead of one subject
distracted, we get a larger subject with distinctions, and so the tension is
removed. We have at first A, which possesses the qualities c and b,
inconsistent adjectives which collide; and we go on to produce harmony by
making a distinction within this subject. That was really not mere A, but
either a complex within A, or (rather here) a wider whole in which A is
included. The real subject is A + D; and this subject contains the
contradiction made harmless by division, since A is c and D is b. This is the
general principle, and I will attempt here to apply it in particular. Let us
suppose the reality to be X (abcdefg . . .), and that we are able only to get
partial views of this reality. Let us first take such a view as “ X (ab) is b.”
This (rightly or wrongly) we should probably call a true view. For the content
b does plainly belong to the subject; and, further, the appearance also—in
other words, the separation of b in the predicate—can partly be explained. For,
answering to this separation, we postulate now another adjective in the subject:
let us call it *. The “ thatness,” the psychical existence of the predicate,
which at first was neglected, has now also itself been included in the subject.
We may hence write the subject as X (ab*); and in this way we seem to avoid
contradiction. Let us go further on the same line, and, having dealt with a
truth, pass next to an error. Take the subject once more as X (abcde . . .),
and let us now say “ X (ab) is d.”
To be different from another is to have already transcended one’s own
being; and all finite existence is thus incurably relative and ideal. Its
quality falls, more or less, outside its particular “ thatness”; and, whether
as the same or again as diverse, it is equally made what it is by community
with others.
The
hic, the hæc, and the hoc – “Scotus was being clever. Since he wanted an
abstract noun, and abstract nouns are feminine in both Greek and Latin
(‘ippotes, eqquitas’), he chose the feminine ‘haec,’ to turn into a ‘thisness.’
But we should expand his rather sexist view to apply to ‘hic’ and ‘hoc,’ too.
In Anglo-Saxon, there is only ‘this,’ with ‘thisness’ first used by Pope
George. The OED first registers ‘thisness’ in 1643.” – cf. OED: "It is at its such-&-suchness,
at its
character -- in other words, at the
_universal_ in it -- that we have to
look. the first cite in the
OED for 'thisness' also features 'thatness': "thisness,” from
"this" + "-ness": rendering ‘haecceitas,’ the quality of
being 'this' (as distinct from anything else): = haecceity. First cite:
"It is evident that [...] THISness, and THATness belong[...] not to matter
by itself, but onely as [matter] is distinguished & individuated by the
form." The two further quotes for 'thisness' being: 1837 Whewell Hist
Induct Sc 1857 I 244: "Which his school called ‘HAECcceity’ – from the
feminine form of the demonstrative masculine ‘hic,’ in Roman, neutre ‘hoc’
(Scotus uses the femine because ‘-ity- is a feminine ending) -- or ‘thisness.’",
and 1895 Rashdall Universities II 532: "An individuating form called by
the later Scotists its ‘haecceitas’ or its `thisness'"). "The investing of the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904 868/2. -- OED, 'thatness'. Trudgill writes in _The Dialects of England_
(Oxford: Blackwell), that Grice would often consult (he was from Harborne and
had a special interest in this – “I seem to have lost my dialect when I moved
to Corpus.” The 'this'-'that' demonstrative system is a two-way system which
distinguishes between things which are distant and things which are near.
Interestingly, however, a number of traditional dialects in England (if not
Oxford) differ from this system in having what Grice called a Griceian _three_-way
distinction. The Yorkshire dialect, for example, has ‘this’ (sing., near),
‘thir’ (pl. near), ‘that’ (sing. Medial) ‘tho’ (plural, medial), thon (sing.
distal) and ‘thon’ (pl., distal). The Mercian Anglian dialect has ‘these’
(sing. near), ‘theys’ (plural, near), ‘that’ (sing. medial), ‘they’ (pl.,
medial), ‘thik’ (sing./pl., distal). “The northern dialect is better in that it
distinguishes between the singular and the plural form for the distal, unlike
the southern dialect which has ‘thik’ for either.” Grice. Still, Grice likes
the sound of ‘thik’ and quotes from his friend M. Wakelin, _The Southwest of England_.
"When I awoke one May day morn/I found an urge within me born/To see the
beauteous countryside/That's all round wher'I do bide./So I set out wi' dog
& stick,/ My head were just a trifle thick./But good ole' fresh air had his
say/& blowed thik trouble clean away." -- B. Green, in _The Dorset
Year Book_. Dorset: Society of Dorset Men. “Some like Russell, but Bradley’s MY
man.” – H. P. Grice: Grice: "Russell is
pretentious; Bradley, an English angel, is not!" "Bradley can use 'thatness' freely; Russell uses it after
Bradley and artificially."
all the rest of the
watery bulk : but return back those few drops from whence they were
taken, and the glass-full that even now had an individuation by itself,
loseth that, and groweth one and the same with the other main stock : yet
if you fill your glass again, wheresoever you take it up, so it be
of the same uniform bulk of water you had before, it is the same glassfuU
of water that you had. But as I said before, this example fitteth
entirely no more than the other did. In such abstracted speculations,
where we must consider matter without form, (which hath no actual being,)
we must not expect adequated examples in nature. But enough is said to
make a speculative man see, that if God should join the soul of a
lately dead man, (even whilst his dead corpse should lie en- tire in his
windingsheet here,) unto a body made of earth, taken from some mountain
in America; it were most true and certain, that the body he should then
live by, were the same identical body he lived with before his death, and
late resurrection. It is evident, that sameness, thisness, and
that- ness, belongeth not to matter by itself, (for a general
indiffer- ence runneth through it all,) but only as it is distinguished
and individuated by the form. Which in our case, whensoever the
same soul doth, it must be understood always to be the same matter and
body.” (Browne, 1643). Grice. Corbin says that English is such a
plastic language, “unlike Roman,” but then there’s haec, and hæcceitas -- Duns
Scotus, J., Scottish Franciscan metaphysician and philosophical theologian. He
lectured at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died and his remains are still
venerated. Modifying Avicenna’s conception of metaphysics as the science of
being qua being, but univocally conceived, Duns Scotus showed its goal was to
demonstrate God as the Infinite Being revealed to Moses as the “I am who am”,
whose creative will is the source of the world’s contingency. Out of love God
fashioned each creature with a unique “haecceity” or particularity formally
distinct from its individualized nature. Descriptively identical with others of
its kind, this nature, conceived in abstraction from haecceity, is both objectively
real and potentially universal, and provides the basis for scientific knowledge
that Peirce calls “Scotistic realism.” Duns Scotus brought many of Augustine’s
insights, treasured by his Franciscan predecessors, into the mainstream of the
Aristotelianism of his day. Their notion of the will’s “supersufficient
potentiality” for self-determination he showed can be reconciled with
Aristotle’s notion of an “active potency,” if one rejects the controDuhem
thesis Duns Scotus, John 247 247
versial principle that “whatever is moved is moved by another.” Paradoxically,
Aristotle’s criteria for rational and non-rational potencies prove the
rationality of the will, not the intellect, for he claimed that only rational
faculties are able to act in opposite ways and are thus the source of
creativity in the arts. If so, then intellect, with but one mode of acting
determined by objective evidence, is non-rational, and so is classed with
active potencies called collectively “nature.” Only the will, acting “with
reason,” is free to will or nill this or that. Thus “nature” and “will”
represent Duns Scotus’s primary division of active potencies, corresponding
roughly to Aristotle’s dichotomy of non-rational and rational. Original too is
his development of Anselm’s distinction of the will’s twofold inclination or
“affection”: one for the advantageous, the other for justice. The first endows
the will with an “intellectual appetite” for happiness and actualization of
self or species; the second supplies the will’s specific difference from other
natural appetites, giving it an innate desire to love goods objectively
according to their intrinsic worth. Guided by right reason, this “affection for
justice” inclines the will to act ethically, giving it a congenital freedom
from the need always to seek the advantageous. Both natural affections can be
supernaturalized, the “affection for justice” by charity, inclining us to love
God above all and for his own sake; the affection for the advantageous by the
virtue of hope, inclining us to love God as our ultimate good and future source
of beatitude. Another influential psychological theory is that of intuitive
intellectual cognition, or the simple, non-judgmental awareness of a
hereand-now existential situation. First developed as a necessary theological
condition for the face-toface vision of God in the next life, intellectual
intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary contingent truths, such
as “I think,” “I choose,” etc., and our awareness of existence. Unlike Ockham,
Duns Scotus never made intellectual intuition the basis for his epistemology,
nor believed it puts one in direct contact with any extramental substance
material or spiritual, for in this life, at least, our intellect works through
the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems to be that indistinct
peripheral aura associated with each direct sensory-intellectual cognition. We
know of it explicitly only in retrospect when we consider the necessary
conditions for intellectual memory. It continued to be a topic of discussion
and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who, influenced by the Scotist John
Major, used an auditory rather than a visual sense model of intellectual
intuition to explain our “experience of God.”
haecceity from Latin haec, ‘this’, 1 loosely, thisness; more
specifically, an irreducible category of being, the fundamental actuality of an
existent entity; or 2 an individual essence, a property an object has
necessarily, without which it would not be or would cease to exist as the
individual it is, and which, necessarily, no other object has. There are in the
history of philosophy two distinct concepts of haecceity. The idea originated
with the work of the thirteenthcentury philosopher Duns Scotus, and was
discussed in the same period by Aquinas, as a positive perfection that serves
as a primitive existence and individuation principle for concrete existents. In
the seventeenth century Leibniz transformed the concept of haecceity, which
Duns Scotus had explicitly denied to be a form or universal, into the notion of
an individual essence, a distinctive nature or set of necessary characteristics
uniquely identifying it under the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Duns
Scotus’s haecceitas applies only to the being of contingently existent entities
in the actual world, but Leibniz extends the principle to individuate
particular things not only through the changes they may undergo in the actual
world, but in any alternative logically possible world. Leibniz admitted as a
consequence the controversial thesis that every object by virtue of its
haecceity has each of its properties essentially or necessarily, so that only
the counterparts of individuals can inhabit distinct logically possible worlds.
A further corollary since the possession
of particular parts in a particular arrangement is also a property and hence
involved in the individual essence of any complex object is the doctrine of mereological essentialism:
every composite is necessarily constituted by a particular configuration of
particular proper parts, and loses its self-identity if any parts are removed
or replaced. Grice was more familiar with the thatness than the thisness
(“Having had to read Bradley for my metaphysics paper!”).
haeckel: an impassioned adherent of Darwin’s
theory of evolution. His wrote “Die Welträtsel,” which became a best-seller and
was very influential in its time. Lenin is said to have admired it. Haeckel’s
philosophy, which he called monism, is characterized negatively by his
rejection of free will, immortality, and theism, as well as his criticisms of
the traditional forms of materialism and idealism. Positively it is
distinguished by passionate arguments for the fundamental unity of organic and
inorganic nature and a form of pantheism.
ha-levi, philosopher. His philosophy introduces
Arabic forms in Hebrew religious expression. He was traveling to Jerusalem on a
pilgrimage when he died. His most important philosophical work is Kuzari: The
Book of Proof and Argument of the Despised Faith, which purports to be a
discussion of a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew, each offering the king of the
Khazars in southern Russia reasons for adopting his faith. Around 740 the
historical king and most of his people converted to Judaism. HaLevi presents
the Christian and the Muslim as Aristotelian thinkers, who fail to convince the
king. The Jewish spokesman begins by asserting his belief in the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of history who is continuously active in
history, rather than the God of the philosophers. Jewish history is the inner
core of world history. From the revelation at Sinai, the most witnessed divine
event claimed by any religion, the Providential history of the Jews is the way
God has chosen to make his message clear to all humankind. Ha-Levi’s view is
the classical expression of Jewish particularism and nationalism. His ideas
have been influential in Judaism and were early printed in Latin and Grecian.
hamann: philosopher. Born
and educated in Königsberg, Hamann, known as the Magus of the North, was one of
the most important Christian thinkers in G.y during the second half of the
eighteenth century. Advocating an irrationalistic theory of faith inspired by
Hume, he opposed the prevailing Enlightenment philosophy. He was a mentor of
the Sturm und Drang literary movement and had a significant influence on
Jacobi, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. As a close acquaintance of Kant, he also had a
great impact on the development of Kant’s critical philosophy through his Hume
translations. Hamann’s most important works, criticized and admired for their
difficult and obscure style, were the Socratic Memorabilia 1759, “Aesthetica in
nuce” and several works on language. He suppressed his “metacritical” writings
out of respect for Kant. However, they were published after his death and now
constitute the bestknown part of his work.
hamilton: “Hamilton and I
have many things in common: he went to Balliol, I went to Corpus – but we both
have a BA and a MA Lit. Hum.” – H. P. Grice. philosopher, educated at Oxford, he was for
most of his life professor at the of
Edinburgh 182156. Though hardly an orthodox or uncritical follower of Reid and
Stewart, he became one of the most important members of the school of Scottish
common sense philosophy. His “philosophy of the conditioned” has a somewhat
Kantian flavor. Like Kant, he held that we can have knowledge only of “the
relative manifestations of an existence, which in itself it is our highest
wisdom to recogHaeckel, Ernst Hamilton, William 360 AM
360 nize as beyond the reach of philosophy.” Unlike Kant, however, he
argued for the position of a “natural realism” in the Reidian tradition. The
doctrine of the relativity of knowledge has seemed to many including J. S. Mill contradictory to his realism. For Hamilton,
the two are held together by a kind of intuitionism that emphasizes certain
facts of consciousness that are both primitive and incomprehensible. They are,
though constitutive of knowledge, “less forms of cognitions than of beliefs.”
In logic he argued for a doctrine involving quantification of predicates and
the view that propositions can be reduced to equations.
hampshireism: His second wife was from the New World. His first wife
wasn’t. He married Renée Orde-Lees, the daughter of the very English Thomas
Orde-Lees, in 1961, and had two children, a son, Julian, and a daughter. To add
to the philosophers’ mistakes. There’s Austin (in “Plea for Excuses” and “Other
Minds”), Strawson (in “Truth” and “Introduction to Logical Theory,” and “On
referring”), Hart (in conversation, on ‘carefully,”), Hare (“To say ‘x is good’
is to recommend x”) and Hampshire (“Intention and certainty”). For Grice, the
certainty is merely implicated and on occasion, only. Cited by Grice as a member of the play group.
Hampshire would dine once a week with Grice. He would discuss and find very
amusing to discuss with Grice on post-war Oxford philosophy. Unlike Grice,
Hampshire attended Austin’s Thursday evening meetings at All Souls. Grice wrote
“Intention and uncertainty” in part as a response to Hampshire and Hart,
Intention and certainty. But Grice brought the issue back to an earlier
generation, to a polemic between Stout (who held a certainty-based view) and
Prichard.
hare: r. m. cited by H.
P. Grice, “Hare’s neustrics”. b.9, English philosopher who is one of the most
influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century and the developer of
prescriptivism in metaethics. Hare was educated at Rugby and Oxford, then
served in the British army during World War II and spent years as a prisoner of
war in Burma. In 7 he took a position at Balliol and was appointed White’s Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the of Oxford in 6. On
retirement from Oxford, he became Graduate Research Professor at the of Florida 393. His major books are Language
of Morals 3, Freedom and Reason 3, Moral Thinking 1, and Sorting Out Ethics 7.
Many collections of his essays have also appeared, and a collection of other
leading philosophers’ articles on his work was published in 8 Hare and Critics,
eds. Seanor and Fotion. According to Hare, a careful exploration of the nature
of our moral concepts reveals that nonironic judgments about what one morally
ought to do are expressions of the will, or commitments to act, that are
subject to certain logical constraints. Because moral judgments are
prescriptive, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them while refusing to comply
with them in the relevant circumstances. Because moral judgments are universal
prescriptions, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them unless we are willing for
them to be followed were we in other people’s positions with their preferences.
Hare later contended that vividly to imagine ourselves completely in other
people’s positions involves our acquiring preferences about what should happen
to us in those positions that mirror exactly what those people now want for
themselves. So, ideally, we decide on a universal prescription on the basis of
not only our existing preferences about the actual situation but also the new
preferences we would have if we were wholly in other people’s positions. What
we can prescribe universally is what maximizes net satisfaction of this
amalgamated set of preferences. Hence, Hare concluded that his theory of moral
judgment leads to preference-satisfaction act utilitarianism. However, like
most other utilitarians, he argued that the best way to maximize utility is to
have, and generally to act on, certain not directly utilitarian
dispositions such as dispositions not to
hurt others or steal, to keep promises and tell the truth, to take special
responsibility for one’s own family, and so on.
harris: philosopher of language – classical. Grice adored him, and
he was quite happy that few knew about Harris! Cf. Tooke. Cf. Priestley and
Hartley – all pre-Griceian philosohers of language that are somehow outside the
canon, when they shouldn’t. They are very Old World, and it’s the influence of
the New World that has made them sort of disappear! That’s what Grice said!
hart: h. l. a. – cited
by Grice, “Hare on ‘carefully.’ Philosopher of European ancestry born in
Yorkshire, principally responsible for the revival of legal and political
philosophy after World War II. After wartime work with military intelligence,
Hart gave up a flourishing law practice to join the Oxford faculty, where he
was a brilliant lecturer, a sympathetic and insightful critic, and a generous
mentor to many scholars. Like the earlier “legal positivists” Bentham and John
Austin, Hart accepted the “separation of law and morals”: moral standards can
deliberately be incorporated in law, but there is no automatic or necessary
connection between law and sound moral principles. In The Concept of Law 1 he
critiqued the Bentham-Austin notion that laws are orders backed by threats from
a political community’s “sovereign” some
person or persons who enjoy habitual obedience and are habitually obedient to
no other human and developed the more
complex idea that law is a “union of primary and secondary rules.” Hart agreed
that a legal system must contain some “obligation-imposing” “primary” rules,
restricting freedom. But he showed that law also includes independent
“power-conferring” rules that facilitate choice, and he demonstrated that a
legal system requires “secondary” rules that create public offices and
authorize official action, such as legislation and adjudication, as well as
“rules of recognition” that determine which other rules are valid in the
system. Hart held that rules of law are “open-textured,” with a core of
determinate meaning and a fringe of indeterminate meaning, and thus capable of
answering some but not all legal questions that can arise. He doubted courts’
claims to discover law’s meaning when reasonable competing interpretations are
available, and held that courts decide such “hard cases” by first performing
the important “legislative” function of filling gaps in the law. Hart’s first
book was an influential study with A. M. Honoré of Causation in the Law 9. His
inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence, “Definition and Theory in
Jurisprudence” 3, initiated a career-long study of rights, reflected also in
Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory 2 and in
Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy 3. He defended liberal public policies.
In Law, Liberty and Morality 3 he refuted Lord Devlin’s contention that a
society justifiably enforces the code of its moral majority, whatever it might
be. In The Morality of the Criminal Law 5 and in Punishment and Responsibility
8, Hart contributed substantially to both analytic and normative theories of
crime and punishment.
Hartley, British philosopher. Although the
notion of association of ideas is ancient, he is generally regarded as the
founder of associationism as a self-sufficient psychology. Despite similarities
between his association psychology and Hume’s, Hartley developed his system
independently, acknowledging only the writings of clergyman John Gay 1699 1745.
Hartley was one of many Enlightenment thinkers aspiring to be “Newtons of the
mind,” in Peter Gay’s phrase. In Hartley, this took the form of uniting
association philosophy with physiology, a project later brought to fruition by
Bain. His major work, Observations on Man 1749, pictured mental events and
neural events as operating on parallel tracks in which neural events cause
mental events. On the mental side, Hartley distinguished like Hume between
sensation and idea. On the physiological side, Hartley adopted Newton’s
conception of nervous transmission by vibrations of a fine granular substance
within nerve-tubes. Vibrations within sensory nerves peripheral to the brain
corresponded to the sensations they caused, while small vibrations in the
brain, vibratiuncles, corresponded to ideas. Hartley proposed a single law of
association, contiguity modified by frequency, which took two forms, one for
the mental side and one for the neural: ideas, or vibratiuncles, occurring
together regularly become associated. Hartley distinguished between
simultaneous association, the link between ideas that occur at the same
harmony, preestablished Hartley, David 362
AM 362 moment, and successive
association, between ideas that closely succeed one another. Successive
associations occur only in a forward direction; there are no backward
associations, a thesis generating much controversy in the later experimental study
of memory.
Hartley, Joseph – philosopher. Hartmann: philosopher
who sought to synthesize the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The
most important of his essays is “Philosophie des Unbewussten.” For Hartmann
both will and idea are interrelated and are expressions of an absolute
“thing-in-itself,” the unconscious. The unconscious is the active essence in
natural and psychic processes and is the teleological dynamic in organic life.
Paradoxically, he claimed that the teleology immanent in the world order and
the life process leads to insight into the irrationality of the “will-to-live.”
The maturation of rational consciousness would, he held, lead to the negation
of the total volitional process and the entire world process would cease. Ideas
indicate the “what” of existence and constitute, along with will and the
unconscious, the three modes of being. Despite its pessimism, this work enjoyed
considerable popularity. Hartmann was an unusual combination of speculative
idealist and philosopher of science defending vitalism and attacking
mechanistic materialism; his pessimistic ethics was part of a cosmic drama of
redemption. Some of his later works dealt with a critical form of Darwinism
that led him to adopt a positive evolutionary stance that undermined his
earlier pessimism. His general philosophical position was selfdescribed as
“transcendental realism.” His Philosophy of the Unconscious was tr. into
English by W. C. Coupland in three volumes in 4. There is little doubt that his
metaphysics of the unconscious prepared the way for Freud’s later theory of the
unconscious mind.
hartmann, n. philosopher (“Not to be
confused with Hartmann – but then neither am I to be confused with [G. R.]
Grice.” – Grice. He taught at the universities of Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and
Göttingen, and wrote more than a dozen major works on the history of
philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. A realist in
epistemology and ontology, Hartmann held that cognition is the apprehension of
something independent of the act of apprehension or any other mental events. An
accurate phenomenology, such as Husserl’s, would acknowledge, according to him,
that we apprehend not only particular, spatiotemporal objects, but also “ideal
objects,” “essences,” which Hartmann explicitly identified with Platonic Forms.
Among these are ethical values and the objects of mathematics and logic. Our
apprehension of values is emotional in character, as Scheler had held. This
point is compatible with their objectivity and their mindindependence, since
the emotions are just another mode of apprehension. The point applies, however,
only to ethical values. Aesthetic values are essentially subjective; they exist
only for the subject experiencing them. The number of ethical values is far
greater than usually supposed, nor are they derivable from a single fundamental
value. At best we only glimpse some of them, and even these may not be
simultaneously realizable. This explains and to some extent justifies the
existence of moral disagreement, between persons as well as between whole
cultures. Hartmann was most obviously influenced by Plato, Husserl, and
Scheler. But he was a major, original philosopher in his own right. He has
received less recognition than he deserves probably because his views were
quite different from those dominant in recent Anglo- philosophy or in recent
Continental philosophy. What is perhaps his most important work, Ethics, was
published in G. in 6, one year before Heidegger’s Being and Time, and appeared
in English in 2.
hartshorne: chief exponent of process philosophy. After
receiving the Ph.D. at Harvard in 3 he came under the influence of Whitehead,
and later, with Paul Weiss, edited The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce 135. In
The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation 4 Hartshorne argued that all
sensations are feelings on an affective continuum. These ideas were later
incorporated into a neoclassical metaphysic that is panpsychist,
indeterministic, and theistic. Nature is a theater of interactions among ephemeral
centers of creative activity, each of which becomes objectively immortal in the
memory of God. In Man’s Vision of God 1 Hartshorne chastised philosophers for
being insufficiently attentive to the varieties of theism. His alternative,
called dipolar theism, also defended in The Divine Hartmann, Eduard von
Hartshorne, Charles 363 AM 363 Relativity 8, pictures God as supremely
related to and perfectly responding to every actuality. The universe is God’s
body. The divine is, in different respects, infinite and finite, eternal and
temporal, necessary and contingent. Establishing God’s existence is a
metaphysical project, which Hartshorne characterizes in Creative Synthesis 0 as
the search for necessary truths about existence. The central element in his
cumulative case for God’s existence, called the global argument, is a modal
version of the ontological argument, which Hartshorne was instrumental in
rehabilitating in The Logic of Perfection 2 and Anselm’s Discovery 5. Creative
Synthesis also articulated the theory that aesthetic values are the most
universal and that beauty is a mean between the twin extremes of order/disorder
and simplicity/complexity. The Zero Fallacy 7, Hartshorne’s twentieth book,
summarized his assessment of the history of philosophy also found in Insights and Oversights of
Great Thinkers 3 and Creativity in
Philosophy 4 and introduced
important refinements of his metaphysics.
hazzing: under conjunctum, we see that the terminology is varied.
There is the copulatum. But Grice prefers to restrict to use of the copulatum
to izzing and hazzing. Oddly Grice sees hazzing as a predicate which he
formalizes as Hxy. To be read x hazzes y, although sometimes he uses ‘x hazz
y.’ Vide ‘accidentia.’ For Grice the role of métier is basic since it shows
finality in nature. Homo sapiens, qua pirot, is to be rational.
hedonism, the view that
pleasure including the absence of pain is the sole intrinsic good in life. The
hedonist may hold that, questions of morality aside, persons inevitably do seek
pleasure psychological hedonism; that, questions of psychology aside, morally
we should seek pleasure ethical hedonism; or that we inevitably do, and ought
to, seek pleasure ethical and psychological hedonism combined. Psychological
hedonism itself admits of a variety of possible forms. One may hold, e.g., that
all motivation is based on the prospect of present or future pleasure. More
plausibly, some philosophers have held that all choices of future actions are
based on one’s presently taking greater pleasure in the thought of doing one
act rather than another. Still a third type of hedonism with roots in empirical psychology is that the attainment of pleasure is the
primary drive of a wide range of organisms including human beings and is
responsible, through some form of conditioning, for all acquired motivations.
Ethical hedonists may, but need not, appeal to some form of psychological
hedonism to buttress their case. For, at worst, the truth of some form of
psychological hedonism makes ethical hedonism empty or inescapable but not false. As a value theory a theory of
what is ultimately good, ethical hedonism has typically led to one or the other
of two conceptions of morally correct action. Both of these are expressions of
moral consequentialism in that they judge actions strictly by their
consequences. On standard formulations of utilitarianism, actions are judged by
the amount of pleasure they produce for all sentient beings; on some
formulations of egoist views, actions are judged by their consequences for
one’s own pleasure. Neither egoism nor utilitarianism, however, must be wedded
to a hedonistic value theory. A hedonistic value theory admits of a variety of
claims about the characteristic sources and types of pleasure. One contentious
issue has been what activities yield the greatest quantity of pleasure with prominent candidates including
philosophical and other forms of intellectual discourse, the contemplation of
beauty, and activities productive of “the pleasures of the senses.” Most philosophical
hedonists, despite the popular associations of the word, have not espoused
sensual pleasure. Another issue, famously raised by J. S. Mill, is whether such
different varieties of pleasure admit of differences of quality as well as
quantity. Even supposing them to be equal in quantity, can we say, e.g., that
the pleasures of intellectual activity are superior in quality to those of
watching sports on television? And if we do say such things, are we departing
from strict hedonism by introducing a value distinction not really based on
pleasure at all? Most philosophers have found hedonism both psychological and ethical exaggerated in its claims. One difficulty for
both sorts of hedonism is the hedonistic paradox, which may be put as follows.
Many of the deepest and best pleasures of life of love, of child rearing, of
work seem to come most often to those who are engaging in an activity for
reasons other than pleasure seeking. Hence, not only is it dubious that we
always in fact seek or value only pleasure, but also dubious that the best way
to achieve pleasure is to seek it. Another area of difficulty concerns
happiness and its relation to pleasure.
In the tradition of Aristotle, happiness is broadly understood as something
like well-being and has been viewed, not implausibly, as a kind of natural end
of all human activities. But ‘happiness’ in this sense is broader than
‘pleasure’, insofar as the latter designates a particular kind of feeling,
whereas ‘well-being’ does not. Attributions of happiness, moreover, appear to
be normative in a way in which attributions of pleasure are not. It is thought
that a truly happy person has achieved, is achieving, or stands to achieve,
certain things respecting the “truly important” concerns of human life. Of course,
such achievements will characteristically produce pleasant feelings; but, just
as characteristically, they will involve states of active enjoyment of
activities where, as Aristotle first
pointed out, there are no distinctive feelings of pleasure apart from the doing
of the activity itself. In short, the Aristotelian thesis that happiness is the
natural end of all human activities, even if it is true, does not seem to lend
much support to hedonism psychological
or ethical.
plathegel
and ariskant
– Hegel, “one of the most influential and systematic of the idealists” (Grice),
also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion. Life
and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son
of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His
mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology
seminary or Stift attached to the at
Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and became
friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the
great genius of G. Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he
accepted a job as a tutor for a family in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797
for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the
freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to
establish himself in a position. In
1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the town of Jena, already widely known as the
home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few
years, he became a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays
had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture,
and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the G. Romantics
many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European
Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still
enthusiastically championed what he termed the principle of modernity,
“absolute freedom.” Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal
political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of
new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was among that
legion of G. intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority
of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and
legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena,
however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of
Philosophy, and came to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the
critical philosophy or “transcendental idealism” of Kant, and its legacy in the
work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work became much more
influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s
search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated
and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way,
was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness,
interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite
prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free,
self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and
other agents. In his early years at Jena especially before Schelling left in
1803, he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic
philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world
and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on
commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible,
principles. In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a
“Logic” and a “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit.” After 1803,
however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication,
what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of
its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books.
Working at a furious pace, he finished hedonistic paradox Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 365 AM 365 what would be eventually called The
Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil.
During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard
would give birth to his illegitimate son. Ludwig was born in February 1807. And
he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day
Napoleon’s armies captured Jena. It was certainly an unprecedented work. In
conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively
more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast,
heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology
to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there
is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether
it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem,
Hegel often invented his own striking language of “inverted worlds,” “struggles
to the death for recognition,” “unhappy consciousness,” “spiritual animal
kingdoms,” and “beautiful souls.” Continuing his career at Jena in those times looked out of
the question, so Hegel accepted a job at Bamberg editing a newspaper, and in
the following year began an eight-year stint 180816 as headmaster and
philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium or secondary school at Nürnberg. During this
period, at forty-one, he married the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also
wrote what is easily his most difficult work, and the one he often referred to
as his most important, a magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which
attempts to be a philosophical account of the concepts necessary in all possible
kinds of account-givings. Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair in
philosophy at the of Heidelberg, where
he published the first of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, his own systematic account of the relation between the
“logic” of human thought and the “real” expression of such interrelated
categories in our understanding of the natural world and in our understanding
and evaluation of our own activities. In 1818, he accepted the much more
prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where he remained until his death in
1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began to exert a powerful influence
over G. letters and intellectual life. In 1821, in the midst of a growing
political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he published his controversial
book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right. His lectures at the were later published as his philosophy of
history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as his history of philosophy.
Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed gradually, in response to
a number of issues in philosophy and often in response to historical events.
Moreover, his language and approach were so heterodox that he has inspired as
much controversy about the meaning of his position as about its adequacy. Hence
any summary will be as much a summary of the controversies as of the basic
position. His dissatisfactions with the absence of a public realm, or any forms
of genuine social solidarity in the G. states and in modernity generally, and
his distaste with what he called the “positivity” of the orthodox religions of
the day their reliance on law, scripture, and abstract claims to authority, led
him to various attempts to make use of the Grecian polis and classical art, as
well as the early Christian understanding of love and a renewed “folk
religion,” as critical foils to such tendencies. For some time, he also
regarded much traditional and modern philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless
classifying that only contributed to contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and
confusion. These concerns remained with him throughout his life, and he is thus
rightly known as one of the first modern thinkers to argue that what had come
to be accepted as the central problem of modern social and political life, the
legitimacy of state power, had been too narrowly conceived. There are now all
sorts of circumstances, he argued, in which people might satisfy the modern
criterion of legitimacy and “consent” to the use of some power, but not fully
understand the terms within which such issues are posed, or assent in an
attenuated, resentful, manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would
experience no connection between their individual will and the actual content
of the institutions they are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is
as much alienation Entfremdung as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the
product of one’s will appears “strange” or “alien,” “other,” and which results
in much of modern life, however chosen or willed, being fundamentally
unsatisfying. However, during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed.
Most importantly, philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the
Hegelian drama. He no longer regarded philosophy as some sort of
self-undermining activity that merely prepared one for some leap into genuine
“speculation” roughly Schelling’s position and began to champion a unique kind
of comprehensive, very determinate reflection on the interrelations among all
the various classical alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he
also attempted to understand the way in which such relations and transitions
were also reflected in the history of the art, politics, and religions of
various historical communities. He thus came to think that philosophy should be
some sort of recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere
partiality, rather than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive
teaching, and an account of the centrality of these continuously developing
attempts in the development of other human practices.Through understanding the
“logic” of such a development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications
of such a rational process in contemporary life, or at least with the
potentialities inherent in contemporary life, would be possible. In all such
influences and developments, one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position
became clearer. For while Hegel still frequently argued that the subject matter
of philosophy was “reason,” or “the Absolute,” the unconditioned presupposition
of all human account-giving and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the
“whole” within which the natural world and human deeds were “parts,” he also
always construed this claim to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was
the history of human experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of
human change and development, understood by Hegel to be the collective
self-education of the human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy
the more traditional ideals because, in one of his most famous phrases, “what
is actual is rational,” or because some full account could be given of the
logic or teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and
political changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves
that the way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite
or contingent, but is “identical” with “what there is, in truth.” This identity
theory or Absolute Knowledgemeans that we will then be able to be “at home” in
the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to
understand, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang
together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The way it all hangs
together is, finally, “due to us,” in some collective and historical and
“logical” sense. In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion
lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself
would be over. Several elements in this general position have inspired a good
deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had
to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought:
the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption
means, for example, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to
other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into
existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With
respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common
tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are
also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming
such beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is simply
a consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by
individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the
priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or
Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the
assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be
“coming to self-consciousness” about itself, and this required that he argue
against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual
will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the
formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular
intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance
that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a
“logic” of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at
self-knowledge resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute
Spirit, by which he either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt
to know itself, or the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman
transcendence, or full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance
all such claims about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or
reifying such a subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and
thoughts of individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on
one another even for their very identity, even while they maintain their independence,
is one of the best-known examples of Hegel’s attempt at a dialectical
resolution of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of past
thought. Hegel often argued that what appeared to be contraries in philosophy,
such as mind/body, freedom/determinism, idealism/materialism,
universal/particular, the state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such
incompatible alternatives only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete
perspective within which the oppositions were formulated. So, in one of his
more famous attacks on such dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could
not be understood coherently as some purely rational self-determination,
independent of heteronomous impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual
opposition between reason and sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued
for the latter view and Hegel regularly returned to such Kantian claims about
the opposition of duty and inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism.
Hegel claimed that Kant’s version of a rational principle, the “categorical
imperative,” was so formal and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding it
could not coherently rule in or rule out the appropriate actions, and that the
“moral point of view” rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to
which no human agent could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the
dualisms of morality could be overcome in ethical life Sittlichkeit, those
modern social institutions which, it was claimed, provided the content or true
“objects” of a rational will. These institutions, the family, civil society,
and the state, did not require duties in potential conflict with our own
substantive ends, but were rather experienced as the “realization” of our
individual free will. It has remained controversial what for Hegel a truly
free, rational self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining,
our desire for happiness and self-actualization, amounted to. Many commentators
have noted that, among modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly
admired, was as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a
refusal to adopt the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided
against themselves. In his most ambitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel
went so far as to claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be
ultimately compatible when thought together within some higher-order “Notion”
Begriff that resolved or “sublated” the opposition, but that one term in such
opposition could actually be said to imply or require its contrary, that a
“positing” of such a notion would, to maintain consistency, require its own
“negating,” and that it was this sort of dialectical opposition that could be
shown to require a sublation, or Aufhebung a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously
means in G. ‘to cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’. This claim for a
dialectical development of our fundamental notions has been the most severely
criticized in Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic
conceptual change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely
develops the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or
position or related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of
Hegel’s Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to
categorize anything that is, simply and immediately, as “Being,” is an attempt
that both “negates itself,” or ends up categorizing everything as “Nothing,”
and then that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order
category of “Becoming.” This analysis continues into an extended argument that
purports to show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately
make use of the distinctions of “essence” and “appearance,” and elements of
syllogistic and finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and
the grand design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of
controversy. Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused
by the popular association of the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis”
with Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented
in 1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus,
and were never used as terms of art by Hegel. Others have argued that the
tensions Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much
broader analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which
positions are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to
the empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to
basic conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also
raised questions about the logical relation between universal and particular
implied in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian
claim about the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations Kant had
written that “intuitions without concepts are blind”. Hegel charges that Kant
did not draw sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist
claim, that he should have completely rethought the traditional distinction
between “what was given to the mind” and “what the mind did with the given.” By
contrast Hegel is confident that he has a theory of a “concrete universal,” concepts
that cannot be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations
of given particulars, because they are required for particulars to Hegel, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 368 AM
368 be apprehended in the first place. They are not originally dependent
on an immediate acquaintance with particulars; there is no such acquaintance.
Critics wonder if Hegel has much of a theory of particularity left, if he does
not claim rather that particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are
only interrelations of concepts, and in which the actual details of the
organization of the natural world and human history are deduced as conceptual
necessities in Hegel’s Encyclopedia. This interpretation of Hegel, that he
believes all entities are really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a
single underlying mental substance, and that this mind develops and posits
itself with some sort of conceptual necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a
term of art coined by Hermann Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half
of the twentieth century. It is a much-disputed reading. Such critics are
especially concerned with the implications of this issue in Hegel’s political
theory, where the great modern opposition between the state and the individual
seems subjected to this same logic, and the individual’s true individuality is
said to reside in and only in the political universal, the State. Thus, on the
one hand, Hegel’s political philosophy is often praised for its early
identification and analysis of a fundamental, new aspect of contemporary
life the categorically distinct realm of
political life in modernity, or the independence of the “State” from the social
world of private individuals engaged in competition and private association
“civil society”. But, on the other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion
of these domains in the State, or that individuals could only be said to be
free in allegiance to a State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most
criticized aspects of his philosophy. Finally, criticisms also frequently
target the underlying intention behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long
insistence on finding some basic unity among the many fragmented spheres of
modern thought and existence, and his demand that this unity be articulated in
a discursive account, that it not be merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated
in edifying speculation. PostHegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of
any such intimations of a whole for modern experience, and have argued that,
with the destruction of the premodern world, we simply have to content
ourselves with the disconnected, autonomous spheres of modern interests. In his
lecture courses these basic themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the
basic institutions of cultural history. History itself is treated as
fundamentally political history, and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major
epochs of political history are claimed to be as they were because of the
internal inadequacies of past epochs, all until some final political
semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art is treated equally
developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through “classical,” to the most
intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic subjectivity, romantic art. The
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody these themes in some of the most
controversial ways, since Hegel often treats religion and its development as a
kind of picture or accessible “representation” of his own views about the
relation of thought to being, the proper understanding of human finitude and
“infinity,” and the essentially social or communal nature of religious life.
This has inspired a characteristic debate among Hegel scholars, with some
arguing that Hegel’s appropriation of religion shows that his own themes are essentially
religious if an odd, pantheistic version of Christianity, while others argue
that he has so Hegelianized religious issues that there is little distinctively
religious left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that prominent in the
post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following his death, there
was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the history of law, on
political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the prominent academic
defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of these were
interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with traditional
Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This began to
change with the work of “young Hegelians” such as D. F. Strauss 180874,
Feuerbach 180472, Bruno Bauer 180982, and Arnold Ruge 180380, who emphasized
the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion,
rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary
political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the
productive activity of human spirit eventually focusing on labor rather than
intellectual and cultural life. Strauss himself characterized the fight as
between “left,” “center,” and “right” Hegelians, depending on whether one was
critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of
Hegelian Geist. The most famous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially
during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen
Jahrbücher 1844. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
369 AM
369 In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and
utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part
of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up
some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of
issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy.
The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were
Bosanquet, McTaggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in
many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be
a Hegelian claim for the “internally related” interconnection of all particulars
within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell waged a hugely
successful counterattack in the name of traditional empiricism and what would
be called “analytic philosophy” against such an enterprise and in this
tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel or what was left of the
historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions. In G.y, Hegel has continued to
influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes itself simply
called “Hegelian Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School, or “critical
theory” group especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. And he has been
extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a
brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel
in the 0s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty
and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but
his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human
selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices
and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism.
Hegelian themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in
“communitarianism” in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to
conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for
many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive
tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social
nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often
interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy.
heideggerianism: heideggerian implicaturum of “Nothing noths.” Grice
thought Heidegger was the greatest philosopher that ever lived. Heideggerianism:
Arendt, h. tuteed by Heidegger and Jaspers; fled to France in 3; and emigrated
in 1 to the United States, where she taught at various universities. Her major
works are The Origins of Totalitarianism 1, The Human Condition 8, Between Past
and Future 1, On Revolution 3, Crises of the Republic 2, and The Life of the
Mind 8. In Arendt’s view, for reasons established by Kant and deepened by
Nietzsche, there is a breach between being and thinking, one that cannot be
closed by thought. Understood as philosophizing or contemplation, thinking is a
form of egoism that isolates us from one another and our world. Despite Kant,
modernity remains mired in egoism, a condition compounded by the emergence of a
“mass” that consists of bodies with needs temporarily met by producing and
consuming and which demands governments that minister to these needs. In place
of thinking, laboring, and the administration of things now called democracy,
all of which are instrumental but futile as responses to the “thrown” quality
of our condition, Arendt proposed to those capable of it a mode of being,
political action, that she found in pronounced form in pre-Socratic Greece and
briefly but gloriously at the founding of the Roman and republics. Political action is initiation,
the making of beginnings that can be explained neither causally nor
teleologically. It is done in the space of appearances constituted by the
presence of other political actors whose re-sponses the telling of equally unpredictable stories
concerning one another’s actions
determine what actions are taken and give character to the acting
participants. In addition to the refined discernments already implied,
political action requires the courage to initiate one knows not what. Its
outcome is power; not over other people or things but mutual empowerment to
continue acting in concert and thereby to overcome egoism and achieve positive
freedom and humanity. Heidegger, Martin:
“the greatest philosopher that ever lived” – H. P. Grice. G. philosopher whose early
works contributed to phenomenology and existentialism e.g., Sartre and whose
later works paved the way to hermeneutics Gadamer and post-structuralism
Derrida and Foucault. Born in Messkirch in the Black Forest region, Heidegger
first trained to be a Jesuit, but switched to mathematics and philosophy in 1.
As an instructor at Freiburg , he worked with the founder of phenomenology,
Husserl. His masterwork, Sein und Zeit Being and Time, 7, was published while
he was teaching at Marburg . This work, in opposition to the preoccupation with
epistemology dominant at the time, focused on the traditional question of
metaphysics: What is the being of entities in general? Rejecting abstract
theoretical approaches to this question, Heidegger drew on Kierkegaard’s religious
individualism and the influential movement called life-philosophy Lebensphilosophie, then identified with
Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey to
develop a highly original account of humans as embedded in concrete situations
of action. Heidegger accepted Husserl’s chair at Freiburg in 8; in 3, having
been elected rector of the , he joined the Nazi party. Although he stepped down
as rector one year later, new evidence suggests complicity with the Nazis until
the end of the war. Starting in the late thirties, his writings started to
shift toward the “antihumanist” and “poetic” form of thinking referred to as
“later Heidegger.” Heidegger’s lifelong project was to answer the “question of
being” Seinsfrage. This question asks, concerning things in general rocks,
tools, people, etc., what is it to be an entity of these sorts? It is the
question of ontology first posed by ancient Grecian philosophers from
Anaximander to Aristotle. Heidegger holds, however, that philosophers starting
with Plato have gone astray in trying to answer this question because they have
tended to think of being as a property or essence enduringly present in things.
In other words, they have fallen into the “metaphysics of presence,” which
thinks of being as substance. What is overlooked in traditional metaphysics is
the background conditions that enable entities to show up as counting or
mattering in some specific way in the first place. In his early works,
Heidegger tries to bring this concealed dimension of things to light by recasting
the question of being: What is the meaning of being? Or, put differently, how
do entities come to show up as intelligible to us in some determinate way? And
this question calls for an analysis of the entity that has some prior
understanding of things: human existence or Dasein the G. word for “existence”
or “being-there,” used to refer to the structures of humans that make possible
an understanding of being. Heidegger’s claim is that Dasein’s pretheoretical or
“preontological” understanding of being, embodied in its everyday practices,
opens a “clearing” in which entities can show up as, say, tools, protons,
numbers, mental events, and so on. This historically unfolding clearing is what
the metaphysical tradition has overlooked. In order to clarify the conditions
that make possible an understanding of being, then, Being and Time begins with
an analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger notes that traditional interpretations of
human existence have been one-sided to the extent that they concentrate on our
ways of existing when we are engaged in theorizing and detached reflection. It
is this narrow focus on the spectator attitude that leads to the picture, found
in Descartes, of the self as a mind or subject representing material objects the so-called subjectobject model. In order
to bypass this traditional picture, Heidegger sets out to describe Dasein’s
“average everydayness,” i.e., our ordinary, prereflective agency when we are
caught up in the midst of practical affairs. The “phenomenology of
everydayness” is supposed to lead us to see the totality of human existence,
including our moods, our capacity for authentic individuality, and our full
range of involvements with the world and with others. The analytic of Dasein is
also an ontological hermeneutics to the extent that it provides an account of
how understanding in general is possible. The result of the analytic is a
portrayal of human existence that is in accord with what Heidegger regards as
the earliest Grecian experience of being as an emerging-into-presence physis:
to be human is to be a temporal event of self-manifestation that lets other
sorts of entities first come to “emerge and abide” in the world. From the
standpoint of this description, the traditional concept of substance whether mental or physical simply has no role to play in grasping
humans. Heidegger’s brilliant diagnoses or “de-structurings” of the tradition
suggest that the idea of substance arises only when the conditions making
entities possible are forgotten or concealed. Heidegger holds that there is no
pregiven human essence. Instead, humans, as self-interpreting beings, just are
what they make of themselves in the course of their active lives. Thus, as
everyday agency, Dasein is not an object with properties, but is rather the
“happening” of a life course “stretched out between birth and death.”
Understood as the “historicity” of a temporal movement or “becoming,” Dasein is
found to have three main “existentials” or basic structures shared by every
“existentiell” i.e., specific and local way of living. First, Dasein finds
itself thrown into a world not of its choosing, already delivered over to the
task of living out its life in a concrete context. This “facticity” of our
lives is revealed in the moods that let things matter to us in some way or
other e.g., the burdensome feelings of
concern that accompany being a parent in our culture. Second, as projection,
Dasein is always already taking some stand on its life by acting in the world.
Understood as agency, human existence is “ahead of itself” in two senses: 1 our
competent dealings with familiar situations sketch out a range of possibilities
for how things may turn out in the future, and 2 each of our actions is
contributing to shaping our lives as people of specific sorts. Dasein is futuredirected
in the sense that the ongoing fulfillment of possibilities in the course of
one’s active life constitutes one’s identity or being. To say that Dasein is
“being-toward-death” is to say that the stands we take our “understanding”
define our being as a totality. Thus, my actual ways of treating my children
throughout my life define my being as a parent in the end, regardless of what
good intentions I might have. Finally, Dasein is discourse in the sense that we
are always articulating or “addressing and
discussing” the entities that show up in
our concernful absorption in current situations. These three existentials
define human existence as a temporal unfolding. The unity of these dimensions being already in a world, ahead of itself,
and engaged with things Heidegger calls
care. This is what it means to say that humans are the entities whose being is
at issue for them. Taking a stand on our own being, we constitute our identity
through what we do. The formal structure of Dasein as temporality is made
concrete through one’s specific involvements in the world where ‘world’ is used
in the life-world sense in which we talk about the business world or the world
of academia. Dasein is the unitary phenomenon of being-in-the-world. A core
component of Heidegger’s early works is his description of how Dasein’s
practical dealings with equipment define the being of the entities that show up
in the world. In hammering in a workshop, e.g., what ordinarily shows up for us
is not a hammer-thing with properties, but rather a web of significance
relations shaped by our projects. Hammering is “in order to” join boards, which
is “for” building a bookcase, which is “for the sake of” being a person with a
neat study. The hammer is encountered in terms of its place in this holistic
context of functionality the
“ready-to-hand.” In other words, the being of the equipment its “ontological definition” consists of its relations to other equipment
and its actual use within the entire practical context. Seen from this
standpoint, the brute, meaningless objects assumed to be basic by the
metaphysical tradition the
“present-at-hand” can show up only when
there is a breakdown in our ordinary dealings with things, e.g., when the
hammer breaks or is missing. In this sense, the ready-to-hand is said to be
more primordial than the material objects treated as basic by the natural
sciences. It follows, then, that the being of entities in the world is
constituted by the framework of intelligibility or “disclosedness” opened by
Dasein’s practices. This clearing is truth in the original meaning of the
Grecian word aletheia, which Heidegger renders as ‘un-concealment’. But it
would be wrong to think that what is claimed here is that humans are initially
just given, and that they then go on to create a clearing. For, in Heidegger’s
view, our own being as agents of specific types is defined by the world into
which we are thrown: in my workshop, I can be a craftsman or an amateur, but
not a samurai paying court to a daimyo. Our identity as agents is made possible
by the context of shared forms of life and linguistic practices of a public
life-world. For the most part, we exist as the “they” das Man, participants in
the historically constituted “cohappening of a people” Volk. The embeddedness
of our existence in a cultural context explains our inveterate tendency toward
inauthenticity. As we become initiated into the practices of our community, we
are inclined to drift along with the crowd, doing what “one” does, enacting
stereotyped roles, and thereby losing our ability to seize on and define our
own lives. Such falling into public preoccupations Heidegger sees as a sign
that we are fleeing from the fact that we are finite beings who stand before
death understood as the culmination of our possibilities. When, through anxiety
and hearing the call of conscience, we face up to our being-toward-death, our
lives can be transformed. To be authentic is to clear-sightedly face up to
one’s responsibility for what one’s life is adding up to as a whole. And because
our lives are inseparable from our community’s existence, authenticity involves
seizing on the possibilities circulating in our shared “heritage” in order to
realize a communal “destiny.” Heidegger’s ideal of resolute “taking action” in
the current historical situation no doubt contributed to his leap into politics
in the 0s. According to his writings of that period, the ancient Grecians
inaugurated a “first beginning” for Western civilization, but centuries of
forgetfulness beginning with the Latinization of Grecian words have torn us
away from the primal experience of being rooted in that initial setting.
Heidegger hoped that, guided by the insights embodied in great works of art
especially Hölderlin’s poetry, National Socialism would help bring about a
world-rejuvenating “new beginning” comparable to the first beginning in ancient
Greece. Heidegger’s later writings attempt to fully escape the subjectivism he
sees dominating Western thought from its inception up to Nietzsche. “The Origin
of the Work of Art” 5, for example, shows how a great work of art such as a
Grecian temple, by shaping the world in which a people live, constitutes the
kinds of people that can live in that world. An Introduction to Metaphysics 5
tries to recover the Grecian experience of humans as beings whose activities of
gathering and naming logos are above all a response to what is more than human.
The later writings emphasize that which resists all human mastery and
comprehension. Such terms as ‘nothingness’, ‘earth’, and ‘mystery’ suggest that
what shows itself to us always depends on a background of what does not show
itself, what remains concealed. Language comes to be understood as the medium
through which anything, including the human, first becomes accessible and
intelligible. Because language is the source of all intelligibility, Heidegger
says that humans do not speak, but rather language speaks us an idea that became central to
poststructuralist theories. In his writings after the war, Heidegger replaces
the notions of resoluteness and political activism with a new ideal of
letting-be or releasement Gelassenheit, a stance characterized by meditative
thinking, thankfulness for the “gift” of being, and openness to the silent
“call” of language. The technological “enframing” Gestell of our age encountering everything as a standing reserve
on hand for our use is treated not as
something humans do, but instead as a manifestation of being itself. The “anti-humanism”
of these later works is seen in the description of technology the mobilization
of everything for the sole purpose of greater efficiency as an epochal event in
the “history of being,” a way things have come-into-their-own Ereignis rather
than as a human accomplishment. The history or “sending” Geschick of being
consists of epochs that have all gone increasingly astray from the original
beginning inaugurated by the pre-Socratics. Since human willpower alone cannot
bring about a new epoch, technology cannot be ended by our efforts. But a
non-technological way of encountering things is hinted at in a description of a
jug as a fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and Heidegger reflects on
forms of poetry that point to a new, non-metaphysical way of experiencing
being. Through a transformed relation to language and art, and by abandoning
“onto-theology” the attempt to ground all entities in one supreme entity, we
might prepare ourselves for a transformed way of understanding being.
hellenistic philosophy:
“Once the Romans defeated Greece, at Oxford we stop talking of ‘Greek’
philosophy, but ‘Hellenistic’ philosophy instead – since most Greeks were
brought to Rome as slaves to teach philosophy to their children” – Grice. Vide
“Roman philosophy” – “Not everybody knows all these Roman philosophers, so
that’s a good thing.” – H. P. Grice. Hellenistic philosophy is the
philosophical systems of the Hellenistic age 32330 B.C., although 31187 B.C.
better defines it as a philosophical era, notably Epicureanism, Stoicism, and
Skepticism. These all emerged in the generation after Aristotle’s death 322
B.C., and dominated philosophical debate until the first century B.C., during
which there were revivals of traditional Platonism and of Aristotelianism. The
age was one in which much of the eastern Mediterranean world absorbed Grecian
culture was “Hellenized,” hence “Hellenistic”, and recruits to philosophy
flocked from this region to Athens, which remained the center of philosophical
activity until 87 B.C. Then the Roman sack of Athens drove many philosophers
into exile, and neither the schools nor the styles of philosophy that had grown
up there ever fully recovered. Very few philosophical writings survive intact
from the period. Our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophers depends mainly on
later doxography, on the Roman writers Lucretius and Cicero both mid-first
century B.C., and on what we learn from the schools’ critics in later
centuries, e.g. Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch. ’Skeptic’, a term not actually
current before the very end of the Hellenistic age, serves as a convenient label
to characterize two philosophical movements. The first is the New Academy: the
school founded by Plato, the Academy, became in this period a largely
dialectical one, conducting searching critiques of other schools’ doctrines
without declaring any of its own, beyond perhaps the assertion however guarded
that nothing could be known and the accompanying recommendation of “suspension
of judgment” epoche. The nature and vivacity of Stoicism owed much to its
prolonged debates with the New Academy. The founder of this Academic phase was
Arcesilaus school head c.268 c.241; its most revered and influential
protagonist was Carneades school head in the mid-second century; and its most
prestigious voice was that of Cicero 10643 B.C., whose highly influential
philosophical works were written mainly from a New Academic stance. But by the
early first century B.C. the Academy was drifting back to a more doctrinal
stance, and in the later part of the century it was largely eclipsed by a
second “skeptic” movement, Pyrrhonism. This was founded by Aenesidemus, a
pioneering skeptic despite his claim to be merely reviving the philosophy of
Pyrrho, a philosophical guru of the early Hellenistic period. His
neo-Pyrrhonism survives today mainly through the writings of Sextus Empiricus
second century A.D., an adherent of the school who, strictly speaking,
represents its post-Hellenistic phase. The Peripatos, Aristotle’s school,
officially survived throughout the era, but it is not regarded as a
distinctively “Hellenistic” movement. Despite the eminence of Aristotle’s first
successor, Theophrastus school head 322287, it thereafter fell from prominence,
its fortunes only reviving around the mid-first century B.C. It is disputed how
far the other Hellenistic philosophers were even aware of Aristotle’s
treatises, which should not in any case be regarded as a primary influence on
them. Each school had a location in Athens to which it could draw pupils. The
Epicurean school was a relatively private institution, its “Garden” outside the
city walls housing a close-knit philosophical community. The Stoics took their
name from the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Colonnade” in central Athens where
they gathered. The Academics were based in the Academy, a public grove just
outside the city. Philosophers were public figures, a familiar sight around
town. Each school’s philosophical identity was further clarified by its
absolute loyalty to the name of its founder
respectively Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, and Plato and by the polarities that developed in interschool
debates. Epicureanism is diametrically opposed on most issues to Stoicism.
Academic Skepticism provides another antithesis to Stoicism, not through any
positions of its own it had none, but through its unflagging critical campaign
against every Stoic thesis. It is often said that in this age the old Grecian
political institution of the city-state had broken down, and that the
Hellenistic philosophies were an answer to the resulting crisis of values.
Whether or not there is any truth in this, it remains clear that moral concerns
were now much less confined to the individual city-state than previously, and
that at an extreme the boundaries had been pushed back to include all mankind
within the scope of an individual’s moral obligations. Our “affinity” oikeiosis
to all mankind is an originally Stoic doctrine that acquired increasing
currency with other schools. This attitude partly reflects the weakening of
national and cultural boundaries in the Hellenistic period, as also in the
Roman imperial period that followed it. The three recognized divisions of
philosophy were ethics, logic, and physics. In ethics, the central objective
was to state and defend an account of the “end” telos, the moral goal to which
all activity was subordinated: the Epicureans named pleasure, the Stoics
conformity with nature. Much debate centered on the semimythical figure of the
wise man, whose conduct in every conceivable circumstance was debated by all
schools. Logic in its modern sense was primarily a Stoic concern, rejected as
irrelevant by the Epicureans. But Hellenistic logic included epistemology,
where the primary focus of interest was the “criterion of truth,” the ultimate
yardstick against which all judgments could be reliably tested. Empiricism was
a surprisingly uncontroversial feature of Hellenistic theories: there was
little interest in the Platonic-Aristotelian idea that knowledge in the strict
sense is non-sensory, and the debate between dogmatists and Skeptics was more
concerned with the question whether any proposed sensory criterion was
adequate. Both Stoics and Epicureans attached especial importance to prolepsis,
the generic notion of a thing, held to be either innate or naturally acquired
in a way that gave it a guaranteed veridical status. Physics saw an opposition
between Epicurean atomism, with its denial of divine providence, and the Stoic
world-continuum, imbued with divine rationality. The issue of determinism was
also placed on the philosophical map: Epicurean morality depends on the denial
of both physical and logical determinism, whereas Stoic morality is compatible
with, indeed actually requires, the deterministic causal nexus through which
providence operates.
helmholtz: philosopher known for groundbreaking work in the
philosophy of perception. Formally trained as a physician, he distinguished
himself in physics in 1848 as a codiscoverer of the law of conservation of
energy, and by the end of his life was perhaps the most influential figure in
G. physical research. Philosophically, his most important influence was on the
study of space. Intuitionist psychologists held that the geometrical structure
of three-dimensional space was given directly in sensation by innate
physiological mechanisms; Helmholtz brought this theory to severe empirical
trials and argued, on the contrary, that our knowledge of space consists of
inferences from accumulated experience. On the mathematical side, he attacked
Kant’s view that Euclidean geometry is the a priori form of outer intuition by
showing that it is possible to have visual experience of non-Euclidean space
“On the Origins and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” 1870. His crucial insight
was that empirical geometry depends on physical assumptions about the behavior
of measuring instruments. This inspired the view of Poincaré and logical
empiricism that the empirical content of geometry is fixed by physical
definitions, and made possible Einstein’s use of non-Euclidean geometry in
physics.
helvétius: philosopher
prominent in the formative phases of eighteenth-century materialism in France.
His De l’esprit 1758 was widely discussed internationally, but condemned by
the of Paris and burned by the
government. Helvétius attempted to clarify his doctrine in his posthumously
published De l’homme. Following Locke’s criticism of the innate ideas,
Helvétius stressed the function of experience in our acquisition of knowledge.
In accord with the doctrines of d’Holbach, Condillac, and La Mettrie, the
materialist Helvétius regarded the sensations as the basis of all our
knowledge. Only by comparison, abstraction, and combination of sensations do we
reach the level of concepts. Peculiar to Helvétius, however, is the stress on
the social determinations of our knowledge. Specific interests and passions are
the starting point of all our striving for knowledge. Egoism is the spring of
our desires and actions. The civil laws of the enlightened state enabled egoism
to be transformed into social competition and thereby diverted toward public
benefits. Like his materialist contemporary d’Holbach and later Condorcet,
Helvétius sharply criticized the social function of the church. Priests, he
claimed, provided society with wrong moral ideas. He demanded a thorough reform
of the educational system for the purpose of individual and social emancipation.
In contrast to the teachings of Rousseau, Helvétius praised the further
development of science, art, and industry as instruments for the historical
progress of mankind. The ideal society consists of enlightened because
well-educated citizens living in comfortable and even moderately luxurious
circumstances. All people should participate in the search for truth, by means
of public debates and discussions. Truth is equated with the moral good.
Helvétius had some influence on Marxist historical materialism.
hempel: eminent
philosopher of science associated with the Vienna Circle of logical empiricist
philosophers in the early 0s, before his emigration to the United States;
thereafter he became one of the most influential philosophers of science of his
time, largely through groundbreaking work on the logical analysis of the
concepts of confirmation and scientific explanation. Hempel received his
doctorate under Reichenbach at the of
Berlin in 4 with a dissertation on the logical analysis of probability. He
studied with Carnap at the of Vienna in
930, where he participated in the “protocol-sentence debate” concerning the
observational basis of scientific knowledge raging within the Vienna Circle
between Moritz Schlick 26 and Otto Neurath 25. Hempel was attracted to the
“radical physicalism” articulated by Neurath and Carnap, which denied the
foundational role of immediate experience and asserted that all statements of
the total language of science including observation reports or
protocol-sentences can be revised as science progresses. This led to Hempel’s
first major publication, “On the Logical Positivists’ Theory of Truth” 5. He
moved to the United States to work with Carnap at the of Chicago in 738. He also taught at
Queens and Yale before his long career
at Princeton 55. In the 0s he collaborated with his friends Olaf Helmer and
Paul Oppenheim on a celebrated series of papers, the most influential of which
are “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” 5 and “Studies in the Logic of
Explanation” 8, coauthored with Oppenheim. The latter paper articulated the
deductive-nomological model, which characterizes scientific explanations as
deductively valid arguments proceeding from general laws and initial conditions
to the fact to be explained, and served as the basis for all future work on the
subject. Hempel’s papers on explanation and confirmation and also related
topics such as concept formation, criteria of meaningfulness, and scientific
theories were collected together in Aspects of Scientific Explanation 5, one of
the most important works in postwar philosophy of science. He also published a
more popular, but extremely influential introduction to the field, Philosophy
of Natural Science 6. Hempel and Kuhn became colleagues at Princeton in the 0s.
Another fruitful collaboration ensued, as a result of which Hempel moved away
from the Carnapian tradition of logical analysis toward a more naturalistic and
pragmatic conception of science in his later work. As he himself explains,
however, this later turn can also be seen as a return to a similarly
naturalistic conception Neurath had earlier defended within the Vienna
Circle.
Heno-theism, allegiance to one supreme
deity while conceding existence to others; also described as monolatry,
incipient monotheism, or practical monotheism. It occupies a middle ground
between polytheism and radical monotheism, which denies reality to all gods
save one. It has been claimed that early Judaism passed through a henotheistic
phase, acknowledging other Middle Eastern deities albeit condemning their
worship, en route to exclusive recognition of Yahweh. But the concept of
progress from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism is a rationalizing
construct, and cannot be supposed to capture the complex development of any
historical religion, including that of ancient Israel.
Henry de Ghent: philosopher. After serving
as a church official at Tournai and Brugge, he taught theology at Paris from
1276. His major writings were “Summa quaestionum ordinariarum” and “Quodlibeta.”
He was the leading representative of the neoAugustinian movement at Paris in
the final quarter of the thirteenth century. His theory of knowledge combines
Aristotelian elements with Augustinian illuminationism. Heavily dependent on
Avicenna for his view of the reality enjoyed by essences of creatures esse
essentiae from eternity, he rejected both real distinction and real identity of
essence and existence in creatures, and defended their intentional distinction.
He also rejected a real distinction between the soul and its powers and
rejected the purely potential character of prime matter. He defended the
duality of substantial form in man, the unicity of form in other material
substances, and the primacy of will in the act of choice.
heraclitus fl. c.500 B.C., Grice
on Heraclitus: They told me,
Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,/They brought me bitter news to hear and
bitter tears to shed./I wept as I remembered how often you and I/Had tired the
sun with talking and sent him down the sky./And now that thou art lying, my
dear old Carian guest,/A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,/Still
are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;/For Death, he taketh all
away, but them he cannot take. Grecian philosopher. A transition figure between the
Milesian philosophers and the later pluralists, Heraclitus stressed unity in
the world of change. He follows the Milesians in positing a series of cyclical
transformations of basic stuffs of the world; for instance, he holds that fire
changes to water and earth in turn. Moreover, he seems to endorse a single
source or arche of natural substances, namely fire. But he also observes that
natural transformations necessarily involve contraries such as hot and cold,
wet and dry. Indeed, without the one contrary the other would not exist, and
without contraries the cosmos would not exist. Hence strife is justice, and war
is the father and king of all. In the conflict of opposites there is a hidden
harmony that sustains the world, symbolized by the tension of a bow or the attunement
of a lyre. Scholars disagree about whether Heraclitus’s chief view is that
there is a one in the many or that process is reality. Clearly the underlying
unity of phenomena is important for him. But he also stresses the transience of
physical substances and the importance of processes and qualities. Moreover,
his underlying source of unity seems to be a law of process and opposition;
thus he seems to affirm both the unity of phenomena and the reality of process.
Criticizing his predecessors such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes for doing
research without insight, Heraclitus claims that we should listen to the logos,
which teaches that all things are one. The logos, a principle of order and
knowledge, is common to all, but the many remain ignorant of it, like
sleepwalkers unaware of the reality around them. All things come to pass
according to the logos; hence it is the law of change, or at least its
expression. Heraclitus wrote a single book, perhaps organized into sections on
cosmology, politics and ethics, and theology. Apparently, however, he did not
provide a continuous argument but a series of epigrammatic remarks meant to
reveal the nature of reality through oracular and riddling language. Although
he seems to have been a recluse without immediate disciples, he may have
stirred Parmenides to his reaction against contraries. In the late fifth
century B.C. Cratylus of Athens preached a radical Heraclitean doctrine
according to which everything is in flux and there is accordingly no knowledge
of the world. This version of Heracliteanism influenced Plato’s view of the
sensible world and caused Plato and Aristotle to attribute a radical doctrine
of flux to Heraclitus. Democritus imitated Heraclitus’s ethical sayings, and in
Hellenistic times the Stoics appealed to him for their basic principles.
herbart: philosopher who
significantly contributed to psychology and the theory of education. Rejecting
the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, he attempted to establish a form of
psychology founded on experience. The task of philosophy is the analysis of
concepts given in ordinary experience. Logic must clarify these concepts,
Metaphysics should correct them, while Aesthetics and Ethics are to complement
them by an analysis of values. Herbart advocated a form of determinism in
psychology and ethics. The laws that govern psychological processes are
identical with those that govern the heavens. He subordinated ethics to
aesthetics, arguing that our moral values originate from certain immediate and
involuntary judgments of like and dislike. The five basic ideas of morality are
inner freedom, perfection, benevolence, law, and justice or equity. Herbart’s
view of education that it should aim at
producing individuals who possess inner freedom and strength of character was highly influential in nineteenth-century
Germany.
herder: philosopher, an
intellectual and literary figure central to the transition from the G.
Enlightenment to Romanticism. He was born in East Prussia and received an early
classical education. About 1762, while studying theology at the of Königsberg, he came under the influence of
Kant. He also began a lifelong friendship with Hamann, who especially
stimulated his interests in the interrelations among language, culture, and
history. After ordination as a Lutheran minister in 1765, he began his
association with the Berlin Academy, earning its prestigious “prize” for his
“Essay on the Origin of Language” 1772. In 1776 he was appointed
Generalsuperintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar through the intercession
of Goethe. He was then able to focus his intellectual and literary powers on
most of the major issues of his time. Of particular note are his contributions
to psychology in Of the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul 1778; to the
philosophy of history and culture in Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of
Mankind 178491, perhaps his most influential work; and to philosophy in
Understanding and Experience 1799, which contains his extensive Metakritik of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Herder was an intellectual maverick and
provocateur, writing when the Enlightenment conception of reason was in decline
but before its limited defense by Kant or its total rejection by Romanticism
had become entrenched in the G.-speaking world. Rejecting any rational system,
Herder’s thought is best viewed as a mosaic of certain ideas that reemerge in
various guises throughout his writings. Because of these features, Herder’s
thought has been compared with that of Rousseau. Herder’s philosophy can be
described as involving elements of naturalism, organicism, and vitalism. He
rejected philosophical explanations, appealing to the supernatural or divine,
such as the concept of the “immortal soul” in psychology, a “divine origin” of
language, or “providence” in history. He sought to discern an underlying
primordial force to account for the psychological unity of the various
“faculties.” He viewed this natural tendency toward “organic formation” as also
operative in language and culture, and as ultimately manifested in the dynamic
development of the various cultures in the form of a universal history.
Finally, he often wrote in a way that suggested the dynamic process of life
itself as the basic metaphor undergirding his thought. His influence can be
traced through Humboldt into later linguistics and through Schelling and Hegel
in the philosophy of history and later G. historicism. He anticipated elements
of vitalism in Schopenhauer and Bergson.
interpretatum:
h
“While ‘heremneia’ sounds poetic and sweet, ‘interpretatio’ sounds thomistic
and rough!” – H. P. Grice. “Plus ‘hermeneia is metaphorical.’ hermeneia: hermeneutics,
the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that
starts with questions of interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly with
interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance in its
historical development and finally became a philosophical position in
twentieth-century G. philosophy. There are two competing positions in
hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Dilthey and sees interpretation or
Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows
Heidegger and sees it as an “ontological event,” an interaction between
interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood.
Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native “really”
meant is a typical problem for the first approach. The interpretation of the
law provides an example for the second view, since the process of applying the
law inevitably transforms it. In general, hermeneutics is the analysis of this
process and its conditions of possibility. It has typically focused on the
interpretation of ancient texts and distant peoples, cases where the
unproblematic everyday understanding and communication cannot be assumed.
Schleiermacher’s analysis of understanding and expression related to texts and
speech marks the beginning of hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific
methodology. This emphasis on methodology continues in nineteenth-century
historicism and culminates in Dilthey’s attempt to ground the human sciences in
a theory of interpretation, understood as the imaginative but publicly
verifiable reenactment of the subjective experiences of others. Such a method
of interpretation reveals the possibility of an objective knowledge of human
beings not accessible to empiricist inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology
for the human sciences. One result of the analysis of interpretation in the
nineteenth century was the recognition of “the hermeneutic circle,” first developed
by Schleiermacher. The circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of
parts to the whole: the interpretation of each part is dependent on the
interpretation of the whole. But interpretation is circular in a stronger
sense: if every interpretation is itself based on interpretation, then the
circle of interpretation, even if it is not vicious, cannot be escaped.
Twentieth-century hermeneutics advanced by Heidegger and Gadamer radicalize
this notion of the hermeneutic circle, seeing it as a feature of all knowledge
and activity. Hermeneutics is then no longer the method of the human sciences
but “universal,” and interpretation is part of the finite and situated
character of all human knowing. “Philosophical hermeneutics” therefore
criticizes Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology and Enlightenment
universalism in ethics, seeing science as a cultural practice and prejudices or
prejudgments as ineliminable in all judgments. Positively, it emphasizes
understanding as continuing a historical tradition, as well as dialogical
openness, in which prejudices are challenged and horizons broadened.
hermetism, also hermeticism, a
philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that
human salvation depends on revealed knowledge gnosis of God and of the human
and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian
version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth
century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Grecian and Latin is a
product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the same literature
exist in Grecian, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of
a discovery made at Nag Hammadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record
hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the same period but
surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy,
magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early
Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iamblichus, pagan
philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic
figure, Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had
its first large effects in the Latin West among the twelfth-century Platonists
of Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the
Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of
Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Grecian discourses in the main body
of the Corpus Hermeticum as distinct from the many Grecian fragments preserved
by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino. Ficino was willing to move so quickly to
Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the “ancient
theology” prisca theologia, a tradition of pagan revelation that ran parallel
to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through Plotinus
and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he called the
Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which he theorized
later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original motivation. The
Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance, when Giovanni
Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples,
Symphorien Champier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco Patrizi, and
others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed Grecian
Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the nineteenth
century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline in the
reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614 that
the Grecian Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of primeval
Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion with most
Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of the
ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures even
later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science, so
Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd,
whose opponents Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi turned away from the Hermetica and
similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth century,
only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom, but he
was then rediscovered by G. students of Christianity and Hellenistic religions,
especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 4. The ancient
Hermetica are now read in the 654 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J.
Festugière.
Herzen: philosopher, he moved in his
philosophy of history from an early Hegelian rationalism to a “philosophy of
contingency,” stressing the “whirlwind of chances” in nature and in human life
and the “tousled improvisation” of the historical process. He rejected
determinism, emphasizing the “phenomenological fact” of the experienced “sense
of freedom.” Anticipating the Dostoevsky of the “Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor,” he offered an original analysis of the “escape from freedom” and
the cleaving to moral and political authority, and sketched a curiously
contemporary-sounding “emotivist” ethical theory. After 1848, disillusioned
with “bourgeois” Europe and its “selfenclosed individualism,” but equally
disillusioned with what he had come to see as the bourgeois ideal of many
European socialists, Herzen turned to the Russian peasant and the peasant
village commune as offering the best hope for a humane development of society.
In this “Russian socialism” he anticipated a central doctrine of the Russian
populists of the 1870s. Herzen stood alone in resisting the common tendency of
such otherwise different thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, and J. S. Mill to
undervalue the historical present, to overvalue the historical future, and to
treat actual persons as means in the service of remote, merely possible
historical ends. Herzen’s own central emphasis fell powerfully and consistently
on the freedom, independence, and non-instrumentalizable value of living
persons. And he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries that there are
no future persons, that it is only in the present that free human individuals
live and move and have their being.
heuristics, a rule or
solution adopted to reduce the complexity of computational tasks, thereby
reducing demands on resources such as time, memory, and attention. If an
algorithm is a procedure yielding a correct solution to a problem, then a
heuristic procedure may not reach a solution even if there is one, or may
provide an incorrect answer. The reliability of heuristics varies between
domains; the resulting biases are predictable, and provide information about
system design. Chess, for example, is a finite game with a finite number of
possible positions, but there is no known algorithm for finding the optimal
move. Computers and humans both employ heuristics in evaluating intermediate
moves, relying on a few significant cues to game quality, such as safety of the
king, material balance, and center control. The use of these criteria
simplifies the problem, making it computationally tractable. They are heuristic
guides, reliable but limited in success. There is no guarantee that the result
will be the best move or even good. They are nonetheless satisfactory for
competent chess. Work on human judgment indicates a similar moral. Examples of
judgmental infelicities support the view that human reasoning systematically
violates standards for statistical reasoning, ignoring base rates, sample size,
and correlations. Experimental results suggest that humans utilize judgmental
heuristics in gauging probabilities, such as representativeness, or the degree
to which an individual or event resembles a prototypical member of a category.
Such heuristics produce reasonable judgments in many cases, but are of limited
validity when measured by a Bayesian standard. Judgmental heuristics are biased
and subject to systemic errors. Experimental support for the importance of
these heuristics depends on cases in which subjects deviate from the normative
standard.
habitus:
hexis
Grecian, from hexo, ‘to have’, ‘to be disposed’, a good or bad condition,
disposition, or state. The traditional rendering, ‘habit’ Latin habitus, is
misleading, for it tends to suggest the idea of an involuntary and merely
repetitious pattern of behavior. A hexis is rather a state of character or of
mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain
way. The term acquired a quasi-technical status after Aristotle advanced the
view that hexis is the genus of virtue, both moral and intellectual. In the
Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes hexeis from passions pathe and faculties
dunamis of the soul. If a man fighting in the front ranks feels afraid when he
sees the enemy approaching, he is undergoing an involuntary passion. His
capacity to be affected by fear on this or other occasions is part of his
makeup, one of his faculties. If he chooses to stay where his commanders placed
him, this is due to the hexis or state of character we call courage. Likewise,
one who is consistently good at identifying what is best for oneself can be
said to possess a hexis called prudence. Not all states and dispositions are
commendable. Cowardice and stupidity are also hexeis. Both in the sense of
‘state’ and of ‘possession’ hexis plays a role in Aristotle’s Categories.
tisberi -- Heytesbury: w. also
called Hentisberus, Hentisberi, Tisberi before 1313c.1372, English philosopher
and chancellor of Oxford . He wrote Sophismata “Sophisms”, Regulae solvendi
sophismata “Rules for Solving Sophisms”, and De sensu composito et diviso “On
the Composite and Divided Sense”. Other works are doubtfully attributed to him.
Heytesbury belonged to the generation immediately after Thomas Bradwardine and
Kilvington, and was among the most significant members of the Oxford
Calculators, important in the early developemnt of physics. Unlike Kilvington
but like Bradwardine, he appealed to mathematical calculations in addition to
logical and conceptual analysis in the treatment of change, motion,
acceleration, and other physical notions. His Regulae includes perhaps the most
influential treatment of the liar paradox in the Middle Ages. Heytesbury’s work
makes widespread use of “imaginary” thought experiments assuming physical
impossibilities that are yet logically consistent. His influence was especially
strong in Italy in the fifteenth century, where his works were studied widely
and commented on many times.
hierarchy, a division of mathematical
objects into subclasses in accordance with an ordering that reflects their
complexity. Around the turn of the century, analysts interested in the
“descriptive set theory” of the real numbers defined and studied two systems of
classification for sets of reals, the Borel (due to Emil Borel) and the G
hierarchies. In the 1940s, logicians interested in recursion and definability
(most importantly, Stephen Kleene) introduced and studied other hierarchies
(the arithmetic, the hyperarithmetic, and the analytical hierarchies) of reals
(identified with sets of natural numbers) and of sets of reals; the relations
between this work and the earlier work were made explicit in the 1950s by J.
Addison. Other sorts of hierarchies have been introduced in other corners of
logic. All these so-called hierarchies have at least this in common: they
divide a class of mathematical objects into subclasses subject to a natural
well-founded ordering (e.g., by subsethood) that reflects the complexity (in a
sense specific to the hierarchy under consideration) of the objects they
contain. What follows describes several hierarchies from the study of
definability. (For more historical and mathematical information see Descriptive
Set Theory by Y. Moschovakis, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980.) (1)
Hierarchies of formulas. Consider a formal language L with quantifiers ‘E’ and
‘D’. Given a set B of formulas in L, we inductively define a hierarchy that
treats the members of B as “basic.” Set P0 % S0 % B. Suppose sets Pn and Sn of
formulas have been defined. Let Pn!1 % the set of all formulas of the form Q1u1
. . . Qmumw when u1, . . . , um are distinct variables, Q1, . . . , Qm are all
‘E’, m M 1, and w 1 Sn. Let Sn+1 % the set of all formulas of that form for Q1,
. . . , Qm all ‘D’, and w 1 Pn. Here are two such hierarchies for languages of
arithmetic. Take the logical constants to be truthfunctions, ‘E’ and ‘D’. (i)
Let L0 % the first-order language of arithmetic, based on ‘%’, a two-place
predicate-constant ‘‹’, an individual-constant for 0, functionconstants for
successor, addition, and multiplication; ‘first-order’ means that bound
variables are all first-order (ranging over individuals); we’ll allow free
second-order variables (ranging over properties or sets of individuals). Let B
% the set of bounded formulas, i.e. those formed from atomic formulas using
connectives and bounded quantification: if w is bounded so are Eu(u ‹ t / w)
and Du(u ‹ t & w). (ii) Let L1 % the second-order language of arithmetic
(formed from L0 by allowing bound second-order variables); let B % the set of
formulas in which no second-order variable is bound, and take all u1, . . . ,
um as above to be second-order variables. (2) Hierarchies of definable sets.
(i) The Arithmetic Hierarchy. For a set of natural numbers (call such a thing
‘a real’) A : A 1 P0 n [ or S0 n ] if and only if A is defined over the
standard model of arithmetic (i.e., with the constant for 0 assigned to 0,
etc., and with the first-order variables ranging over the natural numbers) by a
formula of L0 in Pn [respectively Sn] as described in (1.i). Set D0 n % P0 n
Thus: In fact, all these inclusions are proper. This hierarchy classifies the
reals simple enough to be defined by arithmetic formulas. Example: ‘Dy x % y !
y’ defines the set even of even natural numbers; the formula 1 S1, so even 1 S0
1; even is also defined by a formula in P1; so even 1 P0 1, giving even 1 D0 1.
In fact, S0 1 % the class of recursively enumerable reals, and D0 1 % the class
of recursive reals. The classification of reals under the arithmetic hierarchy
reflects complexity of defining formulas; it differs from classification in
terms of a notion of degree of unsolvability, that reflecting a notion of
comparative computational complexity; but there are connections between these
classifications. The Arithmetic Hierarchy extends to sets of reals (using a
free second-order variable in defining sentences). Example: ‘Dx (Xx & Dy y
% x ! x)’ 1 S1 and defines the set of those reals with an even number; so that
set 1 S0 1.The Analytical Hierarchy. Given a real A : A 1 P1 n [S1 1] if and
only if A is defined (over the standard model of arithmetic with second-order
variables ranging over all sets of natural numbers) by a formula of L1 in Pn
(respectively Sn) as described in (1.ii); D1 n % P1 n 3 S1 n. Similarly for a
set of reals. The inclusions pictured above carry over, replacing superscripted
0’s by 1’s. This classifies all reals and sets of reals simple enough to have
analytical (i.e., second-order arithmetic) definitions.The subscripted ‘n’ in
‘P0 n’, etc., ranged over natural numbers. But the Arithmetic Hierarchy is
extended “upward” into the transfinite by the ramified-analytical hierarchy.
Let R0 % the class of all arithmetical reals. For an ordinal a let Ra!1 % the
class of all sets of reals definable by formulas of L1 in which second-order
variables range only over reals in Ra – this constraint imposes ramification.
For a limit-ordinal l, let Rl % UaThe above hierarchies arise in arithmetic.
Similar hierarchies arise in pure set theory; e.g. by transferring the “process”
that produced the ramified analytical hierarchy to pure set theory we obtain
the constructible hierarchy, defined by Gödel in his 1939 monograph on the
continuum hypothesis.
Grice’s formalists: Hilbert, D. – G.
mathematician and philosopher of mathematics. Born in Königsberg, he also
studied and served on the faculty there, accepting Weber’s chair in mathematics
at Göttingen in 1895. He made important contributions to many different areas
of mathematics and was renowned for his grasp of the entire discipline. His
more philosophical work was divided into two parts. The focus of the first,
which occupied approximately ten years beginning in the early 1890s, was the
foundations of geometry and culminated in his celebrated Grundlagen der
Geometrie (1899). This is a rich and complex work that pursues a variety of
different projects simultaneously. Prominent among these is one whose aim is to
determine the role played in geometrical reasoning by principles of continuity.
Hilbert’s interest in this project was rooted in Kantian concerns, as is
confirmed by the inscription, in the Grundlagen, of Kant’s synopsis of his
critical philosophy: “Thus all human knowledge begins with intuition, goes from
there to concepts and ends with ideas.” Kant believed that the continuous could
not be represented in intuition and must therefore be regarded as an idea of
pure reason – i.e., as a device playing a purely regulative role in the
development of our geometrical knowledge (i.e., our knowledge of the spatial
manifold of sensory experience). Hilbert was deeply influenced by this view of
Kant’s and his work in the foundations of geometry can be seen, in large part,
as an attempt to test it by determining whether (or to what extent) pure
geometry can be developed without appeal to principles concerning the nature of
the continuous. To a considerable extent, Hilbert’s work confirmed Kant’s view
– showing, in a manner more precise than any Kant had managed, that appeals to
the continuous can indeed be eliminated from much of our geometrical reasoning.
The same basic Kantian orientation also governed the second phase of Hilbert’s
foundational work, where the focus was changed from geometry to arithmetic and
analysis. This is the phase during which Hilbert’s Program was developed. This
project began to take shape in the 1917 essay “Axiomatisches Denken.” (The 1904
paper “Über die Grundlagen der Logik und Arithmetik,” which turned away from
geometry and toward arithmetic, does not yet contain more than a glimmer of the
ideas that would later become central to Hilbert’s proof theory.) It reached
its philosophically most mature form in the 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,”
the 1926 address “Die Grundlagen der Mathematik,” and the somewhat more popular
1930 paper “Naturerkennen und Logik.” (From a technical as opposed to a
philosophical vantage, the classical statement is probably the 1922 essay
“Neubegründung der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung.”) The key elements of the
program are (i) a distinction between real and ideal propositions and methods
of proof or derivation; (ii) the idea that the so-called ideal methods, though,
again, playing the role of Kantian regulative devices (as Hilbert explicitly
and emphatically declared in the 1925 paper), are nonetheless indispensable for
a reasonably efficient development of our mathematical knowledge; and (iii) the
demand that the reliability of the ideal methods be established by real (or
finitary) means. As is well known, Hilbert’s Program soon came under heavy
attack from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (especially the second), which have
commonly been regarded as showing that the third element of Hilbert’s Program
(i.e., the one calling for a finitary proof of the reliability of the ideal
systems of classical mathematics) cannot be carried out. Hilbert’s Program, a
proposal in the foundations of mathematics, named for its developer, the German
mathematician-philosopher David Hilbert, who first formulated it fully in the
1920s. Its aim was to justify classical mathematics (in particular, classical
analysis and set theory), though only as a Kantian regulative device and not as
descriptive science. The justification thus presupposed a division of classical
mathematics into two parts: the part (termed real mathematics by Hilbert) to be
regulated, and the part (termed ideal mathematics by Hilbert) serving as
regulator. Real mathematics was taken to consist of the meaningful, true
propositions of mathematics and their justifying proofs. These proofs –
commonly known as finitary proofs – were taken to be of an especially
elementary epistemic character, reducing, ultimately, to quasi-perceptual
intuitions concerning finite assemblages of perceptually intuitable signs
regarded from the point of view of their shapes and sequential arrangement.
Ideal mathematics, on the other hand, was taken to consist of sentences that do
not express genuine propositions and derivations that do not constitute genuine
proofs or justifications. The epistemic utility of ideal sentences (typically
referred to as ideal propositions, though, as noted above, they do not express
genuine propositions at all) and proofs was taken to derive not from their
meaning and/or evidentness, but rather from the role they play in some formal
algebraic or calculary scheme intended to identify or locate the real truths.
It is thus a metatheoretic function of the formal or algebraic properties
induced on those propositions and proofs by their positions in a larger
derivational scheme. Hilbert’s ideal mathematics was thus intended to bear the
same relation to his real mathematics as Kant’s faculty of pure reason was
intended to bear to his faculty of understanding. It was to be a regulative
device whose proper function is to guide and facilitate the development of our
system of real judgments. Indeed, in his 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,”
Hilbert made just this point, noting that ideal elements do not correspond to
anything in reality but serve only as ideas “if, following Kant’s terminology,
one understands as an idea a concept of reason which transcends all experience
and by means of which the concrete is to be completed into a totality.” The
structure of Hilbert’s scheme, however, involves more than just the division of
classical mathematics into real and ideal propositions and proofs. It uses, in
addition, a subdivision of the real propositions into the problematic and the
unproblematic. Indeed, it is this subdivision of the reals that is at bottom
responsible for the introduction of the ideals. Unproblematic real
propositions, described by Hilbert as the basic equalities and inequalities of
arithmetic (e.g., ‘3 ( 2’, ‘2 ‹ 3’, ‘2 ! 3 % 3 ! 2’) together with their
sentential (and certain of their bounded quantificational) compounds, are the
evidentially most basic judgments of mathematics. They are immediately
intelligible and decidable by finitary intuition. More importantly, they can be
logically manipulated in all the ways that classical logic allows without
leading outside the class of real propositions. The characteristic feature of
the problematic reals, on the other hand, is that they cannot be so
manipulated. Hilbert gave two kinds of examples of problematic real
propositions. One consisted of universal generalizations like ‘for any
non-negative integer a, a ! 1 % 1 ! a’, which Hilbert termed hypothetical
judgments. Such propositions are problematic because their denials do not bound
the search for counterexamples. Hence, the instance of the (classical) law of
excluded middle that is obtained by disjoining it with its denial is not itself
a real proposition. Consequently, it cannot be manipulated in all the ways
permitted by classical logic without going outside the class of real
propositions. Similarly for the other kind of problematic real discussed by
Hilbert, which was a bounded existential quantification. Every such sentence
has as one of its classical consequents an unbounded existential quantification
of the same matrix. Hence, since the latter is not a real proposition, the
former is not a real proposition that can be fully manipulated by classical
logical means without going outside the class of real propositions. It is
therefore “problematic.” The question why full classical logical manipulability
should be given such weight points up an important element in Hilbert’s
thinking: namely, that classical logic is regarded as the preferred logic of
human thinking – the logic of the optimally functioning human epistemic engine,
the logic according to which the human mind most naturally and efficiently
conducts its inferential affairs. It therefore has a special psychological
status and it is because of this that the right to its continued use must be
preserved. As just indicated, however, preservation of this right requires
addition of ideal propositions and proofs to their real counterparts, since
applying classical logic to the truths of real mathematics leads to a system
that contains ideal as well as real elements. Hilbert believed that to justify
such an addition, all that was necessary was to show it to be consistent with
real mathematics (i.e., to show that it proves no real proposition that is
itself refutable by real means). Moreover, Hilbert believed that this must be
done by finitary means. The proof of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem in
1931 brought considerable pressure to bear on this part of Hilbert’s Program
even though it may not have demonstrated its unattainability.
“what-is-hinted”
-- hint hinting. Don’t expect Cicero
used this. It’s Germanic and related to ‘hunt,’ to ‘seize.’ As if you throw
something in the air, and expect your recipient will seize it. Grice spends
quite a long section in “Retrospective epilogue” to elucidate “Emissor E
communicates that p via a hint,” versus “Emissor E communicates that p via a
suggestion.” Some level of explicitness (vide candour) is necessary. If it is
too obscure it cannot be held to have been ‘communicated’ in the first place!
Cf. Holdcroft, “Some forms of indirect communication” for the Journal of
Rhetoric. Grice had to do a bit of linguistic botany for his “E implicates that
p”: To do duty for ‘imply,’ suggest, indicate, hint, mean, -- “etc.” indirectly
or implicitly convey.
hintikka, J. Non-Indo-European Finnish
philosopher who emigrated Finland early on to become the first Finnish Griceian
(vide his contribution in P. G. R. I. C. E.)
with contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology,
linguistics and philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and history of
philosophy. His work on distributive normal forms and model set techniques
yielded an improved inductive logic. Model sets differ from Carnap’s
state-descriptions in being partial and not complete descriptions of “possible
worlds.” The techniques simplified metatheoretical proofs and led to new
results in e.g. probability theory and the semantic theory of information.
Their main philosophical import nevertheless is in bridging the gap between
proof theory and model theory. Model sets that describe several possible
“alternative” worlds lead to the possible worlds semantics for modal and
intensional logics. Hintikka has used them as a foundation for the logic of
propositional attitudes (epistemic logic and the logic of perception), and in
studies on individuation, identification, and intentionality. Epistemic logic
also provides a basis for Hintikka’s logic of questions, in which
conclusiveness conditions for answers can be defined. This has resulted in an
interrogative model of inquiry in which knowledge-seeking is viewed as a
pursuit of conclusive answers to initial “big” questions by strategically
organized series of “small” questions (put to nature or to another source of
information). The applications include scientific discovery and explanation.
Hintikka’s independence-friendly logic gives the various applications a unified
basis. Hintikka’s background philosophy and approach to formal semantics and
its applications is broadly Kantian with emphasis on seeking-andfinding methods
and the constitutive activity of the inquirer. Apart from a series of studies
inspired by Kant, he has written extensively on Aristotle, Plato, Descartes,
Leibniz, Frege, and Wittgenstein. Hintikka’s academic career has been not only
in Finland, chiefly at the University of Helsinki, but (especially) in the
United States, where he has held professorships at Stanford, Florida State, and
(currently) Boston University. His students and co-workers in the Finnish
school of inductive logic and in other areas include Leila Haaparanta (b.1954),
Risto Hilpinen (b.1943), Simo Knuuttila (b.1946), Martin Kusch (b.1959), Ilkka
Niiniluoto (b.1946), Juhani Pietarinen (b.1938), Veikko Rantala (b.1933),
Gabriel Sandu (b.1954), Matti Sintonen (b.1951), and Raimo Tuomela (b.1940).
Hintikka set, also called model set, downward saturated set, a set (of a
certain sort) of well-formed formulas that are all true under a single
interpretation of their non-logical symbols (named after Jaakko Hintikka). Such
a set can be thought of as a (partial) description of a logically possible
state of affairs, or possible world, full enough to make evident that the world
described is indeed possible. Thus it is required of a Hintikka set G that it
contain no atomic formula and its negation, that A, B 1 G if A 8 B 1 G, that A
1 G or B 1 G if A 7 B 1 G, and so forth, for each logical constant.
hippocrates, philosopher from Cos. Some sixty
treatises survive under his name, but it is doubtful whether he was the author
of any of them. The Hippocratic corpus contains material from a wide variety of
standpoints, ranging from an extreme empiricism that rejected all grand theory
(On Ancient Medicine) to highly speculative theoretical physiology (On the
Nature of Man, On Regimen). Many treatises were concerned with the accurate
observation and classification of diseases (Epidemics) rather than treatment.
Some texts (On the Art) defended the claims of medicine to scientific status
against those who pointed to its inaccuracies and conjectural status; others
(Oath, On Decorum) sketch a code of professional ethics. Almost all his
treatises were notable for their materialism and rejection of supernatural
“explanations”; their emphasis on observation; and their concern with the
isolation of causal factors. A large number of texts are devoted to gynecology.
The Hippocratic corpus became the standard against which later doctors measured
themselves; and, via Galen’s rehabilitation and extension of Hippocratic
method, it became the basis for Western medicine for two millennia.
historicism, the doctrine that knowledge
of human affairs has an irreducibly historical character and that there can be
no ahistorical perspective for an understanding of human nature and society.
What is needed instead is a philosophical explication of historical knowledge
that will yield the rationale for all sound knowledge of human activities. So
construed, historicism is a philosophical doctrine originating in the
methodological and epistemological presuppositions of critical historiography.
In the mid-nineteenth century certain German thinkers (Dilthey most centrally),
reacting against positivist ideals of science and knowledge, rejected
scientistic models of knowledge, replacing them with historical ones. They
applied this not only to the discipline of history but to economics, law,
political theory, and large areas of philosophy. Initially concerned with
methodological issues in particular disciplines, historicism, as it developed,
sought to work out a common philosophical doctrine that would inform all these
disciplines. What is essential to achieve knowledge in the human sciences is to
employ the ways of understanding used in historical studies. There should in
the human sciences be no search for natural laws; knowledge there will be
interpretive and rooted in concrete historical occurrences. As such it will be
inescapably perspectival and contextual (contextualism). This raises the issue
of whether historicism is a form of historical relativism. Historicism appears
to be committed to the thesis that what for a given people is warrantedly
assertible is determined by the distinctive historical perspective in which
they view life and society. The stress on uniqueness and concrete specificity
and the rejection of any appeal to universal laws of human development
reinforce that. But the emphasis on cumulative development into larger contexts
of our historical knowledge puts in doubt an identification of historicism and
historical relativism. The above account of historicism is that of its main
proponents: Meinecke, Croce, Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and Mannheim. But in
the twentieth century, with Popper and Hayek, a very different conception of
historicism gained some currency. For them, to be a historicist is to believe
that there are “historical laws,” indeed even a “law of historical
development,” such that history has a pattern and even an end, that it is the
central task of social science to discover it, and that these laws should
determine the direction of political action and social policy. They attributed
(incorrectly) this doctrine to Marx but rightly denounced it as pseudo-science.
However, some later Marxists (Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci) were historicists in
the original nonPopperian sense as was the critical theorist Adorno and hermeneuticists
such as Gadamer.
heterological: Grice and Thomson go heterological. Grice was
fascinated by Baron Russell’s remarks on heterological and its implicate. Grice
is particularly interested in Russell’s philosophy because of the usual Oxonian
antipathy towards his type of philosophising. Being an irreverent
conservative rationalist, Grice found in Russell a good point for
dissent! If paradoxes were always sets of propositions or arguments or
conclusions, they would always be meaningful. But some paradoxes are
semantically flawed and some have answers that are backed by a pseudo-argument
employing a defective lemma that lacks a truth-value. Grellings paradox,
for instance, opens with a distinction between autological and heterological
words. An autological word describes itself, e.g., polysyllabic is
polysllabic, English is English, noun is a noun, etc. A heterological word
does not describe itself, e.g., monosyllabic is not monosyllabic, Chinese is
not Chinese, verb is not a verb, etc. Now for the riddle: Is
heterological heterological or autological? If heterological is
heterological, since it describes itself, it is autological. But if heterological
is autological, since it is a word that does not describe itself, it is
heterological. The common solution to this puzzle is that heterological,
as defined by Grelling, is not what Grice a genuine predicate ‒
Gricing is!In other words, Is heterological heterological? is without meaning.
That does not mean that an utterer, such as Baron Russell, may implicate that
he is being very witty by uttering the Grelling paradox! There can be no
predicate that applies to all and only those predicates it does not apply to
for the same reason that there can be no barber who shaves all and only those
people who do not shave themselves. Grice seems to be relying on his
friend at Christ Church, Thomson in On Some Paradoxes, in the same volume
where Grice published his Remarks about the senses, Analytical Philosophy,
Butler (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford, 104–119. Grice thought that Thomson was a
genius, if ever there is one! Plus, Grice thought that, after St. Johns, Christ
Church was the second most beautiful venue in the city of dreaming spires. On
top, it is what makes Oxford a city, and not, as villagers call it, a town.
Refs.: the main source is Grice’s essay on ‘heterologicality,’ but the keyword
‘paradox’ is useful, too, especially as applied to Grice’s own paradox and to
what, after Moore, Grice refers to as the philosopher’s paradoxes. The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
hobbes: “Hobbes is a
Griceian” – Grice. Grice was a member of the Hobbes Society -- Thomas. English
philosopher whose writings, especially the English version of Leviathan (1651),
strongly influenced all of subsequent English moral and political philosophy.
He also wrote a trilogy comprising De Cive (1642; English version,
Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1651), De Corpore
(On the Body, 1655), and De Homine (On Man, 1658). Together with Leviathan (the
revised Latin version of which was published in 1668), these are his major
philosophical works. However, an early draft of his thoughts, The Elements of
Law, Natural and Political(also known as Human Nature and De Corpore Politico),
was published without permission in 1650. Many of the misinterpretations of
Hobbes’s views on human nature come from mistaking this early work as
representing his mature views. Hobbes was influential not only in England, but
also on the Continent. He is the author of the third set of objections to
Descartes’s Meditations. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus was deeply
influenced by Hobbes, not only in its political views but also in the way it
dealt with Scripture. Hobbes was not merely a philosopher; he was mathematical
tutor to Charles II and also a classical scholar. His first published work was
a translation of Thucydides (1628), and among his latest, about a half-century
later, were translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Hobbes’s philosophical
views have a remarkably contemporary sound. In metaphysics, he holds a strong
materialist view, sometimes viewing mental phenomena as epiphenomenal, but
later moving toward a reductive or eliminative view. In epistemology he held a
sophisticated empiricism, which emphasized the importance of language for
knowledge. If not the originator of the contemporary compatibilist view of the
relationship between free will and determinism (see The Questions Concerning
Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 1656), he was one of the primary influences. He
also was one of the most important philosophers of language, explicitly noting
that language is used not only to describe the world but to express attitudes
and, performatively, to make promises and contracts. One of Hobbes’s
outstanding characteristics is his intellectual honesty. Though he may have
been timid (he himself claims that he was, explaining that his mother gave
birth to him because of fright over the coming of the Spanish Armada), his
writing shows no trace of it. During more than half his long lifetime he
engaged in many philosophical controversies, which required considerably more
courage in Hobbes’s day than at present. Both the Roman Catholic church and
Oxford University banned the reading of his books and there was talk not only
of burning his books but of burning Hobbes himself. An adequate interpretation
of Hobbes requires careful attention to his accounts of human nature, reason,
morality, and law. Although he was not completely consistent, his moral and
political philosophy is remarkably coherent. His political theory is often
thought to require an egoistic psychology, whereas it actually requires only
that most persons be concerned with their own self-interest, especially their
own preservation. It does not require that most not be concerned with other
persons as well. All that Hobbes denies is an undifferentiated natural
benevolence: “For if by nature one man should love another (that is) as man,
there could no reason be returned why every man should not equally love every
man, as being equally man.” His argument is that limited benevolence is not an
adequate foundation upon which to build a state. Hobbes’s political theory does
not require the denial of limited benevolence, he indeed includes benevolence
in his list of the passions in Leviathan: “Desire of good to another,
BENEVOLENCE, GOOD WILL, CHARITY. If to man generally, GOOD NATURE.”
Psychological egoism not only denies benevolent action, it also denies action
done from a moral sense, i.e., action done because one believes it is the
morally right thing to do. But Hobbes denies neither kind of action. But when
the words [’just’ and ‘unjust’] are applied to persons, to be just signifies as
much as to be delighted in just dealing, to study how to do righteousness, or
to endeavor in all things to do that which is just; and to be unjust is to
neglect righteous dealing, or to think it is to be measured not according to my
contract, but some present benefit. Hobbes’s pessimism about the number of just
people is primarily due to his awareness of the strength of the passions and
his conviction that most people have not been properly educated and
disciplined. Hobbes is one of the few philosophers to realize that to talk of
that part of human nature which involves the passions is to talk about human
populations. He says, “though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet
because we cannot distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting,
heeding, anticipating, subjugating, self-defending, ever incident to the most
honest and fairest conditioned.” Though we may be aware of small communities in
which mutual trust and respect make law enforcement unnecessary, this is never
the case when we are dealing with a large group of people. Hobbes’s point is
that if a large group of people are to live together, there must be a common
power set up to enforce the rules of the society. That there is not now, nor
has there ever been, any large group of people living together without such a
common power is sufficient to establish his point. Often overlooked is Hobbes’s
distinction between people considered as if they were simply animals, not
modified in any way by education or discipline, and civilized people. Though
obviously an abstraction, people as animals are fairly well exemplified by
children. “Unless you give children all they ask for, they are peevish, and
cry, aye and strike their parents sometimes; and all this they have from
nature.” In the state of nature, people have no education or training, so there
is “continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, [is]
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But real people have been brought
up in families; they are, at least to some degree, civilized persons, and how
they will behave depends on how they are brought up. Hobbes does not say that
society is a collection of misfits and that this is why we have all the trouble
that we do – a position congenial to the psychological egoist. But he does
acknowledge that “many also (perhaps most men) either through defect of mind,
or want of education, remain unfit during the whole course of their lives; yet
have they, infants as well as those of riper years, a human nature; wherefore
man is made fit for society not by nature, but by education.” Education and
training may change people so that they act out of genuine moral motives. That
is why it is one of the most important functions of the sovereign to provide
for the proper training and education of the citizens. In the current debate
between nature and nurture, on the question of behavior Hobbes would come down
strongly on the side of nurture. Hobbes’s concept of reason has more in common
with the classical philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle,
where reason sets the ends of behavior, than with the modern tradition stemming
from Hume where the only function of reason is to discover the best means to
ends set by the passions. For Hobbes, reason is very complex; it has a goal,
lasting selfpreservation, and it seeks the way to this goal. It also discovers
the means to ends set by the passions, but it governs the passions, or tries
to, so that its own goal is not threatened. Since its goal is the same in all
people, it is the source of rules applying to all people. All of this is surprisingly
close to the generally accepted account of rationality. We generally agree that
those who follow their passions when they threaten their life are acting
irrationally. We also believe that everyone always ought to act rationally,
though we know that few always do so. Perhaps it was just the closeness of
Hobbes’s account of reason to the ordinary view of the matter that has led to
its being so completely overlooked. The failure to recognize that the avoidance
of violent death is the primary goal of reason has distorted almost all
accounts of Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy, yet it is a point on which
Hobbes is completely clear and consistent. He explicitly says that reason
“teaches every man to fly a contra-natural dissolution [mortem violentam] as
the greatest mischief that can arrive to nature.” He continually points out
that it is a dictate of right reason to seek peace when possible because people
cannot “expect any lasting preservation continuing thus in the state of nature,
that is, of war.” And he calls temperance and fortitude precepts of reason
because they tend to one’s preservation. It has not generally been recognized
that Hobbes regarded it as an end of reason to avoid violent death because he
often talks of the avoidance of death in a way that makes it seem merely an
object of a passion. But it is reason that dictates that one take all those
measures necessary for one’s preservation; peace if possible, if not, defense.
Reason’s dictates are categorical; it would be a travesty of Hobbes’s view to
regard the dictates of reason as hypothetical judgments addressed to those
whose desire for their own preservation happens to be greater than any
conflicting desire. He explicitly deplores the power of the irrational
appetites and expressly declares that it is a dictate of reason that one not
scorn others because “most men would rather lose their lives (that I say not,
their peace) than suffer slander.” He does not say if you would rather die than
suffer slander, it is rational to do so. Hobbes, following Aristotle, regards
morality as concerned with character traits or habits. Since morality is
objective, it is only those habits that are called good by reason that are
moral virtues. “Reason declaring peace to be good, it follows by the same reason,
that all the necessary means to peace be good also; and therefore that modesty,
equity, trust, humanity, mercy (which we have demonstrated to be necessary to
peace), are good manners or habits, that is, virtues.” Moral virtues are those
habits of acting that the reason of all people must praise. It is interesting
to note that it is only in De Homine that Hobbes explicitly acknowledges that
on this account, prudence, temperance, and courage are not moral virtues. In De
Cive he distinguishes temperance and fortitude from the other virtues and does
not call them moral, but he does not explicitly deny that they are moral
virtues. But in De Homine, he explicitly points out that one should not “demand
that the courage and prudence of the private man, if useful only to himself, be
praised or held as a virtue by states or by any other men whatsoever to whom
these same are not useful.” That morality is determined by reason and that
reason has as its goal self-preservation seems to lead to the conclusion that
morality also has as its goal self-preservation. But it is not the
selfpreservation of an individual person that is the goal of morality, but of
people as citizens of a state. That is, moral virtues are those habits of
persons that make it rational for all other people to praise them. These habits
are not those that merely lead to an individual’s own preservation, but to the
preservation of all; i.e., to peace and a stable society. Thus, “Good
dispositions are those that are suitable for entering into civil society; and
good manners (that is, moral virtues) are those whereby what was entered upon
can be best preserved.” And in De Cive, when talking of morality, he says, “The
goodness of actions consist[s] in this, that it [is] in order to peace, and the
evil in this, that it [is] related to discord.” The nature of morality is a
complex and vexing question. If, like Hobbes, we regard morality as applying
primarily to those manners or habits that lead to peace, then his view seems
satisfactory. It yields, as he notes, all of the moral virtues that are
ordinarily considered such, and further, it allows one to distinguish courage,
prudence, and temperance from the moral virtues. Perhaps most important, it
provides, in almost self-evident fashion, the justification of morality. For
what is it to justify morality but to show that reason favors it? Reason,
seeking self-preservation, must favor morality, which seeks peace and a stable
society. For reason knows that peace and a stable society are essential for
lasting preservation. This simple and elegant justification of morality does
not reduce morality to prudence; rather it is an attempt, in a great
philosophical tradition stemming from Plato, to reconcile reason or rational
self-interest and morality. In the state of nature every person is and ought to
be governed only by their own reason. Reason dictates that they seek peace,
which yields the laws of nature, but it also allows them to use any means they
believe will best preserve themselves, which is what Hobbes calls The Right of
Nature. Hobbes’s insight is to see that, except when one is in clear and
present danger, in which case one has an inalienable right to defend oneself,
the best way to guarantee one’s longterm preservation is to give up one’s right
to act on one’s own decisions about what is the best way to guarantee one’s
long-term preservation and agree to act on the decisions of that single person
or group who is the sovereign. If all individuals and groups are allowed to act
on the decisions they regard as best, not accepting the commands of the
sovereign, i.e., the laws, as the overriding guide for their actions, the
result is anarchy and civil war. Except in rare and unusual cases, uniformity
of action following the decision of the sovereign is more likely to lead to
long-term preservation than diverse actions following diverse decisions. And
this is true even if each one of the diverse decisions, if accepted by the
sovereign as its decision, would have been more likely to lead to long-term
preservation than the actual decision that the sovereign made. This argument
explains why Hobbes holds that sovereigns cannot commit injustice. Only
injustice can properly be punished. Hobbes does not deny that sovereigns can be
immoral, but he does deny that the immorality of sovereigns can properly be
punished. This is important, for otherwise any immoral act by the sovereign
would serve as a pretext for punishing the sovereign, i.e., for civil war. What
is just and unjust is determined by the laws of the state, what is moral and
immoral is not. Morality is a wider concept than that of justice and is
determined by what leads to peace and stability. However, to let justice be
determined by what the reason of the people takes to lead to peace and
stability, rather than by what the reason of the sovereign decides, would be to
invite discord and civil war, which is contrary to the goal of morality: a
stable society and peace. One can create an air of paradox by saying that for
Hobbes it is immoral to attempt to punish some immoral acts, namely, those of
the sovereign. Hobbes is willing to accept this seeming paradox for he never
loses sight of the goal of morality, which is peace. To summarize Hobbes’s
system: people, insofar as they are rational, want to live out their natural lives
in peace and security. To do this, they must come together into cities or
states of sufficient size to deter attack by any group. But when people come
together in such a large group there will always be some that cannot be
trusted, and thus it is necessary to set up a government with the power to make
and enforce laws. This government, which gets both its right to govern and its
power to do so from the consent of the governed, has as its primary duty the
people’s safety. As long as the government provides this safety the citizens
are obliged to obey the laws of the state in all things. Thus, the rationality
of seeking lasting preservation requires seeking peace; this in turn requires
setting up a state with sufficient power to keep the peace. Anything that
threatens the stability of the state is to be avoided. As a practical matter,
Hobbes took God and religion very seriously, for he thought they provided some
of the strongest motives for action. Half of Leviathan is devoted to trying to
show that his moral and political views are supported by Scripture, and to
discredit those religious views that may lead to civil strife. But accepting
the sincerity of Hobbes’s religious views does not require holding that Hobbes
regarded God as the foundation of morality. He explicitly denies that atheists
and deists are subject to the commands of God, but he never denies that they
are subject to the laws of nature or of the civil state. Once one recognizes
that, for Hobbes, reason itself provides a guide to conduct to be followed by
all people, there is absolutely no need to bring in God. For in his moral and
political theory there is nothing that God can do that is not already done by
reason. Grice read most of Hobbes, both in Latin (for his Lit. Hum.) and in
English. When in “Meaning,” Grice says “this is what people are getting at with
their natural versus artificial signs” – he means Hobbes.
Hobson’s choice: willkür –
Hobson’s choice. One of Grice’s favourite words from Kant – “It’s so Kantish!”
I told Pears about this, and having found it’s cognate with English ‘choose,’
he immediately set to write an essay on the topic!” f., ‘option, discretion,
caprice,’ from MidHG. willekür,
f., ‘free choice, free will’; gee kiesen and Kur-kiesen, verb, ‘to select,’ from Middle High German kiesen, Old High German chiosan, ‘to test, try, taste for the
purpose of testing, test by tasting, select after strict examination.’
Gothic kiusan,
Anglo-Saxon ceósan,
English to choose.
Teutonic root kus (with
the change of s into r, kur in the participle erkoren, see also Kur, ‘choice’), from
pre-Teutonic gus, in
Latin gus-tus, gus-tare, Greek γεύω for γεύσω, Indian root juš, ‘to select, be fond of.’
Teutonic kausjun passed
as kusiti into
Slavonic. There is an oil portrait of Thomas Hobson, in the National Portrait
Gallery, London. He looks straight to the artist and is dressed in typical
Tudor dress, with a heavy coat, a ruff, and tie tails Thomas Hobson, a portrait
in the National Portrait Gallery, London. A Hobson's choice is a free choice in
which only one thing is offered. Because a person may refuse to accept what is
offered, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one
may "take it or leave it". The
phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery
stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either
taking the horse in his stall nearest to the door or taking none at all.
According to a plaque underneath a painting of Hobson donated to Cambridge
Guildhall, Hobson had an extensive stable of some 40 horses. This gave the
appearance to his customers that, upon entry, they would have their choice of
mounts, when in fact there was only one: Hobson required his customers to
choose the horse in the stall closest to the door. This was to prevent the best
horses from always being chosen, which would have caused those horses to become
overused.[1] Hobson's stable was located on land that is now owned by St
Catharine's College, Cambridge. Early
appearances in writing According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first
known written usage of this phrase is in The rustick's alarm to the Rabbies,
written by Samuel Fisher in 1660:[3] If
in this Case there be no other (as the Proverb is) then Hobson's choice...which
is, chuse whether you will have this or none.
It also appears in Joseph Addison's paper The Spectator (No. 509 of 14
October 1712); and in Thomas Ward's 1688 poem "England's
Reformation", not published until after Ward's death. Ward wrote: Where to elect there is but one, 'Tis
Hobson's choice—take that, or none. The term "Hobson's choice" is
often used to mean an illusion of choice, but it is not a choice between two
equivalent options, which is a Morton's fork, nor is it a choice between two
undesirable options, which is a dilemma. Hobson's choice is one between
something or nothing. John Stuart Mill,
in his book Considerations on Representative Government, refers to Hobson's
choice: When the individuals composing
the majority would no longer be reduced to Hobson's choice, of either voting
for the person brought forward by their local leaders, or not voting at all. In
another of his books, The Subjection of Women, Mill discusses marriage: Those who attempt to force women into
marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a
similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to
induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's
thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson's
choice, 'that or none'.... And if men are determined that the law of marriage
shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right in point of mere policy, in
leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case, all that has been
done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a
mistake. They should have never been allowed to receive a literary
education.[7] A Hobson's choice is
different from: Dilemma: a choice between
two or more options, none of which is attractive. False dilemma: only certain
choices are considered, when in fact there are others. Catch-22: a logical
paradox arising from a situation in which an individual needs something that
can only be acquired by not being in that very situation. Morton's fork, and a
double bind: choices yield equivalent, and often undesirable, results.
Blackmail and extortion: the choice between paying money (or some non-monetary
good or deed) or risk suffering an unpleasant action. A common error is to use
the phrase "Hobbesian choice" instead of "Hobson's choice",
confusing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes with the relatively obscure Thomas
Hobson (It's possible they may be
confusing "Hobson's choice" with "Hobbesian trap", which
refers to the trap into which a state falls when it attacks another out of fear).[11]
Notwithstanding that confused usage, the phrase "Hobbesian choice" is
historically incorrect. Common law In Immigration and Naturalization Service v.
Chadha (1983), Justice Byron White dissented and classified the majority's
decision to strike down the "one-house veto" as unconstitutional as
leaving Congress with a Hobson's choice. Congress may choose between
"refrain[ing] from delegating the necessary authority, leaving itself with
a hopeless task of writing laws with the requisite specificity to cover endless
special circumstances across the entire policy landscape, or in the
alternative, to abdicate its lawmaking function to the executive branch and
independent agency". In
Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U.S. 617 (1978),[15] the majority opinion ruled
that a New Jersey law which prohibited the importation of solid or liquid waste
from other states into New Jersey was unconstitutional based on the Commerce
Clause. The majority reasoned that New Jersey cannot discriminate between the
intrastate waste and the interstate waste with out due justification. In
dissent, Justice Rehnquist stated:
[According to the Court,] New Jersey must either prohibit all landfill
operations, leaving itself to cast about for a presently nonexistent solution
to the serious problem of disposing of the waste generated within its own
borders, or it must accept waste from every portion of the United States,
thereby multiplying the health and safety problems which would result if it
dealt only with such wastes generated within the State. Because past precedents
establish that the Commerce Clause does not present appellees with such a
Hobson's choice, I dissent. In Monell v.
Department of Social Services of the City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978)[16]
the judgement of the court was that
[T]here was ample support for Blair's view that the Sherman Amendment,
by putting municipalities to the Hobson's choice of keeping the peace or paying
civil damages, attempted to impose obligations to municipalities by indirection
that could not be imposed directly, thereby threatening to "destroy the
government of the states". In the
South African Constitutional Case MEC for Education, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Others
v Pillay, 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC)[17] Chief Justice Langa for the majority of the
Court (in Paragraph 62 of the judgement) writes that: The traditional basis for invalidating laws
that prohibit the exercise of an obligatory religious practice is that it
confronts the adherents with a Hobson's choice between observance of their
faith and adherence to the law. There is however more to the protection of
religious and cultural practices than saving believers from hard choices. As
stated above, religious and cultural practices are protected because they are
central to human identity and hence to human dignity which is in turn central
to equality. Are voluntary practices any less a part of a person's identity or
do they affect human dignity any less seriously because they are not
mandatory? In Epic Systems Corp. v.
Lewis (2018), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented and added in one of the
footnotes that the petitioners "faced a Hobson’s choice: accept
arbitration on their employer’s terms or give up their jobs". In Trump et al v. Mazars USA, LLP, US Court
of Appeals for the District of Columbia No. 19-5142, 49 (D.C. Cir. 11 October
2019) ("[w]orse still, the dissent’s novel approach would now impose upon
the courts the job of ordering the cessation of the legislative function and
putting Congress to the Hobson’s Choice of impeachment or nothing."). Popular culture Hobson's Choice is a
full-length stage comedy written by Harold Brighouse in 1915. At the end of the
play, the central character, Henry Horatio Hobson, formerly a wealthy,
self-made businessman but now a sick and broken man, faces the unpalatable
prospect of being looked after by his daughter Maggie and her husband Will
Mossop, who used to be one of Hobson's underlings. His other daughters have
refused to take him in, so he has no choice but to accept Maggie's offer which
comes with the condition that he must surrender control of his entire business
to her and her husband, Will. The play
was adapted for film several times, including versions from 1920 by Percy Nash,
1931 by Thomas Bentley, 1954 by David Lean and a 1983 TV movie. Alfred Bester's 1952 short story Hobson's
Choice describes a world in which time travel is possible, and the option is to
travel or to stay in one's native time.
In the 1951 Robert Heinlein book Between Planets, the main character Don
Harvey incorrectly mentions he has a Hobson's choice. While on a space station
orbiting Earth, Don needs to get to Mars, where his parents are. The only
rockets available are back to Earth (where he is not welcome) or on to
Venus. In The Grim Grotto by Lemony
Snicket, the Baudelaire orphans and Fiona are said to be faced with a Hobson's
Choice when they are trapped by the Medusoid Mycelium Mushrooms in the
Gorgonian Grotto: "We can wait until the mushrooms disappear, or we can
find ourselves poisoned".In Bram Stoker's short story "The Burial of
Rats", the narrator advises he has a case of Hobson's Choice while being
chased by villains. The story was written around 1874. The Terminal Experiment, a 1995 science
fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer, was originally serialised under the title
Hobson's Choice. Half-Life, a video game
created in 1998 by Valve includes a Hobson's Choice in the final chapter. A
human-like entity, known only as the 'G-Man', offers the protagonist Gordon
Freeman a job, working under his control. If Gordon were to refuse this offer,
he would be killed in an unwinnable battle, thus creating the 'illusion of free
choice'. In Early Edition, the lead
character Gary Hobson is named after the choices he regularly makes during his adventures. In an episode of Inspector George Gently, a
character claims her resignation was a Hobson's choice, prompting a debate
among other police officers as to who Hobson is. In "Cape May" (The Blacklist season
3, episode 19), Raymond Reddington describes having faced a Hobson's choice in
the previous episode where he was faced with the choice of saving Elizabeth
Keen's baby and losing Elizabeth Keen or losing them both. In his 1984 novel Job: A Comedy of Justice,
Robert A. Heinlein's protagonist is said to have Hobson's Choice when he has
the options of boarding the wrong cruise ship or staying on the island. Remarking about the 1909 Ford Model T, US
industrialist Henry Ford is credited as saying “Any customer can have a car
painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”[19] In 'The Jolly Boys' Outing', a 1989 Christmas
Special episode of Only Fools and Horses, Alan states they are left with
Hobson's Choice after their coach has blown up (due to a dodgy radio, supplied
by Del). There's a rail strike, the last bus has gone, and their coach is out
of action. They can't hitch-hike as there's 27 of them, and the replacement
coach doesn't come till the next morning, thus their only choice is to stay in
Margate for the night. See also
Buckley's Chance Buridan's ass Boulwarism Death and Taxes Locus of control
Morton's fork No-win situation Standard form contract Sophie's Choice Zugzwang
References Barrett, Grant.
"Hobson's Choice", A Way with Words
"Thomas Hobson: Hobson's Choice and Hobson's Conduit".
Historyworks. See Samuel Fisher.
"Rusticus ad academicos in exercitationibus expostulatoriis, apologeticis
quatuor the rustick's alarm to the rabbies or The country correcting the
university and clergy, and ... contesting for the truth ... : in four
apologeticall and expostulatory exercitations : wherein is contained, as well a
general account to all enquirers, as a general answer to all opposers of the
most truly catholike and most truly Christ-like Chistians called Quakers, and
of the true divinity of their doctrine : by way of entire entercourse held in
special with four of the clergies chieftanes, viz, John Owen ... Tho. Danson
... John Tombes ... Rich. Baxter ." Europeana. Retrieved 8 August
2014. See The Spectator with Notes and
General Index, the Twelve Volumes Comprised in Two. Philadelphia: J.J.
Woodward. 1832. p. 272. Retrieved 4 August 2014. via Google Books Ward, Thomas (1853). English Reformation, A
Poem. New York: D.& J. Sadlier & Co. p. 373. Retrieved 8 August 2014.
via Internet Archive See Mill, John
Stuart (1861). Considerations on Representative Government (1 ed.). London:
Parker, Son, & Bourn. p. 145. Retrieved 23 June 2014. via Google Books Mill, John Stuart (1869). The Subjection of
Women (1869 first ed.). London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer. pp. 51–2.
Retrieved 28 July 2014. Hobbes, Thomas
(1982) [1651]. Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil. New York: Viking Press. Martinich, A. P. (1999). Hobbes: A Biography.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN
978-0-521-49583-7. Martin, Gary.
"Hobson's Choice". The Phrase Finder. Archived from the original on 6
March 2009. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
"The Hobbesian Trap" (PDF). 21 September 2010. Retrieved 8
April 2012. "Sunday
Lexico-Neuroticism". boaltalk.blogspot.com. 27 July 2008. Retrieved 7
August 2010. Levy, Jacob (10 June 2003).
"The Volokh Conspiracy". volokh.com. Retrieved 7 August 2010. Oxford English Dictionary, Editor:
"Amazingly, some writers have confused the obscure Thomas Hobson with his
famous contemporary, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The resulting malapropism
is beautifully grotesque". Garner, Bryan (1995). A Dictionary of Modern
Legal Usage (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 404–405. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/437/617/ "Monell v. Department of Soc. Svcs. -
436 U.S. 658 (1978)". justicia.com. US Supreme Court. 6 June 1978. 436
U.S. 658. Retrieved 19 February 2014.
"MEC for Education: Kwazulu-Natal and Others v Pillay (CCT 51/06)
[2007] ZACC 21; 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC); 2008 (2) BCLR 99 (CC) (5 October
2007)". www.saflii.org. Snicket,
Lemony (2004) The Grim Grotto, New York: HarperCollins Publishers p.145 -
147 Henry Ford in collaboration with
Samuel Crowther in My Life and Work. 1922. Page 72 External links Chisholm,
Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hobson's Choice" . Encyclopædia Britannica. 13
(11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 553. Categories: English-language
idiomsFree willMetaphors referring to peopleDilemmas. Refs.: H. P. Grice and D.
F. Pears, The philosophy of action, Pears, Choosing and deciding. The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
hohfeld, of Stanford and
Yale. His main contribution to moral theory was his identification of EIGHT
fundamental conceptions: One person X has a duty to a second person Y to do
some act A when it is required that X to do A for Y. X has a privilege (or
liberty) in face of Y to do A when X has no duty to Y not to do A. X has a right
(or claim) against Y that Y do A when Y has a duty to X to do A. X has a no-right
against Y that Y not do A when Y has a liberty in face of X to do A. X has a power
over Y to effect some consequence C for Y when there is some voluntary action
of X that will bring about C for Y. X has a disability in face of Y to effect C
when there is no action X can perform that will bring about C for Y. X has a liability
in face of Y to effect C when Y has a power to effect C for X. X has a immunity
against Y from C when Y has no power over X to effect C. Philosophers have
adapted Hohfeld’s terminology to express analogous conceptions. In ethics,
these fundamental conceptions provide something like atoms into which all more
complex relationships can be analyzed. Semantically, these conceptions reveal
pairs of correlatives, such as a claim of X against Y and a duty of Y to X,
each of which IMPLIES the other, and pairs of opposites, such as a duty of X to
Y and a liberty of Y in face of X, which are contradictories. In the theory of
rights, his distinctions between liberties, claims, powers, and immunities are
often used to reveal ambiguities in the language of rights or to classify
species of rights – Grice thought this was “all implicatural, and due to an
inability to understand Hohfeld.”
hölderlin:
studied
at Tübingen, where he befriended Schelling and Hegel, and at Jena, where he met
Schiller and Fichte. Since Hölderlin never held an academic position or
published any of his philosophical writings, his influence on philosophy was
primarily through his personality, conversations, and letters. He is widely
viewed as the author of the so-called “Oldest System-Program of German
Idealism,” a fragment that culminates in an exaltation of poetry and a call for
a new “mythology of reason.” This theme is illustrated in the novel Hyperion
(1797/99), which criticizes the subjective heroism of ethical idealism,
emphasizes the sacred character of nature, and attempts to conflate religion
and art as “overseers of reason.” In his veneration of nature and objections to
Fichte’s treatment of the “Not-I,” Hölderlin echoed Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.
In his Hellenism and his critique of the “philosophy of reflection” (see Ueber
Sein und Urteil [“On Being and Judgment”]) he anticipated and influenced Hegel.
In Hölderlin’s exaltation of art as alone capable of revealing the nature of
reality, he betrayed a debt to Schiller and anticipated Romanticism. However,
his view of the poet possesses a tragic dimension quite foreign to Schelling
and the younger Romantics. The artist, as the interpreter of divine nature,
mediates between the gods and men, but for this very reason is estranged from
his fellows. This aspect of Hölderlin’s thought influenced Heidegger.
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