pelagianism: the doctrine in
Christian theology that, through the exercise of free will, human beings can
attain moral perfection. A broad movement devoted to this proposition was only
loosely associated with its eponymous leader. Pelagius c.354c.425, a lay
theologian from Britain or Ireland, taught in Rome prior to its sacking in 410.
He and his disciple Celestius found a forceful adversary in Augustine, whom
they provoked to stiffen his stance on original sin, the bondage of the will,
and humanity’s total reliance upon God’s grace and predestination for
salvation. To Pelagius, this constituted fatalism and encouraged moral apathy.
God would not demand perfection, as the Bible sometimes suggested, were that
impossible to attain. Rather grace made the struggle easier for a sanctity that
would not be unreachable even in its absence. Though in the habit of sinning,
in consequence of the fall, we have not forfeited the capacity to overcome that
habit nor been released from the imperative to do so. For all its moral
earnestness this teaching seems to be in conflict with much of the New
Testament, especially as interpreted by Augustine, and it was condemned as
heresy in 418. The bondage of the will has often been reaffirmed, perhaps most
notably by Luther in dispute with Erasmus. Yet Christian theology and practice
have always had their sympathizers with Pelagianism and with its reluctance to
attest the loss of free will, the inevitability of sin, and the utter necessity
of God’s grace.
izzing/hazzing
– per-essentiam/per-accidentem: literally, “by, as, or being an accident
or non-essential feature.” A “per accidens” predication Grice calls a hazzing
(not an izzing) and is one in which an accident is predicated of a substance.
The terminology is medieval. Note that the accident and substance themselves, and
not expressions standing for them, are the terms of the predication relation.
An “ens per accidentem” is either an accident or the “accidental unity” of a
substance and an accident. Descartes, e.g., insists that a person is not a “per
accidentem” union of body and mind. H. P. Grice, “Izzing, hazzing: the per-essentiam/per-accidentem
distinction.”
perceptum: the traditional distinction is perceptum-conceptum: nihil
est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu. this is Grice on sense-datum.
Grice feels that the kettle is hot; Grice sees that the kettle is hot; Grice
perceives that the kettle is hot. WoW:251 uses this example. It may be argued
that the use of ‘see’ is there NOT factive. Cf. “I feel hot but it’s not hot.”
Grice modifies the thing to read, “DIRECTLY PERCEIVING”: Grice only indirectly
perceives that the kettle is hot’ if what he is doing is ‘seeing’ that the
kettle is hot. When Grice sees that the kettle is hot, it is a ‘secondary’
usage of ‘see,’ because it means that Grice perceives that the kettle has some
visual property that INDICATES the presence of hotness (Grice uses phi for the
general formula). Cf. sensum. Lewis and Short have “sentĭo,” which they
render, aptly, as “to sense,” ‘to discern by the senses; to feel, hear, see,
etc.; to perceive, be sensible of (syn. percipio).”
Note that Price is also cited by Grice in Personal identity. Grice: That pillar
box seems red to me. The locus classicus in the philosophical literature for
Grices implicaturum. Grice introduces a dout-or-denial condition for an
utterance of a phenomenalist report (That pillar-box seems red to me). Grice
attacks neo-Wittgensteinian approaches that regard the report as _false_. In a
long excursus on implication, he compares the phenomenalist report with
utterances like He has beautiful handwriting (He is hopeless at philosophy), a
particularised conversational implicaturum; My wife is in the kitchen or the
garden (I have non-truth-functional grounds to utter this), a generalised
conversational implicaturum; She was poor but she was honest (a Great-War
witty (her poverty and her honesty contrast), a conventional implicaturum; and
Have you stopped beating your wife? an old Oxonian conundrum. You have
been beating your wife, cf. Smith has not ceased from eating iron, a
presupposition. More importantly, he considers different tests for each
concoction! Those for the conversational implicaturum will become crucial: cancellability,
calculability, non-detachability, and indeterminacy. In the proceedings he
plays with something like the principle of conversational helpfulness, as
having a basis on a view of conversation as rational co-operation, and as
giving the rationale to the implicaturum. Past the excursus, and back to the
issue of perception, he holds a conservative view as presented by Price at
Oxford. One interesting reprint of Grices essay is in Daviss volume on Causal
theories, since this is where it belongs! White’s response is usually ignored,
but shouldnt. White is an interesting Australian philosopher at Oxford who is
usually regarded as a practitioner of ordinary-language philosophy. However, in
his response, White hardly touches the issue of the implicaturum with which
Grice is primarily concerned. Grice found that a full reprint from the PAS in a
compilation also containing the James Harvard would be too repetitive.
Therefore, he omits the excursus on implication. However, the way Grice
re-formulates what that excursus covers is very interesting. There is the
conversational implicaturum, particularised (Smith has beautiful handwriting)
and generalised (My wife is in the kitchen or in the garden). Then there is the
præsuppositum, or presupposition (You havent stopped beating your wife).
Finally, there is the conventional implicaturum (She was poor, but she was
honest). Even at Oxford, Grices implicaturum goes, philosophers ‒ even Oxonian
philosophers ‒ use imply for all those different animals! Warnock had attended
Austins Sense and Sensibilia (not to be confused with Sense and Sensibility by
Austen), which Grice found boring, but Warnock didnt because Austin reviews his
"Berkeley." But Warnock, for obvious reasons, preferred
philosophical investigations with Grice. Warnock reminisces that Grice once
tells him, and not on a Saturday morning, either, How clever language is, for
they find that ordinary language does not need the concept of a visum. Grice
and Warnock spent lovely occasions exploring what Oxford has as the philosophy
of perception. While Grice later came to see philosophy of perception as a bit
or an offshoot of philosophical psychology, the philosophy of perception is
concerned with that treasured bit of the Oxonian philosophers lexicon, the
sense-datum, always in the singular! The cause involved is crucial. Grice plays
with an evolutionary justification of the material thing as the denotatum of a
perceptual judgement. If a material thing causes the sense-datum of a nut, that
is because the squarrel (or squirrel) will not be nourished by the sense datum
of the nut; only by the nut! There are many other items in the Grice Collection
that address the topic of perception – notably with Warnock, and criticizing
members of the Ryle group like Roxbee-Cox (on vision, cf. visa ‒ taste, and
perception, in general – And we should not forget that Grice contributed a
splendid essay on the distinction of the senses to Butlers Analytic philosophy,
which in a way, redeemed a rather old-fashioned discipline by shifting it to
the idiom of the day, the philosophy of perception: a retrospective, with
Warnock, the philosophy of perception, : perception, the philosophy of perception,
visum. Warnock was possibly the only philosopher at Oxford Grice felt
congenial enough to engage in different explorations in the so-called
philosophy of perception. Their joint adventures involved the disimplicaturum
of a visum. Grice later approached sense data in more evolutionary terms: a
material thing is to be vindicated transcendentally, in the sense that it is a
material thing (and not a sense datum or collection thereof) that nourishes a
creature like a human. Grice was particularly grateful to Warnock. By
reprinting the full symposium on “Causal theory” of perception in his
influential s. of Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Warnock had spread Grices lore
of implicaturum all over! In some parts of the draft he uses more on visa,
vision, vision, with Warnock, vision. Of the five senses, Grice and
Warnock are particularly interested in seeing. As Grice will put it later, see
is a factive. It presupposes the existence of the event reported after the
that-clause; a visum, however, as an intermediary between the material thing
and the perceiver does not seem necessary in ordinary discourse. Warnock will
reconsider Grices views too (On what is seen, in Sibley). While Grice uses
vision, he knows he is interested in Philosophers paradox concerning seeing, notably
Witters on seeing as, vision, taste and the philosophy of perception, vision,
seeing. As an Oxonian philosopher, Grice was of course more interested in
seeing than in vision. He said that Austin would criticise even the use of
things like sensation and volition, taste, The Grice Papers, keyword: taste,
the objects of the five senses, the philosophy of perception, perception, the
philosophy of perception; philosophy of perception, vision, taste,
perception. Mainly with Warnock. Warnock repr. Grice’s “Causal
theory” in his influential Reading in Philosophy, The philosophy of perception,
perception, with Warnock, with Warner; perception. Warnock learns about
perception much more from Grice than from Austin, taste, The philosophy of
perception, the philosophy of perception, notes with Warnock on visum, : visum,
Warnock, Grice, the philosophy of perception. Grice kept the lecture
notes to a view of publishing a retrospective. Warnock recalled Grice
saying, how clever language is! Grice took the offer by Harvard University
Press, and it was a good thing he repr. part of “Causal theory.” However, the
relevant bits for his theory of conversation as rational co-operation lie in
the excursus which he omitted. What is Grices implicaturum: that one should
consider the topic rather than the method here, being sense datum, and
causation, rather than conversational helpfulness. After all, That pillar box
seems red to me, does not sound very helpful. But the topic of Causal theory is
central for his view of conversation as rational co-operation. Why? P1 gets
an impression of danger as caused by the danger out there. He communicates the
danger to P1, causing in P2 some behaviour. Without
causation, or causal links, the very point of offering a theory of conversation
as rational co-operation seems minimized. On top, as a metaphysician, he was
also concerned with cause simpliciter. He was especially proud that Price’s
section on the casual theory of perception, from his Belief, had been repr.
along with his essay in the influential volume by Davis on “Causal theories.”
In “Actions and events,” Grice further explores cause now in connection with
Greek aitia. As Grice notes, the original usage of this very Grecian item is
the one we find in rebel without a cause, cause-to, rather than cause-because.
The two-movement nature of causing is reproduced in the conversational
exchange: a material thing causes a sense datum which causes an expression
which gets communicated, thus causing a psychological state which will cause a
behaviour. This causation is almost representational. A material thing or a
situation cannot govern our actions and behaviours, but a re-præsentatum of it
might. Govern our actions and behaviour is Grices correlate of what a team of
North-Oxfordshire cricketers can do for North-Oxfordshire: what North
Oxfordshire cannot do for herself, Namesly, engage in a game of cricket! In
Retrospective epilogue he casts doubts on the point of his causal approach. It
is a short paragraph that merits much exploration. Basically, Grice is saying
his causalist approach is hardly an established thesis. He also proposes a
similar serious objection to his view in Some remarks about the senses, the
other essay in the philosophy of perception in Studies. As he notes, both
engage with some fundamental questions in the philosophy of perception, which
is hardly the same thing as saying that they provide an answer to each
question! Grice: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be
thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are
several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined
in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis
which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general
kind. Examples which occur to me are the following six. You cannot see a knife
‘as’ a knife, though you may see what is not a knife ‘as’ a knife (keyword:
‘seeing as’). When he said he ‘knew’ that the objects before him were human
hands, Moore was guilty of misusing ‘know.’ For an occurrence to be properly
said to have a ‘cause,’ it must be something abnormal or unusual (keyword:
‘cause’). For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is
‘responsible,’ it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned
(keyword: responsibility). What is actual is not also possible (keyword:
actual). What is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to be
the case (keyword: ‘know’ – cf. Urmson on ‘scalar set’). And cf. with the extra
examples he presents in “Prolegomena.” I have no doubt that there will be other
candidates besides the six which I have mentioned. I must emphasize that I am
not saying that all these examples are importantly similar to the thesis which
I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, they may be. To put the
matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to
involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one
contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of
manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is
to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the
linguistic nuances which we have detectcd, we should make sure that we are
reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are. “Causal theory”, knowledge and
belief, knowledge, belief, philosophical psychology. Grice: the doxastic implicaturum.
I know only implicates I do not believe. The following is a mistake by a
philosopher. What is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to
be the case. The topic had attracted the attention of some Oxonian philosophers
such as Urmson in Parenthetical verbs. Urmson speaks of a scale: I know can be
used parenthetically, as I believe can. For Grice, to utter I believe is
obviously to make a weaker conversational move than you would if you utter
I know. And in this case, an approach to informativeness in terms of entailment
is in order, seeing that I know entails I believe. A is thus allowed to infer
that the utterer is not in a position to make the stronger claim. The mechanism
is explained via his principle of conversational helpfulness. Philosophers tend
two over-use these two basic psychological states, attitudes, or stances. Grice
is concerned with Gettier-type cases, and also the factivity of know versus the
non-factivity of believe. Grice follows the lexicological innovations by
Hintikka: the logic of belief is doxastic; the logic of knowledge is epistemic.
The last thesis that Grice lists in Causal theory that he thinks rests on a big
mistake he formulates as: What is known by me to be the case is NOT also
believed by me to be the case. What are his attending remarks? Grice writes:
The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine
point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical
theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether
or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing
to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. An example which occurs
to me is the following: What is known by me to be the case is not also believed
by me to be the case. I must emphasise that I am not saying that this example
is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticising, only that,
for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position
adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is
characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not
condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it
without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead
to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure
that we are reasonably clear what SORT of nuances they are!
The ætiological implicaturum. Grice. For an occurrence to be properly said
to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. This is an example
Grice lists in Causal theory but not in Prolegomena. But cf. ‘responsible’ –
and Hart and Honoré on accusation -- accusare "call to account, make
complaint against," from ad causa, from “ad,” with regard to, as in ‘ad-’)
+ causa, a cause; a lawsuit,’ v. cause. For
an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something
abnormal or unusual. Similar commentary to his example on
responsible/condemnable apply. The objector may stick with the fact that he is
only concerned with proper utterances. Surely Grice wants to go to a pre-Humeian
account of causation, possible Aristotelian, aetiologia. Where everything has a
cause, except, for Aristotle, God! What are his attending remarks? Grice
writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather
a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several
philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order
to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have
been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. An
example which occurs to me is the following: What is known by me to be the case
is not also believed by me to be the case. I must emphasise that I am not
saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been
criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more
generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of
manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of
philosophising. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely
suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with
the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have
detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances
they are! Causal theory, cause, causality, causation, conference, colloquium,
Stanford, cause, metaphysics, the abnormal/unusual implicaturum, ætiology,
ætiological implicaturum. Grice: the ætiological implicaturum. Grices
explorations on cause are very rich. He is concerned with some alleged misuse
of cause in ordinary language. If as Hume suggests, to cause is to will, one
would say that the decapitation of Charles I wills his death, which sounds
harsh, if not ungrammatical, too. Grice later relates cause to the Greek aitia,
as he should. He notes collocations like rebel without a cause. For the Greeks,
or Grecians, as he called them, and the Griceians, it is a cause to which one
should be involved in elucidating. A ‘cause to’ connects with the idea of
freedom. Grice was constantly aware of the threat of mechanism, and his idea
was to provide philosophical room for the idea of finality, which is not
mechanistically derivable. This leads him to discussion of overlap and priority
of, say, a physical-cum-physiological versus a psychological theory explaining
this or that piece of rational behaviour. Grice can be Wittgensteinian when
citing Anscombes translation: No psychological concept without the behaviour
the concept is brought to explain. It is best to place his later
treatment of cause with his earlier one in Causal theory. It is surprising
Grice does not apply his example of a mistake by a philosopher to the causal
bit of his causal theory. Grice states the philosophical mistake as follows:
For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something
abnormal or unusual. This is an example Grice lists in Causal theory but not in
Prolegomena. For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be
something abnormal or unusual. A similar commentary to his example on
responsible/condemnable applies: The objector may stick with the fact that he
is only concerned with PROPER utterances. Surely Grice wants to embrace a
pre-Humeian account of causation, possible Aristotelian. Keyword: Aitiologia,
where everything has a cause, except, for Aristotle, God! What are his
attending remarks? Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly
concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an
isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would Grice
thinks need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently
parallel to the thesis which Grice has been discussing to be amenable to
treatment of the same general kind. One example which occurs to Grice is the
following: For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be
something abnormal or unusual. Grice feels he must emphasise that he is not
saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been
criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more
generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of
manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of
philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely
suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with
the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have
detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances
they are! Re: responsibility/condemnation. Cf. Mabbott, Flew on punishment,
Philosophy. And also Hart. At Corpus, Grice enjoys his tutor Hardies
resourcefulness in the defence of what may be a difficult position, a
characteristic illustrated by an incident which Hardie himself once told Grice
about himself. Hardie had parked his car and gone to a cinema. Unfortunately,
Hardie had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of
which traffic-lights were, at the time, controlled by the passing traffic. As a
result, the lights are jammed, and it requires four policemen to lift Hardies
car off the strip. The police decides to prosecute. Grice indicated to Hardie
that this hardly surprised him and asked him how he fared. Oh, Hardie says, I
got off. Then Grice asks Hardie how on earth he managed that! Quite simply,
Hardie answers. I just invoked Mills method of difference. The police charged
me with causing an obstruction at 4 p.m. I told the police that, since my car
was parked at 2 p.m., it could not have been my car which caused the
obstruction at 4 p.m. This relates to an example in Causal theory that he Grice
does not discuss in Prolegomena, but which may relate to Hart, and closer to
Grice, to Mabbotts essay on Flew on punishment, in Philosophy. Grice states the
philosophical mistake as follows: For an action to be properly described as one
for which the agent is responsible, it must be thc sort of action for which
people are condemned. As applied to Hardie. Is Hardie irresponsible? In any
case, while condemnable, he was not! Grice writes: The issue with which I have
been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly
not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which
would I think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are
sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable
to treatment of the same general kind. An example which occurs to me is the
following: For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is
responsible, it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned. I
must emphasise that I am not saying that this example is importantly similar to
the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be.
To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to
me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one
contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of
manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is
to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the
linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are
reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are. The modal example, what is
actual is not also possible, should discussed under Indicative conditonals,
Grice on Macbeth’s implicaturum: seeing a dagger as a dagger. Grice elaborates
on this in Prolegomena, but the austerity of Causal theory is charming, since
he does not give a quote or source. Obviously, Witters. Grice writes: Witters
might say that one cannot see a knife as a knife, though one may see what is
not a knife as a knife. The issue, Grice notes, with which I have been mainly
concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an
isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I
think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently
parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment
of the same general kind. An example which occurs to Grice is the following:
You cannot see a knife as a knife, though you may see what is not a knife as a
knife. Grice feels that he must emphasise that he is not saying that this
example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing,
only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the
position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre
which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I
am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark
on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush
ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make
sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! Is this a
dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch
thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision,
sensible to feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false
creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as
palpable as this which now I draw. Thou marshallst me the way that I was going;
and such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o the other
senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, and on thy blade and
dudgeon gouts of blood, which was not so before. Theres no such thing: It is
the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now oer the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtaind sleep; witchcraft
celebrates Pale Hecates offerings, and witherd murder, Alarumd by his sentinel,
the wolf, Whose howls his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With
Tarquins ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure
and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very
stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which
now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too
cold breath gives. I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not,
Duncan; for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell. The Moore
example is used both in “Causal theory” and “Prolegomena.” But the use in
“Causal Theory” is more austere: Philosophers mistake: Malcolm: When Moore said
he knew that the objects before him were human hands, he was guilty of misusing
the word know. Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned
may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one.
There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be
examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the
thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same
general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: When Moore said
he knew that the objects before him were human hands, he was guilty of misusing
the word know. I must emphasise that I am not saying that this example is
importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for
all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted
by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is
characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not
condemning this kind of manoeuvre. Grice is merely suggesting that to embark on
it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush
ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make
sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! So surely
Grice is meaning: I know that the objects before me are human hands as uttered
by Moore is possibly true. Grice was amused by the fact that while at Madison,
Wisc., Moore gave the example: I know that behind those curtains there is a
window. Actually he was wrong, as he soon realised when the educated Madisonians
corrected him with a roar of unanimous laughter. You see, the lecture hall of
the University of Wisconsin at Madison is a rather, shall we say, striking
space. The architect designed the lecture hall with a parapet running around
the wall just below the ceiling, cleverly rigged with indirect lighting to
create the illusion that sun light is pouring in through windows from outside.
So, Moore comes to give a lecture one sunny day. Attracted as he was to this
eccentric architectural detail, Moore gives an illustration of certainty as
attached to common sense. Pointing to the space below the ceiling, Moore
utters. We know more things than we think we know. I know, for example, that
the sunlight shining in from outside proves
At which point he was somewhat startled (in his reserved Irish-English
sort of way) when his audience burst out laughing! Is that a proof of anything?
Grice is especially concerned with I seem He needs a paradeigmatic sense-datum
utterance, and intentionalist as he was, he finds it in I seem to see a red
pillar box before me. He is relying on Paul. Grice would generalise a sense
datum by φ I seem to perceive that the alpha is phi. He agrees that while cause
may be too much, any sentence using because will do: At a circus: You seem to
be seeing that an elephant is coming down the street because an elephant is
coming down the street. Grice found the causalist theory of perception
particularly attractive since its objection commits one same mistake twice: he
mischaracterises the cancellable implicaturum of both seem and
cause! While Grice is approaching the philosophical item in the
philosophical lexicon, perceptio, he is at this stage more interested in
vernacular that- clauses such as sensing that, or even more vernacular ones
like seeming that, if not seeing that! This is of course philosophical (cf.
aesthetikos vs. noetikos). L and S have “perceptĭo,” f. perceptio, as used by
Cicero (Ac. 2, 7, 22) translating catalepsis, and which they render as “a
taking, receiving; a gathering in, collecting;’ frugum fruetuumque reliquorum,
Cic. Off. 2, 3, 12: fructuum;’ also as perception, comprehension, cf.: notio,
cognition; animi perceptiones, notions, ideas; cognitio aut perceptio, aut si
verbum e verbo volumus comprehensio, quam κατάληψιν illi vocant; in philosophy,
direct apprehension of an object by the mind, Zeno Stoic.1.20, Luc. Par. 4,
al.; τῶν μετεώρων;” ἀκριβὴς κ. Certainty; pl., perceptions, Stoic.2.30, Luc.
Herm.81, etc.; introduced into Latin by Cicero, Plu. Cic. 40. As for “causa” Grice
is even more sure he was exploring a time-honoured philosophical topic. The
entry in L and S is “causa,’ perh. root “cav-“ of “caveo,” prop. that which is
defended or protected; cf. “cura,” and that they render as, unhelpfully, as
“cause,” “that by, on account of, or through which any thing takes place or is
done;” “a cause, reason, motive, inducement;” also, in gen., an occasion,
opportunity; oeffectis; factis, syn.
with ratio, principium, fons, origo, caput; excusatio, defensio; judicium,
controversia, lis; partes, actio; condicio, negotium, commodum, al.);
correlated to aition, or aitia, cause, δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν,” cf. Pl. Ti.
68e, Phd. 97a sq.; on the four causes of Arist. v. Ph. 194b16, Metaph. 983a26:
αἰ. τοῦ γενέσθαι or γεγονέναι Pl. Phd. 97a; τοῦ μεγίστου ἀγαθοῦ τῇ πόλει αἰτία
ἡ κοινωνία Id. R. 464b: αἰτίᾳ for the sake of, κοινοῦ τινος ἀγαθοῦ.” Then there
is “αἴτιον” (cf. ‘αἴτιος’) is used like “αἰτία” in the sense of cause, not in
that of ‘accusation.’ Grice goes back to perception at a later stage,
reminiscing on his joint endeavours with akin Warnock, Ps karulise elatically,
potching and cotching obbles, Pirotese, Pirotese, creature construction,
philosophical psychology. Grice was fascinated by Carnaps Ps which
karulise elatically. Grice adds potching for something like perceiving and
cotching for something like cognising. With his essay Some remarks about
the senses, Grice introduces the question by which criterion we
distinguish our five senses into the contemporary philosophy of perception. The
literature concerning this question is not very numerous but the discussion is
still alive and was lately inspired by the volume The Senses2. There are four
acknowledged possible answers to the question how we distinguish the senses,
all of them already stated by Grice. First, the senses are distinguished by the
properties we perceive by them. Second, the senses are distinguished by the
phenomenal qualities of the perception itself or as Grice puts it “by the
special introspectible character of the experiences” Third, the senses are
distinguished by the physical stimuli that are responsible for the relevant
perceptions. Fourth, The senses are distinguished by the sense-organs that are
(causally) involved in the production of the relevant perceptions. Most
contributions discussing this issue reject the third and fourth answers in a
very short argumentation. Nearly all philosophers writing on the topic vote
either for the first or the second answer. Accordingly, most part of the debate
regarding the initial question takes the form of a dispute between these two
positions. Or” was a big thing in Oxford philosophy. The only known
published work of Wood, our philosophy tutor at Christ Church, was an essay in
Mind, the philosophers journal, entitled “Alternative Uses of “Or” ”, a work
which was every bit as indeterminate as its title. Several years later he
published another paper, this time for the Aristotelian Society, entitled On
being forced to a conclusion. Cf. Grice and Wood on the demands of
conversational reason. Wood, The force of linguistic rules. Wood, on the implicaturum
of or in review in Mind of Connor, Logic. The five senses, as Urmson notes, are
to see that the sun is shining, to hear that the car collided, to feel that her
pulse is beating, to smell that something has been smoking and to taste that.
An interesting piece in that it was commissioned by Butler, who knew Grice from
his Oxford days. Grice cites Wood and Albritton. Grice is concerned with a
special topic in the philosophy of perception, notably the identification of
the traditional five senses: vision, audition, taste, smell, and tact. He
introduces what is regarded in the philosophical literature as the first
thought-experiment, in terms of the senses that Martians may have. They have
two pairs of eyes: are we going to allow that they see with both pairs? Grice
introduces a sub-division of seeing: a Martian x-s an object with his upper
pair of eyes, but he y-s an object with the lower pair of eyes. In his
exploration, he takes a realist stance, which respects the ordinary discursive ways
to approach issues of perception. A second interesting point is that in
allowing this to be repr. in Butlers Analytic philosophy, Grice is
demonstrating that analytic philosophers should NOT be obsessed with ordinary
language. Butlers compilation, a rather dry one, is meant as a response to the
more linguistic oriented ones by Flew (Grices first tutee at St. Johns, as it
happens), also published by Blackwell, and containing pieces by Austin, and
company. One philosopher who took Grice very seriously on this was Coady, in
his The senses of the Martians. Grice provides a serious objection to his own
essay in Retrospective epilogue We see with our eyes. I.e. eye is
teleologically defined. He notes that his way of distinguishing the senses is
hardly an established thesis. Grice actually advances this topic in his earlier
Causal theory. Grice sees nothing absurd in the idea that a non-specialist
concept should contain, so to speak, a blank space to be filled in by the
specialist; that this is so, e.g., in the case of the concept of seeing is
perhaps indicated by the consideration that if we were in doubt about the
correctness of speaking of a certain creature with peculiar sense-organs as
seeing objects, we might well wish to hear from a specialist a comparative
account of the human eye and the relevant sense-organs of the creature in
question. He returns to the point in Retrospective epilogue with a bit of
doxastic humility, We see with our eyes is analytic ‒ but
philosophers should take that more seriously. Grice tested the
playmates of his children, aged 7 and 9, with Nothing can be green
and red all over. Instead, Morley Bunker preferred
philosophy undergrads. Aint that boring? To give examples:
Summer follows Spring was judged analytic by Morley-Bunkers informants, as
cited by Sampson, in Making sense (Clarendon) by highly significant majorities
in each group of Subjectss, while We see with our eyes was given near-even
split votes by each group. Over all, the philosophers were somewhat more
consistent with each other than the non-philosophers. But that global finding
conceals results for individual sentences that sometimes manifested the
opposed tendency. Thus, Thunderstorms are electrical disturbances in the
atmosphere is judged analytic by a highly significant majority of the
non-philosophers, while a non-significant majority of the philosophers deemed
it non-analytic or synthetic. In this case, it seems, philosophical training,
surely not brain-washing, induces the realisation that well-established results
of contemporary science are not necessary truths. In other cases, conversely,
cliches of current philosophical education impose their own mental blinkers on
those who undergo it: Nothing can be completely red and green all over is
judged analytic by a significant majority of philosophers but only by a
non-significant majority of non-philosophers. All in all, the results argue
strongly against the notion that our inability to decide consistently whether
or not some statement is a necessary truth derives from lack of skill in
articulating our underlying knowledge of the rules of our language. Rather, the
inability comes from the fact that the question as posed is unreal. We choose
to treat a given statement as open to question or as unchallengeable in the light
of the overall structure of beliefs which we have individually evolved in
order to make sense of our individual experience. Even the cases which seem
clearly analytic or synthetic are cases which individuals judge alike because
the relevant experiences are shared by the whole community, but even for such
cases one can invent hypothetical or suppositional future experiences which, if
they should be realised, would cause us to revise our judgements. This is not
intended to call into question the special status of the truths of
logic, such as either Either it is raining or it is not. He is of course
inclined to accept the traditional view according to which logical particles
such as not and or are distinct from the bulk of the vocabulary in that the former
really are governed by clear-cut inference rules. Grice does expand on the
point. Refs.: Under sense-datum, there are groups of essays. The obvious ones
are the two essays on the philosophy of perception in WOW. A second group
relates to his research with G. J. Warnock, where the keywords are ‘vision,’
‘taste,’ and ‘perception,’ in general. There is a more recent group with this
research with R. Warner. ‘Visum’ and ‘visa’ are good keywords, and cf. the use
of ‘senses’ in “Some remarks about the senses,” in BANC.Philo: Grice’s
favourite philosopher, after Ariskant. The [Greek: protos logos anapodeiktos]
of the Stoic logic ran thus [Greek: ei hemera esti, phos estin ... alla men
hemera estin phos ara estin] (Sext. _P.H._ II. 157, and other passages qu.
Zeller 114). This bears a semblance of inference and isnot so utterly tautological as Cic.'s translation, which
merges [Greek: phos] and [Greek: hemera] into one word, or that of Zeller (114,
note). Si
dies est lucet: a better trans of
Greek: ei phos estin, hemera estin] than was given in 96, where see n. _Aliter
Philoni_: not Philo of Larissa, but a noted dialectician, pupil of Diodorus the
Megarian, mentioned also in 75. The dispute between Diodorus and Philo is
mentioned in Sext. _A.M._ VIII. 115--117 with the same purpose as here, see
also Zeller 39. Conexi = Gr. “synemmenon,” cf. Zeller 109. This was the proper
term for the hypothetical judgment. _Superius_: the Greek: synemmenon consists
of two parts, the hypothetical part and the affirmative--called in Greek [Greek:
hegoumenon] and [Greek: legon]; if one is admitted the other follows of course.Philo's
criterion for the truth of “if p, q” is truth-functional. Philo’s
truth-functional criterion is generally accepted as a minimal condition.Philo
maintains that “If Smith is in London, he, viz. Smith, is attending the meeting
there, viz. in London” is true (i) when the antecedens (“Smith is in London”)
is true and the consequens (“Smith is in London at a meeting”) is true (row 1)
and (ii) when the antecedent is false (rows 3 and 4); false only when the antecedens
(“Smith is in London”) is true and the consequens (“Smith is in London, at a
meeting”) is false. (Sext. Emp., A.
M., 2.113-114). Philo’s “if p, q” is what Whitehead and Russell call,
misleadingly, ‘material’ implication, for it’s neither an implication, nor
materia.In “The Influence of Grice on Philo,” Shropshire puts forward the
thesis that Philo was aware of Griceian ideas on relative identity,
particularly time-relative identity. Accordingly, Philo uses subscript for
temporal indexes. Once famous discussion took place one long winter night.“If it
is day, it is night.”“False!” Diodorus screamed.“True,” his tutee Philo
courteously responded. “But true at night only.”Philo's suggestion is
remarkable – although not that remarkable if we assume he read the now lost
Griceian tract.Philo’s “if,” like Grice’s “if,” – on a bad day -- deviates
noticeably from what Austin (and indeed, Austen) used to refer to as ‘ordinary’
language.As Philo rotundly says: “The Griceian ‘if’ requires abstraction on the
basis of a concept of truth-functionality – and not all tutees will succeed in
GETTING that.” The hint was on Strawson.Philo's ‘if’ has been criticised on two
counts. First, as with Whitehead’s and Russell’s equally odd ‘if,’ – which they
symbolise with an ‘inverted’ C, to irritate Johnson, -- “They think ‘c’ stands
for either ‘consequentia’ or ‘contentum’ -- in the case of material
implication, for the truth of the conditional no connection (or better, Kant’s
relation) of content between antecedent and consequent is required. Uttered or
emitted during the day, e. g. ‘If virtue
benefits, it is day’ is Philonianly true. This introduces a variant of the
so-called ‘paradoxes’ of material implication (Relevance Logic, Conditionals 2.3;
also, English Oxonian philosopher Lemmon 59-60, 82). This or that ancient
philosopher was aware of what he thought was a ‘problem’ for Philo’s ‘if.’
Vide: SE, ibid. 113-117). On
a second count, due to the time-dependency or relativity of the ‘Hellenistic’ ‘proposition,’
Philo's truth-functional criterion implies that ‘if p, q’ changes its truth-value
over time, which amuses Grice, but makes Strawson sick. In Philo’s infamous
metalinguistic disquotational version that Grice finds genial:‘If it is day, it
is night’ is true if it is night, but false if it is day. This is
counter-intuitive in Strawson’s “London,” urban, idiolect (Grice is from the
Heart of England) as regards an utterance in ‘ordinary-language’ involving
‘if.’“We are not THAT otiose at busy London!On a third count, as the concept of
“if” (‘doubt’ in Frisian) also meant to provide for consequentia between from a
premise to a conclusio, this leads to the “rather” problematic result –
Aquinas, S. T. ix. 34) that an ‘argumentum,’ as Boethius calls it, can in
principle change from being valid to being invalid and vice versa, which did
not please the Saint Thomas (Aquinas), “or God, matter of fact.”From Sextus: A.
M., 2.113ffA non-simple proposition is such composed of a duplicated
proposition or of this or that differing proposition. A complex proposition is
controlled by this or that conjunction. 109. Of
these let us take the hypo-thetical proposition, so-called. This, then, is
composed of a duplicated proposition or of differing propositions, by means of
the conjunction “if” (Gr. ‘ei,’ L. ‘si’, German ‘ob’). Thus, e. g. from a
duplicated proposition and the conjunction “if” (Gr. ‘ei,’ L. ‘si,’ G.
‘ob’) there is composed such a hypothetical proposition as this. “If it is day,
it is day’ (110) and from differing
propositions, and by means of the conjunction “if” , one in this
form, “If it is day, it is light.” “Si dies est, lucet.” And of the two propositions
contained in the hypo-thetical proposition, or subordinating clause that which
is placed immediately AFTER the conjunction or subordinating particle “if”
is called “ante-cedent,” or “first;” and ‘if’ being ‘noncommutative,’ and
the other one “consequent” or “second,” EVEN if the whole proposition
is reversed IN ORDER OF EXPRESSION – this is a conceptual issue, not a
grammatical one! -- as thus — “It is light, if it is day.” For in this,
too, the proposition, “It is light,” (lucet) is called consequent although
it is UTTERED first, and ‘It is day’ antecedent, although it is UTTERED second,
owing to the fact that it is placed after the conjunction or subordinating
particle “if.” 111. Such
then is the construction of the hypothetical proposition, and a proposition of
this kind seems to “promise” (or suggest, or implicate) that the ‘consequent’
(or super-ordinated or main proposition) logically follows the ‘antecedens,’ or
sub-ordinated proposition. If the antecedens is true, the consequens is true.
Hence, if this sort of “promise,” suggestio, implicaturum, or what have you, is
fulfilled and the consequens follows the antecedent, the hypothetical
proposition is true. If the promise is not fulfilled, it is false (This is
something Strawson grants as a complication in the sentence exactly after the
passage that Grice extracts – Let’s revise Strawson’s exact wording. Strawson
writes:“There is much more to be noted about ‘if.’ In particular, about whether
the antecedens has to be a ‘GOOD’ antecedens, i. e. a ‘good’ ground – not
inadmissible evidence, say -- or good reason for accepting the consequens, and
whether THIS is a necessary condition for the whole ‘if’ utterance to be TRUE.’
Surely not for Philo. Philo’s criterion is that an ‘if’ utterance is true iff it
is NOT the case that the antecedens is true and it is not the case that the
consequens is true. 112. Accordingly,
let us begin at once with this problem, and consider whether any hypothetical
proposition can be found which is true and which fulfills the promise or
suggestio or implicaturum described. Now all philosophers agree that a hypothetical
proposition is true when the consequent follows the antecedent. As to when the
consequens follows from the antecedens philosophers such as Grice and his tutee
Strawson disagree with one another and propound conflicting criteria. 113. Philo and Grice declares
that the ‘if’ utterance is true whenever it is not the case that the
antecedens (“Smith is in London”) is true and it is not the case that the
consequens (“Smith is in London attending a meeting”) is true. So that,
according to Grice and Philo (vide, “The influence of Grice on Philo”), the
hypothetical is true in three ways or rows (row 1, row 3, and row 4) and false
in one way or row (second row, antecedens T and consequence F). For the first
row, whenever the ‘if’ utterance begins with truth and ends in truth it is
true. E. g. “If it is day, it is light.” “Si dies est, lux est.”For row 4: the
‘if’ utterance is also true whenever the antecedens is false and the consequens
is false. E. g. “If the earth flies, the earth has wings.” ει
πέταται ή γή, πτέρυγας έχει
ή γή (“ei petatai he ge, pteguras ekhei
he ge”) (Si terra volat, habet alas.”)114. Likewise
also that which begins with what is false and ends with what is true is true,
as thus — If the earth flies, the earth exists. “Si terra volat, est
terra”. dialecticis,
in quibus ſubtilitatem nimiam laudando, niſi fallimur, tradu xit Callimachus. 2
Cujus I. ſpecimen nobis fervavit se XTVS EMPI . RIC V S , a qui de Diodori,
Philonis & Chryſippi diſſenſu circa propofi tiones connexas prolixe
diſſerit. Id quod paucis ita comprehendit ci . CERO : 6 In hoc ipfo , quod in
elementis dialectici docent, quomodo judi care oporteat, verum falſumne fit ,
fi quid ita connexum eſt , ut hoc: fi dies eft, lucet, quanta contentio eft,
aliter Diodoro, aliter Philoni, Chry fappo aliter placet. Quæ ut clarius
intelligantur, obſervandum eſt, Dia lecticos in propofitionum conditionatarum ,
quas connexas vocabant, explicatione in eo convenisse, verum esse consequens,
si id vera consequentia deducatur ex antecedente; falsum, si non ſequatur; in
criterio vero , ex quo dijudicanda est consequentiæ veritas, definiendo inter
se diſſenſiſſe. Et Philo quidem veram esse propoſitionem connexam putabat, fi
& antecedens & consequens verum esset , & ſi antecedens atque
conſequens falsum eſſet, & fi a falſo incipiens in verum defineret, cujus
primi exemplum eſt : “Si dies est, lux est,” secondi. “Si terra volat, habet
alas.” Tertii. “Si terra volat, est terra.” Solum vero falsum , quando
incipiens a vero defineret in falſum . Diodorus autem hoc falſum interdum eſſe,
quod contingere pof ſet, afferens, omne quod contigit , ex confequentiæ
complexu removit , ficque, quod juxta Philonem verum eft, fi dies eſt, ego
diſſero, falſum eſſe pronunciavit, quoniam contingere poffit, ut quis, ſi dies
fit, non differat, ſed fileat. Ex qua Dialecticorum diſceptatione Sextus
infert, incertum eſſe criterium propoſitionum hypotheticarum . Ex quibus parca
, ut de bet, manu prolatis, judicium fieri poteſt , quam miſeranda facies
fuerit shia lecticæ eriſticæ , quæ ad materiam magis argumentorum , quam ad
formam - & ad verba magis, quam ideas, quæ ratiocinia conſtituunt
refpiciens, non potuit non innumeras ſine modo & ratione technias &
difficultates ftruere, facile fumi inſtar diſſipandas, fi ad ipſam ratiocinandi
& ideas inter ſe con ferendi & ex tertia judicandi formam attendatur.
Quod fi enim inter ve ritate conſequentiæ & confequentis, ( liceat
pauliſper cum ſcholaſticis barbare loqui diſtinxiffent, inanis diſputatio in
pulverem abiiffet, & eva nuiſſet; nam de prima Diodorus, de altera Philo ,
& hic quidem inepte & minus accurate loquebatur. Sed hæc ws šv zapóów .
Ceterum II. in fo phiſma t) Coutra Gramm . S.309.Log. I. II.S. 115.Seqq. )
Catalogum Diodororum ſatis longum exhi # Nominateas CLEM . ALE X. Strom . I. IV
. ber FABRIC. Bibl.Gr. vol. II. p . 775. pag. 522. % ) Cujusverſus vide apud
LAERT. & SEXT. * Contra Iovinian . I. I. conf. MENAG. ad l. c. H . cc.
Laërt . & Hiſt. phil. mal. Ø . 60 . ubi tamen quatuor A ) Adv. Logic. I. c
. noininat, cum quinque fuerint. b ) Acad. 29. I. IV . 6. 47. DE SECTAM E
GARICA phiſinatibus ftruendis Diodorum excelluiffe, non id folum argumentum
eft, nuod is quibusdam auctor argumenti, quod velatum dicitur , fuifle aflera
tur, fed & quod argumentum dominans invexerit, de quo, ne his nugis lectori
moleſti fimus, Epictetum apud ARRIANVM conſuli velimus. Er ad hæc quoque
Dialecticæ peritiæ acumina referendum eſt argumentum , quo nihilmoveri
probabat. Quod ita sexTvs enarrat: Si quid move tur, aut in eo , in quo eft ,
loco movetur, aut in eo , in quo non eſt. At neque in quo eſt movetur, manet
enim in eo , fi in eo eft ; nec vero , in quo non eſt,movetur; ubi enim aliquid
non eſt, ibi neque agere quidquam ne que pati poteft. Non ergo movetur quicquam
. Quo argumento non ideo ufus eſt Diodorus, quod putat Sextus, ut more
Eleaticorum probaret : non darimotum in rerum natura, & nec interire
quicquam nec oriri ; fed ut ſubtilitatem ingenii dialecticam oftenderet,
verbisque circumveniret. Qua ratione Diodorum mire depexum dedit
Herophilusmedicus. Cum enim luxato humero ad eum veniffet Diodorus, ut ipſum
curaret , facete eum irriſit, eodem argumento probando humerum non excidiffe :
adeo ut precaretur fophifta , omiffis iis cavillationibus adhiberet ei
congruens ex artemedica remedium . f . . Tandem & III . inter atomiſticæ p
hiloſophiæ ſectatores numerari folet Diodorus, eo quod énocy iso xei dueen
CÁMata minima & indiviſibilia cor pora Itatuerit,numero infinita ,
magnitudine finita , ut ex veteribus afferunt præter SEXTVM , & EVSEBIVŠ, \
CHALCIDIVS, ISTOBAEVS k alii , quibus ex recentioribus concinunt cvDWORTHVS 1
& FABRICIV'S. * Quia vero veteres non addunt, an indiviſibilia & minima
ifta corpuſcula , omnibus qualitatibus præter figuram & fitum fpoliata
poſuerit, fine formi dine oppoſiti inter ſyſtematis atomiſtici fectatores
numerari non poteſt. Nam alii quoque philoſophi ejusmodi infecabilia corpuſcula
admiſerunt ; nec tamen atomos Democriticos ſtatuerunt. "Id quod acute
monuit cel. MOSHEMIV S . n . irAnd it is
false only in this one way, when it begins with truth and ends in what is
false, as in a proposition of this kind. “If it is day, it is night.” “Si dies
est, nox est”. (Cf. Cole Porter, “Night
and day, day and night!”.For if it IS day, the clause ‘It is day’ is
true, and this is the antecedent, but the clause ‘It is night,’ which is
the consequens, is false. But when uttered at night, it is true. 115. — But Diodorus asserts
that the hypothetical proposition is true which neither admitted nor
admits of beginning with truth and ending in falsehood. And this is in
conflict with the statement of Philo. For a hypothetical of this kind — If
it is day, I am conversing, when at the present moment it is day and I am
conversing, is true according to Philo since it begins with the true clause It
is day and ends with the true I am conversing; but according to
Diodorus it is false, for it admits of beginning with a clause that is, at one
time, true and ending in the false clause I am conversing, when I
have ceased speaking; also it admitted of beginning with truth and ending with
the falsehood I am conversing, 116. for
before I began to converse it began with the truth It is day and
ended in the falsehood I am conversing. Again, a proposition in this
form — If it is night, I am conversing, when it is day and I am
silent, is likewise true according to Philo, for it begins with what is false
and ends in what is false; but according to Diodorus it is false, for it admits
of beginning with truth and ending in falsehood, after night has come on, and
when I, again, am not conversing but keeping silence. 117. Moreover, the
proposition If it is night, it is day, when it is day, is true
according to Philo for the reason that it begins with the false It is
night and ends in the true It is day; but according to Diodorus it is
false for the reason that it admits of beginning, when night comes on, with the
truth It is night and ending in the falsehood It is day.Philo is
sometimes called ‘Philo of Megara,’ where ‘of’ is used alla Nancy Mitford, of
Chatworth. Although no essay by Philo is preserved (if he wrote it), there are
a number of reports of his doctrine, not all positive!Some think Philo made a
groundbreaking contribution to the development of semantics (influencing
Peirce, but then Peirce was influenced by the World in its totality), in
particular to the philosophy of “as if” (als ob), or “if.”A conditional (sunêmmenon), as Philo calls it, is a
non-simple, i. e. molecular, non atomic, proposition composed of two
propositions, a main, or better super-ordinated proposition, or consequens, and
a sub-ordinated proposition, the antecedens, and the subordinator ‘if’. Philo
invented (possibly influenced by Frege) what he (Frege, not Philo) calls
truth-functionality.Philo puts forward a criterion of truth as he called what
Witters will have as a ‘truth table’ for ‘if’ (or ‘ob,’ cognate with Frisian
gif, doubt).A conditional is is true in three truth-value combinations, and
false when and only when its antecedent is true and
its consequent is false.The Philonian ‘if’ Whitehead and Russell re-labelled
‘material’ implication – irritating Johnson who published a letter in The
Times, “… and dealing with the paradox of implication.”For Philo, like Grice, a
proposition is a function of time that can have different truth-values at
different times—it may change its truth-value over time. In Philo’s
disquotational formula for ‘if’:“If it is day, ‘if it is day, it is night’ is
false; if it is night, ‘if it is day, it is night’ is true.”(Tarski translated
to Polish, in which language Grice read it).Philo’s ramblings on ‘if’ lead to
foreshadows of Whitehead’s and Russell’s ‘paradox of implication’ that
infuriated Johnson – In Russell’s response in the Times, he makes it plain:
“Johnson shouldn’t be using ‘paradox’ in the singular. Yours, etc. Baron
Russell, Belgravia.”Sextus Empiricus [S. E.] M. 8.109–117, gives a precis of Johnson’s paradox of
implication, without crediting Johnson. Philo and Diodorus each considered the
four modalities possibility, impossibility, necessity and non-necessity. These
were conceived of as modal properties or modal values of propositions, not as
modal operators. Philo defined them as follows: ‘Possible is that which is
capable of being true by the proposition’s own nature … necessary is that which
is true, and which, as far as it is in itself, is not capable of being false.
Non-necessary is that which as far as it is in itself, is capable of being
false, and impossible is that which by its own nature is not capable of being
true.’ Boethius fell in love with Philo, and he SAID it! (In Arist. De Int., sec. ed., 234–235
Meiser).Cf. (Epict. Diss.
II.19). Aristotle’s De
Interpretatione 9 (Aulus
Gellius 11.12.2–3). Grice: “Vision was always held by philosophers to be the
superior sense.” Grice:
“Perception is, strictly, the extraction and use of information about one’s
environment exteroception and one’s own body interoception. “ he various
external senses sight, hearing, touch,
smell, and taste though they overlap to
some extent, are distinguished by the kind of information e.g., about light,
sound, temperature, pressure they deliver. Proprioception, perception of the
self, concerns stimuli arising within, and carrying information about, one’s
own body e.g., acceleration, position, and
orientation of the limbs. There are distinguishable stages in the extraction
and use of sensory information, one an earlier stage corresponding to our
perception of objects and events, the other, a later stage, to the perception
of facts about these objects. We see, e.g., both the cat on the sofa an object
and that the cat is on the sofa a fact. Seeing an object or event a cat on the sofa, a person on the street, or
a vehicle’s movement does not require
that the object event be identified or recognized in any particular way
perhaps, though this is controversial, in any way whatsoever. One can, e.g.,
see a cat on the sofa and mistake it for a rumpled sweater. Airplane lights are
often misidentified as stars, and one can see the movement of an object either
as the movement of oneself or under some viewing conditions as expansion or
contraction. Seeing objects and events is, in this sense, non-epistemic: one
can see O without knowing or believing that it is O that one is seeing. Seeing
facts, on the other hand, is epistemic; one cannot see that there is a cat on
the sofa without, thereby, coming to know that there is a cat on the sofa.
Seeing a fact is coming to know the fact in some visual way. One can see
objects the fly in one’s soup, e.g., without realizing that there is a fly in
one’s soup thinking, perhaps, it is a bean or a crouton; but to see a fact, the
fact that there is a fly in one’s soup is, necessarily, to know it is a fly.
This distinction applies to the other sense modalities as well. One can hear
the telephone ringing without realizing that it is the telephone perhaps it’s
the TV or the doorbell, but to hear a fact, that it is the telephone that is
ringing, is, of necessity, to know that it is the telephone that is ringing.
The other ways we have of describing what we perceive are primarily variations
on these two fundamental themes. In seeing where he went, when he left, who
went with him, and how he was dressed, e.g., we are describing the perception
of some fact of a certain sort without revealing exactly which fact it is. If Martha
saw where he went, then Martha saw hence, came to know some fact having to do
with where he went, some fact of the form ‘he went there’. In speaking of
states and conditions the condition of his room, her injury, and properties the
color of his tie, the height of the building, we sometimes, as in the case of
objects, mean to be describing a non-epistemic perceptual act, one that carries
no implications for what if anything is known. In other cases, as with facts,
we mean to be describing the acquisition of some piece of knowledge. One can
see or hear a word without recognizing it as a word it might be in a foreign
language, but can one see a misprint and not know it is a misprint? It
obviously depends on what one uses ‘misprint’ to refer to: an object a word
that is misprinted or a fact the fact that it is misprinted. In examining and
evaluating theories whether philosophical or psychological of perception it is
essential to distinguish fact perception from object perception. For a theory
might be a plausible theory about the perception of objects e.g., psychological
theories of “early vision” but not at all plausible about our perception of
facts. Fact perception, involving, as it does, knowledge and, hence, belief
brings into play the entire cognitive system memory, concepts, etc. in a way
the former does not. Perceptual relativity
e.g., the idea that what we perceive is relative to our language, our
conceptual scheme, or the scientific theories we have available to “interpret”
phenomena is quite implausible as a
theory about our perception of objects. A person lacking a word for, say,
kumquats, lacking this concept, lacking a scientific way of classifying these
objects are they a fruit? a vegetable? an animal?, can still see, touch, smell,
and taste kumquats. Perception of objects does not depend on, and is therefore
not relative to, the observer’s linguistic, conceptual, cognitive, and
scientific assets or shortcomings. Fact perception, however, is another matter.
Clearly one cannot see that there are kumquats in the basket as opposed to
seeing the objects, the kumquats, in the basket if one has no idea of, no
concept of, what a kumquat is. Seeing facts is much more sensitive and, hence,
relative to the conceptual resources, the background knowledge and scientific
theories, of the observer, and this difference must be kept in mind in
evaluating claims about perceptual relativity. Though it does not make objects
invisible, ignorance does tend to make facts perceptually inaccessible. There
are characteristic experiences associated with the different senses. Tasting a
kumquat is not at all like seeing a kumquat although the same object is
perceived indeed, the same fact that it
is a kumquat may be perceived. The
difference, of course, is in the subjective experience one has in perceiving
the kumquat. A causal theory of perception of objects holds that the perceptual
object, what it is we see, taste, smell, or whatever, is that object that
causes us to have this subjective experience. Perceiving an object is that
object’s causing in the right way one to have an experience of the appropriate
sort. I see a bean in my soup if it is, in fact whether I know it or not is
irrelevant, a bean in my soup that is causing me to have this visual
experience. I taste a bean if, in point of fact, it is a bean that is causing
me to have the kind of taste experience I am now having. If it is unknown to me
a bug, not a bean, that is causing these experiences, then I am unwittingly
seeing and tasting a bug perhaps a bug
that looks and tastes like a bean. What object we see taste, smell, etc. is
determined by the causal facts in question. What we know and believe, how we
interpret the experience, is irrelevant, although it will, of course, determine
what we say we see and taste. The same is to be said, with appropriate changes,
for our perception of facts the most significant change being the replacement
of belief for experience. I see that there is a bug in my soup if the fact that
there is a bug in my soup causes me to perception perception 655 655 believe that there is a bug in my soup.
I can taste that there is a bug in my soup when this fact causes me to have
this belief via some taste sensation. A causal theory of perception is more than
the claim that the physical objects we perceive cause us to have experiences
and beliefs. This much is fairly obvious. It is the claim that this causal
relation is constitutive of perception, that necessarily, if S sees O, then O
causes a certain sort of experience in S. It is, according to this theory,
impossible, on conceptual grounds, to perceive something with which one has no
causal contact. If, e.g., future events do not cause present events, if there
is no backward causation, then we cannot perceive future events and objects.
Whether or not future facts can be perceived or known depends on how liberally
the causal condition on knowledge is interpreted. Though conceding that there
is a world of mind-independent objects trees, stars, people that cause us to
have experiences, some philosophers
traditionally called representative realists argue that we nonetheless do not directly
perceive these external objects. What we directly perceive are the effects
these objects have on us an internal
image, idea, or impression, a more or less depending on conditions of
observation accurate representation of the external reality that helps produce
it. This subjective, directly apprehended object has been called by various
names: a sensation, percept, sensedatum, sensum, and sometimes, to emphasize its
representational aspect, Vorstellung G., ‘representation’. Just as the images
appearing on a television screen represent their remote causes the events
occurring at some distant concert hall or playing field, the images visual,
auditory, etc. that occur in the mind, the sensedata of which we are directly
aware in normal perception, represent or sometimes, when things are not working
right, misrepresent their external physical causes. The representative realist
typically invokes arguments from illusion, facts about hallucination, and
temporal considerations to support his view. Hallucinations are supposed to
illustrate the way we can have the same kind of experience we have when as we
commonly say we see a real bug without there being a real bug in our soup or
anywhere else causing us to have the experience. When we hallucinate, the bug
we “see” is, in fact, a figment of our own imagination, an image i.e.,
sense-datum in the mind that, because it shares some of the properties of a
real bug shape, color, etc., we might mistake for a real bug. Since the
subjective experiences can be indistinguishable from that which we have when as
we commonly say we really see a bug, it is reasonable to infer the
representative realist argues that in normal perception, when we take ourselves
to be seeing a real bug, we are also directly aware of a buglike image in the
mind. A hallucination differs from a normal perception, not in what we are
aware of in both cases it is a sense-datum but in the cause of these
experiences. In normal perception it is an actual bug; in hallucination it is,
say, drugs in the bloodstream. In both cases, though, we are caused to have the
same thing: an awareness of a buglike sense-datum, an object that, in normal
perception, we naively take to be a real bug thus saying, and encouraging our
children to say, that we see a bug. The argument from illusion points to the
fact that our experience of an object changes even when the object that we
perceive or say we perceive remains unchanged. Though the physical object the
bug or whatever remains the same color, size, and shape, what we experience
according to this argument changes color, shape, and size as we change the
lighting, our viewing angle, and distance. Hence, it is concluded, what we
experience cannot really be the physical object itself. Since it varies with
changes in both object and viewing conditions, what we experience must be a
causal result, an effect, of both the object we commonly say we see the bug and
the conditions in which we view it. This internal effect, it is concluded, is a
sense-datum. Representative realists have also appealed to the fact that
perceiving a physical object is a causal process that takes time. This temporal
lag is most dramatic in the case of distant objects e.g., stars, but it exists
for every physical object it takes time for a neural signal to be transmitted
from receptor surfaces to the brain. Consequently, at the moment a short time
after light leaves the object’s surface we see a physical object, the object
could no longer exist. It could have ceased to exist during the time light was
being transmitted to the eye or during the time it takes the eye to communicate
with the brain. Yet, even if the object ceases to exist before we become aware
of anything before a visual experience occurs, we are, or so it seems, aware of
something when the causal process reaches its climax in the brain. This
something of which we are aware, since it cannot be the physical object it no
longer exists, must be a sense-datum. The representationalist concludes in this
“time-lag argument,” therefore, that even when the physperception perception
656 656 ical object does not cease to
exist this, of course, is the normal situation, we are directly aware, not of
it, but of its slightly later-occurring representation. Representative realists
differ among themselves about the question of how much if at all the sense-data
of which we are aware resemble the external objects of which we are not aware.
Some take the external cause to have some of the properties the so-called
primary properties of the datum e.g., extension and not others the so-called
secondary properties e.g., color. Direct
or naive realism shares with representative realism a commitment to a world of
independently existing objects. Both theories are forms of perceptual realism.
It differs, however, in its view of how we are related to these objects in
ordinary perception. Direct realists deny that we are aware of mental
intermediaries sensedata when, as we ordinarily say, we see a tree or hear the
telephone ring. Though direct realists differ in their degree of naïveté about
how and in what respect perception is supposed to be direct, they need not be
so naive as sometimes depicted as to deny the scientific facts about the causal
processes underlying perception. Direct realists can easily admit, e.g., that
physical objects cause us to have experiences of a particular kind, and that
these experiences are private, subjective, or mental. They can even admit that
it is this causal relationship between object and experience that constitutes
our seeing and hearing physical objects. They need not, in other words, deny a
causal theory of perception. What they must deny, if they are to remain direct
realists, however, is an analysis of the subjective experience that objects
cause us to have into an awareness of some object. For to understand this
experience as an awareness of some object is, given the wholly subjective
mental character of the experience itself, to interpose a mental entity what the
experience is an awareness of between the perceiver and the physical object
that causes him to have this experience, the physical object that is supposed
to be directly perceived. Direct realists, therefore, avoid analyzing a
perceptual experience into an act sensing, being aware of, being acquainted
with and an object the sensum, sense-datum, sensation, mental representation.
The experience we are caused to have when we perceive a physical object or
event is, instead, to be understood in some other way. The adverbial theory is
one such possibility. As the name suggests, this theory takes its cue from the
way nouns and adjectives can sometimes be converted into adverbs without loss
of descriptive content. So, for instance, it comes to pretty much the same
thing whether we describe a conversation as animated adjective or say that we
conversed animatedly an adverb. So, also, according to an adverbialist, when,
as we commonly say, we see a red ball, the red ball causes in us a moment later
an experience, yes, but not as the representative realist says an awareness
mental act of a sense-datum mental object that is red and circular adjectives.
The experience is better understood as one in which there is no object at all,
as sensing redly and circularly adverbs. The adverbial theorist insists that
one can experience circularly and redly without there being, in the mind or
anywhere else, red circles this, in fact, is what the adverbialist thinks
occurs in dreams and hallucinations of red circles. To experience redly is not
to have a red experience; nor is it to experience redness in the mind. It is,
says the adverbialist, a way or a manner of perceiving ordinary objects
especially red ones seen in normal light. Just as dancing gracefully is not a
thing we dance, so perceiving redly is not a thing and certainly not a red thing in the
mind that we experience. The adverbial
theory is only one option the direct realist has of acknowledging the causal
basis of perception while, at the same time, maintaining the directness of our
perceptual relation with independently existing objects. What is important is
not that the experience be construed adverbially, but that it not be
interpreted, as representative realists interpret it, as awareness of some
internal object. For a direct realist, the appearances, though they are
subjective mind-dependent are not objects that interpose themselves between the
conscious mind and the external world. As classically understood, both naive
and representative realism are theories about object perception. They differ
about whether it is the external object or an internal object an idea in the
mind that we most directly apprehend in ordinary sense perception. But they
need not although they usually do differ in their analysis of our knowledge of
the world around us, in their account of fact perception. A direct realist
about object perception may, e.g., be an indirect realist about the facts that
we know about these objects. To see, not only a red ball in front of one, but
that there is a red ball in front of one, it may be necessary, even on a direct
theory of object perception, to infer or in some way derive this fact from
facts that are known more directly perception perception about one’s
experiences of the ball. Since, e.g., a direct theorist may be a causal
theorist, may think that seeing a red ball is in part constituted by the having
of certain sorts of experience, she may insist that knowledge of the cause of
these experiences must be derived from knowledge of the experience itself. If one
is an adverbialist, e.g., one might insist that knowledge of physical objects
is derived from knowledge of how redly? bluely? circularly? squarely? one
experiences these objects. By the same token, a representative realist could
adopt a direct theory of fact perception. Though the objects we directly see
are mental, the facts we come to know by experiencing these subjective entities
are facts about ordinary physical objects. We do not infer at least at no
conscious level that there is a bug in our soup from facts known more directly
about our own conscious experiences from facts about the sensations the bug
causes in us. Rather, our sensations cause us, directly, to have beliefs about
our soup. There is no intermediate belief; hence, there is no intermediate
knowledge; hence, no intermediate fact perception. Fact perception is, in this
sense, direct. Or so a representative realist can maintain even though
committed to the indirect perception of the objects bug and soup involved in
this fact. This merely illustrates, once again, the necessity of distinguishing
object perception from fact perception. Refs.: H. P. Grice and A. R. White,
“The causal theory of perception,” a symposium for the Aristotelian Socieety,
in G. J. Warnock, “The philosophy of perception,” Oxford readings in
philosophy.
percival, T.: English physician and author
of Medical Ethics 1803. He was central in bringing the Western traditions of
medical ethics from prayers and oaths e.g., the Hippocratic oath toward more
detailed, modern codes of proper professional conduct. His writing on the
normative aspects of medical practice was part ethics, part prudential advice,
part professional etiquette, and part jurisprudence. Medical Ethics treated
standards for the professional conduct of physicians relative to surgeons and
apothecaries pharmacists and general practitioners, as well as hospitals,
private practice, and the law. The issues Percival addressed include privacy,
truth telling, rules for professional consultation, human experimentation, public
and private trust, compassion, sanity, suicide, abortion, capital punishment,
and environmental nuisances. Percival had his greatest influence in England and
America. At its founding in 1847, the
Medical Association used Medical Ethics to guide its own first code of
medical ethics.
perdurance, in one common philosophical
use, the property of being temporally continuous and having temporal parts.
There are at least two conflicting theories about temporally continuous
substances. According to the first, temporally continuous substances have
temporal parts they perdure, while according to the second, they do not. In one
ordinary philosophical use, endurance is the property of being temporally
continuous and not having temporal parts. There are modal versions of the
aforementioned two theories: for example, one version of the first theory is
that necessarily, temporally continuous substances have temporal parts, while
another version implies that possibly, they do not. Some versions of the first
theory hold that a temporally continuous substance is composed of instantaneous
temporal parts or “object-stages,” while on other versions these object-stages
are not parts but boundaries.
perfect competition: perfect co-operation:
the state of an ideal market under the following conditions: a every consumer
in the market is a perfectly rational maximizer of utility; every producer is a
perfect maximizer of profit; there is a very large ideally infinite number of
producers of the good in question, which ensures that no producer can set the
price for its output otherwise, an imperfect competitive state of oligopoly or
monopoly obtains; and every producer provides a product perfectly
indistinguishable from that of other producers if consumers could distinguish
products to the point that there was no longer a very large number of producers
for each distinguishable good, competition would again be imperfect. Under
these conditions, the market price is equal to the marginal cost of producing
the last unit. This in turn determines the market supply of the good, since
each producer will gain by increasing production when price exceeds marginal
cost and will generally cut losses by decreasing production when marginal cost
exceeds price. Perfect competition is sometimes thought to have normative
implications for political philosophy, since it results in Pareto optimality.
The concept of perfect competition becomes extremely complicated when a
market’s evolution is considered. Producers who cannot equate marginal cost
with the market price will have negative profit and must drop out of the
market. If this happens very often, then the number of producers will no longer
be large enough to sustain perfect competition, so new producers will need to
enter the market.
Perfectus – finitum – complete -- perfectionism,
an ethical view according to which individuals and their actions are judged by
a maximal standard of achievement
specifically, the degree to which they approach ideals of aesthetic,
intellectual, emotional, or physical “perfection.” Perfectionism, then, may
depart from, or even dispense with, standards of conventional morality in favor
of standards based on what appear to be non-moral values. These standards
reflect an admiration for certain very rare levels of human achievement.
Perhaps the most characteristic of these standards are artistic and other forms
of creativity; but they prominently include a variety of other activities and
emotional states deemed “noble” e.g.,
heroic endurance in the face of great suffering. The perfectionist, then, would
also tend toward a rather non-egalitarian
even aristocratic view of
humankind. The rare genius, the inspired few, the suffering but courageous artist these examples of human perfection are
genuinely worthy of our estimation, according to this view. Although no fully
worked-out system of “perfectionist philosophy” has been attempted, aspects of
all of these doctrines may be found in such philosophers as Nietzsche.
Aristotle, as well, appears to endorse a perfectionist idea in his
characterization of the human good. Just as the good lyre player not only
exhibits the characteristic activities of this profession but achieves
standards of excellence with respect to these, the good human being, for
Aristotle, must achieve standards of excellence with respect to the virtue or
virtues distinctive of human life in general.
peripatetic – lycaeum -- School, also
called Peripatos, the philosophical playgroup founded by Aristotle at the
Lycaeum gymnasium in Athens. The derivation of ‘Peripatetic’ from the alleged
Aristotelian custom of “walking about, “peripatein,” is, while colourful,
wrong. ‘Peripatos’ is in Griceian a “covered walking hall” – which is among the
facilities, “as the excavations show,” as Grice notes. A scholarch or head-master
presided over roughly two classes of members. One is the “presbyteroi” or
seniors, who have this or that teaching dutu, and the “neaniskoi” or juniors. Grice:
“When Austin instituted the playgroup he saw himself as *the* presbyteros,
while I, like the others, was a ‘neaniskos.”” No females were allowed, to avoid
disruption. During Aristotle’s lifetime his own lectures, whether for the inner
circle of the school (what Aristotle calls ‘the gown’) or for Athens (‘the
town’) at large, are probably the key attraction and core activity. Given
Aristotle’s celebrated knack for organizing group research projects, we may
assume that Peripatetics spent much of their time working on their own specific
assignments either at the swimming-pool library, or at some kind of repository
for specimens used in zoological and botanical investigations. As a foreigner,
Aristotle cannot possibly own any property in Athens. When he left Athens (pretty much as when Austin died) Theophrastus
of Eresus (pretty much like Grice did) succeeded him as scholarch. Theophrastus
is s an able Aristotelian (whereas Grice started to criticise Austin) who wrote
extensively on metaphysics, psychology, physiology, botany, ethics, politics,
and the history of philosophy. With the help of the Peripatetic dictator
Demetrius of Phaleron, Theophrastus was able to secure property rights over the
physical facilities of the school. Under Theophrastus, the Peripatos continued
to flourish and is said to have had 2,000 students. Theophrastus’s successor, Strato
of Lampsakos, has much narrower interests and abandoned key Aristotelian tenets
(such as the syllogism – “I won’t force Aristotle to teach me how to reason
with a middle term in the middle!” – Diog. Laert. v. 673b-c. With Strato, a
progressive decline set in, to which the moving of Aristotle’s swimming-pool
library out of Athens (minus the swimming-pool) by Neleus of Skepsis, certainly
contributed. By the first century B.C. the Peripatos had ceased to exist. “Philosophers
of later periods sympathetic to Aristotle’s views have also been called
Peripatetics; I fact, *I* have, by A. D. Code, of all people!” – Refs.: H. P.
Grice, “How to become a Peripatetic – and not die in the attempt.”
perry: Harvard philosopher who explored the
theory of knowledge, ethics, and social philosophy. Perry received a Pulitzer
Prize for “The Thought and Character of William James,” (a sequel to “The
Thought and Character of H. P. Grice, M. A. Lit. Hum. Oxon.”), a biography of
his teacher and colleague. Perry’s other major works include: “The Moral Economy,”
“General Theory of Value,’ ‘Puritanism and Democracy,” “Puritan philosophy, or
the lack thereof,” “A comparison of Puritan philosophy and Roman philosophy –
or the lack thereof.” – and “Realms of Value “ He is perhaps best known for his
views on value. Perry writes in General Theory of Value in a passage Grice
treasured (“The conception of value”): “Any object, whatever it be, acquires
value when any interest, whatever it be, is taken in it; just as anything
whatsoever becomes a target when anyone whosoever aims at it.” Something’s
having value is nothing but its being the object of some interest, and to know
whether it has value one need only know whether it is the object of someone’s
interest. Morality aims at the promotion of the moral good, which he defines as
“harmonious happiness.” This consists in the reconciliation, harmonizing, and
fulfillment of all interests. Perry’s epistemological and metaphysical views (much
as Grice’s) are part of a revolt against idealism and dualism. Along with five
other philosophers, all from The New World, he wrote The New Realism – “where
‘new’ is meant as a reference to the ‘new’ world.” -- The “New Realists” (or
‘neo-realists,’ as Grice prefers) held that the objects of perception and memory
are directly presented to consciousness and are just what they appear to be;
nothing intervenes between the knower and the external world. The view that the
objects of perception and memory are presented by means of ideas leads, they
argued, to idealism, skepticism, and absurdity. Perry is also known for having
developed, along with E. B. Holt, the “specific response” theory, which is an
attempt to construe belief and perception in terms of bodily adjustment and
behaviour. Grice borrowed, but never returned, the term ‘response’ from Perry –
“although I wasn’t thinking specifically about him.” Refs: H. P. Grice,
“Meaning: stimulus and response.”
Idem: Grice: “A very Roman notion – no
translation – but Peano’s = may do.” personal identity: explored by H. P. Grice
in “Personal Identity,” Mind – and H. P. Grice, “The logical construction
theory of personal identity,” and “David Hume on the vagaries of personal
identity.” -- the numerical identity over time of persons. The question of what
personal identity consists in is the question of what it is what the necessary
and sufficient conditions are for a person existing at one time and a person
existing at another time to be one and the same person. Here there is no
question of there being any entity that is the “identity” of a person; to say
that a person’s identity consists in such and such is just shorthand for saying
that facts about personal identity, i.e., facts to the effect that someone
existing at one time is the same as someone existing at another time, consist
in such and such. This should not be confused with the usage, common in
ordinary speech and in psychology, in which persons are said to have
identities, and, sometimes, to seek, lose, or regain their identities, where
one’s “identity” intimately involves a set of values and goals that structure
one’s life. The words ‘identical’ and ‘same’ mean nothing different in
judgments about persons than in judgments about other things. The problem of
personal identity is therefore not one of defining a special sense of
‘identical,’ and it is at least misleading to characterize it as defining a
particular kind of identity. Applying Quine’s slogan “no entity without
identity,” one might say that characterizing any sort of entity involves
indicating what the identity conditions for entities of that sort are so, e.g.,
part of the explanation of the concept of a set is that sets having the same
members are identical, and that asking what the identity of persons consists in
is just a way of asking what sorts of things persons are. But the main focus in
traditional discussions of the topic has been on one kind of identity judgment
about persons, namely those asserting “identity over time”; the question has
been about what the persistence of persons over time consists in. What has made
the identity persistence of persons of special philosophical interest is partly
its epistemology and partly its connections with moral and evaluative matters.
The crucial epistemological fact is that persons have, in memory, an access to
their own past histories that is unlike the access they have to the histories
of other things including other persons; when one remembers doing or
experiencing something, one normally has no need to employ any criterion of
identity in order to know that the subject of the remembered action or
experience is i.e., is identical with oneself. The moral and evaluative matters
include moral responsibility someone can be held responsible for a past action
only if he or she is identical to the person who did it and our concern for our
own survival and future well-being since it seems, although this has been
questioned, that what one wants in wanting to survive is that there should
exist in the future someone who is identical to oneself. The modern history of
the topic of personal identity begins with Locke, who held that the identity of
a person consists neither in the identity of an immaterial substance as
dualists might be expected to hold nor in the identity of a material substance
or “animal body” as materialists might be expected to hold, and that it
consists instead in “same consciousness.” His view appears to have been that
the persistence of a person through time consists in the fact that certain
actions, thoughts, experiences, etc., occurring at different times, are somehow
united in memory. Modern theories descended from Locke’s take memory continuity
to be a special case of something more general, psychological continuity, and
hold that personal identity consists in this. This is sometimes put in terms of
the notion of a “person-stage,” i.e., a momentary “time slice” of the history
of a person. A series of person-stages will be psychologically continuous if
the psychological states including memories occurring in later members of the
series grow out of, in certain characteristic ways, those occurring in earlier
members of it; and according to the psychological continuity view of personal
identity, person-stages occurring at different times are stages of the same
person provided they belong to a single, non-branching, psychologically
continuous series of person-stages. Opponents of the Lockean and neo-Lockean
psychological continuity view tend to fall into two camps. Some, following
Butler and Reid, hold that personal identity is indefinable, and that nothing informative
can be said about what it consists in. Others hold that the identity of a
person consists in some sort of physical continuity perhaps the identity of a living human
organism, or the identity of a human brain. In the actual cases we know about putting
aside issues about non-bodily survival of death, psychological continuity and
physical continuity go together. Much of the debate between psychological
continuity theories and physical continuity theories has centered on the
interpretation of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain-state
transfers, etc., in which these come apart. Such examples make vivid the
question of whether our fundamental criteria of personal identity are
psychological, physical, or both. Recently philosophical attention has shifted
somewhat from the question of what personal identity consists in to questions
about its importance. The consideration of hypothetical cases of “fission” in
which two persons at a later time are psychologically continuous with one person
at an earlier time has suggested to some that we can have survival or at any rate what matters in survival without personal identity, and that our
self-interested concern for the future is really a concern for whatever future
persons are psychologically continuous with us.
Grice’s personalism: Grice: “I finished
the thing and did not know what to title – my mother said, “Try ‘personal
identity.’ She was a personal trinitarian.” -- a version of personal idealism
that flourished in the United States principally at Boston from the late nineteenth century to the
mid-twentieth century. Its principal proponents were Borden Parker Bowne 1847 0
and three of his students: Albert Knudson 18733; Ralph Flewelling 18710, who
founded The Personalist; and, most importantly, Edgar Sheffield Brightman 43.
Their personalism was both idealistic and theistic and was influential in
philosophy and in theology. Personalism traced its philosophical lineage to
Berkeley and Leibniz, and had as its foundational insight the view that all
reality is ultimately personal. God is the transcendent person and the ground
or creator of all other persons; nature is a system of objects either for or in
the minds of persons. Both Bowne and Brightman considered themselves
empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley. Immediate experience is the starting
point, but this experience involves a fundamental knowledge of the self as a
personal being with changing states. Given this pluralism, the coherence,
order, and intelligibility of the universe are seen to derive from God, the
uncreated person. Bowne’s God is the eternal and omnipotent being of classical
theism, but Brightman argued that if God is a real person he must be construed
as both temporal and finite. Given the fact of evil, God is seen as gradually
gaining control over his created world, with regard to which his will is
intrinsically limited. Another version of personalism developed in France out
of the neo-Scholastic tradition. E. Mounier 550, Maritain, and Gilson
identified themselves as personalists, inasmuch as they viewed the infinite
person God and finite persons as the source and locus of intrinsic value. They
did not, however, view the natural order as intrinsically personal.
Grice’s personhood: Grice: “I finished the
thing and did not know how to title. My mother, a confessed personal
trinitarian, suggested, ‘personal identity.’’ -- the condition or property of
being a person, especially when this is considered to entail moral and/or
metaphysical importance. Personhood has been thought to involve various traits,
including moral agency; reason or rationality; language, or the cognitive
skills language may support such as intentionality and self-consciousness; and
ability to enter into suitable relations with other persons viewed as members
of a self-defining group. Buber emphasized the difference between the I-It
relationship holding between oneself and an object, and the IThou relationship,
which holds between oneself and another person who can be addressed. Dennett
has construed persons in terms of the “intentional stance,” which involves
explaining another’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.
Questions about when personhood begins and when it ends have been central to
debates about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, since personhood has often
been viewed as the mark, if not the basis, of a being’s possession of special
moral status.
Petrus Longobardo – He was born in Novara,
then reckoned as Lombardia! -- theologian and author of the Book of Sentences
Liber sententiarum, a renowned theological sourcebook in the later Middle Ages.
Peter was educated at Bologna, Reims, and Paris before teaching in the school
of Notre Dame in Paris. He became a canon at Notre Dame in 114445 and was
elected bishop of Paris in 1159. His extant works include commentaries on the
Psalms written in the mid-1130s and on the epistles of Paul c.113941; a
collection of sermons; and his one-volume summary of Christian doctrine, the
Sentences completed by 1158. The Sentences consists of four books: Book I, On
the Trinity; Book II, On the Creation of Things; Book III, On the Incarnation;
and Book IV, “On the Doctrine of Signs or Sacraments.” His discussion is
organized around particular questions or issues e.g., “On Knowledge,
Foreknowledge, and Providence” Book I, “Is God the Cause of Evil and Sin?” Book
II. For a given issue Peter typically presents a brief summary, accompanied by
short quotations, of main positions found in Scripture and in the writings of
the church fathers and doctors, followed by his own determination or
adjudication of the matter. Himself a theological conservative, Peter seems to
have intended this sort of compilation of scriptural and ancient doctrinal
teaching as a counter to the popularity, fueled by the recent recovery of
important parts of Aristotle’s logic, of the application of dialectic to
theological matters. The Sentences enjoyed wide circulation and admiration from
the beginning, and within a century of its composition it became a standard
text in the theology curriculum. From the midthirteenth through the
mid-fourteenth century every student of theology was required, as the last
stage in obtaining the highest academic degree, to lecture and comment on
Peter’s text. Later medieval thinkers often referred to Peter as “the Master”
magister, thereby testifying to the Sentences’ preeminence in theological
training. In lectures and commentaries, the greatest minds of this period used
Peter’s text as a framework in which to develop their own original positions
and debate with their contemporaries. As a result the Sentences-commentary
tradition is an extraordinarily rich repository of later medieval philosophical
and theological thought.
Peter of Spain. It is now thought that
there were two Peters of Spain. The prelate
and philosopher was born in Lisbon, studied at Paris, and taught medicine at
Siena 124850. He served in various ecclesiastical posts in Portugal and Italy
125073 before being elected pope as John XXI in 1276. He wrote several books on
philosophical psychology and compiled the famous medical work Thesaurus
pauperum. The second Peter of Spain was a
Dominican who lived during the first half of the thirteenth century. His
Tractatus, later called Summulae logicales, received over 166 printings during
subsequent centuries. The Tractatus presents the essentials of Aristotelian
logic propositions, universals, categories, syllogism, dialectical topics, and
the sophistical fallacies and improves on the mnemonic verses of William
Sherwood; he then introduces the subjects of the so-called parva logicalia
supposition, relatives, ampliation, personality Peter of Spain 662 662 appellation, restriction, distribution,
all of which were extensively developed in the later Middle Ages. There is not
sufficient evidence to claim that Peter wrote a special treatise on
consequences, but his understanding of conditionals as assertions of necessary
connection undoubtedly played an important role in the rules of simple, as
opposed to as-of-now, consequences.
phantasia: Grice: “ “Phantasia,” as any
Clifton schoolboy knows, is cognate with ‘phainomenon,’ as Cant forgot!” -- Grecian,
‘appearance’, ‘imagination’, 1 the state we are in when something appears to us
to be the case; 2 the capacity in virtue of which things appear to us. Although
frequently used of conscious and imagistic experiences, ‘phantasia’ is not
limited to such states; in particular, it can be applied to any propositional
attitude where something is taken to be the case. But just as the English
‘appears’ connotes that one has epistemic reservations about what is actually
the case, so ‘phantasia’ suggests the possibility of being misled by
appearances and is thus often a subject of criticism. According to Plato,
phantasia is a “mixture” of sensation and belief; in Aristotle, it is a
distinct faculty that makes truth and falsehood possible. The Stoics take a
phantasia to constitute one of the most basic mental states, in terms of which
other mental states are to be explained, and in rational animals it bears the propositional
content expressed in language. This last use becomes prominent in ancient
literary and rhetorical theory to designate the ability of language to move us
and convey subjects vividly as well as to range beyond the bounds of our
immediate experience. Here lie the origins of the modern concept of imagination
although not the Romantic distinction between fancy and imagination. Later
Neoplatonists, such as Proclus, take phantasia to be necessary for abstract
studies such as geometry, by enabling us to envision spatial relations.
phenomenalism: one of the twelve
labours of H. P. Grice – very fashionable at Oxford – “until Austin demolished
it with his puritanical “Sense and sensibilia,” – Grice: “Strictly, it should
be ‘sense and sensibile,’ since ‘sensibilia’ is plural – which invokes Ryle’s
paradox of the speckled hen!” -- the view that propositions asserting the
existence of physical objects are equivalent in meaning to propositions
asserting that subjects would have certain sequences of sensations were they to
have certain others. The basic idea behind phenomenalism is compatible with a
number of different analyses of the self or conscious subject. A phenomenalist
might understand the self as a substance, a particular, or a construct out of
actual and possible experience. The view also is compatible with any number of
different analyses of the visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and
kinesthetic sensations described in the antecedents and consequents of the
subjunctive conditionals that the phenomenalist uses to analyze physical object
propositions as illustrated in the last paragraph. Probably the most common
analysis of sensations adopted by traditional phenomenalists is a sense-datum
theory, with the sense-data construed as mind-dependent entities. But there is
nothing to prevent a phenomenalist from accepting an adverbial theory or theory
of appearing instead. The origins of phenomenalism are difficult to trace, in
part because early statements of the view were usually not careful. In his
Dialogues, Berkeley hinted at phenomenalism when he had Philonous explain how
he could reconcile an ontology containing only minds and ideas with the story
of a creation that took place before the existence of people. Philonous
imagines that if he had been present at the creation he should have seen
things, i.e., had sensations, in the order described in the Bible. It can also
be argued, however, that J. S. Mill in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy was the first to put forth a clearly phenomenalistic analysis when
he identified matter with the “permanent possibility of sensation.” When Mill
explained what these permanent possibilities are, he typically used
conditionals that describe the sensations one would have if one were placed in certain
conditions. The attraction of classical phenomenalism grew with the rise of
logical positivism and its acceptance of the verifiability criterion of
meaning. Phenomenalists were usually foundationalists who were convinced that
justified belief in the physical world rested ultimately on our
noninferentially justified beliefs about our sensations. Implicitly committed
to the view that only deductive and inductive inferences are legitimate, and
further assuming that to be justified in believing one proposition P on the
basis of another E, one must be justified in believing both E and that E makes
P probable, the phenomenalist saw an insuperable difficulty in justifying
belief in ordinary statements about the physical world given prevalent
conceptions of physical petitio principii phenomenalism 663 663 objects. If all we ultimately have as
our evidence for believing in physical objects is what we know about the
occurrence of sensation, how can we establish sensation as evidence for the
existence of physical objects? We obviously cannot deduce the existence of
physical objects from any finite sequence of sensations. The sensations could,
e.g., be hallucinatory. Nor, it seems, can we observe a correlation between
sensation and something else in order to generate the premises of an inductive
argument for the conclusion that sensations are reliable indicators of physical
objects. The key to solving this problem, the phenomenalist argues, is to
reduce assertions about the physical world to complicated assertions about the
sequences of sensations a subject would have were he to have certain others.
The truth of such conditionals, e.g., that if I have the clear visual
impression of a cat, then there is one before me, might be mind-independent in
the way in which one wants the truth of assertions about the physical world to
be mind-independent. And to the phenomenalist’s great relief, it would seem
that we could justify our belief in such conditional statements without having
to correlate anything but sensations. Many philosophers today reject some of
the epistemological, ontological, and metaphilosophical presuppositions with
which phenomenalists approached the problem of understanding our relation to
the physical world through sensation. But the argument that was historically
most decisive in convincing many philosophers to abandon phenomenalism was the
argument from perceptual relativity first advanced by Chisholm in “The Problem
of Perception.” Chisholm offers a strategy for attacking any phenomenalistic
analysis. The first move is to force the phenomenalist to state a conditional
describing only sensations that is an alleged consequence of a physical object
proposition. C. I. Lewis, e.g., in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation,
claims that the assertion P that there is a doorknob before me and to the left
entails C that if I were to seem to see a doorknob and seem to reach out and
touch it then I would seem to feel it. Chisholm argues that if P really did
entail C then there could be no assertion R that when conjoined with P did not
entail C. There is, however, such an assertion: I am unable to move my limbs
and my hands but am subject to delusions such that I think I am moving them; I
often seem to be initiating a grasping motion but with no feeling of contacting
anything. Chisholm argues, in effect, that what sensations one would have if
one were to have certain others always depends in part on the internal and
external physical conditions of perception and that this fact dooms any attempt
to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a physical object
proposition couched in terms that describe only connections between
sensations.
phenomenology – Grice:
“Strictly, my area – the science of appearances!” -- referred ironically by J.
L. Austin as “linguistic phenomenology,” in the twentieth century, the
philosophy developed by Husserl and some of his followers. The term has been
used since the mideighteenth century and received a carefully defined technical
meaning in the works of both Kant and Hegel, but it is not now used to refer to
a homogeneous and systematically developed philosophical position. The question
of what phenomenology is may suggest that phenomenology is one among the many
contemporary philosophical conceptions that have a clearly delineated body of
doctrines and whose essential characteristics can be expressed by a set of
wellchosen statements. This notion is not correct, however. In contemporary
philosophy there is no system or school called “phenomenology,” characterized
by a clearly defined body of teachings. Phenomenology is neither a school nor a
trend in contemporary philosophy. It is rather a movement whose proponents, for
various reasons, have propelled it in many distinct directions, with the result
that today it means different things to different people. While within the
phenomenological movement as a whole there are several related currents, they,
too, are by no means homogeneous. Though these currents have a common point of
departure, they do not project toward the same destination. The thinking of
most phenomenologists has changed so greatly that their respective views can be
presented adequately only by showing them in their gradual development. This is
true not only for Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, but also
for such later phenomenologists as Scheler, N. Hartmann, Heidegger, Sartre, and
Merleau-Ponty. To anyone who studies the phenomenological movement without
prejudice the differences among its many currents are obvious. It has been
phenomenal property phenomenology 664
664 said that phenomenology consists in an analysis and description of
consciousness; it has been claimed also that phenomenology simply blends with
existentialism. Phenomenology is indeed the study of essences, but it also
attempts to place essences back into existence. It is a transcendental
philosophy interested only in what is “left behind” after the phenomenological
reduction is performed, but it also considers the world to be already there
before reflection begins. For some philosophers phenomenology is speculation on
transcendental subjectivity, whereas for others it is a method for approaching
concrete existence. Some use phenomenology as a search for a philosophy that
accounts for space, time, and the world, just as we experience and “live” them.
Finally, it has been said that phenomenology is an attempt to give a direct
description of our experience as it is in itself without taking into account
its psychological origin and its causal explanation; but Husserl speaks of a “genetic”
as well as a “constitutive” phenomenology. To some people, finding such an
abundance of ideas about one and the same subject constitutes a strange
situation; for others it is annoying to contemplate the “confusion”; and there
will be those who conclude that a philosophy that cannot define its own scope
does not deserve the discussion that has been carried on in its regard. In the
opinion of many, not only is this latter attitude not justified, but precisely
the opposite view defended by Thevenaz should be adopted. As the term
‘phenomenology’ signifies first and foremost a methodical conception, Thevenaz
argues that because this method, originally developed for a very particular and
limited end, has been able to branch out in so many varying forms, it manifests
a latent truth and power of renewal that implies an exceptional fecundity.
Speaking of the great variety of conceptions within the phenomenological
movement, Merleau-Ponty remarked that the responsible philosopher must
recognize that phenomenology may be practiced and identified as a manner or a
style of thinking, and that it existed as a movement before arriving at a
complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. Rather than force a living
movement into a system, then, it seems more in keeping with the ideal of the
historian as well as the philosopher to follow the movement in its development,
and attempt to describe and evaluate the many branches in and through which it
has unfolded itself. In reality the picture is not as dark as it may seem at first
sight. Notwithstanding the obvious differences, most phenomenologists share
certain insights that are very important for their mutual philosophical
conception as a whole. In this connection the following must be mentioned: 1
Most phenomenologists admit a radical difference between the “natural” and the
“philosophical” attitude. This leads necessarily to an equally radical
difference between philosophy and science. In characterizing this difference
some phenomenologists, in agreement with Husserl, stress only epistemological
issues, whereas others, in agreement with Heidegger, focus their attention
exclusively on ontological topics. 2 Notwithstanding this radical difference,
there is a complicated set of relationships between philosophy and science. Within
the context of these relationships philosophy has in some sense a foundational
task with respect to the sciences, whereas science offers to philosophy at
least a substantial part of its philosophical problematic. 3 To achieve its
task philosophy must perform a certain reduction, or epoche, a radical change
of attitude by which the philosopher turns from things to their meanings, from
the ontic to the ontological, from the realm of the objectified meaning as
found in the sciences to the realm of meaning as immediately experienced in the
“life-world.” In other words, although it remains true that the various
phenomenologists differ in characterizing the reduction, no one seriously
doubts its necessity. 4 All phenomenologists subscribe to the doctrine of intentionality,
though most elaborate this doctrine in their own way. For Husserl
intentionality is a characteristic of conscious phenomena or acts; in a deeper
sense, it is the characteristic of a finite consciousness that originally finds
itself without a world. For Heidegger and most existentialists it is the human
reality itself that is intentional; as Being-in-the-world its essence consists
in its ek-sistence, i.e., in its standing out toward the world. 5 All
phenomenologists agree on the fundamental idea that the basic concern of
philosophy is to answer the question concerning the “meaning and Being” of
beings. All agree in addition that in trying to materialize this goal the
philosopher should be primarily interested not in the ultimate cause of all finite
beings, but in how the Being of beings and the Being of the world are to be
constituted. Finally, all agree that in answering the question concerning the
meaning of Being a privileged position is to be attributed to subjectivity,
i.e., to that being which questions the Being of beings. Phenomenologists
differ, however, the moment they have to specify what is meant by subjectivity.
As noted above, whereas Husserl conceives it as a worldless monad, Heidegger
and most later phenomenologists conceive it as being-in-the-world. Referring to
Heidegger’s reinterpretation of his phenomenology, Husserl writes: one
misinterprets my phenomenology backwards from a level which it was its very
purpose to overcome, in other words, one has failed to understand the fundamental
novelty of the phenomenological reduction and hence the progress from mundane
subjectivity i.e., man to transcendental subjectivity; consequently one has
remained stuck in an anthropology . . . which according to my doctrine has not
yet reached the genuine philosophical level, and whose interpretation as
philosophy means a lapse into “transcendental anthropologism,” that is,
“psychologism.” 6 All phenomenologists defend a certain form of intuitionism
and subscribe to what Husserl calls the “principle of all principles”:
“whatever presents itself in ‘intuition’ in primordial form as it were in its
bodily reality, is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though
only within the limits in which it then presents itself.” Here again, however,
each phenomenologist interprets this principle in keeping with his general
conception of phenomenology as a whole. Thus, while phenomenologists do share
certain insights, the development of the movement has nevertheless been such
that it is not possible to give a simple definition of what phenomenology is.
The fact remains that there are many phenomenologists and many phenomenologies.
Therefore, one can only faithfully report what one has experienced of
phenomenology by reading the phenomenologists. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “J. L.
Austin’s linguistic phenomenology – and conversational implicatura,”
“Conversational phenomenology.”
Philo Judaeus, philosopher who composed
the bulk of his work in the form of commentaries and discourses on Scripture.
He made the first known sustained attempt to synthesize its revealed teachings
with the doctrines of classical philosophy. Although he was not the first to
apply the methods of allegorical interpretation to Scripture, the number and
variety of his interpretations make Philo unique. With this interpretive tool,
he transformed biblical narratives into Platonic accounts of the soul’s quest
for God and its struggle against passion, and the Mosaic commandments into
specific manifestations of general laws of nature. Philo’s most influential
idea was his conception of God, which combines the personal, ethical deity of
the Bible with the abstract, transcendentalist theology of Platonism and
Pythagoreanism. The Philonic deity is both the loving, just God of the Hebrew
Patriarchs and the eternal One whose essence is absolutely unknowable and who
creates the material world by will from primordial matter which He creates ex
nihilo. Besides the intelligible realm of ideas, which Philo is the earliest
known philosopher to identify as God’s thoughts, he posited an intermediate
divine being which he called, adopting scriptural language, the logos. Although
the exact nature of the logos is hard to pin down Philo variously and, without any concern for
consistency, called it the “first-begotten Son of the uncreated Father,”
“Second God,” “idea of ideas,” “archetype of human reason,” and “pattern of
creation” its main functions are clear:
to bridge the huge gulf between the transcendent deity and the lower world and
to serve as the unifying law of the universe, the ground of its order and
rationality. A philosophical eclectic, Philo was unknown to medieval Jewish
philosophers but, beyond his anticipations of Neoplatonism, he had a lasting
impact on Christianity through Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose.
Philolaus, pre-Socratic Grecian
philosopher from Croton in southern Italy, the first Pythagorean to write a
book. The surviving fragments of it are the earliest primary texts for
Pythagoreanism, but numerous spurious fragments have also been preserved.
Philolaus’s book begins with a cosmogony and includes astronomical, medical,
and psychological doctrines. His major innovation was to argue that the cosmos
and everything in it is a combination not just of unlimiteds what is structured
and ordered, e.g. material elements but also of limiters structural and
ordering elements, e.g. shapes. These elements are held together in a harmonia
fitting together, which comes to be in accord with perspicuous mathematical
relationships, such as the whole number ratios that correspond to the harmonic
intervals e.g. octave % phenotext Philolaus 666 666 1 : 2. He argued that secure knowledge
is possible insofar as we grasp the number in accordance with which things are
put together. His astronomical system is famous as the first to make the earth
a planet. Along with the sun, moon, fixed stars, five planets, and
counter-earth thus making the perfect number ten, the earth circles the central
fire a combination of the limiter “center” and the unlimited “fire”.
Philolaus’s influence is seen in Plato’s Philebus; he is the primary source for
Aristotle’s account of Pythagoreanism. H.
P. Grice, “Pythagoras: the written and the unwritten doctrines.”
philosophical biology: Grice, “What is
‘life’?” “How come the Grecians had two expressions for this: ‘zoon’ and
‘bios’?” “Why could the Romans just do with ‘vivere’?’ -- Grice liked to regard
himself as a philosophical biologist, and indeed philosophical physiologist.
bioethics, the subfield of ethics that concerns the ethical issues arising in
medicine and from advances in biological science. One central area of bioethics
is the ethical issues that arise in relations between health care professionals
and patients. A second area focuses on broader issues of social justice in
health care. A third area concerns the ethical issues raised by new biological
knowledge or technology. In relations between health care professionals and
patients, a fundamental issue is the appropriate role of each in decision
making about patient care. More traditional views assigning principal
decision-making authority to physicians have largely been replaced with ideals
of shared decision making that assign a more active role to patients. Shared
decision making is thought to reflect better the importance of patients’
self-determination in controlling their care. This increased role for patients
is reflected in the ethical and legal doctrine of informed consent, which
requires that health care not be rendered without the informed and voluntary
consent of a competent patient. The requirement that consent be informed places
a positive responsibility on health care professionals to provide their
patients with the information they need to make informed decisions about care.
The requirement that consent be voluntary requires that treatment not be
forced, nor that patients’ decisions be coerced or manipulated. If patients
lack the capacity to make competent health care decisions, e.g. young children
or cognitively impaired adults, a surrogate, typically a parent in the case of
children or a close family member in the case of adults, must decide for them.
Surrogates’ decisions should follow the patient’s advance directive if one
exists, be the decision the patient would have made in the circumstances if
competent, or follow the patient’s best interests if the patient has never been
competent or his or her wishes are not known. A major focus in bioethics
generally, and treatment decision making in particular, is care at or near the
end of life. It is now widely agreed that patients are entitled to decide about
and to refuse, according to their own values, any lifesustaining treatment.
They are also entitled to have desired treatments that may shorten their lives,
such as high doses of pain medications necessary to relieve severe pain from
cancer, although in practice pain treatment remains inadequate for many
patients. Much more controversial is whether more active means to end life such
as physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia are morally permissible
in indibhavanga bioethics 88 88 vidual
cases or justified as public policy; both remain illegal except in a very few
jurisdictions. Several other moral principles have been central to defining
professionalpatient relationships in health care. A principle of truth telling
requires that professionals not lie to patients. Whereas in the past it was
common, especially with patients with terminal cancers, not to inform patients
fully about their diagnosis and prognosis, studies have shown that practice has
changed substantially and that fully informing patients does not have the bad
effects for patients that had been feared in the past. Principles of privacy
and confidentiality require that information gathered in the
professionalpatient relationship not be disclosed to third parties without
patients’ consent. Especially with highly personal information in mental health
care, or information that may lead to discrimination, such as a diagnosis of
AIDS, assurance of confidentiality is fundamental to the trust necessary to a
wellfunctioning professionalpatient relationship. Nevertheless, exceptions to
confidentiality to prevent imminent and serious harm to others are well
recognized ethically and legally. More recently, work in bioethics has focused
on justice in the allocation of health care. Whereas nearly all developed
countries treat health care as a moral and legal right, and ensure it to all
their citizens through some form of national health care system, in the United
States about 15 percent of the population remains without any form of health
insurance. This has fed debates about whether health care is a right or
privilege, a public or individual responsibility. Most bioethicists have
supported a right to health care because of health care’s fundamental impact on
people’s well-being, opportunity, ability to plan their lives, and even lives
themselves. Even if there is a moral right to health care, however, few defend
an unlimited right to all beneficial health care, no matter how small the
benefit and how high the cost. Consequently, it is necessary to prioritize or
ration health care services to reflect limited budgets for health care, and
both the standards and procedures for doing so are ethically controversial.
Utilitarians and defenders of cost-effectiveness analysis in health policy
support using limited resources to maximize aggregate health benefits for the
population. Their critics argue that this ignores concerns about equity,
concerns about how health care resources and health are distributed. For example,
some have argued that equity requires giving priority to treating the worst-off
or sickest, even at a sacrifice in aggregate health benefits; moreover, taking
account in prioritization of differences in costs of different treatments can
lead to ethically problematic results, such as giving higher priority to
providing very small benefits to many persons than very large but individually
more expensive benefits, including life-saving interventions, to a few persons,
as the state of Oregon found in its initial widely publicized prioritization
program. In the face of controversy over standards for rationing care, it is
natural to rely on fair procedures to make rationing decisions. Other bioethics
issues arise from dramatic advances in biological knowledge and technology.
Perhaps the most prominent example is new knowledge of human genetics,
propelled in substantial part by the worldwide Human Genome Project, which
seeks to map the entire human genome. This project and related research will
enable the prevention of genetically transmitted diseases, but already raises
questions about which conditions to prevent in offspring and which should be
accepted and lived with, particularly when the means of preventing the
condition is by abortion of the fetus with the condition. Looking further into
the future, new genetic knowledge and technology will likely enable us to
enhance normal capacities, not just prevent or cure disease, and to manipulate
the genes of future children, raising profoundly difficult questions about what
kinds of persons to create and the degree to which deliberate human design
should replace “nature” in the creation of our offspring. A dramatic example of
new abilities to create offspring, though now limited to the animal realm, was
the cloning in Scotland in 7 of a sheep from a single cell of an adult sheep;
this event raised the very controversial future prospect of cloning human
beings. Finally, new reproductive technologies, such as oocyte egg donation,
and practices such as surrogate motherhood, raise deep issues about the meaning
and nature of parenthood and families. Philosophical
biology -- euthanasia, broadly, the beneficent timing or negotiation of the
death of a sick person; more narrowly, the killing of a human being on the
grounds that he is better off dead. In an extended sense, the word ‘euthanasia’
is used to refer to the painless killing of non-human animals, in our interests
at least as much as in theirs. Active euthanasia is the taking of steps to end
a person’s especially a patient’s life. Passive euthanasia is the omission or
termination of means of prolonging life, on the grounds that the person is
better off without them. The distinction between active and passive euthanasia
is a rough guide for applying the more fundamental distinction between
intending the patient’s death and pursuing other goals, such as the relief of
her pain, with the expectation that she will die sooner rather than later as a
result. Voluntary euthanasia is euthanasia with the patient’s consent, or at
his request. Involuntary euthanasia is euthanasia over the patient’s
objections. Non-voluntary euthanasia is the killing of a person deemed
incompetent with the consent of someone
say a parent authorized to speak
on his behalf. Since candidates for euthanasia are frequently in no condition
to make major decisions, the question whether there is a difference between
involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia is of great importance. Few moralists
hold that life must be prolonged whatever the cost. Traditional morality
forbids directly intended euthanasia: human life belongs to God and may be
taken only by him. The most important arguments for euthanasia are the pain and
indignity suffered by those with incurable diseases, the burden imposed by
persons unable to take part in normal human activities, and the supposed right
of persons to dispose of their lives however they please. Non-theological
arguments against euthanasia include the danger of expanding the principle of
euthanasia to an everwidening range of persons and the opacity of death and its
consequent incommensurability with life, so that we cannot safely judge that a
person is better off dead. H. P. Grice, “The roman problem: ‘vita’ for ‘bios’
and ‘zoe.’”
philosophical historian – Grice as –
longitudinal unity -- Danto, A. C. philosopher of art and art history who has
also contributed to the philosophies of history, action, knowledge, science,
and metaphilosophy. Among his influential studies in the history of philosophy
are books on Nietzsche, Sartre, and
thought. Danto arrives at his philosophy of art through his “method of
indiscernibles,” which has greatly influenced contemporary philosophical
aesthetics. According to his metaphilosophy, genuine philosophical questions
arise when there is a theoretical need to differentiate two things that are
perceptually indiscernible such as
prudential actions versus moral actions Kant, causal chains versus constant
conjunctions Hume, and perfect dreams versus reality Descartes. Applying the
method to the philosophy of art, Danto asks what distinguishes an artwork, such
as Warhol’s Brillo Box, from its perceptually indiscernible, real-world
counterparts, such as Brillo boxes by Proctor and Gamble. His answer his partial definition of art is that x is a work of art only if 1 x is
about something and 2 x embodies its meaning i.e., discovers a mode of
presentation intended to be appropriate to whatever subject x is about. These
two necessary conditions, Danto claims, enable us to distinguish between
artworks and real things between
Warhol’s Brillo Box and Proctor and Gamble’s. However, critics have pointed out
that these conditions fail, since real Brillo boxes are about something Brillo
about which they embody or convey meanings through their mode of presentation viz.,
that Brillo is clean, fresh, and dynamic. Moreover, this is not an isolated
example. Danto’s theory of art confronts systematic difficulties in
differentiating real cultural artifacts, such as industrial packages, from
artworks proper. In addition to his philosophy of art, Danto proposes a
philosophy of art history. Like Hegel, Danto maintains that art history as a developmental, progressive process has ended. Danto believes that modern art has
been primarily reflexive i.e., about itself; it has attempted to use its own
forms and strategies to disclose the essential nature of art. Cubism and
abstract expressionism, for example, exhibit saliently the two-dimensional
nature of painting. With each experiment, modern art has gotten closer to
disclosing its own essence. But, Danto argues, with works such as Warhol’s
Brillo Box, artists have taken the philosophical project of self-definition as
far as they can, since once an artist like Warhol has shown that artworks can
be perceptually indiscernible from “real things” and, therefore, can look like
anything, there is nothing further that the artist qua artist can show through
the medium of appearances about the nature of art. The task of defining art
must be reassigned to philosophers to be treated discursively, and art
history as the developmental,
progressive narrative of self-definition
ends. Since that turn of events was putatively precipitated by Warhol in
the 0s, Danto calls the present period of art making “post-historical.” As an
art critic for The Nation, he has been chronicling its vicissitudes for a
decade and a half. Some dissenters, nevertheless, have been unhappy with
Danto’s claim that art history has ended because, they maintain, he has failed
to demonstrate that the only prospects for a developmental, progressive history
of art reside in the project of the self-definition of art. “There are two
concerns by the philosopher with history – the history of philosophy as a
philosophical discipline – and the philosophy of history per se. In the latter,
in what way can we say that decapitation willed the death of Charles II?” –
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Philosophy’s Two Co-Ordinate Unities: Lat. and Long.,”
“Kantotle or Ariskant? The Co-Ordinate Unity of Philosophy.”
philosophical mathematics: Grice: “Not for
nothing Plato’s academy motto was, “Lascite ogni non-geometria voi ch’entrate!”
ΑΓΕΩΜΕΤΡΗΤΟΣ ΜΗΔΕΙΣ ΕΙΣΙΤΩ –
“a-gemetretos medeis eiseto” Grice thought that “7 + 5 = 12” was either
synthetic or analytic – “but hardly both”. Grice on real numbers -- continuum
problem, an open question that arose in Cantor’s theory of infinite cardinal numbers.
By definition, two sets have the same cardinal number if there is a one-to-one
correspondence between them. For example, the function that sends 0 to 0, 1 to
2, 2 to 4, etc., shows that the set of even natural numbers has the same
cardinal number as the set of all natural numbers, namely F0. That F0 is not
the only infinite cardinal follows from Cantor’s theorem: the power set of any
set i.e., the set of all its subsets has a greater cardinality than the set
itself. So, e.g., the power set of the natural numbers, i.e., the set of all
sets of natural numbers, has a cardinal number greater than F0. The first
infinite number greater than F0 is F1; the next after that is F2, and so on.
When arithmetical operations are extended into the infinite, the cardinal
number of the power set of the natural numbers turns out to be 2F0. By Cantor’s
theorem, 2F0 must be greater than F0; the conjecture that it is equal to F1 is
Cantor’s continuum hypothesis in symbols, CH or 2F0 % F1. Since 2F0 is also the
cardinality of the set of points on a continuous line, CH can also be stated in
this form: any infinite set of points on a line can be brought into one-to-one
correspondence either with the set of natural numbers or with the set of all
points on the line. Cantor and others attempted to prove CH, without success.
It later became clear, due to the work of Gödel and Cohen, that their failure
was inevitable: the continuum hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved
from the axioms of set theory ZFC. The question of its truth or falsehood the continuum problem remains open.
Philosophical mathematics: Grice on “7 + 5 = 12” -- Dedekind, R. G.
mathematician, one of the most important figures in the mathematical analysis
of foundational questions that took place in the late nineteenth century.
Philosophically, three things are interesting about Dedekind’s work: 1 the
insistence that the fundamental numerical systems of mathematics must be
developed independently of spatiotemporal or geometrical notions; 2 the
insistence that the numbers systems rely on certain mental capacities
fundamental to thought, in particular on the capacity of the mind to “create”;
and 3 the recognition that this “creation” is “creation” according to certain
key properties, properties that careful mathematical analysis reveals as
essential to the subject matter. 1 is a concern Dedekind shared with Bolzano,
Cantor, Frege, and Hilbert; 2 sets Dedekind apart from Frege; and 3 represents
a distinctive shift toward the later axiomatic position of Hilbert and somewhat
away from the concern with the individual nature of the central abstract
mathematical objects which is a central concern of Frege. Much of Dedekind’s
position is sketched in the Habilitationsrede of 1854, the procedure there
being applied in outline to the extension of the positive whole numbers to the
integers, and then to the rational field. However, the two works best known to
philosophers are the monographs on irrational numbers Stetigkeit und
irrationale Zahlen, 1872 and on natural numbers Was sind und was sollen die
Zahlen?, 8, both of which pursue the procedure advocated in 1854. In both we
find an “analysis” designed to uncover the essential properties involved,
followed by a “synthesis” designed to show that there can be such systems, this
then followed by a “creation” of objects possessing the properties and nothing
more. In the 1872 work, Dedekind suggests that the essence of continuity in the
reals is that whenever the line is divided into two halves by a cut, i.e., into
two subsets A1 and A2 such that if p 1 A1 and q 1 A2, then p ‹ q and, if p 1 A1
and q ‹ p, then q 1 A1, and if p 1 A2 and q
p, then q 1 A2 as well, then there is real number r which “produces”
this cut, i.e., such that A1 % {p; p ‹ r}, and A2 % {p: r m p}. The task is then
to characterize the real numbers so that this is indeed true of them. Dedekind
shows that, whereas the rationals themselves do not have this property, the
collection of all cuts in the rationals does. Dedekind then “defines” the
irrationals through this observation, not directly as the cuts in the rationals
themselves, as was done later, but rather through the “creation” of “new
irrational numbers” to correspond to those rational cuts not hitherto
“produced” by a number. The 8 work starts from the notion of a “mapping” of one
object onto another, which for Dedekind is necessary for all exact thought.
Dedekind then develops the notion of a one-toone into mapping, which is then
used to characterize infinity “Dedekind infinity”. Using the fundamental notion
of a chain, Dedekind characterizes the notion of a “simply infinite system,”
thus one that is isomorphic to the natural number sequence. Thus, he succeeds
in the goal set out in the 1854 lecture: isolating precisely the characteristic
properties of the natural number system. But do simply infinite systems, in
particular the natural number system, exist? Dedekind now argues: Any infinite
system must Dedekind, Richard Dedekind, Richard 210 210 contain a simply infinite system Theorem
72. Correspondingly, Dedekind sets out to prove that there are infinite systems
Theorem 66, for which he uses an infamous argument reminiscent of Bolzano’s
from thirty years earlier involving “my thought-world,” etc. It is generally
agreed that the argument does not work, although it is important to remember
Dedekind’s wish to demonstrate that since the numbers are to be free creations
of the human mind, his proofs should rely only on the properties of the mental.
The specific act of “creation,” however, comes in when Dedekind, starting from
any simply infinite system, abstracts from the “particular properties” of this,
claiming that what results is the simply infinite system of the natural
numbers. Philosophical mathematics --
mathematical analysis, also called standard analysis, the area of mathematics
pertaining to the so-called real number system, i.e. the area that can be based
on an axiom set whose intended interpretation (standard model) has the set of
real numbers as its domain (universe of discourse). Thus analysis includes,
among its many subbranches, elementary algebra, differential and integral
calculus, differential equations, the calculus of variations, and measure
theory. Analytic geometry involves the application of analysis to geometry.
Analysis contains a large part of the mathematics used in mathematical physics.
The real numbers, which are representable by the ending and unending decimals,
are usefully construed as (or as corresponding to) distances measured, relative
to an arbitrary unit length, positively to the right and negatively to the left
of an arbitrarily fixed zero point along a geometrical straight line. In
particular, the class of real numbers includes as increasingly comprehensive
proper subclasses the natural numbers, the integers (positive, negative, and
zero), the rational numbers (or fractions), and the algebraic numbers (such as
the square root of two). Especially important is the presence in the class of
real numbers of non-algebraic (or transcendental) irrational numbers such as
pi. The set of real numbers includes arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large,
finite quantities, while excluding infinitesimal and infinite quantities.
Analysis, often conceived as the mathematics of continuous magnitude, contrasts
with arithmetic (natural number theory), which is regarded as the mathematics
of discrete magnitude. Analysis is often construed as involving not just the
real numbers but also the imaginary (complex) numbers. Traditionally analysis
is expressed in a second-order or higher-order language wherein its axiom set
has categoricity; each of its models is isomorphic to (has the same structure
as) the standard model. When analysis is carried out in a first-order language,
as has been increasingly the case since the 1950s, categoricity is impossible and
it has nonstandard mass noun mathematical analysis models in addition to its
standard model. A nonstandard model of analysis is an interpretation not
isomorphic to the standard model but nevertheless satisfying the axiom set.
Some of the nonstandard models involve objects reminiscent of the much-despised
“infinitesimals” that were essential to the Leibniz approach to calculus and
that were subject to intense criticism by Berkeley and other philosophers and
philosophically sensitive mathematicians. These non-standard models give rise
to a new area of mathematics, non-standard analysis, within which the
fallacious arguments used by Leibniz and other early analysts form the
heuristic basis of new and entirely rigorous proofs. -- mathematical function,
an operation that, when applied to an entity (set of entities) called its
argument(s), yields an entity known as the value of the function for that
argument(s). This operation can be expressed by a functional equation of the
form y % f(x) such that a variable y is said to be a function of a variable x
if corresponding to each value of x there is one and only one value of y. The x
is called the independent variable (or argument of the function) and the y the
dependent variable (or value of the function). (Some definitions consider the
relation to be the function, not the dependent variable, and some definitions
permit more than one value of y to correspond to a given value of x, as in x2 !
y2 % 4.) More abstractly, a function can be considered to be simply a special kind
of relation (set of ordered pairs) that to any element in its domain relates
exactly one element in its range. Such a function is said to be a one-to-one
correspondence if and only if the set {x,y} elements of S and {z,y} elements of
S jointly imply x % z. Consider, e.g., the function {(1,1), (2,4), (3,9),
(4,16), (5,25), (6,36)}, each of whose members is of the form (x,x2) – the
squaring function. Or consider the function {(0,1), (1,0)} – which we can call
the negation function. In contrast, consider the function for exclusive
alternation (as in you may have a beer or glass of wine, but not both). It is
not a one-to-one correspondence. For, 0 is the value of (0,1) and of (1,0), and
1 is the value of (0,0) and of (1,1). If we think of a function as defined on
the natural numbers – functions from Nn to N for various n (most commonly n % 1
or 2) – a partial function is a function from Nn to N whose domain is not
necessarily the whole of Nn (e.g., not defined for all of the natural numbers).
A total function from Nn to N is a function whose domain is the whole of Nn
(e.g., all of the natural numbers). -- mathematical induction, a method of
definition and a method of proof. A collection of objects can be defined
inductively. All members of such a collection can be shown to have a property
by an inductive proof. The natural numbers and the set of well-formed formulas
of a formal language are familiar examples of sets given by inductive
definition. Thus, the set of natural numbers is inductively defined as the smallest
set, N, such that: (B) 0 is in N and (I) for any x in N the successor of x is
in N. (B) is the basic clause and (I) the inductive clause of this definition.
Or consider a propositional language built on negation and conjunction. We
start with a denumerable class of atomic sentence symbols ATOM = {A1, A2, . .
.}. Then we can define the set of well-formed formulas, WFF, as the smallest
set of expressions such that: (B) every member of ATOM is in WFF and (I) if x
is in WFF then (- x) is in WFF and if x and y are in WFF then (x & y) is in
WFF. We show that all members of an inductively defined set have a property by
showing that the members specified by the basis have that property and that the
property is preserved by the induction. For example, we show that all WFFs have
an even number of parentheses by showing (i) that all ATOMs have an even number
of parentheses and (ii) that if x and y have an even number of parentheses then
so do (- x) and (x & y). This shows that the set of WFFs with an even number
of parentheses satisfies (B) and (I). The set of WFFs with an even number of
parentheses must then be identical to WFF, since – by definition – WFF is the
smallest set that satisfies (B) and (I). Ordinary proof by mathematical
induction shows that all the natural numbers, or all members of some set with
the order type of the natural numbers, share a property. Proof by transfinite
induction, a more general form of proof by mathematical induction, shows that
all members of some well-ordered set have a certain property. A set is
well-ordered if and only if every non-empty subset of it has a least element.
The natural numbers are well-ordered. It is a consequence of the axiom of
choice that every set can be well-ordered. Suppose that a set, X, is
well-ordered and that P is the subset of X whose mathematical constructivism
mathematical induction 541 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 541 members have
the property of interest. Suppose that it can be shown for any element x of X,
if all members of X less that x are in P, then so is x. Then it follows by
transfinite induction that all members of X have the property, that X % P. For
if X did not coincide with P, then the set of elements of x not in P would be
non-empty. Since X is well-ordered, this set would have a least element, x*.
But then by definition, all members of X less than x* are in P, and by
hypothesis x* must be in P after all.. -- mathematical intuitionism, a
twentieth-century movement that reconstructs mathematics in accordance with an
epistemological idealism and a Kantian metaphysics. Specifically, Brouwer, its
founder, held that there are no unexperienced truths and that mathematical
objects stem from the a priori form of those conscious acts which generate
empirical objects. Unlike Kant, however, Brouwer rejected the apriority of
space and based mathematics solely on a refined conception of the intuition of
time. Intuitionistic mathematics. According to Brouwer, the simplest
mathematical act is to distinguish between two diverse elements in the flow of
consciousness. By repeating and concatenating such acts we generate each of the
natural numbers, the standard arithmetical operations, and thus the rational
numbers with their operations as well. Unfortunately, these simple, terminating
processes cannot produce the convergent infinite sequences of rational numbers
that are needed to generate the continuum (the nondenumerable set of real
numbers, or of points on the line). Some “proto-intuitionists” admitted
infinite sequences whose elements are determined by finitely describable rules.
However, the set of all such algorithmic sequences is denumerable and thus can
scarcely generate the continuum. Brouwer’s first attempt to circumvent this –
by postulating a single intuition of an ever growing continuum – mirrored
Aristotle’s picture of the continuum as a dynamic whole composed of inseparable
parts. But this approach was incompatible with the set-theoretic framework that
Brouwer accepted, and by 1918 he had replaced it with the concept of an
infinite choice sequence. A choice sequence of rational numbers is, to be sure,
generated by a “rule,” but the rule may leave room for some degree of freedom
in choosing the successive elements. It might, e.g., simply require that the n
! 1st choice be a rational number that lies within 1/n of the nth choice. The
set of real numbers generated by such semideterminate sequences is demonstrably
non-denumerable. Following his epistemological beliefs, Brouwer admitted only
those properties of a choice sequence which are determined by its rule and by a
finite number of actual choices. He incorporated this restriction into his
version of set theory and obtained a series of results that conflict with
standard (classical) mathematics. Most famously, he proved that every function
that is fully defined over an interval of real numbers is uniformly continuous.
(Pictorially, the graph of the function has no gaps or jumps.) Interestingly,
one corollary of this theorem is that the set of real numbers cannot be divided
into mutually exclusive subsets, a property that rigorously recovers the
Aristotelian picture of the continuum. The clash with classical mathematics.
Unlike his disciple Arend Heyting, who considered intuitionistic and classical
mathematics as separate and therefore compatible subjects, Brouwer viewed them
as incompatible treatments of a single subject matter. He even occasionally
accused classical mathematics of inconsistency at the places where it differed
from intuitionism. This clash concerns the basic concept of what counts as a
mathematical object. Intuitionism allows, and classical mathematics rejects,
objects that may be indeterminate with respect to some of their properties.
Logic and language. Because he believed that mathematical constructions occur
in prelinguistic consciousness, Brouwer refused to limit mathematics by the
expressive capacity of any language. Logic, he claimed, merely codifies already
completed stages of mathematical reasoning. For instance, the principle of the
excluded middle stems from an “observational period” during which mankind
catalogued finite phenomena (with decidable properties); and he derided
classical mathematics for inappropriately applying this principle to infinitary
aspects of mathematics. Formalization. Brouwer’s views notwithstanding, in 1930
Heyting produced formal systems for intuitionistic logic (IL) and number
theory. These inspired further formalizations (even of the theory of choice
sequences) and a series of proof-theoretic, semantic, and algebraic studies
that related intuitionistic and classical formal systems. Stephen Kleene, e.g.,
interpreted IL and other intuitionistic formal systems using the classical
theory of recursive functions. Gödel, who showed that IL cannot coincide with
any finite many-valued logic, demonstrated its relation to the modal logic, S4;
and Kripke provided a formal semantics for IL similar to the possible worlds
semantics for S4. For a while the study of intuitionistic formal systems used
strongly classical methods, but since the 1970s intuitionistic methods have
been employed as well. Meaning. Heyting’s formalization reflected a theory of
meaning implicit in Brouwer’s epistemology and metaphysics, a theory that
replaces the traditional correspondence notion of truth with the notion of
constructive proof. More recently Michael Dummett has extended this to a
warranted assertability theory of meaning for areas of discourse outside of
mathematics. He has shown how assertabilism provides a strategy for combating
realism about such things as physical objects, mental objects, and the past. --
mathematical structuralism, the view that the subject of any branch of
mathematics is a structure or structures. The slogan is that mathematics is the
science of structure. Define a “natural number system” to be a countably
infinite collection of objects with one designated initial object and a
successor relation that satisfies the principle of mathematical induction.
Examples of natural number systems are the Arabic numerals and an infinite
sequence of distinct moments of time. According to structuralism, arithmetic is
about the form or structure common to natural number systems. Accordingly, a
natural number is something like an office in an organization or a place in a
pattern. Similarly, real analysis is about the real number structure, the form
common to complete ordered fields. The philosophical issues concerning
structuralism concern the nature of structures and their places. Since a
structure is a one-over-many of sorts, it is something like a universal.
Structuralists have defended analogues of some of the traditional positions on
universals, such as realism and nominalism. Philosophical mathematics --
metamathematics, the study and establishment, by restricted (and, in
particular, finitary) means, of the consistency or reliability of the various
systems of classical mathematics. The term was apparently introduced, with
pejorative overtones relating it to ‘metaphysics’, in the 1870s in connection
with the discussion of non-Euclidean geometries. It was introduced in the sense
given here, shorn of negative connotations, by Hilbert (see his “Neubegründung
der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung,” 1922), who also referred to it as
Beweistheorie or proof theory. A few years later (specifically, in the 1930
papers “Über einige fundamentale Begriffe der Metamathematik” and “Fundamentale
Begriffe der Methodologie der deduktiven Wissenschaften. I”) Tarski fitted it
with a somewhat broader, less restricted sense: broader in that the scope of
its concerns was increased to include not only questions of consistency, but
also a host of other questions (e.g. questions of independence, completeness
and axiomatizability) pertaining to what Tarski referred to as the “methodology
of the deductive sciences” (which was his synonym for ‘metamathematics’); less
restricted in that the standards of proof were relaxed so as to permit other
than finitary – indeed, other than constructive – means. On this broader
conception of Tarski’s, formalized deductive disciplines form the field of
research of metamathematics roughly in the same sense in which spatial entities
form the field of research in geometry or animals that of zoology. Disciplines,
he said, are to be regarded as sets of sentences to be investigated from the
point of view of their consistency, axiomatizability (of various types),
completeness, and categoricity or degree of categoricity, etc. Eventually (see
the 1935 and 1936 papers “Grundzüge des Systemenkalkül, Erster Teil” and
“Grundzüge der Systemenkalkül, Zweiter Teil”) Tarski went on to include all
manner of semantical questions among the concerns of metamathematics, thus
diverging rather sharply from Hilbert’s original syntactical focus. Today, the
terms ‘metatheory’ and ‘metalogic’ are used to signify that broad set of
interests, embracing both syntactical and semantical studies of formal
languages and systems, which Tarski came to include under the general heading
of metamathematics. Those having to do specifically with semantics belong to
that more specialized branch of modern logic known as model theory, while those
dealing with purely syntactical questions belong to what has come to be known
as proof theory (where this latter is now, however, permitted to employ other
than finitary methods in the proofs of its theorems). Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Philosophical geometry, Plato, and Walter Pater.”
Animatum -- philosophical psychology – Grice:
“Someone at Oxford had the bad idea of calling the Wilde lecturer the Wilde
lecturer in mental philosophy – and the sad thing is that Ryle did nothing to
stop it!” -- Eckhart, Johannes, called Meister Eckhart c.12601328, G. mystic,
theologian, and preacher. Eckhart entered the Dominican order early and began
an academic circuit that took him several times to Paris as a student and
master of theology and that initiated him into ways of thinking much influenced
by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. At Paris, Eckhart wrote the required
commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and finished for publication at
least three formal disputations. But he had already held office within the
Dominicans, and he continued to alternate work as administrator and as teacher.
Eckhart preached throughout these years, and he continued to write spiritual
treatises in the vernacular, of which the most important is the Book of Divine
Consolation. Only about a third of Eckhart’s main project in Latin, the Opus
tripartitum, seems ever to have been completed. Beginning in the early 1320s,
questions were raised about Eckhart’s orthodoxy. The questions centered on what
was characteristic of his teaching, namely the emphasis on the soul’s attaining
“emptiness” so as to “give birth to God.” The soul is ennobled by its emptying,
and it can begin to “labor” with God to deliver a spark that enacts the
miraculous union-and-difference of their love. After being acquitted of heresy
once, Eckhart was condemned on 108 propositions drawn from his writings by a
commission at Cologne. The condemnation was appealed to the Holy See, but in
1329 Eckhart was there judged “probably heretical” on 17 of 28 propositions
drawn from both his academic and popular works. The condemnation clearly
limited Eckhart’s explicit influence in theology, though he was deeply
appropriated not only by mystics such as Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, but by
church figures such as Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther. He has since been
taken up by thinkers as different as Hegel, Fichte, and Heidegger. Philosophical
psychology – “soul-to-soul transfer” – the problem of other minds, the question
of what rational basis a person can have for the belief that other persons are
similarly conscious and have minds. Every person, by virtue of being conscious,
is aware of her own state of consciousness and thus knows she has a mind; but
the mental states of others are not similarly apparent to her. An influential
attempt to solve this problem was made by philosophical behaviorists. According
to Ryle in “The Concept of Mind,”(first draft entitled, “The concept of
psyche,” second draft, “The concept of the soul” -- a mind (Ryle means ‘soul’) is
not a ghost in the physical machine but roughly speaking an aggregate of
dispositions to behave intelligently and to respond overtly to sensory
stimulation. Since the behavior distinctive of these mentalistic dispositions
is readily observable in other human beings, the so-called problem of other
minds is easily solved: it arose from mere confusion about the concept of mind.
Ryle’s opponents were generally willing to concede that such dispositions
provide proof that another person has a “mind” or is a sentient being, but they
were not willing to admit that those dispositions provide proof that other
people actually have feelings, thoughts, and sensory experiences. Their
convictions on this last matter generated a revised version of the otherminds
problem; it might be called the problem of other-person experiences. Early
efforts to solve the problem of other minds can be viewed as attempts to solve
the problem of other-person experiences. According to J. S. Mill’s Examination
of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, one can defend one’s conviction that others
have feelings and other subjective experiences by employing an argument from
analogy. To develop that analogy one first attends to how one’s own experiences
are related to overt or publicly observable phenomena. One might observe that
one feels pain when pricked by a pin and that one responds to the pain by
wincing and saying “ouch.” The next step is to attend to the behavior and
circumstances of others. Since other people are physically very similar to
oneself, it is reasonable to conclude that if they are pricked by a pin and
respond by wincing and saying “ouch,” they too have felt pain. Analogous
inferences involving other sorts of mental states and other sorts of behavior
and circumstances add strong support, Mill said, to one’s belief in
other-person experiences. Although arguments from analogy are generally
conceded to provide rationally acceptable evidence for unobserved phenomena,
the analogical argument for other-person experiences was vigorously attacked in
the 0s by philosophers influenced by Vitters’s Philosophical Investigations 3.
Their central contention was that anyone employing the argument must assume
that, solely from her own case, she knows what feelings and thoughts are. This
assumption was refuted, they thought, by Vitters’s private language argument,
which proved that we learn what feelings and thoughts are only in the process
of learning a publicly understandable language containing an appropriate
psychological vocabulary. To understand this latter vocabulary, these critics
said, one must be able to use its ingredient words correctly in relation to
others as well as to oneself; and this can be ascertained only because words
like ‘pain’ and ‘depression’ are associated with behavioral criteria. When such
criteria are satisfied by the behavior of others, one knows that the words are
correctly applied to them and that one is justified in believing that they have
the experiences in question. The supposed problem of other-person experiences
is thus “dissolved” by a just appreciation of the preconditions for coherent
thought about psychological states. Vitters’s claim that, to be conceivable,
“an inner process stands in need of external criteria,” lost its hold on
philosophers during the 0s. An important consideration was this: if a feeling
of pain is a genuine reality different from the behavior that typically
accompanies it, then so-called pain behavior cannot be shown to provide
adequate evidence for the presence of pain by a purely linguistic argument;
some empirical inductive evidence is needed. Since, contrary to Vitters, one
knows what the feeling of pain is like only by having that feeling, one’s
belief that other people occasionally have feelings that are significantly like
the pain one feels oneself apparently must be supported by an argument in which
analogy plays a central role. No other strategy seems possible. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Method in philosophical
psychology: from the bizarre to the banal,” repr. in “The Conception of Value,”
Oxford, Clarendon Press.
philosophical theology: Grice: “My mother
was High Church, but my father was a non-conformist, and the fact that my
resident paternal aunt was a converted Roman certainly did not help!” -- Philosophical
theology -- deism, the view that true religion is natural religion. Some
self-styled Christian deists accepted revelation although they argued that its
content is essentially the same as natural religion. Most deists dismissed
revealed religion as a fiction. God wants his creatures to be happy and has
ordained virtue as the means to it. Since God’s benevolence is disinterested,
he will ensure that the knowledge needed for happiness is universally
accessible. Salvation cannot, then, depend on special revelation. True religion
is an expression of a universal human nature whose essence is reason and is the
same in all times and places. Religious traditions such as Christianity and
Islam originate in credulity, political tyranny, and priestcraft, which corrupt
reason and overlay natural religion with impurities. Deism is largely a
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phenomenon and was most prominent in
England. Among the more important English deists were John Toland 16701722,
Anthony Collins 16761729, Herbert of Cherbury 15831648, Matthew Tindal
16571733, and Thomas Chubb 16791747. Continental deists included Voltaire and
Reimarus. Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer 17641806 were prominent deists. Orthodox writers in this period use
‘deism’ as a vague term of abuse. By the late eighteenth century, the term came
to mean belief in an “absentee God” who creates the world, ordains its laws,
and then leaves it to its own devices. Philosophical theology -- de Maistre,
Joseph-Marie, political theorist, diplomat, and Roman Catholic exponent of
theocracy. He was educated by the Jesuits in Turin. His counterrevolutionary
political philosophy aimed at restoring the foundations of morality, the
family, society, and the state in postrevolutionary Europe. Against
Enlightenment ideals, he reclaimed Thomism, defended the hereditary and
absolute monarchy, and championed ultramontanism The Pope, 1821. Considerations
on France 1796 argues that the decline of moral and religious values was
responsible for the “satanic” 1789 revolution. Hence Christianity and
Enlightenment philosophy were engaged in a fight to the death that he claimed
the church would eventually win. Deeply pessimistic about human nature, the
Essay on the Generating Principle of Political Constitutions 1810 traces the
origin of authority in the human craving for order and discipline. Saint
Petersburg Evenings 1821 urges philosophy to surrender to religion and reason
to faith. Philosophical theology -- divine attributes, properties of God;
especially, those properties that are essential and unique to God. Among
properties traditionally taken to be attributes of God, omnipotence,
omniscience, and omnibenevolence are naturally taken to mean having,
respectively, power, knowledge, and moral goodness to the maximum degree. Here
God is understood as an eternal or everlasting being of immense power,
knowledge, and goodness, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe and
is worthy of human worship. Omnipotence is maximal power. Some philosophers,
notably Descartes, have thought that omnipotence requires the ability to do
absolutely anything, including the logically impossible. Most classical
theists, however, understood omnipotence as involving vast powers, while
nevertheless being subject to a range of limitations of ability, including the
inability to do what is logically impossible, the inability to change the past
or to do things incompatible with what has happened, and the inability to do
things that cannot be done by a being who has other divine attributes, e.g., to
sin or to lie. Omniscience is unlimited knowledge. According to the most
straightforward account, omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions. But
there may be reasons for recognizing a limitation on the class of true
propositions that a being must know in order to be omniscient. For example, if
there are true propositions about the future, omniscience would then include
foreknowledge. But some philosophers have thought that foreknowledge of human
actions is incompatible with those actions being free. This has led some to
deny that there are truths about the future and others to deny that such truths
are knowable. In the latter case, omniscience might be taken to be knowledge of
all knowable truths. Or if God is eternal and if there are certain tensed or
temporally indexical propositions that can be known only by someone who is in
time, then omniscience presumably does not extend to such propositions. It is a
matter of controversy whether omniscience includes middle knowledge, i.e.,
knowledge of what an agent would do if other, counterfactual, conditions were
to obtain. Since recent critics of middle knowledge in contrast to Báñez and
other sixteenth-century Dominican opponents of Molina usually deny that the
relevant counterfactual conditionals alleged to be the object of such knowledge
are true, denying the possibility of middle knowledge need not restrict the
class of true propositions a being must know in order to be omniscient.
Finally, although the concept of omniscience might not itself constrain how an
omniscient being acquires its knowledge, it is usually held that God’s
knowledge is neither inferential i.e., derived from premises or evidence nor
dependent upon causal processes. Omnibenevolenceis, literally, complete desire
for good; less strictly, perfect moral goodness. Traditionally it has been
thought that God does not merely happen to be good but that he must be so and
that he is unable to do what is wrong. According to the former claim God is
essentially good; according to the latter he is impeccable. It is a matter of
controversy whether God is perfectly good in virtue of complying with an
external moral standard or whether he himself sets the standard for goodness.
Divine sovereignty is God’s rule over all of creation. According to this
doctrine God did not merely create the world and then let it run on its own; he
continues to govern it in complete detail according to his good plan.
Sovereignty is thus related to divine providence. A difficult question is how
to reconcile a robust view of God’s control of the world with libertarian free
will. Aseity or perseity is complete independence. In a straightforward sense,
God is not dependent on anyone or anything for his existence. According to
stronger interpretation of aseity, God is completely independent of everything
else, including his properties. This view supports a doctrine of divine
simplicity according to which God is not distinct from his properties.
Simplicity is the property of having no parts of any kind. According to the
doctrine of divine simplicity, God not only has no spatial or temporal parts,
but there is no distinction between God and his essence, between his various
attributes in him omniscience and omnipotence, e.g., are identical, and between
God and his attributes. Attributing simplicity to God was standard in medieval
theology, but the doctrine has seemed to many contemporary philosophers to be
baffling, if not incoherent. divine
command ethics, an ethical theory according to which part or all of morality
divine attributes divine command ethics 240
240 depends upon the will of God as promulgated by divine commands. This
theory has an important place in the history of Christian ethics. Divine
command theories are prominent in the Franciscan ethics developed by John Duns
Scotus and William Ockham; they are also endorsed by disciples of Ockham such
as d’Ailly, Gerson, and Gabriel Biel; both Luther and Calvin adopt divine
command ethics; and in modern British thought, important divine command
theorists include Locke, Berkeley, and Paley. Divine command theories are typically
offered as accounts of the deontological part of morality, which consists of
moral requirements obligation, permissions rightness, and prohibitions
wrongness. On a divine command conception, actions forbidden by God are morally
wrong because they are thus forbidden, actions not forbidden by God are morally
right because they are not thus forbidden, and actions commanded by God are
morally obligatory because they are thus commanded. Many Christians find divine
command ethics attractive because the ethics of love advocated in the Gospels
makes love the subject of a command. Matthew 22:3740 records Jesus as saying
that we are commanded to love God and the neighbor. According to Kierkegaard,
there are two reasons to suppose that Christian love of neighbor must be an
obligation imposed by divine command: first, only an obligatory love can be
sufficiently extensive to embrace everyone, even one’s enemies; second, only an
obligatory love can be invulnerable to changes in its objects, a love that
alters not when it alteration finds. The chief objection to the theory is that
dependence on divine commands would make morality unacceptably arbitrary.
According to divine command ethics, murder would not be wrong if God did not
exist or existed but failed to forbid it. Perhaps the strongest reply to this
objection appeals to the doctrines of God’s necessary existence and essential
goodness. God could not fail to exist and be good, and so God could not fail to
forbid murder. In short, divine commands are not arbitrary fiats. divine foreknowledge, God’s knowledge of the
future. It appears to be a straightforward consequence of God’s omniscience
that he has knowledge of the future, for presumably omniscience includes
knowledge of all truths and there are truths about the future. Moreover, divine
foreknowledge seems to be required by orthodox religious commitment to divine
prophecy and divine providence. In the former case, God could not reliably
reveal what will happen if he does know what will happen. And in the latter case,
it is difficult to see how God could have a plan for what happens without
knowing what that will be. A problem arises, however, in that it has seemed to
many that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action. Some
philosophers notably Boethius have reasoned as follows: If God knows that a
person will do a certain action, then the person must perform that action, but
if a person must perform an action, the person does not perform the action
freely. So if God knows that a person will perform an action, the person does
not perform the action freely. This reason for thinking that divine
foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action commits a simple modal
fallacy. What must be the case is the conditional that if God knows that a person
will perform an action then the person will in fact perform the action. But
what is required to derive the conclusion is the implausible claim that from
the assumption that God knows that a person will perform an action it follows
not simply that the person will perform the action but that the person must
perform it. Perhaps other attempts to demonstrate the incompatibility, however,
are not as easily dismissed. One response to the apparent dilemma is to say
that there really are no such truths about the future, either none at all or
none about events, like future free actions, that are not causally necessitated
by present conditions. Another response is to concede that there are truths
about the future but to deny that truths about future free actions are knowable.
In this case omniscience may be understood as knowledge, not of all truths, but
of all knowable truths. A third, and historically important, response is to
hold that God is eternal and that from his perspective everything is present
and thus not future. These responses implicitly agree that divine foreknowledge
is incompatible with human freedom, but they provide different accounts of
omniscience according to which it does not include foreknowledge, or, at any
rate, not foreknowledge of future free actions.
Philosophical theology -- double truth, the theory that a thing can be
true in philosophy or according to reason while its opposite is true in
theology or according to faith. It serves as a response to conflicts between
reason and faith. For example, on one interpretation of Aristotle, there is
only one rational human soul, whereas, according to Christian theology, there
are many rational human souls. The theory of double truth was attributed to
Averroes and to Latin Averroists such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia
by their opponents, but it is doubtful that they actually held it. Averroes
seems to have held that a single truth is scientifically formulated in
philosophy and allegorically expressed in theology. Latin Averroists apparently
thought that philosophy concerns what would have been true by natural necessity
absent special divine intervention, and theology deals with what is actually
true by virtue of such intervention. On this view, there would have been only
one rational human soul if God had not miraculously intervened to multiply what
by nature could not be multiplied. No one clearly endorsed the view that
rational human souls are both only one and also many in number. H. P. Grice, “Must the Articles be 39 – and
if we add one more, what might it say?.”
philosophism: birrellism – general refelction on life. Grice defines a
philosopher as someone ‘addicted to general reflections on life,’ like Birrell
did. f. paraphilosophy – philosophical hacks. “Austin’s expressed view -- the
formulation of which no doubt involves some irony -- is that we ‘philosophical
hacks’ spend the week making, for the benefit of our tutees, direct attacks on
this or that philosophical issue, and that we need to be refreshed, at the
week-end, by some suitably chosen ‘para-philosophy’ in which some non-philosophical conception is to be
examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate
analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.” His feeling of superiority as a
philosopher is obvious in various fields. He certaintly would not get involved
in any ‘empirical’ survey (“We can trust this, qua philosophers, as given.”) Grice
held a MA (Lit. Hum.) – Literae Humaniores (Philosophy). So he knew what he was
talking about. The curriculum was an easy one. He plays with the fact that
empiricists don’t regard philosophy as a sovereign monarch: philosophia regina
scientiarum, provided it’s queen consort. In “Conceptual analysis and the
province of philosophy,” he plays with the idea that Philosophy is the Supreme
Science. Grice was somewhat obsessed as to what ‘philosohical’ stood for, which
amused the members of his play group! His play group once spends five weeks in
an effort to explain why, sometimes, ‘very’ allows, with little or no change of
meaning, the substitution of ‘highly’ (as in ‘very unusual’) and sometimes does
not (as in ‘very depressed’ or ‘very wicked’); and we reached no conclusion. This
episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity.
But that response is as out of place as a similar response to the medieval
question, ‘How many angels can dance on a needle’s point?’” A needless point?For
much as this medieval question is raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a
difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so The Play Group
discussion is directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examination,
in the first instance, of a conceptual question which is generally agreed among
us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical
importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a
distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant
enquiries. Grice is fortunate that the Lit. Hum. programme does not have much
philosophy! He feels free! In fact, the lack of a philosophical background is
felt as a badge of honour. It is ‘too clever’ and un-English to ‘know’ things.
A pint of philosophy is all Grice wanted. Figurative. This is Harvardite Gordon’s
attempt to formulate a philosophy of the minimum fundamental ideas that all
people on the earth should come to know. Reviewed by A. M. Honoré: Short
measure. Gordon, a Stanley Plummer scholar, e: Bowdoin and Harvard, in The
Eastern Gazette. Grice would exclaim: I always loved Alfred Brooks Gordon!
Grice was slightly disapppointed that Gordon had not included the fundamental
idea of implicaturum in his pint. Short measure, indeed. Grice gives seminars
on Ariskant (“the first part of this individual interested some of my tutees;
the second, others.” Ariskant philosophised in Grecian, but also in the pure
Teutonic, and Grice collaborated with Baker in this area. Curiously, Baker
majors in French and philosophy and does research at the Sorbonne. Grice would
sometimes define ‘philoosphy.’ Oddly, Grice gives a nice example of
‘philosopher’ meaning ‘addicted to general, usually stoic, reflections about
life.’ In the context where it occurs, the implicaturum is Stevensonian. If
Stevenson says that an athlete is usually tall, a philosopher may occasionally
be inclined to reflect about life in general, as a birrelist would. Grice’s
gives an alternate meaning, intended to display circularity: ‘engaged in
philosophical studies.’ The idea of Grice of philosophy is the one the Lit.
Hum. instills. It is a unique
experience, unknown in the New World, our actually outside Oxford, or
post-Grice, where a classicist is not seen as a philosopher. Once a tutorial
fellow in philosophy (rather than classics) and later university lecturer in
philosophy (rather than classics) strengthens his attachment. Grice needs to
regarded by his tutee as a philosopher simpliciter, as oppoosed to a prof: the
Waynflete is a metaphysician; the White is a moralist, the Wykeham a logician,
and the Wilde a ‘mental’. For Grice’s “greatest living philosopher,” Heidegger,
‘philosophy’ is a misnomer. While philology merely discourses (logos) on love,
the philosopher claims to be a wizard (sophos) of love. Liddell and Scott have
“φιλοσοφία,” which they render as “love of knowledge, pursuit thereof,
speculation,” “ἡ φ. κτῆσις ἐπιστήμης.” Then there’s “ἡ πρώτη φ.,” with striking
originality, metaphysic, Arist. Metaph. 1026a24. Just one sense, but various
ambiguities remain in ‘philosopher,’ as per Grice’s two usages. As it happens, Grice is both addicted
to general, usually stoic, speculations about life, and he is a member of The
Oxford Philosophical Society.Refs.: The main sources in the Grice Papers are
under series III, of the doctrines. See also references under ‘lingusitic
botany,’ and Oxonianism. Grice liked to play with the adage of ‘philosophia’ as
‘regina scientiarum.’ A specific essay in his update of “post-war Oxford
philosophy,” in WoW on “Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy,”
BANC, H. P. Grice, “My friend Birrell.”
philosophia
perennis:
a supposed body of truths that appear in the writings of the great
philosophers, or the truths common to opposed philosophical viewpoints. The
term is derived from the title of a book De perenni philosophia published by
Agostino Steuco of Gubbio in 1540. It suggests that the differences between
philosophers are inessential and superficial and that the common essential
truth emerges, however partially, in the major philosophical schools. Aldous
Huxley employed it as a title. L. Lavelle, N. Hartmann, and K. Jaspers also
employ the phrase. M. De Wulf and many others use the phrase to characterize
Neo-Thomism as the chosen vehicle of essential philosophical truths. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “All that remains is mutability.”
philosophical
anthropology:
“What is man?” Grice: “I would distinguish between what is human, and what is
person.” -- philosophical inquiry concerning human nature, often starting with
the question of what generally characterizes human beings in contrast to other
kinds of creatures and things. Thus broadly conceived, it is a kind of inquiry
as old as philosophy itself, occupying philosophers from Socrates to Sartre;
and it embraces philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of
action, and existentialism. Such inquiry presupposes no immutable “essence of
man,” but only the meaningfulness of distinguishing between what is “human” and
what is not, and the possibility that philosophy as well as other disciplines
may contribute to our self-comprehension. It leaves open the question of
whether other kinds of naturally occurring or artificially produced entity may
possess the hallmarks of our humanity, and countenances the possibility of the
biologically evolved, historically developed, and socially and individually
variable character of everything about our attained humanity. More narrowly
conceived, philosophical anthropology is a specific movement in recent European
philosophy associated initially with Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, and
subsequently with such figures as Arnold Gehlen, Cassirer, and the later
Sartre. It initially emerged in Germany simultaneously with the existential
philosophy of Heidegger and the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School,
with which it competed as G. philosophers turned their attention to the
comprehension of human life. This movement was distinguished from the outset by
its attempt to integrate the insights of phenomenological analysis with the
perspectives attainable through attention to human and comparative biology, and
subsequently to social inquiry as well. This turn to a more naturalistic
approach to the understanding of ourselves, as a particular kind of living
creature among others, is reflected in the titles of the two works published in
8 that inaugurated the movement: Scheler’s Man’s Place in Nature and Plessner’s
The Levels of the Organic and Man. For both Scheler and Plessner, however, as
for those who followed them, our nature must be understood by taking further
account of the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of human life.
Even those like Gehlen, whose Der Mensch 0 exhibits a strongly biological
orientation, devoted much attention to these dimensions, which our biological
nature both constrains and makes possible. For all of them, the relation
between the biological and the social and cultural dimensions of human life is
a central concern and a key to comprehending our human nature. One of the
common themes of the later philosophical-anthropological literature e.g., Cassirer’s An Essay on Man 5 and
Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason 0 as well as Plessner’s Contitio Humana
5 and Gehlen’s Early Man and Late Culture 3
is the plasticity of human nature, made possible by our biological
constitution, and the resulting great differences in the ways human beings
live. Yet this is not taken to preclude saying anything meaningful about human
nature generally; rather, it merely requires attention to the kinds of general
features involved and reflected in human diversity and variability. Critics of the
very idea and possibility of a philosophical anthropology e.g., Althusser and
Foucault typically either deny that there are any such general features or
maintain that there are none outside the province of the biological sciences to
which philosophy can contribute nothing substantive. Both claims, however, are
open to dispute; and the enterprise of a philosophical anthropology remains a
viable and potentially significant one. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Gehlen and the
idea that man is sick – homo infirmus.”
philosophical biology: v. H. P. Grice,
“The roman problem: doing with ‘vivere’ for ‘zoe’ and bios’” -- vide: H. P.
Grice, “Philosophical biology and philosophical psychology” -- the philosophy
of science applied to biology. On a conservative view of the philosophy of
science, the same principles apply throughout science. Biology supplies
additional examples but does not provide any special problems or require new
principles. For example, the reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular
biology exemplifies the same sort of relation as the reduction of
thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, and the same general analysis of
reduction applies equally to both. More radical philosophers argue that the
subject matter of biology has certain unique features; hence, the philosophy of
biology is itself unique. The three features of biology most often cited by
those who maintain that philosophy of biology is unique are functional
organization, embryological development, and the nature of selection. Organisms
are functionally organized. They are capable of maintaining their overall
organization in the face of fairly extensive variation in their envisonments.
Organisms also undergo ontogenetic development resulting from extremely complex
interactions between the genetic makeup of the organism and its successive
environments. At each step, the course that an organism takes is determined by
an interplay between its genetic makeup, its current state of development, and
the environment it happens to confront. The complexity of these interactions
produces the naturenurture problem. Except for human artifacts, similar
organization does not occur in the non-living world. The species problem is
another classic issue in the philosophy of biology. Biological species have
been a paradigm example of natural kinds since Aristotle. According to nearly
all pre-Darwinian philosophers, species are part of the basic makeup of the
universe, like gravity and gold. They were held to be as eternal, immutable,
and discrete as these other examples of natural kinds. If Darwin was right,
species are not eternal. They come and go, and once gone can no more reemerge
than Aristotle can once again walk the streets of Athens. Nor are species
immutable. A sample of lead can be transmuted into a sample of gold, but these
elements as elements remain immutable in the face of such changes. However,
Darwin insisted that species themselves, not merely their instances, evolved.
Finally, because Darwin thought that species evolved gradually, the boundaries
between species are not sharp, casting doubt on the essentialist doctrines so
common in his day. In short, if species evolve, they have none of the
traditional characteristics of species. Philosophers and biologists to this day
are working out the consequences of this radical change in our worldview. The
topic that has received the greatest attention by philosophers of biology in
the recent literature is the nature of evolutionary theory, in particular
selection, adaptation, fitness, and the population structure of species. In
order for selection to operate, variation is necessary, successive generations
must be organized genealogically, and individuals must interact differentially
with their environments. In the simplest case, genes pass on their structure
largely intact. In addition, they provide the information necessary to produce
organisms. Certain of these organisms are better able to cope with their
environments and reproduce than are other organisms. As a result, genes are
perpetuated differentially through successive generations. Those
characteristics that help an organism cope with its environments are termed
adaptations. In a more restricted sense, only those characteristics that arose
through past selective advantage count as adaptations. Just as the notion of IQ
was devised as a single measure for a combination of the factors that influence
our mental abilities, fitness is a measure of relative reproductive success.
Claims about the tautological character of the principle philosophical
behaviorism philosophy of biology of the survival of the fittest stem from the
blunt assertion that fitness just is relative reproductive success, as if
intelligence just is what IQ tests measure. Philosophers of biology have
collaborated with biologists to analyze the notion of fitness. This literature
has concentrated on the role that causation plays in selection and, hence, must
play in any adequate explication of fitness. One important distinction that has
emerged is between replication and differential interaction with the environment.
Selection is a function of the interplay between these two processes. Because
of the essential role of variation in selection, all the organisms that belong
to the same species either at any one time or through time cannot possibly be
essentially the same. Nor can species be treated adequately in terms of the
statistical covariance of either characters or genes. The populational
structure of species is crucial. For example, species that form numerous,
partially isolated demes are much more likely to speciate than those that do
not. One especially controversial question is whether species themselves can
function in the evolutionary process rather than simply resulting from it.
Although philosophers of biology have played an increasingly important role in
biology itself, they have also addressed more traditional philosophical
questions, especially in connection with evolutionary epistemology and ethics.
Advocates of evolutionary epistemology argue that knowledge can be understood
in terms of the adaptive character of accurate knowledge. Those organisms that
hold false beliefs about their environment, including other organisms, are less
likely to reproduce themselves than those with more accurate beliefs. To the
extent that this argument has any force at all, it applies only to humansized
entities and events. One common response to evolutionary epistemology is that
sometimes people who hold manifestly false beliefs flourish at the expense of
those who hold more realistic views of the world in which we live. On another
version of evolutionary epistemology, knowledge acquisition is viewed as just
one more instance of a selection process. The issue is not to justify our
beliefs but to understand how they are generated and proliferated. Advocates of
evolutionary ethics attempt to justify certain ethical principles in terms of
their survival value. Any behavior that increases the likelihood of survival
and reproduction is “good,” and anything that detracts from these ends is
“bad.” The main objection to evolutionary ethics is that it violates the
isought distinction. According to most ethical systems, we are asked to
sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. If these others were limited to our
biological relatives, then the biological notion of inclusive fitness might be
adequate to account for such altruistic behavior, but the scope of ethical
systems extends past one’s biological relatives. Advocates of evolutionary
ethics are hard pressed to explain the full range of behavior that is
traditionally considered as virtuous. Either biological evolution cannot
provide an adequate justification for ethical behavior or else ethical systems
must be drastically reduced in their scope.
philosophical economics: Grice: “The oikos
is the house – and a house is not a home unless there’s a cat around.” -- the
study of methodological issues facing positive economic theory and normative
problems on the intersection of welfare economics and political philosophy.
Methodological issues. Applying approaches and questions in the philosophy of
science specifically to economics, the philosophy of economics explores
epistemological and conceptual problems raised by the explanatory aims and
strategy of economic theory: Do its assumptions about individual choice
constitute laws, and do they explain its derived generalizations about markets
and economies? Are these generalizations laws, and if so, how are they tested
by observation of economic processes, and how are theories in the various
compartments of economics
microeconomics, macroeconomics
related to one another and to econometrics? How are the various
schools neoclassical, institutional,
Marxian, etc. related to one another,
and what sorts of tests might enable us to choose between their theories?
Historically, the chief issue of interest in the development of the philosophy
of economics has been the empirical adequacy of the assumptions of rational
“economic man”: that all agents have complete and transitive cardinal or
ordinal utility rankings or preference orders and that they always choose that
available option which maximizes their utility or preferences. Since the actual
behavior of agents appears to disconfirm these assumptions, the claim that they
constitute causal laws governing economic behavior is difficult to sustain. On
the other hand, the assumption of preference-maximizing behavior is
indispensable to twentieth-century economics. These two considerations jointly
undermine the claim that economic theory honors criteria on explanatory power
and evidential probity drawn philosophy of economics philosophy of economics
669 669 from physical science. Much
work by economists and philosophers has been devoted therefore to disputing the
claim that the assumptions of rational choice theory are false or to disputing
the inference from this claim to the conclusion that the cognitive status of
economic theory as empirical science is thereby undermined. Most frequently it
has been held that the assumptions of rational choice are as harmless and as
indispensable as idealizations are elsewhere in science. This view must deal
with the allegation that unlike theories embodying idealization elsewhere in
science, economic theory gains little more in predictive power from these
assumptions about agents’ calculations than it would secure without any
assumptions about individual choice. Normative issues. Both economists and
political philosophers are concerned with identifying principles that will
ensure just, fair, or equitable distributions of scarce goods. For this reason
neoclassical economic theory shares a history with utilitarianism in moral
philosophy. Contemporary welfare economics continues to explore the limits of
utilitarian prescriptions that optimal economic and political arrangements
should maximize and/or equalize utility, welfare, or some surrogate. It also
examines the adequacy of alternatives to such utilitarian principles. Thus,
economics shares an agenda of interests with political and moral philosophy.
Utilitarianism in economics and philosophy has been constrained by an early
realization that utilities are neither cardinally measurable nor
interpersonally comparable. Therefore the prescription to maximize and/or
equalize utility cannot be determinatively obeyed. Welfare theorists have
nevertheless attempted to establish principles that will enable us to determine
the equity, fairness, or justice of various economic arrangements, and that do
not rely on interpersonal comparisons required to measure whether a
distribution is maximal or equal in the utility it accords all agents. Inspired
by philosophers who have surrendered utilitarianism for other principles of
equality, fairness, or justice in distribution, welfare economists have
explored Kantian, social contractarian, and communitarian alternatives in a
research program that cuts clearly across both disciplines. Political
philosophy has also profited as much from innovations in economic theory as
welfare economics has benefited from moral philosophy. Theorems from welfare
economics that establish the efficiency of markets in securing distributions
that meet minimal conditions of optimality and fairness have led moral
philosophers to reexamine the moral status of free-market exchange. Moreover,
philosophers have come to appreciate that coercive social institutions are sometimes
best understood as devices for securing public goods goods like police protection that cannot be
provided to those who pay for them without also providing them to free riders
who decline to do so. The recognition that everyone would be worse off, including
free riders, were the coercion required to pay for these goods not imposed, is
due to welfare economics and has led to a significant revival of interest in
the work of Hobbes, who appears to have prefigured such arguments.
philosophy of education: Grice: “I taught
Peters all he needed to know about this!” -- a branch of philosophy concerned
with virtually every aspect of the educational enterprise. It significantly
overlaps other, more mainstream branches especially epistemology and ethics,
but even logic and metaphysics. The field might almost be construed as a
“series of footnotes” to Plato’s Meno, wherein are raised such fundamental
issues as whether virtue can be taught; what virtue is; what knowledge is; what
the relation between knowledge of virtue and being virtuous is; what the
relation between knowledge and teaching is; and how and whether teaching is
possible. While few people would subscribe to Plato’s doctrine or convenient
fiction, perhaps in Meno that learning by being taught is a process of
recollection, the paradox of inquiry that prompts this doctrine is at once the
root text of the perennial debate between rationalism and empiricism and a
profoundly unsettling indication that teaching passeth understanding.
Mainstream philosophical topics considered within an educational context tend
to take on a decidedly genetic cast. So, e.g., epistemology, which analytic
philosophy has tended to view as a justificatory enterprise, becomes concerned
if not with the historical origins of knowledge claims then with their genesis
within the mental economy of persons generally
in consequence of their educations. And even when philosophers of
education come to endorse something akin to Plato’s classic account of
knowledge as justified true belief, they are inclined to suggest, then, that
the conveyance of knowledge via instruction must somehow provide the student
with the justification along with the true philosophy of education philosophy
of education 670 670 belief thereby reintroducing a genetic dimension to
a topic long lacking one. Perhaps, indeed, analytic philosophy’s general though
not universal neglect of philosophy of education is traceable in some measure
to the latter’s almost inevitably genetic perspective, which the former tended
to decry as armchair science and as a threat to the autonomy and integrity of
proper philosophical inquiry. If this has been a basis for neglect, then
philosophy’s more recent, postanalytic turn toward naturalized inquiries that
reject any dichotomy between empirical and philosophical investigations may
make philosophy of education a more inviting area. Alfred North Whitehead,
himself a leading light in the philosophy of education, once remarked that we
are living in the period of educational thought subject to the influence of
Dewey, and there is still no denying the observation. Dewey’s instrumentalism,
his special brand of pragmatism, informs his extraordinarily comprehensive
progressive philosophy of education; and he once went so far as to define all
of philosophy as the general theory of education. He identifies the educative
process with the growth of experience, with growing as developing where experience is to be understood more in
active terms, as involving doing things that change one’s objective environment
and internal conditions, than in the passive terms, say, of Locke’s
“impression” model of experience. Even traditionalistic philosophers of
education, most notably Maritain, have acknowledged the wisdom of Deweyan
educational means, and have, in the face of Dewey’s commanding philosophical
presence, reframed the debate with progressivists as one about appropriate
educational ends thereby insufficiently
acknowledging Dewey’s trenchant critique of the meansend distinction. And even
some recent analytic philosophers of education, such as R. S. Peters, can be
read as if translating Deweyan insights e.g., about the aim of education into
an analytic idiom. Analytic philosophy of education, as charted by Oxford
philosopher R. S. Peters, Israel Scheffler, and others in the Anglo-
philosophical tradition, has used the tools of linguistic analysis on a wide
variety of educational concepts learning, teaching, training, conditioning,
indoctrinating, etc. and investigated their interconnections: Does teaching entail
learning? Does teaching inevitably involve indoctrinating? etc. This careful,
subtle, and philosophically sophisticated work has made possible a much-needed
conceptual precision in educational debates, though the debaters who most
influence public opinion and policy have rarely availed themselves of that
precisification. Recent work in philosophy of education, however, has taken up
some major educational objectives moral
and other values, critical and creative thinking in a way that promises to have an impact on
the actual conduct of education. Philosophy of education, long isolated in
schools of education from the rest of the academic philosophical community, has
also been somewhat estranged from the professional educational mainstream.
Dewey would surely have approved of a change in this status quo. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Peters and I.”
philosophical historian: philosophy of
history, the philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and
interpret it. ‘History’ in English and its equivalent in most modern European
languages has two primary senses: 1 the temporal progression of large-scale
human events and actions, primarily but not exclusively in the past; and 2 the
discipline or inquiry in which knowledge of the human past is acquired or
sought. This has led to two senses of ‘philosophy of history’, depending on
which “history” has been the object of philosophers’ attentions. Philosophy of
history in the first sense is often called substantive or speculative, and
placed under metaphysics. Philosophy of history in the second sense is called
critical or analytic and can be placed in epistemology. Substantive philosophy
of history. In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin
only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome
flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to
Christiantity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not
just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan
that is intelligible rationally, morally, and for Augustine theologically. As a
believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not
always be evident. In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder
also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term
direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the
purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known example of this
approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of human
freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and
suffering are necessary in the process. Marx, too, claimed to know the
laws in his case economic according to which history unfolds. Similar
searches for overall “meaning” in human history have been undertaken in the
twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee 95, author of the twelve-volume
Study of History, and Oswald Spengler 06, author of Decline of the West. But
the whole enterprise was denounced by the positivists and neo-Kantians of the
late nineteenth century as irresponsible metaphysical speculation. This
attitude was shared by twentieth-century neopositivists and some of their heirs
in the analytic tradition. There is some irony in this, since positivism,
explicitly in thinkers like Comte and implicitly in others, involves belief in
progressively enlightened stages of human history crowned by the modern age of
science. Critical philosophy of history. The critical philosophy of history, i.e.,
the epistemology of historical knowledge, can be traced to the late nineteenth
century and has been dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences. Those
in the positivist, neopositivist, and postpositivist tradition, in keeping with
the idea of the unity of science, believe that to know the historical past is
to explain events causally, and all causal explanation is ultimately of the
same sort. To explain human events is to derive them from laws, which may be
social, psychological, and perhaps ultimately biological and physical. Against
this reductionism, the neo-Kantians and Dilthey argued that history, like other
humanistic disciplines Geisteswissenschaften, follows irreducible rules of its
own. It is concerned with particular events or developments for their own sake,
not as instances of general laws, and its aim is to understand, rather than
explain, human actions. This debate was resurrected in the twentieth century in
the English-speaking world. Philosophers like Hempel and Morton White b.7 elaborated
on the notion of causal explanation in history, while Collingwood and William
Dray b.1 described the “understanding” of historical agents as grasping the
thought behind an action or discovering its reasons rather than its causes. The
comparison with natural science, and the debate between reductionists and
antireductionists, dominated other questions as well: Can or should history be
objective and valuefree, as science purportedly is? What is the significance of
the fact that historians can never perceive the events that interest them,
since they are in the past? Are they not limited by their point of view, their
place in history, in a way scientists are not? Some positivists were inclined
to exclude history from science, rather than make it into one, relegating it to
“literature” because it could never meet the standards of objectivity and
genuine explanation; it was often the anti-positivists who defended the
cognitive legitimacy of our knowledge of the past. In the non-reductionist
tradition, philosophers have increasingly stressed the narrative character of
history: to understand human actions generally, and past actions in particular,
is to tell a coherent story about them. History, according to W. B. Gallie b.2,
is a species of the genus Story. History does not thereby become fiction:
narrative remains a “cognitive instrument” Louis Mink, 183 just as appropriate
to its domain as theory construction is to science. Nevertheless, concepts
previously associated with fictional narratives, such as plot structure and
beginning-middle-end, are seen as applying to historical narratives as well.
This tradition is carried further by Hayden White b.8, who analyzes classical
nineteenth-century histories and even substantive philosophies of history such
as Hegel’s as instances of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. In White’s
work this mode of analysis leads him to some skepticism about history’s
capacity to “represent” the reality of the past: narratives seem to be imposed
upon the data, often for ideological reasons, rather than drawn from them. To
some extent White’s view joins that of some positivists who believe that
history’s literary character excludes it from the realm of science. But for
White this is hardly a defect. Some philosophers have criticized the emphasis
on narrative in discussions of history, since it neglects search and discovery,
deciphering and evaluating sources, etc., which is more important to historians
than the way they “write up” their results. Furthermore, not all history is
presented in narrative form. The debate between pro- and anti-narrativists
among philosophers of history has its parallel in a similar debate among
historians themselves. Academic history in recent times has seen a strong turn
away from traditional political history toward social, cultural, and economic
analyses of the human past. Narrative is associated with the supposedly
outmoded focus on the doings of kings, popes, and generals. These are
considered e.g. by the historian Fernand
Braudel, 285 merely surface ripples compared to the deeper-lying and
slower-moving currents of social and economic change. It is the methods and
concepts of the social sciences, not the art of the storyteller, on which the
historian must draw. This debate has now lost some of its steam and narrative
history has made something of a comeback among historians. Among philosophers
Paul Ricoeur has tried to show that even ostensibly non-narrative history
retains narrative features. Historicity. Historicity or historicality:
Geschichtlichkeit is a term used in the phenomenological and hermeneutic
tradition from Dilthey and Husserl through Heidegger and Gadamer to indicate an
essential feature of human existence. Persons are not merely in history; their
past, including their social past, figures in their conception of themselves
and their future possibilities. Some awareness of the past is thus constitutive
of the self, prior to being formed into a cognitive discipine. Modernism and
the postmodern. It is possible to view some of the debates over the modern and
postmodern in recent Continental philosophy as a new kind of philosophy of
history. Philosophers like Lyotard and Foucault see the modern as the period
from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the present, characterized chiefly by
belief in “grand narratives” of historical progress, whether capitalist,
Marxist, or positivist, with “man” as the triumphant hero of the story. Such
belief is now being or should be abandoned, bringing modernism to an end. In
one sense this is like earlier attacks on the substantive philosophy of
history, since it unmasks as unjustified moralizing certain beliefs about
large-scale patterns in history. It goes even further than the earlier attack,
since it finds these beliefs at work even where they are not explicitly expressed.
In another sense this is a continuation of the substantive philosophy of
history, since it makes its own grand claims about largescale historical
patterns. In this it joins hands with other philosophers of our day in a
general historicization of knowledge e.g., the philosophy of science merges
with the history of science and even of philosophy itself. Thus the later
Heidegger and more recently Richard
Rorty view philosophy itself as a
large-scale episode in Western history that is nearing or has reached its end.
Philosophy thus merges with the history of philosophy, but only thanks to a
philosophical reflection on this history as part of history as a whole.
Jurisprudence, Hartian jurisprudence –
Grice on Hartian jurisprudence -- philosophy of law, also called general
jurisprudence, the study of conceptual and theoretical problems concerning the
nature of law as such, or common to any legal system. Problems in the
philosophy of law fall roughly into two groups. The first contains problems internal
to law and legal systems as such. These include a the nature of legal rules;
the conditions under which they can be said to exist and to influence practice;
their normative character, as mandatory or advisory; and the indeterminacy of
their language; b the structure and logical character of legal norms; the
analysis of legal principles as a class of legal norms; and the relation
between the normative force of law and coercion; c the identity conditions for
legal systems; when a legal system exists; and when one legal system ends and
another begins; d the nature of the reasoning used by courts in adjudicating
cases; e the justification of legal decisions; whether legal justification is
through a chain of inferences or by the coherence of norms and decisions; and
the relation between intralegal and extralegal justification; f the nature of
legal validity and of what makes a norm a valid law; the relation between
validity and efficacy, the fact that the norms of a legal system are obeyed by
the norm-subjects; g properties of legal systems, including comprehensiveness
the claim to regulate any behavior and completeness the absence of gaps in the
law; h legal rights; under what conditions citizens possess them; and their
analytical structure as protected normative positions; i legal interpretation;
whether it is a pervasive feature of law or is found only in certain kinds of
adjudication; its rationality or otherwise; and its essentially ideological
character or otherwise. The second group of problems concerns the philosophy of
law philosophy of law 676 676 relation
between law as one particular social institution in a society and the wider
political and moral life of that society: a the nature of legal obligation;
whether there is an obligation, prima facie or final, to obey the law as such;
whether there is an obligation to obey the law only when certain standards are
met, and if so, what those standards might be; b the authority of law; and the
conditions under which a legal system has political or moral authority or
legitimacy; c the functions of law; whether there are functions performed by a
legal system in a society that are internal to the design of law; and analyses
from the perspective of political morality of the functioning of legal systems;
d the legal concept of responsibility; its analysis and its relation to moral
and political concepts of responsibility; in particular, the place of mental
elements and causal elements in the assignment of responsibility, and the
analysis of those elements; e the analysis and justification of legal
punishment; f legal liberty, and the proper limits or otherwise of the
intrusion of the legal system into individual liberty; the plausibility of
legal moralism; g the relation between law and justice, and the role of a legal
system in the maintenance of social justice; h the relation between legal
rights and political or moral rights; i the status of legal reasoning as a
species of practical reasoning; and the relation between law and practical
reason; j law and economics; whether legal decision making in fact tracks, or
otherwise ought to track, economic efficiency; k legal systems as sources of
and embodiments of political power; and law as essentially gendered, or imbued
with race or class biases, or otherwise. Theoretical positions in the
philosophy of law tend to group into three large kinds legal positivism, natural law, and legal
realism. Legal positivism concentrates on the first set of problems, and
typically gives formal or content-independent solutions to such problems. For
example, legal positivism tends to regard legal validity as a property of a
legal rule that the rule derives merely from its formal relation to other legal
rules; a morally iniquitous law is still for legal positivism a valid legal
rule if it satisfies the required formal existence conditions. Legal rights
exist as normative consequences of valid legal rules; no questions of the
status of the right from the point of view of political morality arise. Legal
positivism does not deny the importance of the second set of problems, but
assigns the task of treating them to other disciplines political philosophy, moral philosophy,
sociology, psychology, and so forth. Questions of how society should design its
legal institutions, for legal positivism, are not technically speaking problems
in the philosophy of law, although many legal positivists have presented their
theories about such questions. Natural law theory and legal realism, by
contrast, regard the sharp distinction between the two kinds of problem as an
artifact of legal positivism itself. Their answers to the first set of problems
tend to be substantive or content-dependent. Natural law theory, for example,
would regard the question of whether a law was consonant with practical reason,
or whether a legal system was morally and politically legitimate, as in whole
or in part determinative of the issue of legal validity, or of whether a legal
norm granted a legal right. The theory would regard the relation between a
legal system and liberty or justice as in whole or in part determinative of the
normative force and the justification for that system and its laws. Legal
realism, especially in its contemporary politicized form, sees the claimed role
of the law in legitimizing certain gender, race, or class interests as the
prime salient property of law for theoretical analysis, and questions of the
determinacy of legal rules or of legal interpretation or legal right as of
value only in the service of the project of explaining the political power of
law and legal systems. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Does Oxford need a chair of
jurisprudence” – symposium with H. L. A. Hart, conducted on the Saturday
morning following Hart’s appointment as chair of jurisprudence.”
philosophy of literature: Grice: “When I
got my Masters in Literae Humaniores, the more human letters, my mather said –
which are the less human ones?” -- literary theory. However, while the literary
theorist, who is often a literary critic, is primarily interested in the
conceptual foundations of practical criticism, philosophy of literature,
usually done by philosophers, is more often concerned to place literature in
the context of a philosophical system. Plato’s dialogues have much to say about
poetry, mostly by way of aligning it with Plato’s metaphysical,
epistemological, and ethico-political views. Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest
example of literary theory in the West, is also an attempt to accommodate the
practice of Grecian poets to Aristotle’s philosophical system as a whole.
Drawing on the thought of philosophers like Kant and Schelling, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge offers in his Biographia Literaria a philosophy of literature that is
to Romantic poetics what Aristotle’s treatise is to classical poetics: a
literary theory that is confirmed both by the poets whose work it legitimates
and by the metaphysics that recommends it. Many philosophers, among them Hume,
Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Sartre, have tried to make room for literature in
their philosophical edifices. Some philosophers, e.g., the G. Romantics, have
made literature and the other arts the cornerstone of philosophy itself. See
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 8.
Sometimes ‘philosophy of literature’ is understood in a second sense:
philosophy and literature; i.e., philosophy and literature taken to be distinct
and essentially autonomous activities that may nonetheless sustain determinate
relations to each other. Philosophy of literature, understood in this way, is
the attempt to identify the differentiae that distinguish philosophy from
literature and to specify their relationships to each other. Sometimes the two
are distinguished by their subject matter e.g., philosophy deals with objective
structures, literature with subjectivity, sometimes by their methods philosophy
is an act of reason, literature the product of imagination, inspiration, or the
unconscious, sometimes by their effects philosophy produces knowledge,
literature produces emotional fulfillment or release, etc. Their relationships
then tend to occupy the areas in which they are not essentially distinct. If
their subject matters are distinct, their effects may be the same philosophy
and literature both produce understanding, the one of fact and the other of
feeling; if their methods are distinct, they may be approaching the same
subject matter in different ways; and so on. For Aquinas, e.g., philosophy and
poetry may deal with the same objects, the one communicating truth about the
object in syllogistic form, the other inspiring feelings about it through
figurative language. For Heidegger, the philosopher investigates the meaning of
being while the poet names the holy, but their preoccupations tend to converge
at the deepest levels of thinking. For Sartre, literature is philosophy engagé,
existential-political activity in the service of freedom. ’Philosophy of
literature’ may also be taken in a third sense: philosophy in literature, the
attempt to discover matters of philosophical interest and value in literary
texts. The philosopher may undertake to identify, examine, and evaluate the
philosophical content of literary texts that contain expressions of
philosophical ideas and discussions of philosophical problems e.g., the debates on free will and theodicy
in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Many if not most courses on philosophy of literature are
taught from this point of view. Much interesting and important work has been
done in this vein; e.g., Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets 0, Cavell’s essays
on Emerson and Thoreau, and Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge 9. It should be noted,
however, that to approach the matter in this way presupposes that literature
and philosophy are simply different forms of the same content: what philosophy
expresses in the form of argument literature expresses in lyric, dramatic, or
narrative form. The philosopher’s treatment of literature implies that he is
uniquely positioned to explicate the subject matter treated in both literary
and philosophical texts, and that the language of philosophy gives optimal expression
to a content less adequately expressed in the language of literature. The model
for this approach may well be Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which treats art
along with religion as imperfect adumbrations of a truth that is fully and
properly articulated only in the conceptual mode of philosophical dialectic.
Dissatisfaction with this presupposition and its implicit privileging of
philosophy over literature has led to a different view of the relation between
philosophy and literature and so to a different program for philosophy of
literature. The self-consciously literary form of Kierkegaard’s writing is an
integral part of his polemic against the philosophical imperialism of the
Hegelians. In this century, the work of philosophers like Derrida and the
philosophers and critics who follow his lead suggests that it is mistaken to
regard philosophy and literature as alternative expressions of an identical
content, and seriously mistaken to think of philosophy as the master discourse,
the “proper” expression of a content “improperly” expressed in literature. All
texts, on this view, have a “literary” form, the texts of philosophers as well
as the texts of novelists and poets, and their content is internally determined
by their “means of expression.” There is just as much “literature in
philosophy” as there is “philosophy in literature.” Consequently, the
philosopher of literature may no longer be able simply to extract philosophical
matter from literary form. Rather, the modes of literary expression confront the
philosopher with problems that bear on the presuppositions of his own
enterprise. E.g., fictional mimesis especially in the works of postmodern
writers raises questions about the possibility and the prephilosophy of
literature philosophy of literature 678
678 philosophy of logic philosophy of logic 679 sumed normativeness of
factual representation, and in so doing tends to undermine the traditional
hierarchy that elevates “fact” over “fiction.” Philosophers’ perplexity over
the truth-value of fictional statements is an example of the kind of problems
the study of literature can create for the practice of philosophy see Rorty,
Consequences of Pragmatism, 2, ch. 7. Or again, the self-reflexivity of
contemporary literary texts can lead philosophers to reflect critically on
their own undertaking and may seriously unsettle traditional notions of
self-referentiality. When it is not regarded as another, attractive but perhaps
inferior source of philosophical ideas, literature presents the philosopher
with epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological problems not encountered
in the course of “normal” philosophizing. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why a
philosopher is a literary soul at Oxford: the etymological meaning of ‘literae
humaniores.’”
Philosophical semanticist -- philosophy of
logic – H. P. Grice, “Logic and conversation” – “Meaning,” in P. F. Strawson,
“Philosophical Logic,” Oxford -- the arena of philosophy devoted to examining
the scope and nature of logic. Aristotle considered logic an organon, or foundation,
of knowledge. Certainly, inference is the source of much human knowledge. Logic
judges inferences good or bad and tries to justify those that are good. One
need not agree with Aristotle, therefore, to see logic as essential to
epistemology. Philosophers such as Vitters, additionally, have held that the
structure of language reflects the structure of the world. Because inferences
have elements that are themselves linguistic or are at least expressible in
language, logic reveals general features of the structure of language. This
makes it essential to linguistics, and, on a Vittersian view, to metaphysics.
Moreover, many philosophical battles have been fought with logical weaponry.
For all these reasons, philosophers have tried to understand what logic is,
what justifies it, and what it tells us about reason, language, and the world.
The nature of logic. Logic might be defined as the science of inference;
inference, in turn, as the drawing of a conclusion from premises. A simple
argument is a sequence, one element of which, the conclusion, the others are
thought to support. A complex argument is a series of simple arguments. Logic,
then, is primarily concerned with arguments. Already, however, several
questions arise. 1 Who thinks that the premises support the conclusion? The
speaker? The audience? Any competent speaker of the language? 2 What are the
elements of arguments? Thoughts? Propositions? Philosophers following Quine
have found these answers unappealing for lack of clear identity criteria. Sentences
are more concrete and more sharply individuated. But should we consider
sentence tokens or sentence types? Context often affects interpretation, so it
appears that we must consider tokens or types-in-context. Moreover, many
sentences, even with contextual information supplied, are ambiguous. Is a
sequence with an ambiguous sentence one argument which may be good on some
readings and bad on others or several? For reasons that will become clear, the
elements of arguments should be the primary bearers of truth and falsehood in
one’s general theory of language. 3 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what
does ‘support’ mean? Logic evaluates inferences by distinguishing good from bad
arguments. This raises issues about the status of logic, for many of its pronouncements
are explicitly normative. The philosophy of logic thus includes problems of the
nature and justification of norms akin to those arising in metaethics. The
solutions, moreover, may vary with the logical system at hand. Some logicians
attempt to characterize reasoning in natural language; others try to
systematize reasoning in mathematics or other sciences. Still others try to
devise an ideal system of reasoning that does not fully correspond to any of
these. Logicians concerned with inference in natural, mathematical, or
scientific languages tend to justify their norms by describing inferential
practices in that language as actually used by those competent in it. These
descriptions justify norms partly because the practices they describe include evaluations
of inferences as well as inferences themselves. The scope of logic. Logical
systems meant to account for natural language inference raise issues of the
scope of logic. How does logic differ from semantics, the science of meaning in
general? Logicians have often treated only inferences turning on certain
commonly used words, such as ‘not’, ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘all’, and ‘some’,
taking them, or items in a symbolic language that correspond to them, as
logical constants. They have neglected inferences that do not turn on them,
such as My brother is married. Therefore, I have a sister-in-law. Increasingly,
however, semanticists have used ‘logic’ more broadly, speaking of the logic of
belief, perception, abstraction, or even kinship. Such uses seem to treat logic and semantics
as coextensive. Philosophers who have sought to maintain a distinction between
the semantics and logic of natural language have tried to develop non-arbitrary
criteria of logical constancy. An argument is valid provided the truth of its
premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. This definition relies on the
notion of truth, which raises philosophical puzzles of its own. Furthermore, it
is natural to ask what kind of connection must hold between the premises and
conclusion. One answer specifies that an argument is valid provided replacing
its simple constituents with items of similar categories while leaving logical
constants intact could never produce true premises and a false conclusion. On
this view, validity is a matter of form: an argument is valid if it
instantiates a valid form. Logic thus becomes the theory of logical form. On
another view, an argument is valid if its conclusion is true in every possible
world or model in which its premises are true. This conception need not rely on
the notion of a logical constant and so is compatible with the view that logic
and semantics are coextensive. Many issues in the philosophy of logic arise
from the plethora of systems logicians have devised. Some of these are deviant
logics, i.e., logics that differ from classical or standard logic while seeming
to treat the same subject matter. Intuitionistic logic, for example, which
interprets the connectives and quantifiers non-classically, rejecting the law
of excluded middle and the interdefinability of the quantifiers, has been
supported with both semantic and ontological arguments. Brouwer, Heyting, and
others have defended it as the proper logic of the infinite; Dummett has
defended it as the correct logic of natural language. Free logic allows
non-denoting referring expressions but interprets the quantifiers as ranging
only over existing objects. Many-valued logics use at least three truthvalues,
rejecting the classical assumption of bivalence
that every formula is either true or false. Many logical systems attempt
to extend classical logic to incorporate tense, modality, abstraction,
higher-order quantification, propositional quantification, complement
constructions, or the truth predicate. These projects raise important
philosophical questions. Modal and tense logics. Tense is a pervasive feature
of natural language, and has become important to computer scientists interested
in concurrent programs. Modalities of several sorts alethic possibility, necessity and deontic
obligation, permission, for example
appear in natural language in various grammatical guises. Provability,
treated as a modality, allows for revealing formalizations of metamathematics.
Logicians have usually treated modalities and tenses as sentential operators.
C. I. Lewis and Langford pioneered such approaches for alethic modalities; von
Wright, for deontic modalities; and Prior, for tense. In each area, many
competing systems developed; by the late 0s, there were over two hundred axiom
systems in the literature for propositional alethic modal logic alone. How
might competing systems be evaluated? Kripke’s semantics for modal logic has
proved very helpful. Kripke semantics in effect treats modal operators as
quantifiers over possible worlds. Necessarily A, e.g., is true at a world if
and only if A is true in all worlds accessible from that world. Kripke showed
that certain popular axiom systems result from imposing simple conditions on
the accessibility relation. His work spawned a field, known as correspondence
theory, devoted to studying the relations between modal axioms and conditions
on models. It has helped philosophers and logicians to understand the issues at
stake in choosing a modal logic and has raised the question of whether there is
one true modal logic. Modal idioms may be ambiguous or indeterminate with
respect to some properties of the accessibility relation. Possible worlds raise
additional ontological and epistemological questions. Modalities and tenses
seem to be linked in natural language, but attempts to bring tense and modal
logic together remain young. The sensitivity of tense to intra- and
extralinguistic context has cast doubt on the project of using operators to
represent tenses. Kamp, e.g., has represented tense and aspect in terms of
event structure, building on earlier work by Reichenbach. Truth. Tarski’s
theory of truth shows that it is possible to define truth recursively for
certain languages. Languages that can refer to their own sentences, however,
permit no such definition given Tarski’s assumptions for they allow the formulation of the liar
and similar paradoxes. Tarski concluded that, in giving the semantics for such
a language, we must ascend to a more powerful metalanguage. Kripke and others,
however, have shown that it is possible for a language permitting
self-reference to contain its own truth
680 predicate by surrendering bivalence or taking the truth predicate
indexically. Higher-order logic. First-order predicate logic allows
quantification only over individuals. Higher-order logics also permit
quantification over predicate positions. Natural language seems to permit such
quantification: ‘Mary has every quality that John admires’. Mathematics,
moreover, may be expressed elegantly in higher-order logic. Peano arithmetic
and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, e.g., require infinite axiom sets in
firstorder logic but are finitely axiomatizable
and categorical, determining their models up to isomorphism in second-order logic. Because they quantify
over properties and relations, higher-order logics seem committed to Platonism.
Mathematics reduces to higher-order logic; Quine concludes that the latter is
not logic. Its most natural semantics seems to presuppose a prior understanding
of properties and relations. Also, on this semantics, it differs greatly from
first-order logic. Like set theory, it is incomplete; it is not compact. This
raises questions about the boundaries of logic. Must logic be axiomatizable?
Must it be possible, i.e., to develop a logical system powerful enough to prove
every valid argument valid? Could there be valid arguments with infinitely many
premises, any finite fragment of which would be invalid? With an operator for
forming abstract terms from predicates, higher-order logics easily allow the
formulation of paradoxes. Russell and Whitehead for this reason adopted type
theory, which, like Tarski’s theory of truth, uses an infinite hierarchy and
corresponding syntactic restrictions to avoid paradox. Type-free theories avoid
both the restrictions and the paradoxes, as with truth, by rejecting bivalence
or by understanding abstraction indexically. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why I don’t
use ‘logic,’ but I use ‘semantic.’”
Philosophical geometer, philosophical
mathematician – H. P. Grice, “ΑΓΕΩΜΕΤΡΗΤΟΣ ΜΗΔΕΙΣ ΕΙΣΙΤΩ; or, The school of
Plato.” philosophy of mathematics, the
study of ontological and epistemological problems raised by the content and
practice of mathematics. The present agenda in this field evolved from critical
developments, notably the collapse of Pythagoreanism, the development of modern
calculus, and an early twentieth-century foundational crisis, which forced
mathematicians and philosophers to examine mathematical methods and
presuppositions. Grecian mathematics. The Pythagoreans, who represented the
height of early demonstrative Grecian mathematics, believed that all scientific
relations were measureable by natural numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. or ratios of
natural numbers, and thus they assumed discrete, atomic units for the measurement
of space, time, and motion. The discovery of irrational magnitudes scotched the
first of these beliefs. Zeno’s paradoxes showed that the second was
incompatible with the natural assumption that space and time are infinitely
divisible. The Grecian reaction, ultimately codified in Euclid’s Elements,
included Plato’s separation of mathematics from empirical science and, within
mathematics, distinguished number theory
a study of discretely ordered entities
from geometry, which concerns continua. Following Aristotle and
employing methods perfected by Eudoxus, Euclid’s proofs used only “potentially
infinite” geometric and arithmetic procedures. The Elements’ axiomatic form and
its constructive proofs set a standard for future mathematics. Moreover, its dependence
on visual intuition whose consequent deductive gaps were already noted by
Archimedes, together with the challenge of Euclid’s infamous fifth postulate
about parallel lines, and the famous unsolved problems of compass and
straightedge construction, established an agenda for generations of
mathematicians. The calculus. The two millennia following Euclid saw new
analytical tools e.g., Descartes’s geometry that wedded arithmetic and
geometric considerations and toyed with infinitesimally small quantities.
These, together with the demands of physical application, tempted
mathematicians to abandon the pristine Grecian dichotomies. Matters came to a
head with Newton’s and Leibniz’s almost simultaneous discovery of the powerful
computational techniques of the calculus. While these unified physical science
in an unprecedented way, their dependence on unclear notions of infinitesimal
spatial and temporal increments emphasized their shaky philosophical
foundation. Berkeley, for instance, condemned the calculus for its
unintuitability. However, this time the power of the new methods inspired a
decidedly conservative response. Kant, in particular, tried to anchor the new
mathematics in intuition. Mathematicians, he claimed, construct their objects
in the “pure intuitions” of space and time. And these mathematical objects are
the a priori forms of transcendentally ideal empirical objects. For Kant this
combination of epistemic empiricism and ontological idealism explained the
physical applicability of mathematics and thus granted “objective validity”
i.e., scientific legitimacy to mathematical procedures. Two nineteenth-century
developments undercut this Kantian constructivism in favor of a more abstract
conceptual picture of mathematics. First, Jànos Bolyai, Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard
Riemann, Nikolai Lobachevsky, and others produced consistent non-Euclidean
geometries, which undid the Kantian picture of a single a priori science of
space, and once again opened a rift between pure mathematics and its physical
applications. Second, Cantor and Dedekind defined the real numbers i.e., the
elements of the continuum as infinite sets of rational and ultimately natural
numbers. Thus they founded mathematics on the concepts of infinite set and
natural number. Cantor’s set theory made the first concept rigorously
mathematical; while Peano and Frege both of whom advocated securing rigor by
using formal languages did that for the second. Peano axiomatized number
theory, and Frege ontologically reduced the natural numbers to sets indeed sets
that are the extensions of purely logical concepts. Frege’s Platonistic
conception of numbers as unintuitable objects and his claim that mathematical
truths follow analytically from purely logical definitions the thesis of logicism are both highly anti-Kantian. Foundational
crisis and movements. But antiKantianism had its own problems. For one thing,
Leopold Kronecker, who following Peter Dirichlet wanted mathematics reduced to
arithmetic and no further, attacked Cantor’s abstract set theory on doctrinal
grounds. Worse yet, the discovery of internal antinomies challenged the very
consistency of abstract foundations. The most famous of these, Russell’s
paradox the set of all sets that are not members of themselves both is and
isn’t a member of itself, undermined Frege’s basic assumption that every
well-formed concept has an extension. This was a full-scale crisis. To be sure,
Russell himself together with Whitehead preserved the logicist foundational
approach by organizing the universe of sets into a hierarchy of levels so that
no set can be a member of itself. This is type theory. However, the crisis
encouraged two explicitly Kantian foundational projects. The first, Hilbert’s
Program, attempted to secure the “ideal” i.e., infinitary parts of mathematics
by formalizing them and then proving the resultant formal systems to be
conservative and hence consistent extensions of finitary theories. Since the
proof itself was to use no reasoning more complicated than simple numerical
calculations finitary reasoning the whole metamathematical project belonged
to the untainted “contentual” part of mathematics. Finitary reasoning was
supposed to update Kant’s intuition-based epistemology, and Hilbert’s
consistency proofs mimic Kant’s notion of objective validity. The second
project, Brouwer’s intuitionism, rejected formalization, and was not only
epistemologically Kantian resting mathematical reasoning on the a priori
intuition of time, but ontologically Kantian as well. For intuitionism
generated both the natural and the real numbers by temporally ordered conscious
acts. The reals, in particular, stem from choice sequences, which exploit
Brouwer’s epistemic assumptions about the open future. These foundational
movements ultimately failed. Type theory required ad hoc axioms to express the
real numbers; Hilbert’s Program foundered on Gödel’s theorems; and intuitionism
remained on the fringes because it rejected classical logic and standard
mathematics. Nevertheless the legacy of these movements their formal methods, indeed their
philosophical agenda still characterizes
modern research on the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. Set theory,
e.g. despite recent challenges from category theory, is the lingua franca of
modern mathematics. And formal languages with their precise semantics are
ubiquitous in technical and philosophical discussions. Indeed, even
intuitionistic mathematics has been formalized, and Michael Dummett has recast
its ontological idealism as a semantic antirealism that defines truth as warranted
assertability. In a similar semantic vein, Paul Benacerraf proposed that the
philosophical problem with Hilbert’s approach is inability to provide a uniform
realistic i.e., referential, non-epistemic semantics for the allegedly ideal
and contentual parts of mathematics; and the problem with Platonism is that its
semantics makes its objects unknowable. Ontological issues. From this modern
perspective, the simplest realism is the outright Platonism that attributes a
standard model consisting of “independent” objects to classical theories
expressed in a first-order language i.e., a language whose quantifiers range
over objects but not properties. But in fact realism admits variations on each
aspect. For one thing, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem shows that formalized
theories can have non-standard models. There are expansive non-standard models:
Abraham Robinson, e.g., used infinitary non-standard models of Peano’s axioms
to rigorously reintroduce infinitesimals. Roughly, an infinitesimal is the
reciprocal of an infinite element in such a model. And there are also
“constructive” models, whose objects must be explicitly definable. Predicative
theories inspired by Poincaré and Hermann Weyl, whose stage-by-stage
definitions refer only to previously defined objects, produce one variety of
such models. Gödel’s constructive universe, which uses less restricted
definitions to model apparently non-constructive axioms like the axiom of
choice, exemplifies another variety. But there are also views various forms of
structuralism which deny that formal theories have unique standard models at
all. These views inspired by the fact,
already sensed by Dedekind, that there are multiple equivalid realizations of
formal arithmetic allow a mathematical
theory to characterize only a broad family of models and deny unique reference
to mathematical terms. Finally, some realistic approaches advocate
formalization in secondorder languages, and some eschew ordinary semantics
altogether in favor of substitutional quantification. These latter are still
realistic, for they still distinguish truth from knowledge. Strict
finitists inspired by Vitters’s more
stringent epistemic constraints reject
even the open-futured objects admitted by Brouwer, and countenance only finite
or even only “feasible” objects. In the other direction, A. A. Markov and his
school in Russia introduced a syntactic notion of algorithm from which they
developed the field of “constructive analysis.” And the mathematician Errett Bishop, starting from a
Brouwer-like disenchantment with mathematical realism and with strictly formal
approaches, recovered large parts of classical analysis within a non-formal
constructive framework. All of these approaches assume abstract i.e., causally
isolated mathematical objects, and thus they have difficulty explaining the
wide applicability of mathematics constructive or otherwise within empirical
science. One response, Quine’s “indispensability” view, integrates mathematical
theories into the general network of empirical science. For Quine, mathematical
objects just like ordinary physical
objects exist simply in virtue of being
referents for terms in our best scientific theory. By contrast Hartry Field,
who denies that any abstract objects exist, also denies that any purely
mathematical assertions are literally true. Field attempts to recast physical
science in a relational language without mathematical terms and then use
Hilbert-style conservative extension results to explain the evident utility of
abstract mathematics. Hilary Putnam and Charles Parsons have each suggested
views according to which mathematics has no objects proper to itself, but
rather concerns only the possibilities of physical constructions. Recently,
Geoffrey Hellman has combined this modal approach with structuralism.
Epistemological issues. The equivalence proved in the 0s of several different
representations of computability to the reasoning representable in elementary
formalized arithmetic led Alonzo Church to suggest that the notion of finitary
reasoning had been precisely defined. Church’s thesis so named by Stephen
Kleene inspired Georg Kreisel’s investigations in the 0s and 70s of the general
conditions for rigorously analyzing other informal philosophical notions like
semantic consequence, Brouwerian choice sequences, and the very notion of a
set. Solomon Feferman has suggested more recently that this sort of piecemeal
conceptual analysis is already present in mathematics; and that this rather
than any global foundation is the true role of foundational research. In this
spirit, the relative consistency arguments of modern proof theory a
continuation of Hilbert’s Program provide information about the epistemic
grounds of various mathematical theories. Thus, on the one hand, proofs that a
seemingly problematic mathematical theory is a conservative extension of a more
secure theory provide some epistemic support for the former. In the other
direction, the fact that classical number theory is consistent relative to
intuitionistic number theory shows contra Hilbert that his view of constructive
reasoning must differ from that of the intuitionists. Gödel, who did not
believe that mathematics required any ties to empirical perception, suggested
nevertheless that we have a special nonsensory faculty of mathematical intuition
that, when properly cultivated, can help us decide among formally independent
propositions of set theory and other branches of mathematics. Charles Parsons,
in contrast, has examined the place of perception-like intuition in
mathematical reasoning. Parsons himself has investigated models of arithmetic
and of set theory composed of quasi-concrete objects e.g., numerals and other
signs. Others consistent with some of Parsons’s observations have given a
Husserlstyle phenomenological analysis of mathematical intuition. Frege’s
influence encouraged the logical positivists and other philosophers to view
mathematical knowledge as analytic or conventional. Poincaré responded that the
principle of mathematical induction could not be analytic, and Vitters also attacked
this conventionalism. In recent years, various formal independence results and
Quine’s attack on analyticity have encouraged philosophers and historians of
mathematics to focus on cases of mathematical knowledge that do not stem from
conceptual analysis or strict formal provability. Some writers notably Mark
Steiner and Philip Kitcher emphasize the analogies between empirical and
mathematical discovery. They stress such things as conceptual evolution in
mathematics and instances of mathematical generalizations supported by
individual cases. Kitcher, in particular, discusses the analogy between
axiomatization in mathematics and theoretical unification. Penelope Maddy has
investigated the intramathematical grounds underlying the acceptance of various
axioms of set theory. More generally, Imre Lakatos argued that most
mathematical progress stems from a concept-stretching process of conjecture,
refutation, and proof. This view has spawned a historical debate about whether
critical developments such as those mentioned above represent Kuhn-style
revolutions or even crises, or whether they are natural conceptual advances in
a uniformly growing science. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “ΑΓΕΩΜΕΤΡΗΤΟΣ ΜΗΔΕΙΣ ΕΙΣΙΤΩ; or, the
school of Plato.”
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