valitum: value, the worth of something. Philosophers have
discerned these main forms: intrinsic, instrumental, inherent, and relational
value. Intrinsic value may be taken as basic and many of the others defined in
terms of it. Among the many attempts to explicate the concept of intrinsic
value, some deal primarily with the source of value, while others employ the
concept of the “fittingness” or “appropriateness” to it of certain kinds of
emotions and desires. The first is favored by Moore and the second by Brentano.
Proponents of the first view hold that the intrinsic value of X is the value
that X has solely in virtue of its intrinsic nature. Thus, the state of
affairs, Smith’s experiencing pleasure, has intrinsic value provided it has
value solely in virtue of its intrinsic nature. Followers of the second
approach explicate intrinsic value in terms of the sorts of emotions and
desires appropriate to a thing “in and for itself” or “for its own sake”. Thus,
one might say X has intrinsic value or is intrinsically good if and only if X
is worthy of desire in and for itself, or, alternatively, it is fitting or
appropriate for anyone to favor X in and for itself. Thus, the state of affairs
of Smith’s experiencing pleasure is intrinsically valuable provided that state
of affairs is worthy of desire for its own sake, or it is fitting for anyone to
favor that state of affairs in and for itself. Concerning the other forms of
value, we may say that X has instrumental value if and only if it is a means
to, or causally contributes to, something that is intrinsically valuable. If
Smith’s experiencing pleasure is intrinsically valuable and his taking a warm bath
is a means to, or Valentinus value 948
948 causally contributes to, his being pleased, then his taking a warm
bath is instrumentally valuable or “valuable as a means.” Similarly, if health
is intrinsically valuable and exercise is a means to health, then exercise is
instrumentally valuable. X has inherent value if and only if the experience,
awareness, or contemplation of X is intrinsically valuable. If the experience
of a beautiful sunset is intrinsically valuable, then the beautiful sunset has
inherent value. X has contributory value if and only if X contributes to the
value of some whole, W, of which it is a part. If W is a whole that consists of
the facts that Smith is pleased and Brown is pleased, then the fact that Smith
is pleased contributes to the value of W, and Smith’s being pleased has
contributory value. Our example illustrates that something can have
contributory value without having instrumental value, for the fact that Smith
is pleased is not a means to W and, strictly speaking, it does not bring about
or causally contribute to W. Given the distinction between instrumental and
contributory value, we may say that certain sorts of experiences and activities
can have contributory value if they are part of an intrinsically valuable life
and contribute to its value, even though they are not means to it. Finally, we
may say that X has relational value if and only if X has value in virtue of
bearing some relation to something else. Instrumental, inherent, and
contributory value may be construed as forms of relational value. But there are
other forms of relational value one might accept, e.g. one might hold that X is
valuable for S in virtue of being desired by S or being such that S would
desire X were S “fully informed” and “rational.” Some philosophers defend the
organicity of intrinsic value. Moore, for example, held that the intrinsic
value of a whole is not necessarily equal to the sum of the intrinsic values of
its parts. According to this view, the presence of an intrinsically good part
might lower the intrinsic value of a whole of which it is a part and the
presence of an intrinsically bad part might raise the intrinsic value of a
whole to which it belongs. Defenders of organicity sometimes point to examples
of Mitfreude taking joy or pleasure in another’s joy and Schadenfreude taking
joy or pleasure in another’s suffering to illustrate their view. Suppose Jones
believes incorrectly that Smith is happy and Brown believes incorrectly that
Gray is suffering, but Jones is pleased that Smith is happy and Brown is
pleased that Gray is suffering. The former instance of Mitfreude seems
intrinsically better than the latter instance of Schadenfreude even though they
are both instances of pleasure and neither whole has an intrinsically bad part.
The value of each whole is not a “mere sum” of the values of its parts. Valitum -- axiology: value theory, also
called axiology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of value
and with what kinds of things have value. Construed very broadly, value theory
is concerned with all forms of value, such as the aesthetic values of beauty
and ugliness, the ethical values of right, wrong, obligation, virtue, and vice,
and the epistemic values of justification and lack of justification. Understood
more narrowly, value theory is concerned with what is intrinsically valuable or
ultimately worthwhile and desirable for its own sake and with the related
concepts of instrumental, inherent, and contributive value. When construed very
broadly, the study of ethics may be taken as a branch of value theory, but
understood more narrowly value theory may be taken as a branch of ethics. In
its more narrow form, one of the chief questions of the theory of value is,
What is desirable for its own sake? One traditional sort of answer is hedonism.
Hedonism is roughly the view that i the only intrinsically good experiences or
states of affairs are those containing pleasure, and the only instrinsically
bad experiences or states of affairs are those containing pain; ii all
experiences or states of affairs that contain more pleasure than pain are
intrinsically good and all experiences or states of affairs that contain more
pain than pleasure are intrinsically bad; and iii any experience or state of
affairs that is intrinsically good is so in virtue of being pleasant or
containing pleasure and any experience or state of affairs that is
intrinsically bad is so in virtue of being painful or involving pain. Hedonism
has been defended by philosophers such as Epicurus, Bentham, Sidgwick, and, with
significant qualifications, J. S. Mill. Other philosophers, such as C. I.
Lewis, and, perhaps, Brand Blanshard, have held that what is intrinsically or
ultimately desirable are experiences that exhibit “satisfactoriness,” where
being pleasant is but one form of being satisfying. Other philosophers have
recognized a plurality of things other than pleasure or satisfaction as having
intrinsic value. Among the value pluralists are Moore, Rashdall, Ross,
Brentano, Hartmann, and Scheler. In addition to certain kinds of pleasures,
these thinkers count some or all of the following as intrinsically good:
consciousness and the flourishing of life, knowledge and insight, moral virtue
and virtuous actions, friendship and mutual affection, beauty and aesthetic
experience, a just distribution of goods, and self-expression. Many, if not
all, of the philosophers mentioned above distinguish between what has value or
is desirable for its own sake and what is instrumentally valuable. Furthermore,
they hold that what is desirable for its own sake or intrinsically good has a
value not dependent on anyone’s having an interest in it. Both of these claims
have been challenged by other value theorists. Dewey, for example, criticizes
any sharp distinction between what is intrinsically good or good as an end and
what is good as a means on the ground that we adopt and abandon ends to the
extent that they serve as means to the resolution of conflicting impulses and
desires. Perry denies that anything can have value without being an object of
interest. Indeed, Perry claims that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘Interest is taken in
X’ and that it is a subject’s interest in a thing that confers value on it.
Insofar as he holds that the value of a thing is dependent upon a subject’s
interest in that thing, Perry’s value theory is a subjective theory and
contrasts sharply with objective theories holding that some things have value
not dependent on a subject’s interests or attitudes. Some philosophers,
dissatisfied with the view that value depends on a subject’s actual interests
and theories, have proposed various alternatives, including theories holding
that the value of a thing depends on what a subject would desire or have an
interest in if he were fully rational or if desires were based on full information.
Such theories may be called “counterfactual” desire theories since they take
value to be dependent, not upon a subject’s actual interests, but upon what a
subject would desire if certain conditions, which do not obtain, were to
obtain. Value theory is also concerned with the nature of value. Some
philosophers have denied that sentences of the forms ‘X is good’ or ‘X is
intrinsically good’ are, strictly speaking, either true or false. As with other
forms of ethical discourse, they claim that anyone who utters these sentences
is either expressing his emotional attitudes or else prescribing or commending
something. Other philosophers hold that such sentences can express what is true
or false, but disagree about the nature of value and the meaning of value terms
like ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘better’. Some philosophers, such as Moore, hold that
in a truth of the form ‘X is intrinsically good’, ‘good’ refers to a simple,
unanalyzable, non-natural property, a property not identical with or analyzable
by any “natural” property such as being pleasant or being desired. Moore’s view
is one form of non-naturalism. Other philosophers, such as Brentano, hold that
‘good’ is a syncategorematic expression; as such it does not refer to a
property or relation at all, though it contributes to the meaning of the
sentence. Still other philosophers have held that ‘X is good’ and ‘X is
intrinsically good’ can be analyzed in natural or non-ethical terms. This sort
of naturalism about value is illustrated by Perry, who holds that ‘X is
valuable’ means ‘X is an object of interest’. The history of value theory is
full of other attempted naturalistic analyses, some of which identify or
analyze ‘good’ in terms of pleasure or being the object of rational desire.
Many philosophers argue that naturalism is preferable on epistemic grounds. If,
e.g., ‘X is valuable’ just means ‘X is an object of interest’, then in order to
know whether something is valuable, one need only know whether it is the object
of someone’s interest. Our knowledge of value is fundamentally no different in
kind from our knowledge of any other empirical fact. This argument, however, is
not decisive against non-naturalism, since it is not obvious that there is no
synthetic a priori knowledge of the sort Moore takes as the fundamental value
cognition. Furthermore, it is not clear that one cannot combine non-naturalism
about value with a broadly empirical epistemology, one that takes certain kinds
of experience as epistemic grounds for beliefs about value. Valitum -- valid, having the property that a
well-formed formula, argument, argument form, or rule of inference has when it
is logically correct in a certain respect. A well-formed formula is valid if it
is true under every admissible reinterpretation of its non-logical symbols. If
truth-value gaps or multiple truth-values are allowed, ‘true’ here might be
replaced by ‘non-false’ or takes a “designated” truth-value. An argument is
valid if it is impossible for the premises all to be true and, at the same
time, the conclusion false. An argument form schema is valid if every argument
of that form is valid. A rule of inference is valid if it cannot lead from all
true premises to a false conclusion. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The conception of
value,” The Paul Carus Lectures for the American Philosophical Association,
published by Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
vanini: philosopher, a
Renaissance Aristotelian who studied law and theology. He became a monk and
traveled all over Europe. After abjuring, he taught and practiced medicine. He
was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. His major work is four volumes of
dialogues, De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis “On the
Secrets of Nature, Queen and Goddess of Mortal Beings,” 1616. He was influenced
by Averroes and Pietro Pomponazzi, whom he regarded as his teacher. Vanini
rejects revealed religion and claims that God is immanent in nature. The world
is ruled by a necessary natural order and is eternal. Like Averroes, he denies
the immortality and the immateriality of the human soul. Like Pomponazzi, he
denies the existence of miracles and claims that all apparently extraordinary
phenomena can be shown to have natural causes and to be predetermined. Despite
the absence of any original contribution, from the second half of the
seventeenth century Vanini was popular as a symbol of free and atheist thought.
Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vanini e Grice,” Villa Grice.
variable: in semantics, a symbol interpreted so as to be
associated with a range of values, a set of entities any one of which may be
temporarily assigned as a value of the variable. Grice uses more specifically
for a variable for a ‘grice,’ a type of extinct pig that existed (‘in the
past’) in Northern England – “There is a variable number of grices in the
backyard, Paul.” An occurrence of a variable in a mathematical or logical
expression is a free occurrence if assigning a value is necessary in order for
the containing expression to acquire a semantic value a denotation, truth-value, or other meaning.
Suppose a semantic value is assigned to a variable and the same value is
attached to a constant as meaning of the same kind; if an expression contains
free occurrences of just that variable, the value of the expression for that
assignment of value to the variable is standardly taken to be the same as the
value of the expression obtained by substituting the constant for all the free
occurrences of the variable. A bound occurrence of a variable is one that is
not free. Grice: “Strictly, a variable is the opposite of a constant, but a
constant varies – ain’t that paradoxical?” -- H. P. Grice, “The variable and
the constant;” H. P. Grice, “Variable and meta-variable,” “Order and variable.”
vauvenargues: luc de Clapiers de, army officer and secular
moralist. Discovering Plutarch at an early age, he critically adopted Stoic
idealism. Poverty-stricken, obscure, and solitary, he was ambitious for glory.
Though eventful, his military career brought little reward. In poor health, he
resigned in 1744 to write. In 1747, he published Introduction to the Knowledge
of the Human Mind, followed by Reflections and Maxims. Voltaire and Mirabeau
praised his vigorous and eclectic thought, which aimed at teaching people how
to live. Vauvenargues was a deist and an optimist who equally rejected Bossuet’s
Christian pessimism and La Rochefoucauld’s secular pessimism. He asserted human
freedom and natural goodness, but denied social and political equality. A lover
of martial virtues and noble passions, Vauvenargues crafted memorable maxims
and excelled in character depiction. His complete works were published in
1862.
vazquez: g. Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in
Villaescusa de Haro, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Ocaña,
Madrid, Alcalá, and Rome. He was a prolific writer; his philosophically most
important work is a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Vázquez was
strongly influenced by Aquinas, but he differed from him in important ways and
showed marked leanings toward Augustine. He rejected the Thomistic doctrine of the
real distinction between essence and existence and the position that matter
designated by quantity materia signata quantitate is the principle of
individuation. Instead of Aquinas’s five ways for proving the existence of God,
he favored a version of the moral argument similar to the one later used by
Kant and also favored the teleological argument. Following Augustine, he
described the union of body and soul as a union of two parts. Finally, Vázquez
modified the doctrine of formal and objective concepts present in Toletus and
Suárez in a way that facilitated the development of idealism in early modern
philosophy. He accomplished this by identifying the actual being esse of the
thing that is known conceptus objectivus with the act conceptus formalis whereby
it is known.
venn diagram, a logic diagram invented by the English philosopher
J. Venn in which standard form statements the four kinds listed below are
represented by two appropriately marked overlapping circles, as follows:
Syllogisms are represented by three overlapping circles, as in the examples
below. If a few simple rules are followed, e.g. “diagram universal premises
first,” then in a valid syllogism diagramming the premises automatically gives
a diagram in which the conclusion is represented. In an invalid syllogism
diagramming the premises does not automatically give a diagram in which the
conclusion is represented, as below. Venn diagrams are less perspicuous for the
beginner than Euler diagrams. Grice: “I tried to teach Strawson some Euler first;
but English as he is, he said, ‘Stick with Venn.’” – Refs.: H. P. Grice, “From
Euler to Strawson via Venn: diagramme and impicaturum.”
Verum – Grice: “From ‘verum’ we have to ‘make’ true, as the
Romans put it, ‘verificare’ -- verificatum -- verificationism, a metaphysical
theory about what determines meaning: the meaning of a statement consists in
its methods of verification. Verificationism thus differs radically from the
account that identifies meaning with truth conditions, as is implicit in Frege’s
work and explicit in Vitters’s Tractatus and throughout the writings of
Davidson. On Davidson’s theory, e.g., the crucial notions for a theory of
meaning are truth and falsity. Contemporary verificationists, under the
influence of the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett, propose what they see as a
constraint on the concept of truth rather than a criterion of meaningfulness.
No foundational place is generally assigned in modern verificationist semantics
to corroboration by observation statements; and modern verificationism is not
reductionist. Thus, many philosophers read Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
as rejecting verificationism. This is because they fail to notice an important
distinction. What Quine rejects is not verificationism but “reductionism,”
namely, the theory that there is, for each statement, a corresponding range of
verifying conditions determinable a priori. Reductionism is inherently localist
with regard to verification; whereas verificationism, as such, is neutral on
whether verification is holistic. And, lastly, modern verificationism is, veil
of ignorance verificationism 953 953
whereas traditional verificationism never was, connected with revisionism in
the philosophy of logic and mathematics e.g., rejecting the principle of
bivalence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The taming of the true.”
verstehen G., ‘understanding’ (literally, for-standing), ‘interpretation’,
a method in the human sciences that aims at reconstructing meanings from the
“agent’s point of view.” Such a method makes primary how agents understand
themselves, as, e.g., when cultural anthropologists try to understand symbols
and practices from the “native’s point of view.” Understanding in this sense is
often contrasted with explanation, or Erklärung. Whereas explanations discover
causes in light of general laws and take an external perspective, understanding
aims at explicating the meaning that, from an internal perspective, an action
or expression has for the actor. This distinction often is the basis for a
further methodological and ontological distinction between the natural and the
human sciences, the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. Whereas the data of
the natural sciences may be theory-dependent and in that sense interpretive,
the human sciences are “doubly” interpretive; they try to interpret the
interpretations that human subjects give to their actions and practices. The
human sciences do not aim at explaining events but at understanding meanings,
texts, and text analogues. Actions, artifacts, and social relations are all
like texts in that they have a significance for and by human subjects. The
method of Verstehen thus denies the “unity of science” thesis typical of
accounts of explanation given by empiricists and positivists. However, other
philosophers such as Weber argue against such a dichotomy and assert that the
social sciences in particular must incorporate features of both explanation and
understanding, and psychoanalysis and theories of ideology unify both
approaches. Even among proponents of this method, the precise nature of
interpretation remains controversial. While Dilthey and other neo-Kantians
proposed that Verstehen is the imaginative reexperiencing of the subjective
point of view of the actor, Vitters and his following propose a sharp
distinction between reasons and causes and understand reasons in terms of
relating an action to the relevant rules or norms that it follows. In both
cases, the aim of the human sciences is to understand what the text or text
analogue really means for the agent. Following Heidegger, recent G.
hermeneutics argues that Verstehen does not refer to special disciplinary
techniques nor to merely cognitive and theoretical achievements, but to the
practical mode of all human existence, its situatedness in a world that
projects various possibilities. All understanding then becomes interpretation,
itself a universal feature of all human activity, including the natural
sciences. The criteria of success in Verstehen also remain disputed,
particularly since many philosophers deny that it constitutes a method. If all
understanding is interpretation, then there are no presuppositionless, neutral
data that can put them to an empirical test. Verstehen is therefore not a
method but an event, in which there is a “fusion of horizons” between text and
interpreter. Whether criteria such as coherence, the capacity to engage in a
tradition, or increasing dialogue apply depends on the type, purpose, and
context of various interpretations. Grice: “If Austin coined a witticism,
that’s ‘uptake,’ so much better than the verbose ‘understanding,’ which in
Cockney means a leg!” --.
viscious
regress – Grice preferred ‘vicious
circle’ versus ‘virtuous circle’ – “Whether virtuous regress sounds oxymoronic”
-- regress that is in some way unacceptable, where a regress is an infinite
series of items each of which is in some sense dependent on a prior item of a
similar sort, e.g. an infinite series of events each of which is caused by the
next prior event in the series. Reasons for holding a regress to be vicious might
be that it is either impossible or that its existence is inconsistent with
things known to be true. The claim that something would lead to a vicious
regress is often made as part of a reductio ad absurdum argument strategy. An
example of this can be found in Aquinas’s argument for the existence of an
uncaused cause on the ground that an infinite regress of causes is vicious.
Those responding to the argument have sometimes contended that this regress is
not in fact vicious and hence that the argument fails. A more convincing
example of a regress is generated by the principle that one’s coming to know
the meaning of a word must always be based on a prior understanding of other
words. If this principle is correct, then one can know the meaning of a word w1
only on the basis of previously understanding the meanings of other words w2
and w3. But a further application of the principle yields the result that one
can understand these words w2 and w3 only on the basis of understanding still
other words. This leads to an infinite regress. Since no one understands any
words at birth, the regress implies that no one ever comes to understand any
words. But this is clearly false. Since the existence of this regress is
inconsistent with an obvious truth, we may conclude that the regress is vicious
and consequently that the principle that generates it is false.
vico: cited by H. P. Grice, “Vico and the origin of
language.” Philosopher who founded modern philosophy of history, philosophy of
culture, and philosophy of mythology. He was born and lived all his life in or
near Naples, where he taught eloquence. The Inquisition was a force in Naples
throughout Vico’s lifetime. A turning point in his career was his loss of the
concourse for a chair of civil law 1723. Although a disappointment and an
injustice, it enabled him to produce his major philosophical work. He was
appointed royal historiographer by Charles of Bourbon. Vico’s major work is “La
scienza nuova” completely revised in a
second, definitive version in 1730. In the 1720s, he published three connected
works in Latin on jurisprudence, under the title Universal Law; one contains a
sketch of his conception of a “new science” of the historical life of nations.
Vico’s principal works preceding this are On the Study Methods of Our Time
1709, comparing the ancients with the moderns regarding human education, and On
the Most Ancient Wisdom of the s 1710, attacking the Cartesian conception of
metaphysics. His Autobiography inaugurates the conception of modern
intellectual autobiography. Basic to Vico’s philosophy is his principle that
“the true is the made” “verum ipsum factum”, that what is true is convertible
with what is made. This principle is central in his conception of “science”
scientia, scienza. A science is possible only for those subjects in which such
a conversion is possible. There can be a science of mathematics, since
mathematical truths are such because we make them. Analogously, there can be a
science of the civil world of the historical life of nations. Since we make the
things of the civil world, it is possible for us to have a science of them. As
the makers of our own world, like God as the maker who makes by knowing and
knows by making, we can have knowledge per caussas through causes, from within.
In the natural sciences we can have only conscientia a kind of “consciousness”,
not scientia, because things in nature are not made by the knower. Vico’s “new
science” is a science of the principles whereby “men make history”; it is also
a demonstration of “what providence has wrought in history.” All nations rise
and fall in cycles within history corsi e ricorsi in a pattern governed by
providence. The world of nations or, in the Augustinian phrase Vico uses, “the
great city of the human race,” exhibits a pattern of three ages of “ideal
eternal history” storia ideale eterna. Every nation passes through an age of
gods when people think in terms of gods, an age of heroes when all virtues and
institutions are formed through the personalities of heroes, and an age of humans
when all sense of the divine is lost, life becomes luxurious and false, and
thought becomes abstract and ineffective; then the cycle must begin again. In
the first two ages all life and thought are governed by the primordial power of
“imagination” fantasia and the world is ordered through the power of humans to
form experience in terms of “imaginative universals” universali fantastici.
These two ages are governed by “poetic wisdom” sapienza poetica. At the basis
of Vico’s conception of history, society, and knowledge is a conception of
mythical thought as the origin of the human world. Fantasia is the original
power of the human mind through which the true and the made are converted to
create the myths and gods that are at the basis of any cycle of history.
Michelet was the primary supporter of Vico’s ideas in the nineteenth century;
he made them the basis of his own philosophy of history. Coleridge is the
principal disseminator of Vico’s views in England. James Joyce used the New
Science as a substructure for Finnegans Wake, making plays on Vico’s name,
beginning with one in Latin in the first sentence: “by a commodius vicus of
recirculation.” Croce revives Vico’s philosophical thought, wishing to conceive
Vico as the Hegel. Vico’s ideas have
been the subject of analysis by such prominent philosophical thinkers as
Horkheimer and Berlin, by anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, and by literary
critics such as René Wellek and Herbert Read. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vico alla
Villa Grice.” H. P. Grice, “Vico and language.”
weiner kraus -- Vienna Circle
vide ayerism -- a group of philosophers and scientists who met
periodically for discussions in Vienna from 2 to 8 and who proposed a
self-consciously revolutionary conception of scientific knowledge. The Circle
was initiated by the mathematician Hans Hahn to continue a prewar forum with
the physicist Philip Frank and the social scientist Otto Neurath after the
arrival in Vienna of Moritz Schlick, a philosopher who had studied with Max
Planck. Carnap joined in 6 from 1 in Prague; other members included Herbert
Feigl from 0 in Iowa, Friedrich Waismann, Bergmann, Viktor Kraft, and Bela von
Juhos. Viennese associates of the Circle included Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger,
Felix Kaufmann, and Edgar Zilsel. Popper was not a member or associate. During
its formative period the Circle’s activities were confined to discussion
meetings many on Vitters’s Tractatus. In 9 the Circle entered its public period
with the formation of the Verein Ernst Mach, the publication of its manifesto
Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis by Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath
tr. in Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, 3, and the first of a series of
philosophical monographs edited by Frank and Schlick. It also began
collaboration with the independent but broadly like-minded Berlin “Society of
Empirical Philosophy,” including Reichenbach, Kurt Grelling, Kurt Lewin,
Friedrich Kraus, Walter Dubislav, Hempel, and Richard von Mises: the groups
together organized their first public conferences in Prague and Königsberg,
acquired editorship of a philosophical journal renamed Erkenntnis, and later
organized the international Unity of Science congresses. The death and
dispersion of key members from 4 onward Hahn died in 4, Neurath left for
Holland in 4, Carnap left for the United States in 5, Schlick died in 6 did not
mean the extinction of Vienna Circle philosophy. Through the subsequent work of
earlier visitors Ayer, Ernest Nagel, Quine and members and collaborators who
emigrated to the United States Carnap, Feigl, Frank, Hempel, and Reichenbach,
the logical positivism of the Circle Reichenbach and Neurath independently
preferred “logical empiricism” strongly influenced the development of analytic
philosophy. The Circle’s discussions concerned the philosophy of formal and
physical science, and even though their individual publications ranged much
wider, it is the attitude toward science that defines the Circle within the
philosophical movements of central Europe at the time. The Circle rejected the
need for a specifically philosophical epistemology that bestowed justification
on knowledge claims from beyond science itself. In this, the Circle may also
have drawn on a distinct Austrian tradition a thesis of its historian Neurath:
in most of G.y, science and philosophy had parted ways during the nineteenth
century. Starting with Helmholtz, of course, there also arose a movement that
sought to distinguish the scientific respectability of the Kantian tradition
from the speculations of G. idealism, yet after 0 neo-Kantians insisted on the
autonomy of epistemology, disparaging earlier fellow travelers as “positivist.”
Yet the program of reducing the knowledge claim of science and providing
legitimations to what’s left found wide favor with the more empirical-minded like
Mach. Comprehensive description, not explanation, of natural phenomena became
the task for theorists who no longer looked to philosophy for foundations, but
found them in the utility of their preferred empirical procedures. Along with
the positivists, the Vienna Circle thought uneconomical the Kantian answer to
the question of the possibility of objectivity, the synthetic a priori.
Moreover, the Vienna Circle and its conventionalist precursors Poincaré and
Duhem saw them contradicted by the results of formal science. Riemann’s
geometries showed that questions about the geometry of physical space were open
to more than one answer: Was physical space Euclidean or non-Euclidean? It fell
to Einstein and the pre-Circle Schlick Space and Time in Contemporary Physics,
7 to argue that relativity theory showed the untenability of Kant’s conception
of space and time as forever fixed synthetic a priori forms of intuition. Yet
Frege’s anti-psychologistic critique had also shown empiricism unable to
account for knowledge of arithmetic and the conventionalists had ended the
positivist dream of a theory of experiential elements that bridged the gap
between descriptions of fact and general principles of science. How, then,
could the Vienna Circle defend the claim
under attack as just one worldview among others that science provides knowledge? The Circle
confronted the problem of constitutive conventions. As befitted their
self-image beyond Kant and Mach, they found their paradigmatic answer in the
theory of relativity: they thought that irreducible conventions of measurement
with wide-ranging implications were sharply separable from pure facts like
point coincidences. Empirical theories were viewed as logical structures of
statements freely created, yet accountable to experiential input via their
predictive consequences identifiable by observation. The Vienna Circle defended
empiricism by the reconceptualization of the relation between a priori and a
posteriori inquiries. First, in a manner sympathetic to Frege’s and Russell’s
doctrine of logicism and guided by Vitters’s notion of tautology, arithmetic
was considered a part of logic and treated as entirely analytical, without any
empirical content; its truth was held to be exhausted by what is provable from
the premises and rules of a formal symbolic system. Carnap’s Logical Syntax of
Language, 4, assimilated Gödel’s incompleteness result by claiming that not
every such proof could be demonstrated in those systems themselves which are
powerful enough to represent classical arithmetic. The synthetic a priori was
not needed for formal science because all of its results were non-synthetic.
Second, the Circle adopted verificationism: supposedly empirical concepts whose
applicability was indiscernible were excluded from science. The terms for
unobservables were to be reconstructed by logical operations from the
observational terms. Only if such reconstructions were provided did the more
theoretical parts of science retain their empirical character. Just what kind
of reduction was aimed for was not always clear and earlier radical positions
were gradually weakened; Reichenbach instead considered the relation between
observational and theoretical statements to be probabilistic. Empirical science
needed no synthetic a priori either; all of its statements were a posteriori.
Combined with the view that the analysis of the logical form of expressions
allowed for the exact determination of their combinatorial value,
verificationism was to exhibit the knowledge claims of science and eliminate
metaphysics. Whatever meaning did not survive identification with the
scientific was deemed irrelevant to knowledge claims Reichenbach did not share
this view either. Since the Circle also observed the then long-discussed ban on
issuing unconditional value statements in science, its metaethical positions
may be broadly characterized as endorsing noncognitivism. Its members were not
simply emotivists, however, holding that value judgments were mere expressions
of feeling, but sought to distinguish the factual and evaluative contents of
value judgments. Those who, like Schlick Questions of Ethics, 0, engaged in
metaethics, distinguished the expressive component x desires y of value
judgments from their implied descriptive component doing zfurthers aim y and held
that the demand inherent in moral principles possessed validity if the implied
description was true and the expressed desire was endorsed. This analysis of
normative concepts did not render them meaningless but allowed for
psychological and sociological studies of ethical systems; Menger’s formal
variant Morality, Decision and Social Organization, 4 proved influential for
decision theory. The semiotic view that knowledge required structured
representations was developed in close contact with foundational research in
mathematics and depended on the “new” logic of Frege, Russell, and Vitters, out
of which quantification theory was emerging. Major new results were quickly
integrated albeit controversially and Carnap’s works reflect the development of
the conception of logic itself. In his Logical Syntax he adopted the “Principle
of Tolerance” vis-à-vis the question of the foundation of the formal sciences:
the choice of logics and languages was conventional and constrained, apart from
the demand for consistency, only by pragmatic considerations. The proposed
language form and its difference from alternatives simply had to be stated as
exactly as possible: whether a logico-linguistic framework as a whole correctly
represented reality was a cognitively meaningless question. Yet what was the
status of the verifiability principle? Carnap’s suggestion that it represents
not a discovery but a proposal for future scientific language use deserves to
be taken seriously, for it not only characterizes his own conventionalism, but
also amplifies the Circle’s linguistic turn, according to which all philosophy
concerned ways of representing, rather than the nature of the represented. What
the Vienna Circle “discovered” was how much of science was conventional: its
verificationism was a proposal for accommodating the creativity of scientific
theorizing without accommodating idealism. Whether an empirical claim in order
to be meaningful needed to be actually verified or only potentially verifiable,
or fallible or only potentially testable, and whether so by current or only by
future means, became matters of discussion during the 0s. Equally important for
the question whether the Circle’s conventionalism avoided idealism and
metaphysics were the issues of the status of theoretical discourse about
unobservables and the nature of science’s empirical foundation. The view
suggested in Schlick’s early General Theory of Knowledge 8, 2d. ed. 5 and
Frank’s The Causal Law and its Limitations 2 and elaborated in Carnap’s
“Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science” in Foundations of the Unity of
Science I.1, 8 characterized the theoretical language as an uninterpreted
calculus that is related to the fully interpreted observational language only
by partial definitions. Did such an instrumentalism require for its empirical
anchor the sharp separation of observational from theoretical terms? Could such
a separation even be maintained? Consider the unity of science thesis.
According to the methodological version, endorsed by all members, all of science
abides by the same criteria: no basic methodological differences separate the
natural from the social or cultural sciences Geisteswissenschaften as claimed
by those who distinguish between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’. According
to the metalinguistic version, all objects of scientific knowledge could in
principle be comprehended by the same “universal” language. Physicalism asserts
that this is the language that speaks of physical objects. While everybody in
the Circle endorsed physicalism in this sense, the understanding of its
importance varied, as became clear in the socalled protocol sentence debate.
The nomological version of the unity thesis was only later clearly
distinguished: whether all scientific laws could be reduced to those of physics
was another matter on which Neurath came to differ. Ostensively, this debate
concerned the question of the form, content, and epistemological status of
scientific evidence statements. Schlick’s unrevisable “affirmations” talked
about phenomenal states in statements not themselves part of the language of
science “The Foundation of Knowledge,” 4, tr. in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism.
Carnap’s preference changed from unrevisable statements in a primitive
methodologically solipsistic protocol language that were fallibly translatable
into the physicalistic system language 1; see Unity of Science, 4, via
arbitrary revisable statements of that system language that are taken as
temporary resting points in testing 2, to revisable statements in the
scientific observation language 5; see “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of
Science, 637. These changes were partly prompted by Neurath, whose own
revisable “protocol statements” spoke, amongst other matters, of the relation
between observers and the observed in a “universal slang” that mixed
expressions of the physicalistically cleansed colloquial and the high
scientific languages “Protocol Statements,”
tr. in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism. Ultimately, these proposals
answered to different projects. Since all agreed that all statements of science
were hypothetical, the questions of their “foundation” concerned rather the
very nature of Vienna Circle philosophy. For Schlick philosophy became the
activity of meaning determination inspired by Vitters; Carnap pursued it as the
rational reconstruction of knowledge claims concerned only with what
Reichenbach called the “context of justification” its logical aspects, not the
“context of discovery”; and Neurath replaced philosophy altogether with a
naturalistic, interdisciplinary, empirical inquiry into science as a
distinctive discursive practice, precluding the orthodox conception of the
unity of science. The Vienna Circle was neither a monolithic nor a necessarily
reductionist philosophical movement, and quick assimilation to the tradition of
British empiricism mistakes its struggles with the formcontent dichotomy for
foundationalism, when instead sophisticated responses to the question of the
presuppositions of their own theories of knowledge were being developed. In its
time and place, the Circle was a minority voice; the sociopolitical dimension
of its theories stressed more by some
Neurath than others Schlick as a renewal
of Enlightenment thought, ultimately against the rising tide of Blutund-Boden
metaphysics, is gaining recognition. After the celebrated “death” of
reductionist logical positivism in the 0s the historical Vienna Circle is
reemerging as a multifaceted object of the history of analytical philosophy
itself, revealing in nuce different strands of reasoning still significant for
postpositivist theory of science. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “What Freddie brought us
from Vienna.”
violence: Grice: “I would define ‘violence’ as the use of force
to cause physical harm, death, or destruction physical violence; the causing of severe mental or emotional
harm, as through humiliation, deprivation, or brainwashing, whether using force
or not psychological violence; more broadly, profaning, desecrating, defiling,
or showing disrespect for i.e., “doing violence” to something valued, sacred,
or cherished; extreme physical force in the natural world, as in tornados,
hurricanes, and earthquakes. Physical violence may be directed against persons,
animals, or property.” Grice goes on: “In the first two cases, harm, pain,
suffering, and death figure prominently; in the third, illegality or
illegitimacy the forceful destruction of property is typically considered
violence when it lacks authorization. Psychological violence applies
principally to persons. It may be understood as the violation of beings worthy
of respect. But it can apply to higher animals as well as in the damaging
mental effects of some experimentation, e.g., involving isolation and
deprivation. Environmentalists sometimes speak of violence against the
environment, implying both destruction and disrespect for the natural world.
Sometimes the concept of violence is used to characterize acts or practices of
which one morally disapproves. To this extent it has a normative force. But
this prejudges whether violence is wrong. One may, on the other hand, regard
inflicting harm or death as only prima facie wrong i.e., wrong all other things
being equal. This gives violence a normative character, establishing its prima
facie wrongness. But it leaves open the ultimate moral justifiability of its
use. Established practices of physical or psychological violence e.g., war, capital punishment constitute institutionalized violence. So do
illegal or extralegal practices like vigilantism, torture, and state terrorism
e.g., death squads. Anarchists sometimes regard the courts, prisons, and police
essential to maintaining the state as violence. Racism and sexism may be
considered institutional violence owing to their associated psychological as
well as physical violence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Causes and reasons.”
virtuosum – Grice: “The etymology of ‘virtue’ is fantastic: it
is strictly a bit like ‘manliness,’ only the Romans were never sure who was
‘vir’ and who wasn’t!” -- “virtue is entire” – “Do not multiply virtues beyond
necessity” -- virtue ethics, also called virtue-based ethics and agent-based
ethics, conceptions or theories of morality in which virtues play a central or
independent role. Thus, it is more than simply the account of the virtues
offered by a given theory. Some take the principal claim of virtue ethics to be
about the moral subject that, in living
her life, she should focus her attention on the cultivation of her or others’
virtues. Others take the principal claim to be about the moral theorist that, in mapping the structure of our moral
thought, she should concentrate on the virtues. This latter view can be
construed weakly as holding that the moral virtues are no less basic than other
moral concepts. In this type of virtue ethics, virtues are independent of other
moral concepts in that claims about morally virtuous character or action are,
in the main, neither reducible to nor justified on the basis of underlying
claims about moral duty or rights, or about what is impersonally valuable. It
can also be construed strongly as holding that the moral virtues are more basic
than other moral concepts. In such a virtue ethics, virtues are fundamental,
i.e., claims about other moral concepts are either reducible to underlying
claims about moral virtues or justified on their basis. Forms of virtue ethics
predominated in Western philosophy before the Renaissance, most notably in
Aristotle, but also in Plato and Aquinas. Several ancient and medieval
philosophers endorsed strong versions of virtue ethics. These views focused on
character rather than on discrete behavior, identifying illicit behavior with
vicious behavior, i.e., conduct that would be seriously out of character for a
virtuous person. A virtuous person, in turn, was defined as one with
dispositions relevantly linked to human flourishing. On these views, while a
person of good character, or someone who carefully observes her, may be able to
articulate certain principles or rules by which she guides her conduct or to
which, at least, it outwardly conforms, the principles are not an ultimate
source of moral justification. On the contrary, they are justified only insofar
as the conduct they endorse would be in character for a virtuous person. For
Aristotle, the connection between flourishing and virtue seems conceptual. He conceived
moral virtues as dispositions to choose under the proper guidance of reason,
and defined a flourishing life as one lived in accordance with these virtues.
While most accounts of the virtues link them to the flourishing of the virtuous
person, there are other possibilities. In principle, the flourishing to which
virtue is tied whether causally or conceptually may be either that of the
virtuous subject herself, or that of some patient who is a recipient of her
virtuous behavior, or that of some larger affected group the agent’s community, perhaps, or all
humanity, or even sentient life in general. For the philosophers of ancient
Greece, it was human nature, usually conceived teleologically, that fixed the
content of this flourishing. Medieval Christian writers reinterpreted this,
stipulating both that the flourishing life to which the virtues lead extends
past death, and that human flourishing is not merely the fulfillment of
capacities and tendencies inherent in human nature, but is the realization of a
divine plan. In late twentieth-century versions of virtue ethics, some
theorists have suggested that it is neither to a teleology inherent in human
nature nor to the divine will that we should look in determining the content of
that flourishing to which the virtues lead. They understand flourishing more as
a matter of a person’s living a life that meets the standards of her cultural,
historical tradition. In his most general characterization, Aristotle called a
thing’s virtues those features of it that made it and its operation good. The
moral virtues were what made people live well. This use of ‘making’ is
ambiguous. Where he and other premodern thinkers thought the connection between
virtues and living well to be conceptual, moral theorists of the modernist era
have usually virtue ethics virtue ethics understood it causally. They commonly
maintain that a virtue is a character trait that disposes a person to do what
can be independently identified as morally required or to effect what is best
best for herself, according to some theories; best for others, according to
different ones. Benjamin Franklin, e.g., deemed it virtuous for a person to be
frugal, because he thought frugality was likely to result in her having a less
troubled life. On views of this sort, a lively concern for the welfare of
others has moral importance only inasmuch as it tends to motivate people
actually to perform helpful actions. In short, benevolence is a virtue because
it conduces to beneficent conduct; veracity, because it conduces to truth
telling; fidelity, because it conduces to promise keeping; and so on. Reacting
to this aspect of modernist philosophy, recent proponents of virtue ethics deny
that moral virtues derive from prior determinations of what actions are right
or of what states of affairs are best. Some, especially certain theorists of
liberalism, assign virtues to what they see as one compartment of moral thought
and duties to a separate, and only loosely connected compartment. For them, the
life and theory of virtue is autonomous. They hold that virtues and duties have
independent sources of justification, with virtues chiefly concerned with the
individual’s personal “ideals,” self-image, or conception of her life goals,
while duties and rights are thought to derive from social rules regulating
interpersonal dealings. Proponents of virtue ethics maintain that it has
certain advantages over more modern alternatives. They argue that virtue ethics
is properly concrete, because it grounds morality in facts about human nature or
about the concrete development of particular cultural traditions, in contrast
with modernist attempts to ground morality in subjective preference or in
abstract principles of reason. They also claim that virtue ethics is truer to
human psychology in concentrating on the less conscious aspects of
motivation on relatively stable
dispositions, habits, and long-term goals, for example where modern ethics focuses on decision making
directed by principles and rules. Virtue ethics, some say, offers a more unified
and comprehensive conception of moral life, one that extends beyond actions to
comprise wants, goals, likes and dislikes, and, in general, what sort of person
one is and aims to be. Proponents of virtue ethics also contend that, without
the sensitivity and appreciation of their situation and its opportunities that
only virtues consistently make available, agents cannot properly apply the
rules that modernist ethical theories offer to guide their actions. Nor, in
their view, will the agent follow those rules unless her virtues offer her
sufficient clarity of purpose and perseverance against temptation. Several
objections have been raised against virtue ethics in its most recent forms.
Critics contend that it is antiquarian, because it relies on conceptions of
human nature whose teleology renders them obsolete; circular, because it
allegedly defines right action in terms of virtues while defining virtues in
terms of right action; arbitrary and irrelevant to modern society, since there
is today no accepted standard either of what constitutes human flourishing or
of which dispositions lead to it; of no practical use, because it offers no
guidance when virtues seem to conflict; egoistic, in that it ultimately directs
the subject’s moral attention to herself rather than to others; and fatalistic,
in allowing the morality of one’s behavior to hinge finally on luck in one’s
constitution, upbringing, and opportunities. There may be versions of virtue
ethics that escape the force of all or most of the objections, but not every
form of virtue ethics can claim for itself all the advantages mentioned
above. virtue epistemology, the subfield
of epistemology that takes epistemic virtue to be central to understanding
justification or knowledge or both. An epistemic virtue is a personal quality
conducive to the discovery of truth, the avoidance of error, or some other
intellectually valuable goal. Following Aristotle, we should distinguish these
virtues from such qualities as wisdom or good judgment, which are the intellectual
basis of practical but not necessarily
intellectual success. The importance,
and to an extent, the very definition, of this notion depends, however, on
larger issues of epistemology. For those who favor a naturalist conception of
knowledge say, as belief formed in a “reliable” way, there is reason to call
any truth-conducive quality or properly working cognitive mechanism an
epistemic virtue. There is no particular reason to limit the epistemic virtues
to recognizable personal qualities: a high mathematical aptitude may count as
an epistemic virtue. For those who favor a more “normative” conception of
knowledge, the corresponding notion of an epistemic virtue or vice will be
narrower: it will be tied to personal qualities like impartiality or carelessness
whose exercise one would associate with an ethics of belief. H. P. Grice,
“Philosophy, like virtue, is entire;” H. P. Grice, “Virtutes non sunt
multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” H. P. Grice, “Aristotle’s mesotes – where
virtue lies.”
vital lie: Grice: “I would define a vital life as an instance of
self-deception or lying to oneself when it fosters hope, confidence,
self-esteem, mental health, or creativity; or any false belief or unjustified
attitude that helps people cope with difficulties; or a lie to other people designed to promote
their wellbeing; e.. g.: self-deceiving optimism about one’s prospects for
success in work or personal relationships may generate hope, mobilize energy,
enrich life’s meaning, and increase chances for success. Grice considers the
optimism law as basic in folk-psychology. Ibsen dramatises “life-lies” as
essential for happiness The Wild Duck, and O’Neill portrays “pipe dreams” as
necessary crutches The Iceman Cometh. Nietzsche endorsed “pious illusions” or
“holy fictions” about the past that liberate individuals and societies from
shame and guilt On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. In
Problems of belief, Schiller praised normal degrees of vanity and self-conceit
because they support selfesteem. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Optimism,” in “Method in
philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre.”
vitoria: dominican jurist, political philosopher, and
theologian who is regarded as the founder of modern international law. Born in
Vitoria or Burgos, he studied and taught at the
of SaintJacques in Paris, where he met Erasmus and Vives. He also taught
at the of San Gregorio in Valladolid and
at Salamanca. His most famous works are the notes relectiones for twelve public
addresses he delivered at Salamanca, published posthumously in 1557. Two
relectiones stand out: De Indis and De jure belli. They were responses to the
legal and political issues raised by the discovery and colonization of America.
In contrast with Mariana’s contract Arianism, Vitoria held that political
society is our natural state. The aim of the state is to promote the common
good and preserve the rights of citizens. Citizenship is the result of
birthplace jus solis rather than blood jus sanguini. The authority of the state
resides in the body politic but is transferred to rulers for its proper
exercise. The best form of government is monarchy because it preserves the
unity necessary for social action while safeguarding individual freedoms. Apart
from the societies of individual states, humans belong to an international
society. This society has its own authority and laws that establish the rights
and duties of the states. These laws constitute the law of nations jus gentium.
vives: attended the
of Paris and lived most of his life in Flanders. With his friend Erasmus
he prepared a widely used commentary of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. From 1523
to 1528 Vives visited England, taught at Oxford, befriended More, and became
Catherine of Aragon’s confidant. While in Paris, Vives repudiated medieval
logic as useless Adversus pseudodialecticos, 1520 and proposed instead a
dialectic emphasizing resourceful reasoning and clear and persuasive exposition
De tradendis disciplinis. His method was
partially inspired by Rudolph Agricola and probably influential upon Peter
Ramus. Less interested in theology than Erasmus or More, he surpassed both in
philosophical depth. As one of the great pedagogues of his age, Vives proposed
a plan of education that substituted the Aristotelian ideal of speculative
certainty for a pragmatic probability capable of guiding action. Vives enlarged
the scope of women’s education De institutione feminae Christianae, 1524 and
contributed to the teaching of classical Latin Exercitatio linguae latinae,
1538. A champion of EuroVisistadvaita Vedanta Vives, Juan Luis 962 962 pean unity against the Turks, he
professed the belief that international order De concordia, 1526 depended upon
the control of passion De anima et vita, 1538. As a social reformer, Vives
pioneered the secularization of welfare De subventione pauperum, 1526 and
opposed the abuse of legal jargon Aedes legum, 1520. Although his Jewish
parents were victimized by the Inquisition, Vives remained a Catholic and
managed to write an apology of Christianity without taking sides in
controversial theological matters De veritate fidei.
volition: cf. desideratum. a mental event involved with the
initiation of action. ‘To will’ is sometimes taken to be the corresponding verb
form of ‘volition’. The concept of volition is rooted in modern philosophy;
contemporary philosophers have transformed it by identifying volitions with
ordinary mental events, such as intentions, or beliefs plus desires. Volitions,
especially in contemporary guises, are often taken to be complex mental events
consisting of cognitive, affective, and conative elements. The conative element
is the impetus the underlying
motivation for the action. A velleity is
a conative element insufficient by itself to initiate action. The will is a
faculty, or set of abilities, that yields the mental events involved in
initiating action. There are three primary theories about the role of volitions
in action. The first is a reductive account in which action is identified with
the entire causal sequence of the mental event the volition causing the bodily
behavior. J. S. Mill, for example, says: “Now what is action? Not one thing,
but a series of two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an
effect. . . . [T]he two together constitute the action” Logic. Mary’s raising
her arm is Mary’s mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s
volitional state nor her arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the
entire causal sequence the “causing” is the action. The primary difficulty for
this account is maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate
volition and the resultant bodily behavior without referring to action. There
are two non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the
initiating volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of
the volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are
mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: “The Mind . . . is to
be accounted active in . . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In
plucking this flower I am active, because I do it by the motion of my hand,
which was consequent upon my volition” Three Dialogues. In this century,
Prichard is associated with this theory: “to act is really to will something”
Moral Obligation, 9, where willing is sui generis though at other places
Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do
something. In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come
under attack by Ryle Concept of Mind. Ryle argues that it leads to a vicious
regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do it, and
so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is nothing
beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of Ryle’s,
which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of art;
“[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist
theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like]
‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility” Concept of
Mind. Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action with
the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: “Volition or willing is
an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and
thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is nothing but that
particular determination of the mind, whereby . . . the mind endeavors to give
rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to be in its power”
Essay concerning Human Understanding. This is a functional account, since an
event is an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm rising is Mary’s
action of raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her willing to raise it.
If her arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch, it would not be
action, even if the bodily movements were photographically the same. In
response to Ryle’s charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal theorists tend
to identify volitions with ordinary mental events. For example, Davidson takes
the cause of actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid Sellars takes
volitions to be intentions to do something here and now. Despite its
plausibility, however, the causal theory faces two difficult problems: the
first is purported counterexamples based on wayward causal chains connecting
the antecedent mental event and the bodily movements; the second is provision
of an enlightening account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does
justice to the conative element. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A. J. P. Kenny on
voliting.”
arouet -- voltaire: pen name of François-Marie Arouet -- philosopher and
writer who won early fame as a playwright and poet and later was an influential
popularizer of Newtonian natural philosophy. His enduring reputation rests on
his acerbically witty essays on religious and moral topics especially the
Philosophical Letters, and the Dictionaire Philosophique, his brilliant
stories, and his passionate polemics against the injustices of the ancien
régime. In Whitehead’s phrase, he was more “a philosophe than a philosopher” in
the current specialized disciplinary sense. He borrowed most of his views on
metaphysics and epistemology from Locke, whose work, along with Newton’s, he
came to know and extravagantly admire during his stay 172628 in England. His is
best placed in the line of great
literary moralists that includes Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, and Camus.
Voltaire’s position is skeptical, empirical, and humanistic. His skepticism is
not of the radical sort that concerned Descartes. But he denies that we can
find adequate support for the grand metaphysical claims of systematic
philosophers, such as Leibniz, or for the dogmatic theology of institutional
religions. Voltaire’s empiricism urges us to be content with the limited and
fallible knowledge of our everyday experience and its development through the
methods of empirical science. His humanism makes a plea, based on his
empiricist skepticism, for religious and social tolerance: none of us can know
enough to be justified in persecuting those who disagree with us on fundamental
philosophical and theological matters. Voltaire’s positive view is that our
human condition, for all its flaws and perils, is meaningful and livable
strictly in its own terms, quite apart from any connection to the threats and
promises of dubious transcendental realms. Voltaire’s position is well
illustrated by his views on religion. Although complex doctrines about the
Trinity or the Incarnation strike him as gratuitous nonsense, he nonetheless is
firmly convinced of the reality of a good God who enjoins us through our moral
sense to love one another as brothers and sisters. Indeed, it is precisely this
moral sense that he finds outraged by the intolerance of institutional
Christianity. His deepest religious thinking concerns the problem of evil,
which he treated in his “Poem of the Lisbon Earthquake” and the classic tales
Zadig 1747 and Candide 1759. He rejects the Panglossian view held by Candide’s
Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of Leibniz that we can see the hand of providence in
our daily life but is prepared to acknowledge that an all-good God does not as
an extreme deism would hold let his universe just blindly run. Whatever
metaphysical truth there may be in the thought that “all is for the best in the
best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire insists that this idea is ludicrous as a
practical response to evil and recommends instead concrete action to solve
specific local problems: “We must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire was and
remains an immensely controversial figure. Will Durant regarded him as “the
greatest man who ever lived,” while Joseph de Maistre maintained that
“admiration for Voltaire is an infallible sign of a corrupt soul.” Perhaps it
is enough to say that he wrote with unequaled charm and wit and stood for
values that are essential to, if perhaps not the very core of, our humanity. Grice:
“I love his “Philosophical Dictionary,” – it’s in alphabetical order, too!” --.
voluntarism: -- W. James: “I will that the chair slides over the
floor toward me. It doesn’t.” cf. Grice on the volitive – desiderative -- any
philosophical view that makes our ability to control the phenomena in question
an essential part of the correct understanding of those phenomena. Thus,
ethical voluntarism is the doctrine that the standards that define right and
wrong conduct are in some sense chosen by us. Doxastic voluntarism is the
doctrine that we have extensive control over what we believe; we choose what to
believe. A special case of doxastic voluntarism is theological voluntarism,
which implies that religious belief requires a substantial element of choice;
the evidence alone cannot decide the issue. This is a view that is closely
associated with Pascal, Kierkegaard, and James. Historical voluntarism is the
doctrine that the human will is a major factor in history. Such views contrast
with Marxist views of history. Metaphysical voluntarism is the doctrine, linked
with Schopenhauer, that the fundamental organizing principle of the world is
not the incarnation of a rational or a moral order but rather the will, which
for Schopenhauer is an ultimately meaningless striving for survival, to be
found in all of nature. Refs.: H. P.
Grice, “The will”
neumann: J. philosopher. Born in Budapest and trained in Hungary,
Switzerland, and Germany, he visited Princeton
and became a professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study – Grice: “They offered first a post at the
Institute of Unadvanced Study, but he declined it.” -- His most outstanding
work in pure mathematics was on rings of operators in Hilbert spaces. In
quantum mechanics he showed the equivalence of matrix mechanics to wave
mechanics, and argued that quantum mechanics could not be embedded in an
underlying deterministic system. He established important results in set theory
and mathematical logic, and worked on Hilbert’s Program to prove the
consistency of mathematics within mathematics until he was shocked by Gödel’s
incompleteness theorems. He established the mathematical theory of games and
later showed its application to economics. In these many different areas, von
Neumann demonstrated a remarkable ability to analyze a subject matter and
develop a mathematical formalism that answered basic questions about that
subject matter; formalization in logic is the special case of this process
where the subject matter is language and reasoning. With the advent of World
War II von Neumann turned his great analytical ability to more applied areas of
hydrodynamics, ballistics, and nuclear explosives. In 5 he began to work on the
design, use, and theory of electronic computers. He later became a leading
scientist in government. Von Neumann contributed to the hardware architecture
of the modern electronic computer, and he invented the first modern program
language. A program in this language could change the addresses of its own
instructions, so that it became possible to use the same subroutine on
different data structures and to write programs to process programs. Von
Neumann proposed to use a computer as a research tool for exploring very
complex phenomena, such as the discontinuous nature of shock waves. He began
the development of a theory of automata that would cover computing,
communication, and control systems, as well as natural organisms, biological
evolution, and societies. To this end, he initiated the study of probabilistic
automata and of selfreproducing and cellular automata. Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Seminar at the Institude for Advanced Study,” – “The Advanced Study of the
Implicaturum,” lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
wright: G. H., Finnish philosopher, one of the most
influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. His early work,
influenced by logical empiricism, is on logic, probability, and induction,
including contributions in modal and deontic logic, the logic of norms and
action, preference logic, tense logic, causality, and determinism. In the 0s
his ideas about the explanation of action helped to link the analytic tradition
to Continental hermeneutics. His most important contribution is A Treatise on
Induction and Probability 1, which develops a system of eliminative induction
using the concepts of necessary and sufficient condition. In 9 von Wright went
to Cambridge to meet Broad, and he attended Vitters’s lectures. Regular
discussions with Moore also had an impact on him. In 8 von Wright succeeded
Vitters as professor at Cambridge . After Vitters’s death in 1, von Wright
returned to Helsinki. Together with Anscombe and Rush Rhees, he became executor
and editor of Vitters’s Nachlass. The study, organization, systematization, and
publication of this exceptionally rich work became a lifelong task for him. In
his Cambridge years von Wright became interested in the logical properties of
various modalities: alethic, deontic, epistemic. An Essay in Modal Logic 1
studies, syntactically, various deductive systems of modal logic. That year he
published his famous article “Deontic Logic” in Mind. It made him the founder
of modern deontic logic. These logical works profoundly influenced analytic
philosophy, especially action theory. Von Wright distinguishes technical oughts
means-ends relationships from norms issued by a norm-authority. His Norm and
Action 3 discusses philosophical problems concerning the existence of norms and
the truth of normative statements. His main work on metaethics is The Varieties
of Goodness 3. In Explanation and Understanding 1 he turned to philosophical
problems concerning the human sciences. He defends a manipulation view of
causality, where the concept of action is basic for that of cause: human action
cannot be explained causally by laws, but must be understood intentionally. The
basic model of intentionality is the practical syllogism, which explains action
by a logical connection with wants and beliefs. This work, sometimes
characterized as anti-positivist analytical hermeneutics, bridges analytic and
Continental philosophy. His studies in truth, knowledge, modality, lawlikeness,
causality, determinism, norms, and practical inference were published in 384 in
his Philosophical Papers. von Neumann, John von Wright, G. H. 965 965 In 1 von Wright became a member of the
Academy of Finland, the highest honor Finland gives to its scientists. Over
many years he has written, in Swedish and Finnish, eloquent essays in the
history of ideas and the philosophy of culture. He has become increasingly
critical of the modern scientific-technological civilization, its narrowly
instrumental concept of rationality, and its myth of progress. His public pleas
for peace, human rights, and a more harmonious coexistence of human beings and
nature have made him the most esteemed intellectual in the Scandinavian
countries. Refs.: H. P. Grice’s “von Wright’s ‘alethic’ and why I need it;” H.
P. Grice, “von Wright on the eight state-of-affair connectors;” H. P. Grice,
“von Wright and the sorry story of deontic logic.”
voting
paradox: the possibility that if there
are three candidates, A, B, and C, for democratic choice, with at least three
choosers, and the choosers are asked to make sequential choices among pairs of
candidates, A could defeat B by a majority vote, B could defeat C, and C could
defeat A. This would be the outcome if the choosers’ preferences were ABC, BCA,
and CAB. Hence, although each individual voter may have a clear preference
ordering over the candidates, the collective may have cyclic preferences, so
that individual and majoritarian collective preference orderings are not
analogous. While this fact is not a logical paradox, it is perplexing to many
analysts of social choice. It may also be morally perplexing in that it
suggests majority rule can be quite capricious. For example, suppose we vote
sequentially over various pairs of candidates, with the winner at each step
facing a new candidate. If the candidates are favored by cyclic majorities, the
last candidate to enter the fray will win the final vote. Hence, control over
the sequence of votes may determine the outcome. It is easy to find cyclic
preferences over such candidates as movies and other matters of taste. Hence,
the problem of the voting paradox is clearly real and not merely a logical
contrivance. But is it important? Institutions may block the generation of
evidence for cyclic majorities by making choices pairwise and sequentially, as
above. And some issues over which we vote provoke preference patterns that
cannot produce cycles. For example, if our issue is one of unidimensional
liberalism versus conservatism on some major political issue such as welfare
programs, there may be no one who would prefer to spend both more and less
money than what is spent in the status quo. Hence, everyone may display
single-peaked preferences with preferences falling as we move in either
direction toward more money or toward less from the peak. If all important issues
and combinations of issues had this preference structure, the voting paradox
would be unimportant. It is widely supposed by many public choice scholars that
collective preferences are not single-peaked for many issues or, therefore, for
combinations of issues. Hence, collective choices may be quite chaotic. What
order they display may result from institutional manipulation. If this is
correct, we may wonder whether democracy in the sense of the sovereignty of the
electorate is a coherent notion. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice’s Book of Paradoxes
– with pictures and illustrations.”
ward: j. English philosopher and psychologist. Influenced
by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism
and its allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected
the associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only
of sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward
emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior
existence of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of
feeling and, most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and
behavior by the willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses
attention and will. In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’
mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic
monism. While his criticisms of associationism and naturalism were telling,
Ward was a transitional figure whose positive influence is limited, if we
except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific
psychology – he founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a
psychology laboratory – he, with his
student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford,
which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of
McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian (“until Prichard converted
me”). Ward’s major work is “Psychology” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed.,
1886), reworked as Psychological Principles (1918). See also ASSOCIATIONISM,
JAMES, KANT.
allegedly ‘wayward’
causal chain: Grice: “What is the
antonym of ‘wayward’?” -- a causal chain, referred to in a proposed causal
analysis of a key concept, that goes awry. Causal analyses have been proposed
for key concepts – e.g., reference, action, explanation, knowledge, artwork.
There are two main cases of wayward (or deviant) causal chains that defeat a
causal analysis: (1) those in which the prescribed causal route is followed,
but the expected event does not occur; and (2) those in which the expected
event occurs, but the prescribed causal route is not followed. Consider action.
One proposed analysis is that a person’s doing something is an action if and
only if what he does is caused by his beliefs and desires. The possibility of
wayward causal chains defeats this analysis. For case (1), suppose, while
climbing, John finds he is supporting another man on a rope. John wants to rid
himself of this danger, and he believes that he can do so by loosening his
grip. His belief and desire unnerve him, causing him to loosen his hold. The
prescribed causal route was followed, but the ensuing event, his grip
loosening, is not an action. For case (2), suppose Harry wants to kill his rich
uncle, and he believes that he can find him at home. His beliefs and desires so
agitate him that he drives recklessly. He hits and kills a pedestrian, who, by
chance, is his uncle. The killing occurs, but without following the prescribed
causal route; the killing was an accidental consequence of what Harry did. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Aetiologica: from Roman ‘cause’ to Anglo-Saxon ‘for’” –
Woodfield, “Be-*cause* she thought he had insulted him.’”
warnock: “One of my most intelligent collaborators.” Unlike
any other of the collaborators, Warnock had what Grice calls “the gift for
botanising.” They would spend hours on the philosophy of perception. His other
English collaborators were, in alphabetic order: Pears, Strawson, and Thomson.
And you can see the difference. Thomson was pretty obscure. Pears was a closet
Vittersian. And Strawson was ‘to the point.’ With Warnock, Grice could ramble
at ease. Warnock became the custodian of Austin’s heritage which somehow
annoyed Grice. But the Warnock that Grice enjoyed most was the
Warnock-while-the-SchoolMaster-Austin-was-around. Because they could play. And
NOT in the play group, which was “anything but.” But Grice would philosophise
on ‘perception,’ and especially ‘see’ – with Warnock. Their idiolects differed.
Warnock, being Irish, was more creative, and less conservative. So it was good
for Warnock to have Grice to harness him! Through Warnock, Grice got to discuss
a few things with Urmson, the co-custodian of Austin’s legacy. But again, most
of the discussions with Urmson were before Austin’s demise. Urmson and Warnock
are the co-editors of Austin’s “Philosophical Papers.” Would Austin have
accepted? Who knows. The essays were more or less easily available. Still.
Warnockianism: Grice: “I told Warnock, ‘How clever
language is!” “He agreed, for we realised that language makes all the
distinctions you need, and when you feel there is one missing, language allows
you to introduce it!” --. Refs.: H. P. Grice and G. J. Warnock, The philosophy
of perception – Folder – BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University
of California, Berkeley.
weapon: Grice’s shining new tool. The funny thing is that his
tutee Strawson didn’t allow him to play with it ONCE! Or weapon. Grice refers
to the implicaturum as a philosopher’s tool, and that the fun comes in the
application. Strawson and Wiggins p. 522, reminds us of Austin. Austin used to
say that when a philosopher “forges a new weapon, he is also fshioning new
skids to put under his feet.” It is perhaps inappropriate that a memorial
should mention this, but here they were, the memorialists. They were suggesting
that Grice forged a shining new tool, the implicaturum, or implicaturum –
rather, he proposed a rational explanation for the distinction between what an
emissor means (e. g., that p) and what anything else may be said,
‘metabolically,’ to “mean.” Suggesting an analogy with J. L. Austin and his
infelicitious notion of infelicity, which found him fashioning a shining new
skid, the memorialists suggest the same for Grice – but of course the analogy
does not apply.
what the eye
no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for. Grice. Vide sytactics. Grice played with ‘elimination
rules’ for his scope device. Once applied, Grice said: “What the eye no longer
sees the heart no longer grieves for.” “As they say,” he added.
whistle. If you can’t say it you can’t whistle it either – But
you can implicate it. “To say” takes a ‘that’-clause. “To implicate” takes a
‘that’-clause. Grice: “ ‘To whisle’ takes a ‘that’-clause, “By whistling, E
communicates that he intends his emissee to be there.” “Whistle and I’ll be
there” – Houseman to a Shropshire farmer.
willkür, v.
Hobson’s choice. Grice: “‘will-kuer’ is a fascinating German expression,
literally will-care’.”
wilson – this
is the way to quote J. C. Wilson. Grice loved him, and thanked Farquarhson for
editing his papers.
wilson’s
ultimate counterexample to Grice --
Grice’s counterexample – “the ultimate counter-example” -- counterinstance,
also called counterexample. 1 A particular instance of an argument form that
has all true premises but a false conclusion, thereby showing that the form is
not universally valid. The argument form ‘p 7 q, - p / , ~q’, for example, is
shown to be invalid by the counterinstance ‘Grass is either red or green; Grass
is not red; Therefore, grass is not green’. 2 A particular false instance of a
statement form, which demonstrates that the form is not a logical truth. A
counterinstance to the form ‘p 7 q / p’, for example, would be the statement
‘If grass is either red or green, then grass is red’. 3 A particular example
that demonstrates that a universal generalization is false. The universal
statement ‘All large cities in the United States are east of the Mississippi’
is shown to be false by the counterinstance of San Francisco, which is a large
city in the United States that is not east of the Mississippi. V.K. counterpart
theory, a theory that analyzes statements about what is possible and impossible
for individuals statements of de re modality in terms of what holds of
counterparts of those individuals in other possible worlds, a thing’s
counterparts being individuals that resemble it without being identical with
it. The name ‘counterpart theory’ was coined by David Lewis, the theory’s principal
exponent. Whereas some theories analyze ‘Mrs. Simpson might have been queen of
England’ as ‘In some possible world, Mrs. Simpson is queen of England’,
counterpart theory analyzes it as ‘In some possible world, a counterpart of
Mrs. Simpson is queen of a counterpart of England’. The chief motivation for
counterpart theory is a combination of two views: a de re modality should be
given a possible worlds analysis, and b each actual individual exists only in
the actual world, and hence cannot exist with different properties in other
possible worlds. Counterpart theory provides an analysis that allows ‘Mrs.
Simpson might have been queen’ to be true compatibly with a and b. For Mrs.
Simpson’s counterparts in other possible worlds, in those worlds where she herself
does not exist, may have regal properties that the actual Mrs. Simpson lacks.
Counterpart theory is perhaps prefigured in Leibniz’s theory of
possibility.
winchism: After P. Winch, P. London-born philosopher. He
quotes Grice in a Royal Philosophy talk:
“Grice’s point is that we should distinguish the truth of one’s remark form the
point of one’s remarks – Grice’s example is: “Surely I have neither any doubt
nor any desire to deny that the pillar box in front of me is red, and yet I
won’t hesitate to say that it seems red to me” – Surely pointless, but an
incredible truth meant to refute G. A. Paul!” Winch translated Vitters’s
“little essay on value” which Grice “did not use for [his] essay on the
conception of value.” (“Kultur und Wert.”). Grice: “Not contented with natural
science, Winch wants a social one!”
wisdom: see metaphysical wisdom.
wodeham: Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Adam de (c.
1295–1358), English Franciscan philosopher- who lectured on Peter Lombard’s
Sentences at Oxford. His oeuvre includes a “Tractatus de indivisibilibus,
divisum in cinque partibus”; his “Lectura secunda” and “Lecturae Oxonienses” as transcribed by Henry
Totting of Oyta, and published by John Major. Wodeham’s main work, like
Grice’s, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain only partially published. A
brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts he consulted
in his main unpublication, Wodeham deems Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan
doctor. Occam, Wodeham’s teacher, is the other great influence on Wodeham (“I
treasure the razor he gave me for my birthday.”) Wodeham defends his tutor
Ockham’s views against attacks mounted by Walter Chatton. Grice was familiar
with Wodeham (“from Wodeham, as it happens”) because he wrote the prologue to
Ockham’s Summa logicae. Wodeham’s own influence rivals that of Ockham. Among
the authors he strongly influenced are Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt,
Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre d’Ailly, Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of
Candia (Alexander V), Henry Totting of Oyta, John Major, and lastly, but
certainly not leastly, H. P. Grice. Wodeham’s lectures were composed for tutees
with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in semantics, logic,
and mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus and Occam, Wodeham argues –
and this is borrowed by Grice -- that the sensitive and intellective souls are
not distinct (vide Grice, “The power structure of the soul”). Wodeham further
develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing intellectual intuition
of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from sensory intuition of
external objects. This is developed by Grice in his contrast of “I am not
hearing a noise,” and “That is not blue.” Thus, knowledge based on experience
can be based on intuition, according to Wodeham. Wodeham goes on to
distinguishs different grades (or degrees, as Grice prefers, which Grice
symbolises as ‘d’) of evidence (for credibility and desirability) and allows
that this or that sensory perception may be mistaken (“but if all were, we are
in trouble’). Nonetheless, they can form the basis for knowledge, since they
are, caeteris paribus, reliable. “A mistake can always be corrected by reason
and experience. In semantic and pragmatic theories, Wodeham defends the view
that the immediate object of knowledge is what he calls the “complexum significabile,”
that which the conclusion is designed to signify.
wolff: “Who’s afraid of the rationalist wolff,” Grice would
chant. Grice borrowed (“but I was never able to return”) from Wolff the idea of
‘psychologia rationalis,’ that Grice uses profusely. philosopher and the most
powerful advocate for secular rationalism in early eighteenth-century Germany.
Although he was a Lutheran, his early education in Catholic Breslau made him
familiar with both the Scholasticism of Aquinas and Suárez and more modern
sources. His later studies at Leipzig were completed with a dissertation on the
application of mathematical methods to ethics (1703), which brought him to the
attention of Leibniz. He remained in correspondence with Leibniz until the
latter’s death (1716), and became known as the popularizer of Leibniz’s
philosophy, although his views did not derive from that source alone. Appointed
to teach mathematics in Halle in 1706 (he published mathematical textbooks and
compendia that dominated German universities for decades), Wolff began
lecturing on philosophy as well by 1709. His rectoral address On the Practical
Philosophy of the Chinese (1721) argued that revelation and even belief in God
were unnecessary for arriving at sound principles of moral and political
reasoning; this brought his uneasy relations with the Halle Pietists to a head,
and in 1723 they secured his dismissal and indeed banishment. Wolff was
immediately welcomed in Marburg, where he became a hero for freedom of thought,
and did not return to Prussia until the ascension of Frederick the Great in
1740, when he resumed his post at Halle. Wolff published an immense series of
texts on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, natural theology, and teleology
(1713–24), in which he created the philosophical terminology of modern German;
he then published an even more extensive series of works in Latin for the rest
of his life, expanding and modifying his German works but also adding works on
natural and positive law and economics (1723–55). He accepted the traWodeham,
Adam de Wolff, Christian 980 980
ditional division of logic into the doctrines of concepts, judgment, and
inference, which influenced the organization of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(1781–87) and even Hegel’s Science of Logic(1816). In metaphysics, he included
general ontology and then the special disciplines of rational cosmology,
rational psychology, and rational theology (Kant replaced Wolff’s general
ontology with his transcendental aesthetic and analytic, and then demolished
Wolff’s special metaphysics in his transcendental dialectic). Wolff’s
metaphysics drew heavily on Leibniz, but also on Descartes and even empiricists
like Locke. Methodologically, he attempted to derive the principle of
sufficient reason from the logical law of identity (like the unpublished
Leibniz of the 1680s rather than the published Leibniz of the 1700s);
substantively, he began his German metaphysics with a reconstruction of
Descartes’s cogito argument, then argued for a simple, immaterial soul, all of
its faculties reducible to forms of representation and related to body by
preestablished harmony. Although rejected by Crusius and then Kant, Wolff’s
attempt to found philosophy on a single principle continued to influence German
idealism as late as Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel, and his example of beginning
metaphysics from the unique representative power of the soul continued to
influence not only later writers such as Reinhold and Fichte but also Kant’s
own conception of the transcendental unity of apperception. In spite of the
academic influence of his metaphysics, Wolff’s importance for German culture
lay in his rationalist rather than theological ethics. He argued that moral
worth lies in the perfection of the objective essence of mankind; as the
essence of a human is to be an intellect and a will (with the latter dependent
on the former), which are physically embodied and dependent for their
well-being on the well-being of their physical body, morality requires
perfection of the intellect and will, physical body, and external conditions
for the well-being of that combination. Each person is obliged to perfect all
instantiations of this essence, but in practice does so most effectively in his
own case; duties to oneself therefore precede duties to others and to God.
Because pleasure is the sensible sign of perfection, Wolff’s perfectionism
resembles contemporary utilitarianism. Since he held that human perfection can
be understood by human reason independently of any revelation, Wolff joined
contemporary British enlighteners such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in arguing
that morality does not depend on divine commands, indeed the recognition of
divine commands depends on an antecedent comprehension of morality (although
morality does require respect for God, and thus the atheistic morality of the
Chinese, even though sound as far as it went, was not complete). This was the
doctrine that put Wolff’s life in danger, but it had tremendous repercussions for
the remainder of his century, and certainly in Kant.
wollaston: when Grice is in a humorous mood, or mode, as he
prefers, he cites Wollaston at large! Wollaston is notorious for arguing that
the immorality of this or that action lies in an utterer who describes it
implicating a false proposition. Wollaston maintains that there is harmony
between reason (or truth) and happiness. Therefore, any ction that contradict
truth through misrepresentation thereby frustrates human happiness and is thus “plain
evil.” Wollaston gives the example of Willard [Quine] who, to pay Paul [Grice],
robs Peter [Strawspm] stealing his watch.
Grice comments: “In falsely epresenting Strawson’s watch as his own,
Willard makes the act wrong, even if he did it to pay me what he owed me.” Wollaston’s
views, particularly his taking morality to consist in universal and necessary
truths, were influenced by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among
his many critics the most famous is, as Grice would expect, Hume, who contends
that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity (“unless you disimplicate it in
the bud.”). For Hume, any action concealed from public view (e.g., adultery)
conveys (or ‘explicates’) no false proposition and therefore is not immoral,
since one can annul it, to use Grice’s jargon. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Wollaston
and the longitudinal unity of philosophy.”
wollheim: R. A. London-born philosopher of Eastern-European
ancestry, BPhil Oxon, Balliol (under D. Marcus) and All Souls. Examined by H. P. Grice. “What’s two times
two?” Wollheim treasured that examination. It was in the context of a
discussion of J. S. Mill and I. Kant, for whom addition and multiplication are
‘synthetic’ – a priori for Kant, a posteriori for Mill. Grice was trying to
provide a counterexample to Mill’s thesis that all comes via deduction or
induction.
woodianism: Grice loved O. P. Wood, as anyone at Oxford did –
even those who disliked Ryle!
woozleyianism: R. M. Harnish discussed H. P. Grice’s implicaturum
with A. D. Woozley. Woozley would know because he had been in contact with
Grice since for ever. Woozley had a closer contact with Austin, since, unlike
Grice, ‘being from the right side of the tracks,’ he socialized with Austin in
what Berlin pretentiously calls the ‘early beginnings of Oxford philosophy,’ as
if the Middle Ages never happened. Woozley edited Reid, that Grice read, or
reed. Since the first way to approach Grice’s philosophy is with his colleagues
at his Play Group, Woozley plays a crucial role. Grice: “While Woozley would
attend Austin’s Sat. morns., he wouldn’t say much – in fact, he seldom said
much.”
ward: “one of the most philosophical psychologists England
(if not Oxford) ever produced!” – H. P. Grice -- cited by H. P. Grice. --
English philosopher. Influenced by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply
criticized Bain’s associationism and its allied nineteenth-century reductive
naturalism. His psychology rejected the associationists’ sensationism, which
regarded mind as passive, capable only of sensory receptivity and composed
solely of cognitive presentations. Ward emphasized the mind’s inherent
activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence of an inferred but
necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and, most importantly,
of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the willful exercise of
attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will. In his metaphysics,
Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a
teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of associationism and
naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure whose positive
influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although
sympathetic to scientific psychology he
founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a psychology
laboratory he, with his student Stout,
represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored.
Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who
calls himself a Stoutian “until Prichard converted me”. Ward’s major work is
“Psychology” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., 6, reworked as Psychological
Principles 8.
allegedly ‘wayward’
causal chain: Grice: “What is the
antonym of ‘wayward’?’ A causal chain, referred to in a proposed causal
analysis of a key concept, that goes awry. Causal analyses have been proposed
for key concepts e.g., reference,
action, explanation, knowledge, artwork. There are two main cases of wayward or
deviant causal chains that defeat a causal analysis: 1 those in which the
prescribed causal route is followed, but the expected event does not occur; and
2 those in which the expected event occurs, but the prescribed causal route is
not followed. Consider action. One proposed analysis is that a person’s doing
something is an action if and only if what he does is caused by his beliefs and
desires. The possibility of wayward causal chains defeats this analysis. For
case 1, suppose, while climbing, John finds he is supporting another man on a
rope. John wants to rid himself of this danger, and he believes that he can do
so by loosening his grip. His belief and desire unnerve him, causing him to
loosen his hold. The prescribed causal route was followed, but the ensuing
event, his grip loosening, is not an action. For case 2, suppose Harry wants to
kill his rich uncle, and he believes that he can find him at home. His beliefs
and desires so agitate him that he drives recklessly. He hits and kills a
pedestrian, who, by chance, is his uncle. The killing occurs, but without
following the prescribed causal route; the killing was an accidental
consequence of what Harry did. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “Aetiologica: from Roman ‘causa’ to Anglo-Saxon ‘for’”, Woodfield, “Be-*cause*
he thought she had insulted him,” H. P. Grice, “A philosophical mistake:
‘cause’ is called for for unusual events only.”
weber: philosopher born in Berlin. Grice liked him “because
he invented, or thought he invented, more or less, ‘zweckrationalitaet’ – which
he refused to translate!” – H. P. Grice.-- born in a liberal and intellectual
household, he taught economics in Heidelberg, where his circle included leading
sociologists and philosophers such as Simmel and Lukacs. Although Weber gave up
his professorship after a nervous breakdown in 9, he remained important in
public life, an adviser to the commissions that drafted the peace treaty at
Versailles and the Weimar constitution. Weber’s social theory was influenced
philosophically by both neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche, creating tensions in a
theorist who focused much of his attention on Occidental rationalism and yet
was a noncognitivist in ethics. He wrote many comparative studies on topics
such as law and urbanization and a celebrated study of the cultural factors
responsible for the rise of capitalism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism 4. But his major, synthetic work in social theory is Economy and
Society 4; it includes a methodological introduction to the basic concepts of
sociology that has been treated by many philosophers of social science. One of
the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to understand how social
processes become “rationalized,” taking up certain themes want-belief model
Weber, Max 968 of the G. philosophy of
history since Hegel as part of social theory. Culture, e.g., became
rationalized in the process of the “disenchantment of worldviews” in the West,
a process that Weber thought had “universal significance.” But because of his
goal-oriented theory of action and his noncognitivism in ethics, Weber saw rationalization
exclusively in terms of the spread of purposive, or meansends rationality
Zweckrationalität. Rational action means choosing the most effective means of
achieving one’s goals and implies judging the consequences of one’s actions and
choices. In contrast, value rationality Wertrationalität consists of actions
oriented to ultimate ends, where considerations of consequences are irrelevant.
Although such action is rational insofar as it directs and organizes human
conduct, the choice of such ends or values themselves cannot be a matter for
rational or scientific judgment. Indeed, for Weber this meant that politics was
the sphere for the struggle between irreducibly competing ultimate ends, where
“gods and demons fight it out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and
values. Professional politicians, however, should act according to an “ethics
of responsibility” Verantwortungsethik aimed at consequences, and not an
“ethics of conviction” Gesinnungsethik aimed at abstract principles or ultimate
ends. Weber also believed that rationalization brought the separation of “value
spheres” that can never again be unified by reason: art, science, and morality
have their own “logics.” Weber’s influential methodological writings reject
positivist philosophy of science, yet call for “value neutrality.” He accepts
the neo-Kantian distinction, common in his day under the influence of Rickert,
between the natural and the human sciences, between the Natur- and the
Geisteswissenschaften. Because human social action is purposive and meaningful,
the explanations of social sciences must be related to the values Wertbezogen
and ideals of the actors it studies. Against positivism, Weber saw an
ineliminable element of Verstehen, or understanding of meanings, in the
methodology of the human sciences. For example, he criticized the legal
positivist notion of behavioral conformity for failing to refer to actors’
beliefs in legitimacy. But for Weber Verstehen is not intuition or empathy and
does not exclude causal analysis; reasons can be causes. Thus, explanations in
social science must have both causal and subjective adequacy. Weber also
thought that adequate explanations of large-scale, macrosocial phenomena
require the construction of ideal types, which abstract and summarize the
common features of complex, empirical phenomena such as “sects,” “authority,”
or even “the Protestant ethic.” Weberian ideal types are neither merely
descriptive nor simply heuristic, but come at the end of inquiry through the
successful theoretical analysis of diverse phenomena in various historical and
cultural contexts. Weber’s analysis of rationality as the disenchantment of the
world and the spread of purposive reason led him to argue that reason and
progress could turn into their opposites, a notion that enormously influenced
critical theory. Weber had a critical “diagnosis of the times” and a
pessimistic philosophy of history. At the end of The Protestant Ethic Weber
warns that rationalism is desiccating sources of value and constructing an
“iron cage” of increasing bureaucratization, resulting in a loss of meaning and
freedom in social life. According to Weber, these basic tensions of modern
rationality cannot be resolved.
weil: philosopher and writer, born in Paris – “Oddly, if
her surname were translated to English she would be “Madame Because”!, as in
one of my mother’s favourite ballads!” – H. P. Grice. Weil was one of the first
women to graduate from the École Normale Supérieure, having earlier studied
under the philosopher Alain. While teaching in various lycées Weil became involved in radical
leftist politics, and her early works concern social problems and labor. They
also show an attempt to work out a theory of action as fundamental to human
knowing. This is seen first in her diploma essay, “Science and Perception in
Descartes,” and later in her critique of Marx, capitalism, and technocracy in
“Reflections concerning the Causes of Social Oppression and Liberty.” Believing
that humans cannot escape certain basic harsh necessities of embodied life,
Weil sought to find a way by which freedom and dignity could be achieved by
organizing labor in such a way that the mind could understand that necessity
and thereby come to consent to it. After a year of testing her theories by
working in three factories in 435, Weil’s early optimism was shattered by the
discovery of what she called “affliction” malheur, a destruction of the human
person to which one cannot consent. Three important religious experiences,
however, caused her to attempt to put the problem into a Weber’s law Weil,
Simone 969 969 larger context. By
arguing that necessity obeys a transcendent goodness and then by using a
kenotic model of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, she tried to show that
affliction can have a purpose and be morally enlightening. The key is the
renunciation of any ultimate possession of power as well as the social
personality constituted by that power. This is a process of “attention” and
“decreation” by which one sheds the veil that otherwise separates one from
appreciating goodness in anything but oneself, but most especially from God.
She understands God as a goodness that is revealed in self-emptying and in
incarnation, and creation as an act of renunciation and not power. During her
last months, while working for the Free
in London, Weil’s social and religious interests came together,
especially in The Need for Roots. Beginning with a critique of social rights
and replacing it with obligations, Weil sought to show, on the one hand, how
modern societies had illegitimately become the focus of value, and on the other
hand, how cultures could be reconstructed so that they would root humans in
something more ultimate than themselves. Returning to her earlier themes, Weil
argued that in order for this rootedness to occur, physical labor must become
the spiritual core of culture. Weil died of tuberculosis while this book was in
progress. Often regarded as mystical and syncretistic, Weil’s philosophy owes
much to an original reading of Plato e.g., in Intimations of Christianity Among
the Ancient Grecians as well as to Marx, Alain, and Christianity. Recent
studies, however, have also seen her as significantly contributing to social,
moral, and religious philosophy. Her concern with problems of action and
persons is not dissimilar to Vitters’s.
well-formed
formula (Villa Grice: formula). For Grice, an otiosity – surely an ill-formed
formula is an oxymoron -- a grammatically wellformed sentence or structured
predicate of an artificial language of the sort studied by logicians. A
well-formed formula is sometimes known as a wff pronounced ‘woof’ or simply a
formula. Delineating the formulas of a language involves providing it with a
syntax or grammar, composed of both a vocabulary a specification of the symbols
from which the language is to be built, sorted into grammatical categories and
formation rules a purely formal or syntactical specification of which strings
of symbols are grammatically well-formed and which are not. Formulas are
classified as either open or closed, depending on whether or not they contain
free variables variables not bound by quantifiers. Closed formulas, such as x
Fx / Gx, are sentences, the potential bearers of truth-values. Open formulas,
such as Fx / Gx, are handled in any of three ways. On some accounts, these
formulas are on a par with closed ones, the free variables being treated as
names. On others, open formulas are structured predicates, the free variables
being treated as place holders for terms. And on still other accounts, the free
variables are regarded as implicitly bound by universal quantifiers, again
making open formulas sentences.
westermarck: “philosopher who spent his life studying all the
mores and morals of cultures – except his own – because he claimed he didn’t
have one!” – H. P. Grice. His main works, The Origin and Development of Moral
Ideas and Ethical Relativity, attack the idea that moral principles express
objective value. In defending ethical relativism, he argued that moral
judgments are based not on intellectual but on emotional grounds. He admitted
that cultural variability in itself does not prove ethical relativism, but
contended that the fundamental differences are so comprehensive and deep as to
constitute a strong presumption in favor of relativism.
whewell: English philosopher of science. He was a master of Trinity
, Cambridge. Francis Bacon’s early work on induction was furthered by Whewell,
J. F. W. Herschel, and J. S. Mill, who attempted to create a logic of welfare
economics Whewell, William 970 970 induction,
a methodology that can both discover generalizations about experience and prove
them to be necessary. Whewell’s theory of scientific method is based on his
reading of the history of the inductive sciences. He thought that induction
began with a non-inferential act, the superimposition of an idea on data, a
“colligation,” a way of seeing facts in a “new light.” Colligations generalize
over data, and must satisfy three “tests of truth.” First, colligations must be
empirically adequate; they must account for the given data. Any number of ideas
may be adequate to explain given data, so a more severe test is required.
Second, because colligations introduce generalizations, they must apply to
events or properties of objects not yet given: they must provide successful
predictions, thereby enlarging the evidence in favor of the colligation. Third,
the best inductions are those where evidence for various hypotheses originally
thought to cover unrelated kinds of data “jumps together,” providing a
consilience of inductions. Consilience characterizes those theories achieving
large measures of simplicity, generality, unification, and deductive strength.
Furthermore, consilience is a test of the necessary truth of theories, which
implies that what many regard as merely pragmatic virtues of theories like
simplicity and unifying force have an epistemic status. Whewell thus provides a
strong argument for scientific realism. Whewell’s examples of consilient
theories are Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, which covers phenomena
as seemingly diverse as the motions of the heavenly bodies and the motions of
the tides, and the undulatory theory of light, which explains both the
polarization of light by crystals and the colors of fringes. There is evidence
that Whewell’s methodology was employed by Maxwell, who designed the
influential Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge. Peirce and Mach favored
Whewell’s account of method over Mill’s empiricist theory of induction. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “From induction to deduction, via abduction.”
whitehead: cited by H. P. Grice, a. n., philosopher of science,
educated first at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire and then at Trinity ,
Cambridge, Whitehead emerged as a first-class mathematician with a rich general
background. In 5 he became a fellow of Trinity
and remained there in a teaching role until 0. In the early 0s Bertrand
Russell entered Trinity as a student in
mathematics; by the beginning of the new century Russell had become not only a
student and friend but a colleague of Whitehead’s at Trinity . Each had written
a first book on algebra Whitehead’s A Treatise on Universal Algebra won him
election to the Royal Society in 3. When they discovered that their projected
second books largely overlapped, they undertook a collaboration on a volume
that they estimated would take about a year to write; in fact, it was a decade
later that the three volumes of their ground-breaking Principia Mathematica
appeared, launching symbolic logic in its modern form. In the second decade of
this century Whitehead and Russell drifted apart; their responses to World War
I differed radically, and their intellectual interests and orientations
diverged. Whitehead’s London period 024 is often viewed as the second phase of
a three-phase career. His association with the
of London involved him in practical issues affecting the character of
working-class education. For a decade Whitehead held a professorship at the
Imperial of Science and Technology and
also served as dean of the Faculty of Science in the , chair of the Academic
Council which managed educational affairs in London, and chair of the council
that managed Goldsmith’s . His book The Aims of Education 8 is a collection of
essays largely growing out of reflections on the experiences of these years.
Intellectually, Whitehead’s interests were moving toward issues in the
philosophy of science. In the years 922 he published An Enquiry Concerning the
Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of
Relativity the third led to his later 1
election as a fellow of the British Academy. In 4, at the age of sixty-three,
Whitehead made a dramatic move, both geographically and intellectually, to
launch phase three of his career: never having formally studied philosophy in
his life, he agreed to become professor of philosophy at Harvard , a position
he held until retirement in 7. The accompanying intellectual shift was a move
from philosophy of science to metaphysics. The earlier investigations had
assumed the self-containedness of nature: “nature is closed to mind.” The
philosophy of nature examined nature at the level of abstraction entailed by
this assumption. Whitehead had come to regard philosophy as “the critic of
abstractions,” a notion introduced in Science and the Modern World 5. This book
traced the intertwined emergence of Newtonian science and its philosophical
presuppositions. It noted that with the development of the theory of relativity
in the twentieth century, scientific understanding had left behind the
Newtonian conceptuality that had generated the still-dominant philosophical
assumptions, and that those philosophical assumptions considered in themselves
had become inadequate to explicate our full concrete experience. Philosophy as
the critic of abstractions must recognize the limitations of a stance that
assumes that nature is closed to mind, and must push deeper, beyond such an
abstraction, to create a scheme of ideas more in harmony with scientific
developments and able to do justice to human beings as part of nature. Science
and the Modern World merely outlines what such a philosophy might be; in 9
Whitehead published his magnum opus, titled Process and Reality. In this
volume, subtitled “An Essay in Cosmology,” his metaphysical understanding is
given its final form. It is customary to regard this book as the central
document of what has become known as process philosophy, though Whitehead
himself frequently spoke of his system of ideas as the philosophy of organism.
Process and Reality begins with a sentence that sheds a great deal of light
upon Whitehead’s metaphysical orientation: “These lectures are based upon a
recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and
ended with Hume.” Descartes, adapting the classical notion of substance to his
own purposes, begins a “phase of philosophic thought” by assuming there are two
distinct, utterly different kinds of substance, mind and matter, each requiring
nothing but itself in order to exist. This assumption launches the reign of
epistemology within philosophy: if knowing begins with the experiencing of a
mental substance capable of existing by itself and cut off from everything
external to it, then the philosophical challenge is to try to justify the claim
to establish contact with a reality external to it. The phrase “and ended with
Hume” expresses Whitehead’s conviction that Hume and more elegantly, he notes,
Santayana showed that if one begins with Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions,
skepticism is inevitable. Contemporary philosophers have talked about the end
of philosophy. From Whitehead’s perspective such talk presupposes a far too
narrow view of the nature of philosophy. It is true that a phase of philosophy
has ended, a phase dominated by epistemology. Whitehead’s response is to offer
the dictum that all epistemological difficulties are at bottom only camouflaged
metaphysical difficulties. One must return to that moment of Cartesian
beginning and replace the substance metaphysics with an orientation that avoids
the epistemological trap, meshes harmoniously with the scientific
understandings that have displaced the much simpler physics of Descartes’s day,
and is consonant with the facts of evolution. These are the considerations that
generate Whitehead’s fundamental metaphysical category, the category of an
actual occasion. An actual occasion is not an enduring, substantial entity.
Rather, it is a process of becoming, a process of weaving together the
“prehensions” a primitive form of ‘apprehension’ meant to indicate a “taking
account of,” or “feeling,” devoid of conscious awareness of the actual
occasions that are in the immediate past. Whitehead calls this process of
weaving together the inheritances of the past “concrescence.” An actual entity
is its process of concrescence, its process of growing together into a unified
perspective on its immediate past. The seeds of Whitehead’s epistemological
realism are planted in these fundamental first moves: “The philosophy of
organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. . . . For Kant, the world emerges
from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the
world.” It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad,
with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is “all
window.” It is as though one were to take Aristotle’s system of categories and
ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its
position of preeminence by the category of relation the result would, mutatis mutandis, be an
understanding of being somewhat on the model of a Whiteheadian actual occasion.
In moving from Descartes’s dualism of mental substance and material substance
to his own notion of an actual entity, Whitehead has been doing philosophy
conceived of as the critique of abstractions. He holds that both mind and
matter are abstractions from the concretely real. They are important
abstractions, necessary for everyday thought and, of supreme importance,
absolutely essential in enabling the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries
to accomplish their magnificent advances in scientific thinking. Indeed,
Whitehead, in his philosophy of science phase, by proceeding as though “nature
is closed to mind,” was operating with those selfsame abstractions. He came to
see that while these abstractions were indispensable for certain kinds of
investigations, they were, at the philosophical level, as Hume had
demonstrated, a disaster. In considering mind and matter to be ontological
ultimates, Descartes had committed what Whitehead termed the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness. The category of an actual occasion designates the fully
real, the fully concrete. The challenge for such an orientation, the challenge
that Process and Reality is designed to meet, is so to describe actual
occasions that it is intelligible how collections of actual occasions, termed
“nexus” or societies, emerge, exhibiting the characteristics we find associated
with “minds” and “material structures.” Perhaps most significantly, if this
challenge is met successfully, biology will be placed, in the eyes of
philosophy, on an even footing with physics; metaphysics will do justice both
to human beings and to human beings as a part of nature; and such vexing
contemporary problem areas as animal rights and environmental ethics will
appear in a new light. Whitehead’s last two books, Adventures of Ideas 3 and
Modes of Thought 8, are less technical and more lyrical than is Process and
Reality. Adventures of Ideas is clearly the more significant of these two. It
presents a philosophical study of the notion of civilization. It holds that the
social changes in a civilization are driven by two sorts of forces: brute,
senseless agencies of compulsion on the one hand, and formulated aspirations
and articulated beliefs on the other. These two sorts of forces are epitomized
by barbarians and Christianity in the ancient Roman world and by steam and
democracy in the world of the industrial revolution. Whitehead’s focal point in
Adventures of Ideas is aspirations, beliefs, and ideals as instruments of change.
In particular, he is concerned to articulate the ideals and aspirations
appropriate to our own era. The character of such ideals and aspirations at any
moment is limited by the philosophical understandings available at that moment,
because in their struggle for release and efficacy such ideals and aspirations
can appear only in the forms permitted by the available philosophical
discourse. In the final section of Adventures of Ideas Whitehead presents a
statement of ideals and aspirations fit for our era as his own philosophy of
organism allows them to take shape and be articulated. The notions of beauty,
truth, adventure, zest, Eros, and peace are given a content drawn from the
technical understandings elaborated in Process and Reality. But in Adventures of
Ideas a less technical language is used, a language reminiscent of the poetic
imagery found in the style of Plato’s Republic, a language making the ideas
accessible to readers who have not mastered Process and Reality, but at the
same time far richer and more meaningful to those who have. Whitehead notes in
Adventures of Ideas that Plato’s later thought “circles round the interweaving
of seven main notions, namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The Psyche,
The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle. These
notions are as important for us now, as they were then at the dawn of the
modern world, when civilizations of the old type were dying.” Whitehead uses
these notions in quite novel and modern ways; one who is unfamiliar with his
metaphysics can get something of what he means as he speaks of the Eros of the
Universe, but if one is familiar from Process and Reality with the notions of
the Primordial Nature of God and the Consequent Nature of God then one sees
much deeper into the meanings present in Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead was not
religious in any narrow, doctrinal, sectarian sense. He explicitly likened his
stance to that of Aristotle, dispassionately considering the requirements of
his metaphysical system as they refer to the question of the existence and
nature of God. Whitehead’s thoughts on these matters are most fully developed
in Chapter 11 of Science and the Modern World, in the final chapter of Process
and Reality, and in Religion in the Making 6. These thoughts are expressed at a
high level of generality. Perhaps because of this, a large part of the interest
generated by Whitehead’s thought has been within the community of theologians.
His ideas fairly beg for elaboration and development in the context of
particular modes of religious understanding. It is as though many modern
theologians, recalling the relation between the theology of Aquinas and the
metaphysics of Aristotle, cannot resist the temptation to play Aquinas to
Whitehead’s Aristotle. Process theology, or Neo-Classical Theology as it is
referred to by Hartshorne, one of its leading practitioners, has been the arena
within which a great deal of clarification and development of Whitehead’s ideas
has occurred. Whitehead was a gentle man, soft-spoken, never overbearing or
threatening. He constantly encouraged students to step out on their own, to
develop their creative capacities. His concern not to inhibit students made him
a notoriously easy grader; it was said that an A-minus in one of his courses
was equivalent to failure. Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead
chronicles many evenings of discussion in the Whitehead household. He there
described Whitehead as follows: his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the
complexion pink and white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a
child’s yet with the depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with
humour. And there was his figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of
a scholar’s toil. Always benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in
him; for all his formidable armament, never a wounding word. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Definite descriptions in
Whitehead and Russell and in the vernacular,” “Definite descriptions in
Whitethead’s and Russell’s formalese and in Strawson’s vernacular” -- BANC.
alnwick: English Franciscan theologian from Northumbria -- William
studied under Duns Scotus at Paris, and wrote the Reportatio Parisiensia, a
central source for Duns Scotus’s teaching. In his own works, William opposed
Scotus on the univocity of being and haecceitas. Some of his views were
attacked by Ockham.
auvergne: g. c.11249,
philosopher who was born in Aurillac, taught at Paris, and became bishop
of Paris in 1228. Critical of the new Aristotelianism of his time, he insisted
that the soul is an individual, immortal form of intellectual activity alone,
so that a second form was needed for the body and sensation. Though he rejected
the notion of an agent intellect, he described the soul as a mirror that
reflects both exemplary ideas in God’s mind and sensible singulars. He
conceived being as something common to everything that is, after the manner of
Duns Scotus, but rejected the Avicennan doctrine that God necessarily produces
the universe, arguing that His creative activity is free of all determination.
He is the first example of the complex of ideas we call Augustinianism, which
would pass on through Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure and other Franciscans,
forming a point of departure for the philosophy of Duns Scotus.
auxerre: theologian and
renowned teacher of grammar, arts, and theology at the of Paris. In 1231 he was appointed by Pope
Gregory IX to a commission charged with editing Aristotle’s writings for
doctrinal purity. The commission never submitted a report, perhaps partly due
to William’s death later that same year. William’s major work, the Summa aurea
121520, represents one of the earliest systematic attempts to reconcile the
Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions in medieval philosophy. William
tempers, e.g., the Aristotelian concession that human cognition begins with the
reception in the material intellect of a species or sensible representation
from a corporeal thing, with the Augustinian idea that it is not possible to
understand the principles of any discipline without an interior, supernatural
illumination. He also originated the theological distinction between perfect
happiness, which is uncreated and proper to God, and imperfect happiness, which
pertains to human beings. William was also one of the first to express what
became, in later centuries, the important distinction between God’s absolute
and ordained powers, taking, with Gilbert of Poitiers, the view that God could,
absolutely speaking, change the past. The Summa aurea helped shape the thought
of several important philosophers and theologians who were active later in the
century, including Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. William remained
an authority in theological discussions throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.
moerbeke.: philosopher who tr. from Grecian into Latin of works
in philosophy and natural science. Having joined the Dominicans and spent some
time in Grecian-speaking territories, William served at the papal court and
then as Catholic archbishop of Corinth 1278c.1286. But he worked from the 1260s
on as a careful and literal-minded translator. William was the first to render
into Latin some of the most important works by Aristotle, including the
Politics, Poetics, and History of Animals. He retr. or revised earlier translations
of several other Aristotelian works. William also provided the first Latin
versions of commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius,
Ammonius, John Philoponus, and Simplicius, not to mention his efforts on behalf
of Grecian optics, mathematics, and medicine. When William provided the first
Latin translation of Proclus’s Elements of Theology, Western readers could at
last recognize the Liber de causis as an Arabic compilation from Proclus rather
than as a work by Aristotle.
williams: “There are many Williams in Oxford, but only one “B.
A. O., “ as he pretentiously went by!” – H. P. Grice. B. A. O. London-born
Welsh philosopher who has made major contributions to many fields but is
primarily known as a moral philosopher. His approach to ethics, set out in
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 5, is characterized by a wide-ranging
skepticism, directed mainly at the capacity of academic moral philosophy to
further the aim of reflectively living an ethical life. One line of skeptical
argument attacks the very idea of practical reason. Attributions of practical
reasons to a particular agent must, in Williams’s view, be attributions of
states that can potentially explain the agent’s action. Therefore such reasons
must be either within the agent’s existing set of motivations or within the
revised set of motivations that the agent would acquire upon sound reasoning.
Williams argues from these minimal assumptions that this view of reasons as
internal reasons undermines the idea of reason itself being a source of
authority over practice. Williams’s connected skepticism about the claims of
moral realism is based both on his general stance toward realism and on his
view of the nature of modern societies. In opposition to internal realism, Williams
has consistently argued that reflection on our conception of the world allows
one to develop a conception of the world maximally independent of our peculiar
ways of conceptualizing reality an
absolute conception of the world. Such absoluteness is, he argues, an
inappropriate aspiration for ethical thought. Our ethical thinking is better
viewed as one way of structuring a form of ethical life than as the ethical
truth about how life is best lived. The pervasive reflectiveness and radical
pluralism of modern societies makes them inhospitable contexts for viewing
ethical concepts as making knowledge available to groups of concept users.
Modernity has produced at the level of theory a distortion of our ethical
practice, namely a conception of the morality system. This view is
reductionist, is focused centrally on obligations, and rests on various
fictions about responsibility and blame that Williams challenges in such works
as Shame and Necessity 3. Much academic moral philosophy, in his view, is
shaped by the covert influence of the morality system, and such distinctively
modern outlooks as Kantianism and utilitarianism monopolize the terms of
contemporary debate with insufficient attention to their origin in a distorted
view of the ethical. Williams’s views are not skeptical through and through; he
retains a commitment to the values of truth, truthfulness in a life, and
individualism. His most recent work, which thematizes the long-implicit
influence of Nietzsche on his ethical philosophy, explicitly offers a
vindicatory “genealogical” narrative for these ideals.
wilson: J. C. – not to be confused with Neil Wilson, author
of “Grice: The ultimate counterexample” -- Oxonian philosopher, like Grice.
Cook Wilson studied with T. H. Green before becoming Wykeham Professor of Logic
at Oxford and leading the Oxford reaction against the then entrenched absolute
idealism. More influential as a tutor than as a writer, his major oeuvre,
Statement and Inference, was posthumously reconstructed from drafts of papers,
philosophical correspondence, and an extensive set of often inconsistent
lectures for his logic courses. A staunch critic of Whitehead’s mathematical
logic, Wilson conceived of logic as the study of thinking, an activity unified
by the fact that thinking either is knowledge or depends on knowledge “What we
know we kow”. Wilson claims that knowledge involves apprehending an object that
in most cases is independent of the act of apprehension and that knowledge is
indefinable without circularity, views he defended by appealing to common
usage. Many of Wilson’s ideas are disseminated by H. W. B. Joseph, especially
in his “Logic.” Rejecting “symbolic logic,” Joseph attempts to reinvigorate
traditional logic conceived along Wilsonian lines. To do so Joseph combined a
careful exposition of Aristotle with insights drawn from idealistic logicians.
Besides Joseph, Wilson decisively influenced a generation of Oxford
philosophers including Prichard and Ross, and Grice who explores the
‘interrogative subordination’ in the account of ‘if.’ “Who killed Cock Robin”.
windelband: philosopher and originator of Baden neoKantianism. He
studied under Kuno Fischer 18247 and Lotze, and was professor at Zürich,
Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. Windelband gave Baden neo-Kantianism its
distinctive mark of Kantian axiology as the core of critical philosophy. He is
widely recognized for innovative work in the history of philosophy, in which
problems rather than individual philosophers are the focus and organizing
principle of exposition. He is also known for his distinction, first drawn in
“Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft” “History and Natural Science,” 4, between
the nomothetic knowledge that most natural sciences seek the discovery of
general laws in order to master nature and the idiographic knowledge that the
historical sciences pursue description of individual and unique aspects of
reality with the aim of self-affirmation. His most important student, and
successor at Heidelberg, was Heinrich Rickert 1863 6, who made lasting contributions
to the methodology of the historical sciences.
scire – sapio
-- sapientia: wisdom, an understanding
of the highest principles of things that functions as a guide for living a
truly exemplary human life. From the preSocratics through Plato this was a
unified notion. But Aristotle introduced a distinction between theoretical
wisdom sophia and practical wisdom phronesis, the former being the intellectual
virtue that disposed one to grasp the nature of reality in terms of its
ultimate causes metaphysics, the latter being the ultimate practical virtue
that disposed one to make sound judgments bearing on the conduct of life. The
former invoked a contrast between deep understanding versus wide information,
whereas the latter invoked a contrast between sound judgment and mere technical
facility. This distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom persisted
through the Middle Ages and continues to our own day, as is evident in our use
of the term ‘wisdom’ to designate both knowledge of the highest kind and the
capacity for sound judgment in matters of conduct. Grice: “The etymology of
‘sapientia’ is excellent – it’s like taste!” – săpĭo , īvi or ĭi
(sapui, Aug. Civ. Dei, 1, 10; id. Ep. 102, 10; but sapivi, Nov. ap. Prisc. p.
879 P.; id. ap. Non. 508, 21: I.“saPisti,” Mart. 9, 6, 7: “sapisset,” Plaut.
Rud. 4, 1, 8), 3, v. n. and a. [kindr. with ὀπός, σαφής, and σοφός], to taste,
savor; to taste, smack, or savor of, to have a taste or flavor of a thing (cf.
gusto). I. Lit. (so only in a few examples). 1. Of things eaten or drunk:
“oleum male sapiet,” Cato, R. R. 66, 1: “occisam saepe sapere plus multo suem,”
Plaut. Mil. 2, 6, 104: “quin caseus jucundissime sapiat,” Col. 7, 8, 2: “nil
rhombus nil dama sapit,” Juv. 11, 121.—With an acc. of that of or like which a
thing tastes: “quis (piscis) saperet ipsum mare,” Sen. Q. N. 3, 18, 2: “cum in
Hispaniā multa mella herbam eam sapiunt,” Plin. 11, 8, 8, § 18: “ipsum aprum
(ursina),” Petr. 66, 6.—Poet.: anas plebeium sapit, has a vulgar taste, Petr.
poët. 93, 2: “quaesivit quidnam saperet simius,” Phaedr. 3, 4, 3.—* 2. Of that
which tastes, to have a taste or a sense of taste (perh. so used for the sake
of the play upon signif. II.): “nec sequitur, ut, cui cor sapiat, ei non sapiat
palatus,” Cic. Fin. 2, 8, 24.— 3. Transf., of smell, to smell of or like a
thing (syn.: oleo, redoleo; very rare): Cicero, Meliora, inquit, unguenta sunt,
quae terram quam crocum sapiunt. Hoc enim maluit dixisse quam redolent. Ita est
profecto; “illa erit optima, quae unguenta sapiat,” Plin. 17, 5, 3, § 38:
“invenitur unguenta gratiosiora esse, quae terram, quam quae crocum sapiunt,”
id. 13, 3, 4, § 21.—In a lusus verbb. with signif. II.: istic servus quid
sapit? Ch. Hircum ab alis, Plaut. Ps. 2, 4, 47.— II. Trop. 1. To taste or smell
of, savor of, i. e., a. To resemble (late Lat.): “patruos,” Pers. 1, 11.— b. To
suggest, be inspired by: “quia non sapis ea quae Dei sunt,” Vulg. Matt. 16, 23;
id. Marc. 8, 33.— c. Altum or alta sapere, to be high-minded or proud: “noli
altum sapere,” Vulg. Rom. 11, 20: “non alta sapientes,” id. ib. 12, 16.— 2. To
have good taste, i.e. to have sense or discernment; to be sensible, discreet,
prudent, wise, etc. (the predominant signif. in prose and poetry; most freq. in
the P. a.). (α). Neutr., Plaut. Ps. 2, 3, 14: “si aequum siet Me plus sapere
quam vos, dederim vobis consilium catum, etc.,” id. Ep. 2, 2, 73 sq.: “jam diu
edepol sapientiam tuam abusa est haec quidem. Nunc hinc sapit, hinc sentit,”
id. Poen. 5, 4, 30; cf.: “populus est moderatior, quoad sentit et sapit
tuerique vult per se constitutam rem publicam,” Cic. Rep. 1, 42, 65; “so (with
sentire),” Plaut. Am. 1, 1, 292; id. Bacch. 4, 7, 19; id. Merc. 2, 2, 24; id.
Trin. 3, 2, 10 sq.; cf.: “qui sapere et fari possit quae sentiat,” Hor. Ep. 1,
4, 9; Plaut. Bacch. 1, 2, 14: “magna est admiratio copiose sapienterque
dicentis, quem qui audiunt intellegere etiam et sapere plus quam ceteros
arbitrantur,” Cic. Off. 2, 14, 48: “veluti mater Plus quam se sapere Vult
(filium),” Hor. Ep. 1, 18, 27: “qui (puer) cum primum sapere coepit,” Cic. Fam.
14, 1, 1; Poët. ap. Cic. Fam. 7, 16, 1: “malo, si sapis, cavebis,” if you are
prudent, wise, Plaut. Cas. 4, 4, 17; so, “si sapis,” id. Eun. 1, 1, 31; id.
Men. 1, 2, 13; id. Am. 1, 1, 155; id. Aul. 2, 9, 5; id. Curc. 1, 1, 28 et saep.;
Ter. Eun. 4, 4, 53; id. Heaut. 2, 3, 138: “si sapias,” Plaut. Merc. 2, 3, 39;
4, 4, 61; id. Poen. 1, 2, 138; Ter. Heaut. 3, 3, 33; Ov. H. 5, 99; 20, 174: “si
sapies,” Plaut. Bacch. 4, 9, 78; id. Rud. 5, 3, 35; Ter. Heaut. 4, 4, 26; Ov.
M. 14, 675: “si sapiam,” Plaut. Men. 4, 2, 38; id. Rud. 1, 2, 8: “si sapiet,”
id. Bacch. 4, 9, 74: “si saperet,” Cic. Quint. 4, 16: hi sapient, * Caes. B. G.
5, 30: Ph. Ibo. Pl. Sapis, you show your good sense, Plaut. Mil. 4, 8, 9; id.
Merc. 5, 2, 40: “hic homo sapienter sapit,” id. Poen. 3, 2, 26: “quae
(meretrix) sapit in vino ad rem suam,” id. Truc. 4, 4, 1; cf. id. Pers. 1, 3,
28: “ad omnia alia aetate sapimus rectius,” Ter. Ad. 5, 3, 46: “haud stulte
sapis,” id. Heaut. 2, 3, 82: “te aliis consilium dare, Foris sapere,” id. ib.
5, 1, 50: “pectus quoi sapit,” Plaut. Bacch. 4, 4, 12; id. Mil. 3, 1, 191; id.
Trin. 1, 2, 53; cf.: “cui cor sapiat,” Cic. Fin. 2, 8, 24: “id (sc. animus
mensque) sibi solum per se sapit, id sibi gaudet,” Lucr. 3, 145.— (β). Act., to
know, understand a thing (in good prose usually only with general objects):
“recte ego rem meam sapio,” Plaut. Ps. 1, 5, 81: “nullam rem,” id. Most. 5, 1,
45: qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam, Poët. ap. Cic. Div. 1,
58, 132; Cic. Att. 14, 5, 1; Plaut. Mil. 2, 3, 65; cf.: “quamquam quis, qui
aliquid sapiat, nunc esse beatus potest?” Cic. Fam. 7, 28, 1: “quantum ego
sapio,” Plin. Ep. 3, 6, 1: “jam nihil sapit nec sentit,” Plaut. Bacch. 4, 7,
22: “nihil,” Cic. Tusc. 2, 19, 45: “plane nihil,” id. Div. in Caecil. 17, 55:
nihil parvum, i. e. to occupy one's mind with nothing trivial (with sublimia
cures), Hor. Ep. 1, 12, 15; cf.: cum sapimus patruos, i.e. resemble them,
imitate them in severity, Pers. 1, 11. — 3. Prov.: sero sapiunt Phryges, are
wise behind the time; or, as the Engl. saying is, are troubled with afterwit:
“sero sapiunt Phryges proverbium est natum a Trojanis, qui decimo denique anno
velle coeperant Helenam quaeque cum eā erant rapta reddere Achivis,” Fest. p.
343 Müll.: “in Equo Trojano (a tragedy of Livius Andronicus or of Naevius) scis
esse in extremo, Sero sapiunt. Tu tamen, mi vetule, non sero,” Cic. Fam. 7, 16,
1.—Hence, să-pĭens , entis (abl. sing. sapiente, Ov. M. 10, 622; gen. plur.
sapientum, Lucr. 2, 8; Hor. S. 2, 3, 296; “but sapientium,” id. C. 3, 21, 14),
P. a. (acc. to II.), wise, knowing, sensible, well-advised, discreet, judicious
(cf. prudens). A. In gen.: “ut quisque maxime perspicit, quid in re quāque
verissimum sit, quique acutissime et celerrime potest et videre et explicare
rationem, is prudentissimus et sapientissimus rite haberi solet,” Cic. Off. 1,
5, 16; cf.: “sapientissimum esse dicunt eum, cui quod opus sit ipsi veniat in
mentem: proxume acceder illum, qui alterius bene inventis obtemperet,” id. Clu.
31, 84: “M. Bucculeius, homo neque meo judicio stultus et suo valde sapiens,”
id. de Or. 1, 39, 179: “rex aequus ac sapiens,” id. Rep. 1, 26, 42; cf.: “Cyrus
justissimus sapientissimusque rex,” id. ib. 1, 27, 43: “bonus et sapiens et
peritus utilitatis civilis,” id. ib. 2, 29, 52: “o, Neptune lepide, salve,
Neque te aleator ullus est sapientior,” Plaut. Rud. 2, 3, 29: “quae tibi mulier
videtur multo sapientissima?” id. Stich. 1, 2, 66: “(Aurora) ibat ad hunc
(Cephalum) sapiens a sene diva viro,” wise, discreet, Ov. H. 4, 96 Ruhnk.; so,
“puella,” id. M. 10, 622: “mus pusillus quam sit sapiens bestia,” Plaut. Truc.
4, 4, 15; id. As. 3, 3, 114 et saep.—With gen. (analogous to gnarus, peritus,
etc.): “qui sapiens rerum esse humanarum velit,” Gell. 13, 8, 2.—Subst.:
săpĭens , entis, m., a sensible, shrewd, knowing, discreet, or judicious
person: “semper cavere hoc sapientes aequissimumst,” Plaut. Rud. 4, 7, 20; cf.:
“omnes sapientes suom officium aequom est colere et facere,” id. Stich. 1, 1,
38; id. Trin. 2, 2, 84: “dictum sapienti sat est,” id. Pers. 4, 7, 19; Ter.
Phorm. 3, 3, 8; Plaut. Rud. 2, 4, 15 sq.: “insani sapiens nomen ferat, aequus
iniqui,” Hor. Ep. 1, 6, 15: “sapiens causas reddet,” id. S. 1, 4, 115: “quali
victu sapiens utetur,” id. ib. 2, 2, 63; 1, 3, 132.—In a lusus verbb. with the
signif. of sapio, I., a person of nice taste: “qui utuntur vino vetere
sapientes puto Et qui libenter veteres spectant fabulas,” good judges,
connoisseurs, Plaut. Cas. prol. 5: fecundae leporis sapiens sectabitur armos,
Hor. S. 2, 4, 44.—As a surname of the jurists Atilius, C. Fabricius, M'.
Curius, Ti. Coruncanius, Cato al., v. under B. fin.— b. Of abstract things:
“opera,” Plaut. Pers. 4, 5, 2: “excusatio,” Cic. Att. 8, 12, 2: “modica et
sapiens temperatio,” id. Leg. 3, 7, 17: “mores,” Plaut. Rud. 4, 7, 25: “verba,”
Ter. Ad. 5, 1, 7: “consilium,” Ov. M. 13, 433: “Ulixes, vir sapienti facundiā
praeditus,” Gell. 1, 15, 3: “morus, quae novissima urbanarum germinat, nec nisi
exacto frigore, ob id dicta sapientissima arborum,” Plin. 16, 25, 41, § 102.—
B. After the predominance of Grecian civilization and literature, particularly
of the Grecian philosophy, like σοφός, well acquainted with the true value of
things, wise; and subst., a wise man, a sage (in Cic. saepiss.): ergo hic,
quisquis est, qui moderatione et constantiā quietus animo est sibique ipse
placatus ut nec tabescat molestiis nec frangatur timore nec sitienter quid
expetens ardeat desiderio nec alacritate futili gestiens deliquescat; “is est
sapiens quem quaerimus, is est beatus,” Cic. Tusc. 4, 17, 37: “sapientium
praecepta,” id. Rep. 3, 4, 7: “si quod raro fit, id portentum putandum est:
sapientem esse portentum est. Saepius enim mulam peperisse arbitror, quam
sapientem fuisse,” id. Div. 2, 28, 61: “statuere quid sit sapiens, vel maxime
videtur esse sapientis,” id. Ac. 2, 3, 9; cf. id. Rep. 1, 29, 45.—So esp. of
the seven wise men of Greece: “ut ad Graecos referam orationem ... septem
fuisse dicuntur uno tempore, qui sapientes et haberentur et vocarentur,” Cic.
de Or. 3, 34, 137: “eos vero septem quos Graeci sapientes nominaverunt,” id.
Rep. 1, 7, 12: “sapienti assentiri ... se sapientem profiteri,” id. Fin. 2,3,
7.—Ironically: “sapientum octavus,” Hor. S. 2, 3, 296.—With the Romans, an
appellation of Lœlius: te, Laeli, sapientem et appellant et existimant.
Tribuebatur hoc modo M. Catoni: scimus L. Atilium apud patres nostros
appellatum esse sapientem, sed uterque alio quodam modo: Atilius, qui prudens
esse in jure civili putabatur; “Cato quia multarum rerum usum habebat ...
propterea quasi cognomen jam habebat in senectute sapientis ... Athenis unum
accepimus et eum quidem etiam Apollinis oraculo sapientissimum judicatum,” Cic.
Lael. 2, 6; cf.: “numquam ego dicam C. Fabricium, M'. Curium, Ti. Coruncanium,
quos sapientes nostri majores judicabant, ad istorum normam fuisse sapientes,”
id. ib. 5, 18: “ii, qui sapientes sunt habiti, M. Cato et C. Laelius,” id. Off.
3, 4, 16; Val. Max. 4, 1, ext. 7; Lact. 4, 1.—Hence, adv.: săpĭen-ter ,
sensibly, discreetly, prudently, judiciously, wisely: “recte et sapienter
facere,” Plaut. Am. 1, 1, 133; id. Mil. 3, 3, 34: “consulere,” id. ib. 3, 1,
90: “insipienter factum sapienter ferre,” id. Truc. 4, 3, 33: “factum,” id.
Aul. 3, 5, 3: “dicta,” id. Rud. 4, 7, 24: “quam sapienter jam reges hoc nostri
viderint,” Cic. Rep. 2, 17, 31: “provisa,” id. ib. 4, 3, 3: “a majoribus
prodita fama,” id. ib. 2, 2, 4: “considerate etiam sapienterque fecerunt,” id.
Phil. 4, 2, 6; 13, 6, 13: “vives sapienter,” Hor. Ep. 1, 10, 44: “agendum,” Ov.
M. 13, 377: “temporibus uti,” Nep. Epam. 3, 1; Hor. C. 4, 9, 48.—Comp.: “facis
sapientius Quam pars latronum, etc.,” Plaut. Curc. 4, 3, 15; id. Poen. prol. 7:
“nemo est, qui tibi sapientius suadere possit te ipso,” Cic. Fam. 2, 7, 1:
“sapientius fecisse,” id. Brut. 42, 155.—Sup.: “quod majores nostros et
probavisse maxime et retinuisse sapientissime judico,” Cic. Rep. 2, 37, 63.
Vide H. P. Grice, “Philosophy: love of wisdom, love of taste,” BANC.
viters,
sraffa, and Grice -- L. – cited by H. P. Grice, “Some like Vitters,
but Moore’s MY man.” Vienna-born philosopher trained as an enginner at
Manchester. Typically referred to Wittgenstein in the style of English
schoolboy slang of the time as, “Witters,” pronounced “Vitters.”“I heard Austin
said once: ‘Some like Witters, but Moore’s MY man.’ Austin would open the
“Philosophical Investigations,” and say, “Let’s see what Witters has to say
about this.” Everybody ended up loving Witters at the playgroup.” Witters’s
oeuvre was translated first into English by C. K. Ogden. There are interesting
twists. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Vitters.” Grice was sadly discomforted when one of
his best friends at Oxford, D. F. Pears, dedicated so much effort to the
unveiling of the mysteries of ‘Vitters.’ ‘Vitters’ was all in the air in
Grice’s inner circle. Strawson had written a review of Philosophical
Investigations. Austin was always mocking ‘Vitters,’ and there are other
connections. For Grice, the most important is that remark in “Philosohpical
Investigations,” which he never cared to check ‘in the Hun,’ about a horse not
being seen ‘as a horse.’ But in “Prolegomena” he mentions Vitters in other
contexts, too, and in “Causal Theory,” almost anonymously – but usually with
regard to the ‘seeing as’ puzzle. Grice would also rely on Witters’s now
knowing how to use ‘know’ or vice versa. In “Method” Grice quotes verbatim: ‘No
psyche without the manifestation the ascription of psyche is meant to explain,”
and also to the effect that most ‘-etic’ talk of behaviour is already ‘-emic,’
via internal perspective, or just pervaded with intentionalism. One of the most
original and challenging philosophical writers of the twentieth century. Born
in Vienna into an assimilated family of Jewish extraction, he went to England
as a student and eventually became a protégé of Russell’s at Cambridge. He
returned to Austria at the beginning of The Great War I, but went back to
Cambridge in 8 and taught there as a fellow and professor. Despite spending
much of his professional life in England, Vitters never lost contact with his
Austrian background, and his writings combine in a unique way ideas derived
from both the insular and the continental European tradition. His thought is
strongly marked by a deep skepticism about philosophy, but he retained the
conviction that there was something important to be rescued from the
traditional enterprise. In his Blue Book 8 he referred to his own work as “one
of the heirs of the subject that used to be called philosophy.” What strikes
readers first when they look at Vitters’s writings is the peculiar form of
their composition. They are generally made up of short individual notes that
are most often numbered in sequence and, in the more finished writings,
evidently selected and arranged with the greatest care. Those notes range from
fairly technical discussions on matters of logic, the mind, meaning,
understanding, acting, seeing, mathematics, and knowledge, to aphoristic
observations about ethics, culture, art, and the meaning of life. Because of
their wide-ranging character, their unusual perspective on things, and their
often intriguing style, Vitters’s writings have proved to appeal to both
professional philosophers and those interested in philosophy in a more general
way. The writings as well as his unusual life and personality have already produced
a large body of interpretive literature. But given his uncompromising stand, it
is questionable whether his thought will ever be fully integrated into academic
philosophy. It is more likely that, like Pascal and Nietzsche, he will remain
an uneasy presence in philosophy. From an early date onward Vitters was greatly
influenced by the idea that philosophical problems can be resolved by paying
attention to the working of language a
thought he may have gained from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der
Sprache 102. Vitters’s affinity to Mauthner is, indeed, evident in all phases
of his philosophical development, though it is particularly noticeable in his
later thinking.Until recently it has been common to divide Vitters’s work into
two sharply distinct phases, separated by a prolonged period of dormancy.
According to this schema the early “Tractarian” period is that of the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus 1, which Vitters wrote in the trenches of World War I, and
the later period that of the Philosophical Investigations 3, which he composed
between 6 and 8. But the division of his work into these two periods has proved
misleading. First, in spite of obvious changes in his thinking, Vitters
remained throughout skeptical toward traditional philosophy and persisted in
channeling philosophical questioning in a new direction. Second, the common
view fails to account for the fact that even between 0 and 8, when Vitters
abstained from actual work in philosophy, he read widely in philosophical and
semiphilosophical authors, and between 8 and 6 he renewed his interest in
philosophical work and wrote copiously on philosophical matters. The posthumous
publication of texts such as The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar,
Philosophical Remarks, and Conversations with the Vienna Circle has led to
acknowledgment of a middle period in Vitters’s development, in which he
explored a large number of philosophical issues and viewpoints a period that served as a transition between
the early and the late work. Early period. As the son of a greatly successful
industrialist and engineer, Vitters first studied engineering in Berlin and
Manchester, and traces of that early training are evident throughout his
writing. But his interest shifted soon to pure mathematics and the foundations
of mathematics, and in pursuing questions about them he became acquainted with
Russell and Frege and their work. The two men had a profound and lasting effect
on Vitters even when he later came to criticize and reject their ideas. That
influence is particularly noticeable in the Tractatus, which can be read as an
attempt to reconcile Russell’s atomism with Frege’s apriorism. But the book is
at the same time moved by quite different and non-technical concerns. For even
before turning to systematic philosophy Vitters had been profoundly moved by
Schopenhauer’s thought as it is spelled out in The World as Will and
Representation, and while he was serving as a soldier in World War I, he
renewed his interest in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and
mystical outlook. The resulting confluence of ideas is evident in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus and gives the book its peculiar character. Composed in a
dauntingly severe and compressed style, the book attempts to show that
traditional philosophy rests entirely on a misunderstanding of “the logic of
our language.” Following in Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps, Vitters argued
that every meaningful sentence must have a precise logical structure. That
structure may, however, be hidden beneath the clothing of the grammatical
appearance of the sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis
in order to be made evident. Such analysis, Vitters was convinced, would
establish that every meaningful sentence is either a truth-functional composite
of another simpler sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation
of simple names. He argued further that every atomic sentence is a logical
picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly
the same formal structure as the atomic sentence that depicts it. He employed
this “picture theory of meaning” as it
is usually called to derive conclusions
about the nature of the world from his observations about the structure of the
atomic sentences. He postulated, in particular, that the world must itself have
a precise logical structure, even though we may not be able to determine it
completely. He also held that the world consists primarily of facts,
corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that
those facts, in turn, are concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to
the simple names of which the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived
these metaphysical conclusions from his view of the nature of language, Vitters
did not consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their
concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like. As a
result, there has been a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement among
interpreters about their character. The propositions of the Tractatus are for
the most part concerned with spelling out Vitters’s account of the logical
structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have
understandably been of most interest to philosophers who are primarily concerned
with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for Vitters himself
the most important part of the book consisted of the negative conclusions about
philosophy that he reaches at the end of his text: in particular, that all
sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or
truth-functional composites of such are strictly speaking meaningless. Among
these he included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all
propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all propositions of logic,
indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all the propositions of the
Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying
something important, but what they try to express in words can only show
itself. As a result Vitters concluded that anyone who understood what the
Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions as senseless, that
she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached
such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical
propositions. She would see the world rightly and would then also recognize
that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science;
but those could never touch what was really important in human life, the
mystical. That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the last proposition of the
Tractatus declared. Middle period. It was only natural that Vitters should not
embark on an academic career after he had completed that work. Instead he
trained to be a school teacher and taught primary school for a number of years
in the mountains of lower Austria. In the mid-0s he also built a house for his
sister; this can be seen as an attempt to give visual expression to the
logical, aesthetic, and ethical ideas of the Tractatus. In those years he
developed a number of interests seminal for his later development. His school
experience drew his attention to the way in which children learn language and
to the whole process of enculturation. He also developed an interest in
psychology and read Freud and others. Though he remained hostile to Freud’s
theoretical explanations of his psychoanalytic work, he was fascinated with the
analytic practice itself and later came to speak of his own work as therapeutic
in character. In this period of dormancy Vitters also became acquainted with
the members of the Vienna Circle, who had adopted his Tractatus as one of their
key texts. For a while he even accepted the positivist principle of meaning
advocated by the members of that Circle, according to which the meaning of a
sentence is the method of its verification. This he would later modify into the
more generous claim that the meaning of a sentence is its use. Vitters’s most
decisive step in his middle period was to abandon the belief of the Tractatus
that meaningful sentences must have a precise hidden logical structure and the
accompanying belief that this structure corresponds to the logical structure of
the facts depicted by those sentences. The Tractatus had, indeed, proceeded on
the assumption that all the different symbolic devices that can describe the
world must be constructed according to the same underlying logic. In a sense,
there was then only one meaningful language in the Tractatus, and from it one
was supposed to be able to read off the logical structure of the world. In the
middle period Vitters concluded that this doctrine constituted a piece of
unwarranted metaphysics and that the Tractatus was itself flawed by what it had
tried to combat, i.e., the misunderstanding of the logic of language. Where he
had previously held it possible to ground metaphysics on logic, he now argued
that metaphysics leads the philosopher into complete darkness. Turning his attention
back to language he concluded that almost everything he had said about it in
the Tractatus had been in error. There were, in fact, many different languages
with many different structures that could meet quite different specific needs.
Language was not strictly held together by logical structure, but consisted, in
fact, of a multiplicity of simpler substructures or language games. Sentences
could not be taken to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of
sentences did not all function as names of simple objects. These new
reflections on language served Vitters, in the first place, as an aid to
thinking about the nature of the human mind, and specifically about the
relation between private experience and the physical world. Against the existence
of a Cartesian mental substance, he argued that the word ‘I’ did not serve as a
name of anything, but occurred in expressions meant to draw attention to a
particular body. For a while, at least, he also thought he could explain the
difference between private experience and the physical world in terms of the
existence of two languages, a primary language of experience and a secondary
language of physics. This duallanguage view, which is evident in both the
Philosophical Remarks and The Blue Book, Vitters was to give up later in favor
of the assumption that our grasp of inner phenomena is dependent on the
existence of outer criteria. From the mid-0s onward he also renewed his
interest in the philosophy of mathematics. In contrast to Frege and Russell, he
argued strenuously that no part of mathematics is reducible purely to logic.
Instead he set out to describe mathematics as part of our natural history and
as consisting of a number of diverse language games. He also insisted that the
meaning of those games depended on the uses to which the mathematical formulas
were put. Applying the principle of verification to mathematics, he held that
the meaning of a mathematical formula lies in its proof. These remarks on the
philosophy of mathematics have remained among Vitters’s most controversial and
least explored writings. Later period. Vitters’s middle period was
characterized by intensive philosophical work on a broad but quickly changing
front. By 6, however, his thinking was finally ready to settle down once again
into a steadier pattern, and he now began to elaborate the views for which he
became most famous. Where he had constructed his earlier work around the logic
devised by Frege and Russell, he now concerned himself mainly with the actual
working of ordinary language. This brought him close to the tradition of
British common sense philosophy that Moore had revived and made him one of the
godfathers of the ordinary language philosophy that was to flourish in Oxford
in the 0s. In the Philosophical Investigations Vitters emphasized that there
are countless different uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and
“sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a perspicuous view of those
multiple uses and thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These
puzzles were the result of insufficient attention to the working of language
and could be resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which
they had been reached. Vitters thus came to think of philosophy as a
descriptive, analytic, and ultimately therapeutic practice. In the
Investigations he set out to show how common philosophical views about meaning
including the logical atomism of the Tractatus, about the nature of concepts,
about logical necessity, about rule-following, and about the mindbody problem
were all the product of an insufficient grasp of how language works. In one of
the most influential passages of the book he argued that concept words do not
denote sharply circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark family resemblances
between the things labeled with the concept. He also held that logical
necessity results from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine
their own applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of
regular practices. Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only
insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct application. As a
consequence, he argued, there cannot be a completely private language, i.e., a
language that in principle can be used only to speak about one’s own inner
experience. This private language argument has caused much discussion.
Interpreters have disagreed not only over the structure of the argument and
where it occurs in Vitters’s text, but also over the question whether he meant
to say that language is necessarily social. Because he said that to speak of
inner experiences there must be external and publicly available criteria, he
has often been taken to be advocating a logical behaviorism, but nowhere does
he, in fact, deny the existence of inner states. What he says is merely that
our understanding of someone’s pain is connected to the existence of natural
and linguistic expressions of pain. In the Philosophical Investigations Vitters
repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be learned. This
learning, he says, is fundamentally a process of inculcation and drill. In
learning a language the child is initiated in a form of life. In Vitters’s
later work the notion of form of life serves to identify the whole complex of
natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our language and by a
particular understanding of the world. He elaborated those ideas in notes on
which he worked between 8 and his death in 1 and which are now published under
the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief is always part of
a system of beliefs that together constitute a worldview. All confirmation and
disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are internal to the
system. For all this he was not advocating a relativism, but a naturalism that
assumes that the world ultimately determines which language games can be
played. Vitters’s final notes vividly illustrate the continuity of his basic
concerns throughout all the changes his thinking went through. For they reveal
once more how he remained skeptical about all philosophical theories and how he
understood his own undertaking as the attempt to undermine the need for any
such theorizing. The considerations of On Certainty are evidently directed
against both philosophical skeptics and those philosophers who want to refute
skepticism. Against the philosophical skeptics Vitters insisted that there is
real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily
reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of what has been
drilled into us, and of our modifications of this inheritance. We have no
general reason to doubt this inherited body of knowledge, we do not generally
doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to do so. But On Certainty
also argues that it is impossible to refute skepticism by pointing to
propositions that are absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared ‘I
think, therefore I am’ indubitable, or as Moore did when he said, “I know for
certain that this is a hand here.” The fact that such propositions are
considered certain, Vitters argued, indicates only that they play an
indispensable, normative role in our language game; they are the riverbed
through which the thought of our language game flows. Such propositions cannot
be taken to express metaphysical truths. Here, too, the conclusion is that all
philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such
argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but a certain kind of
natural human practice. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Il gesto della mano di Sraffa.”
Speranza, “Sraffa’s handwave, and his impicaturum.”
wodeham: “If Adam of Wodeham was called Wodeham, I should, by
the same token, be called “Harborne”” – H. P. Grice. Oxonian philosopher, like
Grice. Adam de English Franciscan philosopher-theologian who lectured on Peter
Lombard’s Sentences at London, Norwich, and Oxford. His published works include
the Tractatus de indivisibilibus; his Lectura secunda Norwich lectures; and an
abbreviation of his Oxford lectures by Henry Totting of Oyta, published by John
Major in 1512. Wodeham’s main work, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain
unpublished. A brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts
he consulted, Wodeham deemed Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor.
William Ockham, Wodeham’s teacher, was the other great influence on Wodeham’s
philosophical theology. Wodeham defended Ockham’s views against attacks mounted
by Walter Chatton; he also wrote the prologue to Ockham’s Summa logicae. Wodeham’s
own influence rivaled that of Ockham. Among the authors he strongly influenced
are Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre
d’Ailly, Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia Alexander V, Henry
Totting of Oyta, and John Major. Wodeham’s theological works were written for
an audience with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in
semantics, logic, and medieval mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus
and Ockham, Wodeham argued that the sensitive and intellective souls were not
distinct. He further develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing
intellectual intuition of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from
sensory intuition of external objects. Scientific knowledge based on experience
can be based on intuition, according to Wodeham. He distinguishes different
grades of evidence, and allows that sensory perceptions may be mistaken.
Nonetheless, they can form the basis for scientific knowledge, since they are
reliable; mistakes can be corrected by reason and experience. In semantic
theory, Wodeham defends the view that the immediate object of scientific
knowledge is the complexe significabile, that which the conclusion is designed
to signify.
wolff: cited by H. P. Grice, c. philosopher and the most
powerful advocate for secular rationalism in early eighteenth-century G.y.
Although he was a Lutheran, his early education in Catholic Breslau made him
familiar with both the Scholasticism of Aquinas and Suárez and more modern
sources. His later studies at Leipzig were completed with a dissertation on the
application of mathematical methods to ethics 1703, which brought him to the
attention of Leibniz. He remained in correspondence with Leibniz until the
latter’s death 1716, and became known as the popularizer of Leibniz’s
philosophy, although his views did not derive from that source alone. Appointed
to teach mathematics in Halle in 1706 he published mathematical textbooks and
compendia that dominated G. universities for decades, Wolff began lecturing on
philosophy as well by 1709. His rectoral address On the Practical Philosophy of
the Chin. argued that revelation and even belief in God were unnecessary for
arriving at sound principles of moral and political reasoning; this brought his
uneasy relations with the Halle Pietists to a head, and in 1723 they secured
his dismissal and indeed banishment. Wolff was immediately welcomed in Marburg,
where he became a hero for freedom of thought, and did not return to Prussia
until the ascension of Frederick the Great in 1740, when he resumed his post at
Halle. Wolff published an immense series of texts on logic, metaphysics,
ethics, politics, natural theology, and teleology, in which he created the
philosophical terminology of modern G.; he then published an even more
extensive series of works in Latin for the rest of his life, expanding and
modifying his G. works but also adding works on natural and positive law and
economics. He accepted the traditional division of logic into the doctrines of
concepts, judgment, and inference, which influenced the organization of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason and even Hegel’s Science of Logic1816. In metaphysics,
he included general ontology and then the special disciplines of rational
cosmology, rational psychology, and rational theology Kant replaced Wolff’s
general ontology with his transcendental aesthetic and analytic, and then
demolished Wolff’s special metaphysics in his transcendental dialectic. Wolff’s
metaphysics drew heavily on Leibniz, but also on Descartes and even empiricists
like Locke. Methodologically, he attempted to derive the principle of
sufficient reason from the logical law of identity like the unpublished Leibniz
of the 1680s rather than the published Leibniz of the 1700s; substantively, he
began his G. metaphysics with a reconstruction of Descartes’s cogito argument,
then argued for a simple, immaterial soul, all of its faculties reducible to
forms of representation and related to body by preestablished harmony. Although
rejected by Crusius and then Kant, Wolff’s attempt to found philosophy on a
single principle continued to influence G. idealism as late as Reinhold,
Fichte, and Hegel, and his example of beginning metaphysics from the unique
representative power of the soul continued to influence not only later writers
such as Reinhold and Fichte but also Kant’s own conception of the
transcendental unity of apperception. In spite of the academic influence of his
metaphysics, Wolff’s importance for G. culture lay in his rationalist rather
than theological ethics. He argued that moral worth lies in the perfection of
the objective essence of mankind; as the essence of a human is to be an
intellect and a will with the latter dependent on the former, which are
physically embodied and dependent for their well-being on the well-being of
their physical body, morality requires perfection of the intellect and will,
physical body, and external conditions for the well-being of that combination.
Each person is obliged to perfect all instantiations of this essence, but in
practice does so most effectively in his own case; duties to oneself therefore
precede duties to others and to God. Because pleasure is the sensible sign of
perfection, Wolff’s perfectionism resembles contemporary utilitarianism. Since
he held that human perfection can be understood by human reason independently
of any revelation, Wolff joined contemporary British enlighteners such as
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in arguing that morality does not depend on divine
commands, indeed the recognition of divine commands depends on an antecedent
comprehension of morality although morality does require respect for God, and
thus the atheistic morality of the Chin., even though sound as far as it went,
was not complete. This was the doctrine that put Wolff’s life in danger, but it
had tremendous repercussions for the remainder of his century, and certainly in
Kant. H. P. Grice, “Psychologia ratioalis.”
wollaston: w. cited by H. P. Grice. English moralist notorious
for arguing that the immorality of actions lies in their implying false
propositions. An assistant headmaster who later took priestly orders, Wollaston
maintains in his one published work, The Religion of Nature Delineated 1722,
that the foundations of religion and morality are mutually dependent. God has
preestablished a harmony between reason or truth and happiness, so that actions
that contradict truth through misrepresentation thereby frustrate human
happiness and are thus evil. For instance, if a person steals another’s watch,
her falsely representing the watch as her own makes the act wrong. Wollaston’s
views, particularly his taking morality to consist in universal and necessary
truths, were influenced by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among
his many critics the most famous was Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory
implies an absurdity: any action concealed from public view e.g., adultery
conveys no false proposition and therefore is not immoral. Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Why bother with Wollaston?” BANC.
wollstonecraft, M, author of “A Vindication of the Rights of
Somerville,” a central text of Oxonian feminist philosophy. Wollstonecraft’s
chief target is Rousseau: her goal is to argue against the separate and
different education Rousseau provided for girls and to extend his recommendations
to girls as well as boys. Wollstonecraft saw such an improved education for
women as necessary to their asserting their right as “human creatures” to
develop their faculties in a way conducive to human virtue. She also wrote A
Vindication of the Rights of Men 1790, an attack on Edmund Burke’s pamphlet on
the Revolution, as well as novels,
essays, an account of her travels, and books for children.
wright: philosopher. His philosophical discussions are
stimulating and attracted many, including Peirce, James, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., who thinks of him as their “intellectual boxing master.” Wright
eventually accepted empiricism, especially that of J. S. Mill, though under
Darwinian influence he modified Mill’s view considerably by rejecting the
empiricist claim that general propositions merely summarize particulars. Wright
claims instead that scientific theories are hypotheses to be further developed,
and insisted that a moral rule is irreducible and needs no utilitarian “proof.”
Though he denied the “summary” view of universals, he is not strictly a
pragmatist, since for him a low-level empirical proposition like Peirce’s ‘this
diamond is hard’ is not a hypothesis but a self-contained irreducible
statement.
wundt: proto-Griceian philosophical psychologist. philosopher
that Grice, who calls himself a ‘philosophical psychologist,’ often quotes. “As
the founder of scientific psychology, Wundt was influential in my embracing
‘philosophical psychology,’ as a revenge.” Although trained as a physician
(“like Vitters”), Wundt turns to philosophy and in Leipzig’s downtown
established the first recognized psychology laboratory. For Wundt, psychology
deals with conscious experience, a definition soon overtaken by Ryle’s
behaviourism. Wundt’s psychology has two departments: the so-called
physiological psychology (Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, Grice
preferred ‘philosophical physiology’), primarily the experimental study of
immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s psycho-physics; and the
Volkerpsychologie (Volkerpsychologie, -- or ‘folkpsychology,’ as Grice prefers
– ‘philosohical psychology is a folk-science’ -- which circulated at Oxford as
“The Language of Gestures,” the non-experimental study of the higher mental
processes via their products, conversation, language, myth, and custom.
Although Wundt is a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as
psychology’s founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little
influence, except on Grice and a few intelligent Griceians. A typical scholar
of his time, Wundt, like Grice, also explored across the whole of philosophy,
including logic and ethics. W. M. philosopher and psychologist, a founder of
scientific psychology. Although trained as a physician, he turned to philosophy
and in 1879, at the of Leipzig,
established the first recognized psychology laboratory. For Wundt, psychology
was the science of conscious experience, a definition soon overtaken by
behaviorism. Wundt’s psychology had two departments: the so-called physiological
psychology Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, 3 vols., 1873 74; only
vol. 1 of the fifth edition, 0, was tr. into English, primarily the
experimental study of immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s
psychophysics; and the Volkerpsychologie Volkerpsychologie, 10 vols., 020;
fragment tr. as The Language of Gestures, 3, the non-experimental study of the
higher mental processes via their products, language, myth, and custom.
Although Wundt was a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as
psychology’s founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little
influence. A typical G. scholar of his time, he also wrote across the whole of
philosophy, including logic and ethics. .
wyclif: “It never ceased to amaze me how Wyclif was able to
find Anglo-Saxon terms for all the “Biblia Vulgata”!” – H. P. Grice. English
Griceian philosophical theologian and religious reformer. He worked for most of
his life in Oxford as a secular clerk, teaching philosophy and later theology
and writing extensively in both fields. The mode of thought expressed in his
surviving works is one of extreme realism, and in this his thought fostered the
split of Bohemian, later Hussite, philosophy from that of the G. masters
teaching in Prague. His worldline Wyclif, John 982 982 philosophical summa was most influential
for his teaching on universals, but also dealt extensively with the question of
determinism; these issues underlay his later handling of the questions of the
Eucharist and of the identity of the church respectively. His influence on
English philosophy was severely curtailed by the growing hostility of the
church to his ideas, the condemnation of many of his tenets, the persecution of
his followers, and the destruction of his writings.
qu-quaestio
-- x-question: Grice borrowed the
erotetic from Cook Wilson, who in fact was influenced by Stout and will also
influence Collingwood. While Grice starts by considering the pseudo-distinction
between x-questions and yes/no questions, he soon finds out that they all
reduce to the x-question, since a yes/no question obviously asks for a variable
(the truth value of the whole proposition) to be filled. Grice sometimes
follows Ryle who had quoted Carnap on the ‘w
frage.’ Grice is aware of the ‘wh’ rune in Anglo-Saxon, but was confused
by ‘how.’ “For fun, I will spell ‘how,’ ‘whow.’” Although a Midlander Grice
preferred the northern English pronunciation of aspirating the ‘wh-‘ and was
irritated that only ‘who’ and ‘whose’ keep the aspiration.
xenophanes:
Grice: “You have to be careful when you research for this in Italy – they spell
it with an ‘s’!” -- Grecian philosopher, a proponent of an idealized
conception of the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound
epistemological views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Grecian city on the coast of
Asia Minor, he emigrated as a young man to the Grecian West Sicily and southern
Italy. The formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism.
He is the first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports
but also quite a few verbatim quotations fragments from his
“Lampoons” Silloi and from other didactic poetry. Xenophanes attacks the
worldview of Homer, Hesiod, and traditional Grecian piety: it is an outrage
that the poets attribute moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion
reflects regional biases blond gods for the Northerners; black gods for the
Africans. Indeed, anthropomorphic gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the
human viewpoint “If cattle, or horses, or lions . . . could draw pictures of
the gods . . . ,” frg. 15. There is a single “greatest” god, who is not at all
like a human being, either in body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of
organs, he effects changes without “moving,” through the sheer power of his
thought. The rainbow is no sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud
formation. Nor are the sun or the moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from
the elusive “Twin Sons of Zeus” St. Elmo’s fire to sun, moon, and stars, are
varieties of cloud formation. There are no mysterious infernal regions; the
familiar strata of earth stretch down ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is
the one visible at our feet: the horizontal border between earth and air.
Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his theological and cosmological pronouncements
with an epistemological caveat: what he offers is only a “conjecture.” In later
antiquity Xenophanes came to be regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School,
and his teachings were assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This
appears to be based on nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness
and utter immobility of God.
xenophon: Grice: “You have to be carefully
when researching for this philosopher in Italy – They spell it ‘Senofonte’ Grecian
soldier and historian, author of several Socratic dialogues, along with
important works on history, education, political theory, and other topics. He
was interested in philosophy, and he was a penetrating and intelligent “social
thinker” whose views on morality and society have been influential over many
centuries. His perspective on Socrates’ character and moral significance
provides a valuable supplement and corrective to the better-known views of
Plato. Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, the only ones besides Plato’s to survive
intact, help us obtain a broader picture of the Socratic dialogue as a literary
genre. They also provide precious evidence concerning the thoughts and
personalities of other followers of Socrates, such as Antisthenes and
Alcibiades. Xenophon’s longest and richest Socratic work is the Memorabilia, or
“Memoirs of Socrates,” which stresses Socrates’ self-sufficiency and his
beneficial effect on his companions. Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates and his
Symposium were probably intended as responses to Plato’s Apology and Symposium.
Xenophon’s Socratic dialogue on estate management, the Oeconomicus, is valuable
for its underlying social theory and its evidence concerning the role and
status of women in classical Athens. Refs.: Speranza, “All you need is Loeb,”
Villa Grice.
yes/no
question – “sic” et “ne” – modus interrogativus. Grice: “Cicero has this as ‘sic’ and ‘non.’ For Grice,
tertium non datur. Grice’s example is “Have you stopped beating your wife, Smith?” “Smith is tricked into
having to say ‘yes,’ which makes him a criminal, or “no,” which doesn’t but
*implicates* him in a crime.” “The explicit cancellation would be, “No, because
I never started it.” – “But usually Smith is never so intelligently Griceian
like *that*! Vide: modus interrogatives.
Grice finds the formalisation of a yes-no question more complicated than
that of an x-question. Like Carnap, he concludes that the distinction is
otiose, because a yes/no question also is after a variable to be filled by a
definite value, regarding the truth-value of the proposition as a whole rather
than a part thereof. Grice: “While I’ll casually use ‘yes,’ I’m well aware that
the ‘s,’ as every German schoolboy knows, is otiose – it’s ‘yeah’ which is the
correct form!” -- Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Cicero on ‘sic’ and ‘ne’.” BANC,
Speranza, “First time in Corpus?”
yog and zog: “If” (Cicero’s ‘si’) is a problem for Grice. “Especially
in it being the only subordinate particle I have seriously explored.” According
to Strawson and Wiggins, this was Grice having forged his shining new tool –
the distinction between ‘By emitting x, An emissor coomunicates that p” and
“The emissum x ‘means’ ‘p.’ Apply that to ‘if.’ In Strawson and Wiggins’s
precis, for Grice, ‘p yields q’ is part of the conversational implicaturum – for
Strawson and Wiggins it is part of the conventional implicaturum. They agree on
‘p horseshoe q’ being the explicit
emissum or explicatum in “Emissor explicitly conveys and communicates that p
horseshoe q.” For Grice, the implicaturum, which, being conversational is
cancellable, is calculated on the assumption that the addressee can work out
that the emissor has non-truth-functional grounds for the making of any
stronger claim. For Strawson, that non-truth-functional reason is precisely ‘p
yields q,’ which leads Strawson to think that the thing is not cancellable and
conventionally implicated. If Strawson were right that this is Grice forging a
new shining tool to crack the crib of reality and fashioning thereby a new
shining skid under his metaphysical feet, it would be almost the second use of
the tool! This is an expansion by Grice
on the implicaturum of a ‘propositio conditionalis.’ Grice, feeling
paradoxical, invites us to suppose a scenario involving ‘if.’ He takes it
as a proof that his account of the conversational implicaturum of ‘if’ is, as
Strawson did not agree, correct, and that what an utterer explicitly conveys by
‘if p, q’ is ‘p > q.’ that two chess
players, Yog and Zog, play 100 games under the following conditions. Yog is
white nine of ten times. There are no draws. And the results are:
Yog, when white, won 80 of 90 games. Yog, when black, won zero of ten
games. This implies that: 8/9 times, if Yog was white, Yog won. 1/2
of the time, if Yog lost, Yog was black.
9/10 that either Yog wasnt white or he won. From these statements,
it might appear one could make these deductions by contraposition and
conditional disjunction: If Yog was white, then 1/2 of the time Yog won.
9/10 times, if Yog was white, then he won. But both propositions are
untrue. They contradict the assumption. In fact, they do not provide enough
information to use Bayesian reasoning to reach those conclusions. That might be
clearer if the propositions had instead been stated differently. When Yog was
white, Yog won 8/9 times. No information is given about when Yog was black.
When Yog lost, Yog was black 1/2 the time. No information is given about when
Yog won. (9/10 times, either Yog was black and won, Yog was black and lost, or
Yog was white and won. No information is provided on how the 9/10 is divided
among those three situations. The paradox by Grice shows that the exact meaning
of statements involving conditionals and probabilities is more complicated than
may be obvious on casual examination. Refs.: Grice’s interest with ‘if’ surely
started after he carefully read the section on ‘if’ and the horseshoe in
Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory. He was later to review his attack on
Strawson in view of Strawson’s defense in ‘If and the horseshoe.’ The polemic
was pretty much solved as a matter of different intuitions: what Grice sees as
a conversational implicaturum, Strawson does see as an ‘implicaturum,’ but a
non-defeasible one – what Grice would qualify as ‘conventional.’ Grice leaves
room for an implicaturum to be nonconversational and yet nonconventional, but
it is not worth trying to fit Strawson’s suggestion in this slot, since
Strawson, unlike Grice, has nothing against a convention. Grice was motivated
to formulate his ‘paradox,’ seeing that Strawson was saying that the so-called
‘paradoxes’ of ‘entailment’ and ‘implication’ are a misnomer. “They are not
paradoxical; they are false!” Grice has specific essays on both the paradoxes
of entailment and the paradoxes of implication-. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC
MSS 90/135c, The University of California, Berkeley.
zabarella: Grice: “Zabarella
is what I would call a proto-Griceain.” In fact, at Villa Grice, Grice was
often called the English Zabarella, after philosopher Jacopo Zabarella, of
Padova. Zabarella produces extensive commentaries on Grice’s favourite tract by
Aristotle, “De Anima,” and Physica and also discussed some Aristotelian
interpreters. However, Zabarella’s most original contribution is his work in
semantics, “Opera logica.” Zabarella regards semantics as a preliminary study
that provides the tools necessary for philosophical analysis. Two such tools
are what Zabarella calls “order” (cf. Grice, ‘be orderly’). Another tool is
what Zabarella calls “ method.” Order teaches us how to organize the content of
a discipline to apprehend it more easily. Method teaches us how to draw a
syllogistic inference. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and methods
classified by other interpreters to compositive order, and resolutive order,
and composite method and and resolutive method. The compositive order from a
principle to this or that corollary applies to this or that speculative,
alethic or theoretical discipline. The ‘resolutive’ order, from a desired end
to the means appropriate to its achievement applies to this or that practical
discipline, such as ‘pragmatics’ understood as a manual of rules of etiquette.
This much is already in Aristotle. However, Zabarella offers an original
analysis of ‘method.’ The compositive method infers a particular consequence or
corollary from a ‘generic’ principle. The ‘resolutive’ method INFERS an
originating gneric principle from this or that particular consequence,
corollary, or instantiantion, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from
effect to cause. Zabarella’s terminology influenced Galileo’s mechanics, and
has been applied to Grice’s inference of the principle of conversational
co-operation out from the only evidence which Grice has, which is this or that
‘dyadic’ exchange, as he calls it. In Grice’s case, his corpus is intentionally
limited to conversations between two philosophers: A: What’s that? B: A pillar
box? A: What colour is it? B: Seems red to me. From such an exchange, Grice
infers the principle of conversational co-operation. It clashes when a
cancellation (or as Grice prefers, an annulation) is on sight: “I surely don’t
mean to imply that it MIGHT actually be red.” “Then why be so guarded? I
thought you were cooperating.”H. P. Grice. “We can regard Jacopo as an Aristotelian
philosopher who taught at the of Padua.
He wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul and also
discussed other interpreters such as Averroes. However, his most original
contribution was his work in logic, Opera logica 1578. Zabarella regards logic
as a preliminary study that provides the tools necessary for philosophical
analysis. Two such tools are order and method: order teaches us how to organize
the content of a discipline to apprehend it more easily; method teaches us how
to draw syllogistic inferences. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and
methods classified by other interpreters to compositive and resolutive orders
and methods. The compositive order from first principles to their consequences
applies to theoretical disciplines. The resolutive order from a desired end to
means appropriate to its achievement applies to practical disciplines. This
much was already in Aristotle. Zabarella offers an original analysis of method.
The compositive method infers particular consequences from general principles.
The resolutive method infers originating principles from particular
consequences, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from effect to cause.
It has been suggested that Zabarella’s terminology might have influenced
Galileo’s mechanics. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Zabarella,” Speranza, “Grice and
Zabarella,” Villa Grice.
zeigarnik
effect:
‘Conversation as a compete task and the Zeigmaik effect’ -- H. P. Grice. the
selective recall of uncompleted tasks in comparison to completed tasks. The
effect was named for Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of K. Lewin, who discovered it
and described it in a paper published in the Psychologische Forschung in 7.
Subjects received an array of short tasks, such as counting backward and
stringing beads, for rapid completion. Performance on half of these was
interrupted. Subsequent recall for the tasks favored the interrupted tasks.
Zeigarnik concluded that recall is influenced by motivation and not merely
associational strength. The effect was thought relevant to Freud’s claim that
unfulfilled wishes are persistent. Lewin attempted to derive the effect from
field theory, suggesting that an attempt to reach a goal creates a tension
released only when that goal is reached; interruption of the attempt produces a
tension favoring recall. Conditions affecting the Zeigarnik effect are
incompletely understood, as is its significance. Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Conversation as a complete task and the Zeigmarnik effect.” BANC
zeno’s
paradoxes.
“Since Elea is in Italy, we can say Zeno is Italian.” – H. P. Grice.
“Linguistic puzzles, in nature.” H. P.
Grice. four paradoxes relating to space and motion attributed to Zeno of Elea
fifth century B.C.: the racetrack, Achilles and the tortoise, the stadium, and
the arrow. Zeno’s work is known to us through secondary sources, in particular
Aristotle. The racetrack paradox. If a runner is to reach the end of the track,
he must first complete an infinite number of different journeys: getting to the
midpoint, then to the point midway between the midpoint and the end, then to
the point midway between this one and the end, and so on. But it is logically
impossible for someone to complete an infinite series of journeys. Therefore
the runner cannot reach the end of the track. Since it is irrelevant to the
argument how far the end of the track is
it could be a foot or an inch or a micron away this argument, if sound, shows that all
motion is impossible. Moving to any point will involve an infinite number of
journeys, and an infinite number of journeys cannot be completed. The paradox
of Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles can run much faster than the tortoise,
so when a race is arranged between them the tortoise is given a lead. Zeno
argued that Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise no matter how fast he
runs and no matter how long the race goes on. For the first thing Achilles has
to do is to get to the place from which the tortoise started. But the tortoise,
though slow, is unflagging: while Achilles was occupied in making up his
handicap, the tortoise has advanced a little farther. So the next thing
Achilles has to do is to get to the new place the tortoise occupies. While he
is doing this, the tortoise will have gone a little farther still. However
small the gap that remains, it will take Achilles some time to cross it, and in
that time the tortoise will have created another gap. So however fast Achilles
runs, all that the tortoise has to do, in order not to be beaten, is not to
stop. The stadium paradox. Imagine three equal cubes, A, B, and C, with sides
all of length l, arranged in a line stretching away from one. A is moved
perpendicularly out of line to the right by a distance equal to l. At the same
time, and at the same rate, C is moved perpendicularly out of line to the left
by a distance equal to l. The time it takes A to travel l/2 relative to B
equals the time it takes A to travel to l relative to C. So, in Aristotle’s
words, “it follows, Zeno thinks, that half the time equals its double” Physics
259b35. The arrow paradox. At any instant of time, the flying arrow “occupies a
space equal to itself.” That is, the arrow at an instant cannot be moving, for
motion takes a period of time, and a temporal instant is conceived as a point,
not itself having duration. It follows that the arrow is at rest at every
instant, and so does not move. What goes for arrows goes for everything:
nothing moves. Scholars disagree about what Zeno himself took his paradoxes to
show. There is no evidence that he offered any “solutions” to them. One view is
that they were part of a program to establish that multiplicity is an illusion,
and that reality is a seamless whole. The argument could be reconstructed like
this: if you allow that reality can be successively divided into parts, you
find yourself with these insupportable paradoxes; so you must think of reality
as a single indivisible One. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “Zeno’s sophisma.”
zettel: Grice entitled his further notes on logic and
conversation, “zettel” – “What’s good enough for Vitters is good enough for
me.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversation: Zettel,” BANC.
zoroastrianism: H. P. Grice wrote,
“Thus Implicated Zarahustra,” the national religion of ancient Iran. Zoroastrianism
suffered a steep decline after the seventh century A.D. because of conversion
to Islam. Of a remnant of roughly 100,000 adherents today, three-fourths are
Parsis “Persians” in or from western India; the others are Iranian
Zoroastrians. The tradition is identified with its prophet; his name in
Persian, Zarathushtra, is preserved in G. and Griceian, but the ancient Grecian
rendering of that name, Zoroaster, is the form used in most other modern
European languages. Zoroaster’s hymns to Ahura Mazda “the Wise Lord”, called
the Gathas, are interspersed among ritual hymns to other divine powers in the
collection known as the Avesta. In them, Zoroaster seeks reassurance that good
will ultimately triumph over evil and that Ahura Mazda will be a protector to
him in his prophetic mission. The Gathas expect that humans, by aligning
themselves with the force of righteousness and against evil, will receive bliss
and benefit in the next existence. The dating of the texts and of the prophet
himself is an elusive matter for scholars, but it is clear that Zoroaster lived
somewhere in Iran sometime prior to the emergence of the Achaemenid empire in
the sixth century B.C. His own faith in Ahura Mazda, reflected in the Gathas,
came to be integrated with other strains of old Indo-Iranian religion. We see
these in the Avesta’s hymns and the religion’s ritual practices. They venerate
an array of Iranian divine powers that resemble in function the deities found
in the Vedas of India. A common Indo-Iranian heritage is indicated conclusively
by similarities of language and of content between the Avesta and the Vedas.
Classical Zoroastrian orthodoxy does not replace the Indo-Iranian divinities
with Ahura Mazda, but instead incorporates them into its thinking more or less
as Ahura Mazda’s agents. The Achaemenid kings from the sixth through the fourth
centuries B.C. mention Ahura Mazda in their inscriptions, but not Zoroaster.
The Parthians, from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D.,
highlighted Mithra among the Indo-Iranian pantheon. But it was under the
Sasanians, who ruled Iran from the third to the seventh centuries, that
Zoroastrianism became the established religion. A salient doctrine is the
teaching concerning the struggle between good and evil. The time frame from the
world’s creation to the final resolution or judgment finds the Wise Lord, Ahura
Mazda or Ohrmazd, in the Pahlavi language of Sasanian times, locked in a
struggle with the evil spirit, Angra Mainyu in Pahlavi, Ahriman. The teaching
expands on an implication in the text of the Gathas, particularly Yasna 30,
that the good and evil spirits, coming together in the beginning and
establishing the living and inanimate realms, determined that at the end
benefit would accrue to the righteous but not the wicked. In Sasanian times,
there was speculative concern to assert Ahura Mazda’s infinity, omnipotence,
and omniscience, qualities that may indicate an impact of Mediterranean
philosophy. For example, the Bundahishn, a Pahlavi cosmological and
eschatological narrative, portrays Ahura Mazda as infinite in all four compass
directions but the evil spirit as limited in one and therefore doomed to
ultimate defeat. Such doctrine has been termed by some dualistic, in that it
has at least in Sasanian times seen the power of God rivaled by that of an evil
spirit. Zoroastrians today assert that they are monotheists, and do not worship
the evil spirit. But to the extent that the characterization may hold
historically, Zoroastrianism has manifested an “ethical” dualism, of good and
evil forces. Although capable of ritual pollution through waste products and
decay, the physical world, God’s creation, remains potentially morally good.
Contrast “ontological” dualism, as in gnostic and Manichaean teaching, where
the physical world itself is the result of the fall or entrapment of spirit in
matter. In the nineteenth century, Zoroastrian texts newly accessible to Europe
produced an awareness of the prophet’s concern for ethical matters. Nietzsche’s
values in his work Thus Spake Zarathustra, however, are his own, not those of
the ancient prophet. The title is arresting, but the connection of Nietzsche
with historical Zoroastrianism is a connection in theme only, in that the work
advances ideas about good and evil in an oracular style. Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Nietzsche’s implicatura,” BANC.
zweckrationalität: Grice: “What I
like about Weber’s ‘zweckrationalitaet’ is that it’s one of the latter items in
my dictionary!” -- Grice: “I’m slightly confused by Weber, who was hardly a
philosopher, and his use of ‘zweck,’ – which Kant would have disliked. H. P.
Grice used the vernacular here, since he found it tricky to look for the
Oxonian for ‘Zweck.’ As he was reading Weber, Grice realises that one
of the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to understand how a social
process (such as a conversation, seen as a two-player game) become
“rationalized,” taking up certain themes of philosophy of history since Hegel
as part of social theory. Conversation, as part of culture, e.g., becomes
‘rationalised’ in the process of the “disenchantment of a world views” in the
West, a process that Weber thinks has “universal significance.” But because of
his goal-oriented theory of action and his non-cognitivism in ethics, Weber
sees rationalization, like Grice, and unlike, say, Habermas, exclusively in
terms of the spread of purposive, or MEANS–ends rationality (“Zweckrationalität”).
Rational action means choosing the most effective MEANS of achieving one’s
goals and implies judging the consequences of one’s actions and choices. In
contrast, value rationality (“Wertrationalität,” that Grice translates as
‘worth-rationality’) consists of any action oriented to this or that ultimate
END, where considerations of consequences are irrelevant. Although such action
is rational insofar as it directs and organises human conduct, the choice of
this or that end, or this or that value itself cannot be, for Weber, unlike
Grice, a matter for rational or scientific judgment. Indeed, for Weber this
means that politics is the sphere for the struggle between at least two of this
or that irreducibly competing ultimate end, where “gods and demons fight it
out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and values. Grice tries to look for a way to give a criterion of
rationality other than the ‘common-or-garden’ means-end variety. When it comes
to conversation, see, Speranza, “The feast of [conversational] reason – Grice’s
Conversational immanuel – three steps towards a critique of conversational
reason.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversational rationality,” in The H. P. Grice
Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of California,
Berkeley.
References (Following the tradition of H. P. Grice’s Playgroup, only
Oxonian English-born male philosophers of Grice’s generation listed)
Austin,
J. L. Philosophical papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Austin,
J. L. Sense and sensibilia, reconstructed from manuscript notes by G. J.
Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Austin,
J. L. How to do things with words, ed. by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Blackburn,
S. W. Spreading the word. Oxford.
Bostock,
D. Logic.
Flew,
A. G. N. Logic and language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Grice,
H. P. Studies in the Way of Words
Grice,
H. P. Negation and privation
Grice,
H. P. The conception of value. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Grice,
H. P. Aspects of reason, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Grice,
H. P., D. F. Pears, and P. F. Strawson, ‘Metaphysics,’ in D. F. Pears, The
nature of metaphysics. London: Macmillan.
Hampshire,
S. N. Thought and action. London: Chatto and Windus.
Hampshire,
S. N. and H. L. A. Hart, Intention, decision, and certainty. Mind.
Hare,
R. M. The language of morals. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Hart,
H. L. A. Review of Holloway, The Philosophical Quarterly
Nowell-Smith,
P. H. Ethics. Middlesex: Penguin
Pears,
D. F. Philosophical psychology. London: Duckworth.
Pears,
D. F. Motivated irrationality.
Pears,
D. F. and H. P. Grice, The philosophy of action.
Strawson,
P. F. Introduction to Logical Theory.
Strawson,
P. F. Logico-Linguistic Papers.
Strawson,
P. F. and H. P. Grice, In defense of a dogma.
Strawson,
P. F. and H. P. Grice, Categories
Strawson,
P. F. and H. P. Grice, Meaning.
Thomson,
J. F. and H. P. Grice, The philosophy of action.
Urmson,
J. O. Philosophical Analysis: its development between the two wars.
Warnock,
G. J. The object of morality
Warnock,
G. J. Language and Morals
Woozley,
A. D. On H. P. Grice.
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