THESAVRVS GRICEIANVM, in twelve volumes -- vol. I.

THESAVRVS GRICEIANVM

H. P. Grice, St. John’s Oxford

Compiled by Grice’s Playgroup, The Bodleian

a: The choice of the “a” here is because of the Latin “affirmo” versus “nego.” This gives “a” and “i” as ‘affirmatum,’ and ‘e’ and ‘o’ as ‘negatum.’ Grice knows that his problem with Strawson is the Square of Opposition (Grice 1989: )So he is well aware of the question about Barbara and Celarent. So this is the ‘universalis dedicativa.’ Vide below entries for “E” (universalis abdicative), “I” (particularis dedicativa)  and “O” (particularis abdicative). The square (figura quadrata) is generated by criss-crossing the two categories, aptly sub-divided, -- ‘quantitas’ into universalis and particularis, and qualitaas into dedicativa and the abdicative.What is “to affirm”? And what does “to affirm” have in common with “to negate”? These are deep questions that Grice tries to answer in “Negation and privation” and “Lectures on negation.” – The distinction between ‘affirmatum” and “negatum” is not clear – Etymologically, the roots are diverse. To affirm derives from ad-firmare – to make firm. To negate, rather, derives from the mere negative particle turned into a verb, “ne-gare.” It’s even more complicated in Griceain! Grice would never have given attention to this had it not be for “affirmo”and “nego” and for a little treatise he enjoyed reading, “Barbara,  Celarent”  af-firmo (better adf- ), āvi, ātum, 1, v. a. I. To present a thing in words, as fixed, firm, i. e. certain, true; to assert, maintain, aver, declare, asseverate, affirm: “dicendum est mihi, sed ita, nihil ut adfirmem, quaeram omnia,” Cic. Div. 2, 3; so id. Att. 13, 23; id. Brut. 1, 1: “jure jurando,” Liv. 29, 23: “quidam plures Deo ortos adfirmant,” Tac. G. 2; cf. id. Agr. 10: “adfirmavit non daturum se,” he protested that he would give nothing, Suet. Aug. 42.—Impers.: “atque affirmatur,” Tac. H. 2, 49.—Hence, II. To give confirmation of the truth of a thing, to strengthen, to confirm, corroborate, sanction: “adfirmare spem alicui,” Liv. 1, 1: “opinionem,” id. 32, 35: “dicta alicujus,” id. 28, 2: “aliquid auctoritate sua,” id. 26, 24: “populi Romani virtutem armis,” Tac. H. 4, 73: “secuta anceps valetudo iram Deūm adfirmavit,” id. A. 14, 22.—Hence, * affirmanter (adf- ), adv. (of the absol. P. a. affirmans), with assurance or certainty, assuredly: “praedicere aliquid,” Gell. 14, 1, 24; and: af-firmātē (adf- ), adv. (of the absol. P. a. affirmatus), with asseveration, with assurance, certainly, assuredly, positively: “quod adfirmate, quasi Deo teste promiserit, id tenendum est,” Cic. Off. 3, 29.—Sup.: “adfirmatissime scribere aliquid,” Gell. 10, 12, 9. Refs.: Grice 1989, H. P. Grice, “The implicatures of the Square of Opposition, as dismissed by P. F. Strawson.”

∀: rendered by Grice as “all,” borrowed from Gentzen’s “All-Zeichen.” (Peano did not use it). Grice is a stickler, and uses the brackets, (∀x) –  Grice thinks that Whitehead and Russell did perfectly well with their substitutional account to ‘all,’ “even it that displeased my tutee P. F. Strawson.” Parsons, who Grice admires, suggests that one treat quantification over predicative classes substitutionally, and capture “the idea that classes are not“real” independently of the expression forthem. Grice perceives a difficulty relating to the allegedly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities. A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of “Emissor E communicates that p” iff “Emissor E desires that p.” which Grice would be willing to countenance,  'p' operates simply as a ‘gap sign.’ ‘p’ does appear in the analysandum, and re-appears in the corresponding analysans. If Grice were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that “to feel Byzantine” is just to have a an anti-rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that Grice is or might *be* Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticize Grice on the grounds that Grice saddles himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. And why? Well, because, alla Parsons, if a quantifier is covertly involved at all, it will only be a universal quantifier which in such a case as this is more than adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. Grice’s situation vis-a-vis the ‘proposition’ is in no way different. There should be an entry for the inverted E, the first entry under the E.

abderite: Grice was something of a logical atomist, so he used to refer to himself as a neo-Abderite. The reference being to Democritus and Leucippus, from Abdera. The Grecian philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, the two earliest exponents of atomism, later revived by Baron Russell as “logical” atomism, calling himself a neo-abderite. Even though Abdera, in Thrace in northern Greece, is home to three pre-Socratics  Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras   ‘Abderite’ and the phrase ‘School of Abdera’ are applied only to Leucippus and Democritus. We can thus distinguish between early Grecian atomism and Epicureanism, which is the later version of atomism developed by Epicurus of Athens. This usage is in one respect inapt: the corresponding Grecian “abderite” is used by some snobs in antiquity as a synonym of ‘simpleton,’ not in disparagement of any of the three philosophers of Abdera but as a regional slur, the three philosophers but not Russell included.

Aaron, r. English philosopher born in Seven Sisters, Sussex.

abdicatum: Apuleius makes an analogy that Grice (and the Grecians before) finds interesting. It is the ‘propositio dedicative’ apophatike’/’propositio abdicativa’ kataphatike distinction. The ‘abdicatum’ would be the ‘negatum.’ The ‘dedicatum’ would be the ‘affirmatum.’ Apuleius’s terms make the correlation evident and Grice preferred it to that of ‘affirmatum’ and ‘negatum,’ – “where the correlation is not that obvious.” So there is the abdicatum, the negatum, and the negation. ‘Negatum’ and ‘affirmatum’ are actually used when translating Husserl from the vernacular! For Husserl, Negation negation a noetic modification of a positing, noematic cancellation  every ‘negatum’ an Object posited as existing, reiterated negation; a ‘negatum’ not a determination produced by reflection; non-being equivalent to being validly negated. Grice’s interest in ‘not’ as a unary functor is central. Grice was ablet to tutor Strawson in philosophy in that famous term. In his “Introduction to logical theory,” Strawson alleges to show that some logical ‘laws,’ taken together, show that any truth-functional sentence or formula in which the main constant is “~ “ is the contradictory of the sentence or formula which results from omitting that sign.” Strawson goes on to say: “A standard and primary use of “not” in a sentence is to assert the contradictory of the statement which would be made by the use, in the same context, of the same sentence without “not.” Of course we must not suppose that the insertion of “not” anywhere in any sentence always has this effect. “Some bulls are not dangerous” is not the contradictory of “Some bulls are dangerous.” This is why the identification of “~” with “it is not the case that” is to be preferred to its identification with “not” simpliciter. This identification, then, involves only those minimum departures from the logic of ordinary language which must always result from the formal logician's activity of codifying rules with the help of verbal patterns : viz., (i) the adoption of a rigid rule when ordinary language permits variations and deviations from the standard use (cf. rules “ ~(p Λ ~p)” and “ ~~p ≡ p” and the discussions in 1-8, and 2-9); (ii) that stretching of the sense of ‘exemplify’ which allows, us, e.g., to regard ‘Tom is not mad’ as well as ‘Not all bulls are dangerous’ as 'exemplifications’ of  not-p.’” Strawson goes on: “So we shall call ‘~’ the negation sign, and read ‘~’as ‘not.’ One might be tempted to suppose that declaring formulae “ ~(p Λ ~p)” and “p v ~p” laws of the system was the same as saying that, as regards this system, a statement cannot be both true and false and must be either true or false. But it is not. The rules that  “ ~(p Λ ~p)” and “p v ~p” are analytic are not rules about ‘true’ and ‘false;’ they are rules about ‘~.; They say that, given that a statement has one of the two truth-values, then it is logically impossible for both that statement and the corresponding statement of the form ‘ ~p’  to be true, and for both that statement and the corresponding statement of the form ‘~p’ to be false.” A bit of palæo-Griceian history is in order. Sheffer, defines ‘not’ and negation in terms of incompatibility in ‘A set of five independent postulates for Boolean algebras, with application to logical constants,’ Trans. American Mathematical Society. Grice does refers to ‘the strokes.’ His use of the plural is interesting as a nod to Peirce’s minute logic in his ‘Boolian [sic] algebra with one constant.’ There is indeed Peirce’s stroke, or ampheck (↓), Sheffer’s stroke (|, /, ↑), and and Quine’s stroke (†, strictly Quine’s dagger). Some philosophers prefer to refer to Peirces Stroke as Peirce’s arrow, or strictly stressed double-edged sword. His editors disambiguate his ampheck, distinguishing between the dyadic functor or connective equivalent to Sheffer’s stroke and ‘nor.’ While Whitehead, Russell, and Witters love Sheffer’s stroke, Hilbert does not: ‘‘p/p’ ist dann gleichbedeutend mit ‘X̄.’ Grice explores primitiveness. It is possible, to some extent, to qualify this or that device in terms of primitiveness. As regards ‘not,’ if a communication-system did not contain a unitary negative device, there would be many things that communicators can now communicate that they would be then unable to communicate. He has two important caveats. That would be the case unless, first, the communication-system contained some very artificial-seeming connective like one or other of the strokes, and, second, communicators put themselves to a good deal of trouble, as Plato does in ‘The Sophist’ with ‘diaphoron,’ that Wiggins symbolises with ‘Δ,’ to find, more or less case by case, complicated forms of expression, not necessarily featuring a connective, but involving such expressions as ‘other than’or ‘incompatible with.’ Grice further refers to Aristotle’s ‘apophasis’ in De Int.17a25. Grice, always lured by the potentiality of a joint philosophical endeavour, treasures his collaboration with Strawson that is followed by one with Austin on Cat. and De Int. So what does Aristotle say in De Int.? Surely Aristotle could have started by referring to Plato’s Parmenides, aptly analysed by Wiggins. Since Aristotle is more of a don than a poet, he has to give ‘not’ a name: ‘ἀπόφασις ἐστιν ἀπόφανσίς τινος ἀπό τινος,’a predication of one thing away from another, i.e. negation of it. This is Grice’s reflection, in a verificationist vein, of two types of this or that negative utterance. His immediate trigger is Ryle’s contribution on a symposium on Bradley’s idea of an internal relation, where Grice appeals to Peirce’s incompatibility. ‘The proposition ‘This is red’ is imcompatible with the proposition, ‘This is not coloured.’ While he uses a souly verb or predicate for one of them, Grice will go back to the primacy of ‘potching’ at a later stage. A P potches that the obble is not fang, but feng. It is convenient to introduce this or that soul-state, ψ, sensing that …, or perceiving that … Grice works mainly with two scenarios, both involved with the first-person singular pronoun ‘I’ with which he is obsessed. Grice’s first scenario concerns a proposition that implies another proposition featuring ‘someone, viz. I,’ the first-person singular pronoun as subject, a sensory modal verb, and an object, the proposition, it is not the case that ‘the α is φ₁.’ The denotatum of the first-person pronoun perceives that a thing displays this or the visual sense-datum of a colour, and the corresponding sensory modal predicate. Via a reductive (but not reductionist) analysis, we get that, by uttering ‘It is not the case that I see that the pillar box is blue,’ the utterer U means, i. e. m-intends his addressee A to believe, U he sees that the pillar box is red. U’s source, reason, ground, knowledge, or belief, upon which he bases his uttering his utterance is U’s *indirect* mediated actual experience, belief, or knowledge, linked to a sense-datum φ₂ (red) other than φ₁ (blue). Grice’s second scenario concerns a proposition explicitly featuring the first-person singular pronoun, an introspection, involving an auditory sense-datum of a noise. Via reductive (but not reductionist) analysis, we get that, by uttering ‘It is not the case that I hear that the bell tolls in Gb,’ U means that he lacks the experience of hearing that the bell tolls simpliciter. U’s source, reason, ground, knowledge, or belief, upon which he bases his uttering his utterance is the *direct* unmediated felt absence, or absentia, or privatio or privation, or apophasis, verified by introspection, of the co-relative ψ, which Grice links to the absence of the experience, belief, or knowledge, of the sense-datum, the apophasis of the experience, which is thereby negated. In either case, Grice’s analysans do not feature ‘not.’ Grice turns back to the topic in seminars later at Oxford in connection with Strawson’s cursory treatment of ‘not’ in “Logical Theory.”‘Not’ (and ~.) is the first pair, qua unary satisfactory-value-functor (unlike this or that dyadic co-ordinate, and, or, or the dyadic sub-ordinate if) in Grice’s list of this or that vernacular counterpart attached to this or that formal device. Cf. ‘Smith has not ceased from eating iron,’ in ‘Causal theory.’ In the fourth James lecture, Grice explores a role for negation along the lines of Wilson’s Statement and Inference.’ Grice’s ‘Vacuous Names’ contains Gentzen-type syntactic inference rules for both ‘not’’s introduction (+, ~) and the elimination (-, ~) and the correlative value assignation. Note that there are correlative rules for Peirce’s arrow. Grice’s motivation is to qualify ‘not’ with a subscript scope-indicating device on ~ for a tricky case like ‘The climber of Mt. Everest on hands and knees is not to atttend the party in his honour.’ The logical form becomes qualified: ‘~₂(Marmaduke Bloggs is coming)₁’, or ‘~₂(Pegasus flies)₁.’ generic formula is ~₂p₁, which indicates that p is introduced prior to ~. In the earlier James lectures he used the square bracket device. The generic formula being ‘~[p],’ where [p] reads that p is assigned common-ground status. Cancelling the implicata may be trickier. ‘It is not the case that I hear that the bell tolls because it is under reparation.’ ‘That is not blue; it’s an optical illusion.’ Cf. Grice on ‘It is an illusion. What is it?’ Cf. The king of France is not bald because there is no king of France. In Presupposition, the fourth Urbana lecture, Grice uses square brackets for the subscript scope indicating device. ‘Do not arrest [the intruder]!,’ the device meant to assign common-ground status. In ‘Method” Grice plays with the internalisation of a pre-theoretical concept of not within the scope of ‘ψ.’ In the Kant lectures on “Aspects,” Grice explores ‘not’ within the scope of this or that mode operator, as in the buletic utterance, ‘Do not arrest the intruder!’ Is that internal narrow scope, ‘!~p,’ or external wide scope, ‘~!p’? Grice also touches on this or that mixed-mode utterance, and in connection with the minor problem of presupposition within the scope of an operator other than the indicative-mode operator. ‘Smith has not ceased from eating iron, because Smith does not exist ‒ cf. Hamlet sees that his father is on the rampants, but the sight is not reciprocated ‒ Macbeth sees that Banquo is near him, but his vision is not reciprocated. Grice is having in mind Hare’s defense of a non-doxastic utterance. In his commentary in PGRICE, Grice expands on this metaphysical construction routine of Humeian projection with the pre-intuitive concept of  ‘not,’ specifying the different stages the intuitive concept undergoes until it becomes fully rationally recostructed, as something like a Fregeian sense. In the centerpiece lecture of the William James set, Grice explores Wilson’s Statement and inference to assign a métier to ‘not,’ and succeeds in finding one. The conversational métier of ‘not’ is explained in terms of the conversational implicatum. By uttering ‘Smith has not been to prison yet,’ U implies that some utterer has, somewhere, sometime, expressed an opinion to the contrary. This is connected by Grice with the ability a rational creature has to possess to survive. The creature has to be able, as Sheffer notes, to deny this or that. Grices notable case is the negation of a conjunction. So it may well be that the most rational role for ‘not’ is not primary in that it is realised once less primitive operators are introduced. Is there a strict conceptual distinction, as Grice suggests, between negation and privation? If privation involves or presupposes negation, one might appeal to something like Modified Occam’s Razor (M. O. R.), do not multiply negations beyond necessity. In his choice of examples, Grice seems to be implicating negation for an empirically verifiable, observational utterance, such as U does not see that the pillar box is blue not because U does not exist, but on the basis of U’s experiencing, knowing, believing and indeed seeing that the pillar box is red. This is a negation, proper, or simpliciter (even if it involves a sense-datum phi2 incompatible with sense-datum phi1. Privation, on the other hand, would be involved in an utterance arrived via introspection, such as U does not hear that the bell is ringing on the basis of his knowing that he is aware of the absence, simpliciter, of an experience to that effect. Aristotle, or some later Aristotelian, may have made the same distinction, within apophasis between negation or negatio and privation or privatio. Or not. Of course, Grice is ultimately looking for the rationale behind the conversational implicatum in terms of a principle of conversational helpfulness underlying his picture of conversation as rational co-operation. To use his Pological jargon in Method, in Pirotese and Griceish There is the P₁, who potches that the obble is not fang, but feng. P₁ utters p explicitly conveying that p. P₂ alternatively feels like negating that. By uttering ~p, P₂ explicitly conveys that ~p. P₁ volunteers to P₂, ~p, explicitly conveying that ~p. Not raining! Or No bull. You are safe. Surely a rational creature should be capable to deny this or that, as Grice puts it in Indicative conditionals. Interestingly, Grice does not consider, as Gazdar does, under Palmer), he other possible unitary functors (three in a standard binary assignation of values) – just negation, which reverses the satisfactory-value of the radix or neustic.  In terms of systematics, thus, it is convenient to regard Grices view on negation and privation as his outlook on the operators as this or that procedure by the utterer that endows him with this or that basic expressive, operative power. In this case, the expressive power is specifically related to his proficiency with not. The proficiency is co-related with this or that device in general, whose vernacular expression will bear a formal counterpart. Many of Grices comments addressed to this more general topic of this or that satisfactoriness-preserving operator apply to not, and thus raise the question about the explicitum or explicatum of not. A Griceian should not be confused. The fact that Grice does not explicitly mention not or negation when exploring the concept of a generic formal device does not mean that what he says about formal device may not be particularised to apply to not or negation. His big concession is that Whitehead and Russell (and Peano before them) are right about the explicitum or explicatum of not being ~, even if Grice follows Hilbert and Ackermann in dismissing Peirces arrow for pragmatic reasons. This is what Grice calls the identity thesis to oppose to Strawsons divergence thesis between not and ~. More formally, by uttering Not-p, U explicitly conveys that ~p. Any divergence is explained via the implicatum. A not utterance is horribly uninformative, and not each of them is of philosophical interest. Grice joked with Bradley and Searles The man in the next table is not lighting the cigarette with a twenty-dollar bill, the denotatum of the Subjects being a Texas oilman in his country club. The odd implicatum is usually to the effect that someone thought otherwise. In terms of Cook Wilson, the role of not has more to do with the expressive power of a rational creature to deny a molecular or composite utterance such as p and q Grice comments that in the case of or, the not may be addressed, conversationally, to the utterability of the disjunction. His example involves the logical form Not (p or q). It is not the case that Wilson or Heath will be prime minister. Theres always hope for Nabarro or Thorpe.  The utterer is, at the level of the implicatum, not now contradicting what his co-conversationalist has utterered. The utterer is certainly not denying that Wilson will be Prime Minister. It is, rather, that the utterer U wishes not to assert or state, say, what his co-conversant has asserted, but, instead, to substitute a different statement or claim which the utterer U regards as preferable under the circumstances. Grice calls this substitutive disagreement. This was a long-standing interest of Grices: an earlier manuscript reads Wilson or MacMillan will be prime minister. Let us take a closer look at the way Grice initially rephrases his two scenarios involving not as attached to an auditory and a visual sense datum. I do not hear that the bell is ringing is rationally justified by the absence or absentia of the experience of hearing it. I do not see that the pillar box is blue is rationally justified by U’s sensing that the pillar box is red. The latter depends on Kant’s concept of the synthetic a priori with which Grice tests with his childrens playmates. Can a sweater be red and green all over? No stripes allowed! Can a pillar box be blue and red all over? Cf. Ryles’ssymposium on negation with Mabbott, for the Aristotelian Society, a source for Grices reflexion. Ryle later discussing Bradleys internal relations, reflects that that the proposition, ‘This pillar box is only red’ is incompatible with ‘This pillar box is only blue.’ As bearing this or that conversational implicata, Grices two scenarios can be re-phrased, unhelpfully, as I am unhearing a noise and That is  unred. The apparently unhelpful point bears however some importance. It shows that negation and not are not co-extensive. The variants also demonstrate that the implicatum, qua conversational, rather than conventional, is non-detachable. Not is hardly primtive pure Anglo-Saxon. It is the rather convoluted abbreviation of ne-aught. Its ne that counts as the proper, pure, amorphous Anglo-Saxon negation, as in a member of parliament (if not a horse) uttering nay.  Grices view of conversation as rational co-operation, as displayed in this or that conversational implicatum necessitates that the implicatum is never attached to this or that expression. Here the favoured, but not exclusive expression, is not, since Strawson uses it. But the vernacular provides a wealth of expressive ways to be negative! Grice possibly chose negation not because, as with this or that nihilistic philosopher, such as Schopenhauer, or indeed Parmenides, he finds the concept a key one. But one may well say that this is the Schopenhauerian or the Parmenidesian in Griceian. Grice is approaching not in linguistic, empiricist, or conceptual key. He is applying the new Oxonian methodology: the reductive analysis alla Russell in terms of logical construction. Grices implies priority is with by uttering x, by which U explicitly conveys that ~p, U implicitly conveys that q. The essay thus elaborates on this implicated q. For the record, nihilism was coined by philosopher Jacobi, while the more primitive negatio and privatio is each a time-honoured item in the philosophical lexicon, with which mediaeval this or that speculative grammarian is especially obsessed. Negatio translates the ‘apophasis’ of Aristotle, and has a pretty pedigreed history. The philosophical lexicon has nĕgātĭo, f. negare, which L and S, unhelpfully, render as a denying, denial, negation, Cicero, Sull. 13, 39: negatio inficiatioque facti, id. Part. 29, 102. L and S go on to add that negatio is predicated of to the expression that denies, a negative. Grice would say that L and S should realise that its the utterer who denies. The source L and S give is ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 32, 38. As for Grices other word, there is “prīvātĭo,” f. privare, which again unhelpfully, L and S render as a taking away, privation of a thing. doloris, Cic. Fin. 1, 11, 37, and 38, or pain-free, as Grice might prefer, cf. zero-tolerance. L and S also cite: 2, 9, 28: culpæ, Gell. 2, 6, 10. The negatio-privatio distinction is attested in Grecian, indeed the distinction requires its own entry. For it is Boethius who first renders Aristotle’s ‘hexis’ into ‘habitus’ and Aristotle’s steresis’ into ‘privatio.’ So the the Grecians were never just happy with “ἀπόφασις (A)” and they had to keep multiplying negations beyond necessity. The noun is from “ἀπόφημι.” Now L and S unhepfully render the noun as as denial, negation, adding “oκατάφασις,” for which they cites from The Sophista by Plato (263e), to  give then the definition “ἀπόφασις ἐστιν ἀπόφανσίς τινος ἀπό τινος,” a predication of one thing away from another, i.e. negation of it, for which they provide the source that Grice is relying.  on: Arist. Int.17a25, cf. APo. 72a14; ἀπόφασις τινός, negation, exclusion of a thing,  Pl. Cra. 426d; δύο ἀ. μίαν κατάφασιν ἀποτελοῦσι Luc. Gall.11. If he was not the first to explore philosophically negation, Grice may be regarded as a philosopher who most explored negation as occurring in a that-clause followed by a propositional complexus that contains ~, and as applied to a personal agent, in a lower branch of philosophical psychology. It is also the basis for his linguistic botany. He seems to be trying to help other philosopher not to fall in the trap of thinking that not has a special sense. The utterer means that ~p. In what ways is that to be interpreted? Grice confessed to never been impressed by Ayer. The crudities and dogmatisms seemed too pervasive. Is Grice being an empiricist and a verificationist? Let us go back to This is not red and I am not hearing a noise. Grices suggestion is that the incompatible fact offering a solution to this problem is the fact that the utterer of “Someone, viz. I, does not hear that the bell tolls” is indicating (and informing) that U merely entertains the positive (affirmative) proposition, Someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls, without having an attitude of certainty towards it. More generally, Grice is proposing, like Bradley and indeed Bosanquet, who Grice otherwise regards as a minor philosopher, a more basic Subjects-predicate utterance. The α is not β. The utterer states I do not know that α is β if and only if every present mental or souly process, of mine, has some characteristic incompatible with the knowledge that α is β. One may propose a doxastic weaker version, replacing the dogmatic Oxonian know with believe. Grices view of compatibility is an application of the Sheffer stroke that Grice will later use in accounts of not. ~p iff p|p or ~p ≡df p|p. But then, as Grice points out, Sheffer is hardly Griceian. If Pirotese did not contain a unitary negative device, there would be many things that a P should be able to express that the P should be unable to express unless Pirotese contained some very artificially-looking dyadic functor like one or other of the strokes, or the P put himself to a good deal of trouble to find, more or less case by case, complicated forms of expression, as Platos Parmenides does, involving such expressions as other than, or incompatible with. V. Wiggins on Platos Parmenides in a Griceian key. Such a complicate form of expression would infringe the principle of conversational helpfulness, notably in its desideratum of conversational clarity, or conversational perspicuity [sic], where the sic is Grices seeing that unsensitive Oxonians sometimes mistake perspicuity for the allegedly, cognate perspicacity (L. perspicacitas, like perspicuitas, from perspicere). Grice finds the unitary brevity of not-p attractive. Then theres the pretty Griceian idea of the pregnant proposition. Im not hearing a nose is pregnant, as Occam has it, with I am hearing a noise. A scholastic and mediæval philosopher loves to be figurative. Grices main proposal may be seen as drawing on this or that verificationist assumption by Ayer, who actually has a later essay on not falsely connecting it with falsity. Grices proposed better analysis would please Ayer, had Grice been brought on the right side of the tracks, since it can be Subjectsed to a process of verification, on the understanding that either perception through the senses (It is red) or introspection (Every present mental or souly process of mine ) is each an empirical phenomenon. But there are subtleties to be drawn. At Oxford, Grices view on negation will influence philosophers like Wiggins, and in a negative way, Cohen, who raises the Griceian topic of the occurrence of negation in embedded clauses, found by Grice to be crucial for the rational genitorial justification of not as a refutation of the composite p and q), and motivating Walker with a reply (itself countered by Cohen ‒ Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended?). So problems are not absent, as they should not! Grice re-read Peirces definition or reductive analysis of not and enjoyed it!  Peirce discovers the logical connective Grice calls the Sheffer Stroke, as well as the related connective nor (also called Joint Denial, and quite appropriately Peirces Arrow, with other Namess in use being Quines Arrow or Quines Dagger and today usually symbolized by “/”). The relevant manuscript, numbered MS 378 in a subsequent edition and titled A Boolian [sic] Algebra with One Constant, MS 378, was actually destined for discarding and was salvaged for posterity A fragmentary text by Peirce also shows familiarity with the remarkable meta-logical characteristics that make a single function functionally complete, and this is also the case with Peirces unfinished Minute Logic: these texts are published posthumously. Peirce designates the two truth functions, nand and nor, by using the symbol “” which he called ampheck, coining this neologism from the Grecian ἀμφήκης, of equal length in both directions. Peirces editors disambiguate the use of symbols by assigning “” to the connective we call Sheffers troke while preserving the symbol “/” for nor.  In MS 378, A Boolian Algebra with One Constant, by Peirce, tagged “to be discarded” at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, Peirce reduces the number of logical operators to one constant. Peirce states that his notation uses the minimum number of different signs and shows for the first time the possibility of writing both universal and particular propositions with but one copula. Peirce’s notation is later termed Sheffers stroke, and is also well-known as the nand operation, in Peirce’s terms the operation by which two propositions written in a pair are considered to be both denied. In the same manuscript, Peirce also discovers what is the expressive completeness of ‘nor,’ indeed today rightly recognized as the Peirce arrow. Like Sheffer, of Cornell, independently does later (only to be dismissed by Hilbert and Ackermann), Peirce understands that these two connectives can be used to reduce all mathematically definable connectives (also called primitives and constants) of propositional logic. This means that all definable connectives of propositional logic can be defined by using only Sheffers stroke or nor as the single connective. No other connective (or associated function) that takes one or two variables as inputs has this property. Standard, two-valued propositional logic has no unary functions that have the remarkable property of functional completeness. At first blush, availability of this option ensures that economy of resources can be obtained—at least in terms of how many functions or connectives are to be included as undefined. Unfortunately, as Grice, following Hilbert and Ackermann realise, there is a trade-off between this philosophical semantic gain in economy of symbolic resources and the pragmatically unwieldy length and rather counterintuitive, to use Grices phrase, appearance of the formulas that use only the one connective.  It is characteristic of his logical genius, however, and emblematic of his rather under-appreciated, surely not by Grice, contributions to the development of semiotics that Peirce grasps the significance of functional completeness and figure out what truth functions — up to arity 2 — are functionally complete for two-valued propositional logic, never mind helping the philosopher to provide a reductive analysis of negation that Grice is looking for. Strictly, this is the property of weak functional completeness, given that we disregard whether constants or zero-ary functions like 1 or 0 can be defined. Peirce subscribes to a semeiotic view, popular in the Old World with Ogden and Welby, and later Grice, according to which the fundamental nature and proper tasks of the formal study of communication are defined by the rules set down for the construction and manipulation of symbolic resources. A proliferation of symbols for the various connectives that are admitted into the signature of a logical system suffers from a serious defect on this view. The symbolic grammar fails to match or represent the logical fact of interdefinability of the connectives, and reductive analysis of all to one. Peirce is willing sometimes to accept constructing a formal signature for two-valued propositional logic by using the two-members set of connectives, which is minimally functionally complete. This means that these two connectives — or, if we are to stick to an approach that emphasizes the notational character of logical analysis, these two symbols —are adequate expressively. Every mathematically definable connective of the logic can be defined by using only these two. And the set is minimally functionally complete in that neither of these connectives can be defined by the other (so, as we say, they are both independent relative to each other.) The symbol   can be viewed as representing a constant truth function (either unary or binary) that returns the truth value 0 for any input or inputs. Or it can be regarded as a constant, which means that it is a zero=ary (zero-input) function, a degenerate function, which refers to the truth value 0. Although not using, as Grice does, Peanos terminology, Peirce takes the second option. This set has cardinality 2 (it has exactly 2 members) but it is not the best we can do. Peirces discovery of what we have called the Sheffer functions or strokes (anachronistically and unfairly to Peirce, as Grice notes, but bowing to convention) shows that we can have a set of cardinality 1 (a one-member set or a so-called singleton) that is minimally functionally complete with respect to the definable connectives of two-valued propositional logic. Thus, either one of the following sets can do. The sets are functionally complete and, because they have only one member each, we say that the connectives themselves have the property of functional completeness. / is the symbol of Sheffers stroke or nand and /is the symbol of the Peirce Arrow or nor. Grice stipulates as such, even though he does not introduce his grammar formally. It is important to show ow these functions can define other functions. Algebraically approached, this is a matter of functional composition In case one wonders why the satisfaction with defining the connectives of the set that comprises the symbols for negation, inclusive disjunction, and conjunction, there is an explanation. There is an easy, although informal, way to show that this set is functionally complete. It is not minimally functionally complete because nor and nand are inter-definable. But it is functionally complete. Thus, showing that one can define these functions suffices for achieving functional completeness. Definability should be thought as logical equivalence. One connective can be defined by means of others if and only if the formulae in the definition (what is defined and what is doing the defining) are logically equivalent. Presuppose the truth-tabular definitions of the connectives.  Grice enjoyed that. Meanwhile, at Corpus, Grice is involved in serious philosophical studies under the tutelage of Hardie. While his philosophical socialising is limited, having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, first at Corpus, and then at Merton, and ending at St. Johns, Grice fails to attend the seminal meetings at All Souls held on Thursday evenings by the play group of the seven (Austin, Ayer, Berlin, Hampshire, MacDermott, MacNabb, and Woozley). Three of them will join Grice in the new play group after the war: Austin, Hampshire, and Woozley. But at St. Johns Grice tutors Strawson, and learns all about the linguistic botany methodology on his return from the navy. Indeed, his being appointed Strawson as his tutee starts a life-long friendship and collaboration. There are separate entries for the connectives: conjunction, disjunction, and conditional. Abdicatum -- double negation. 1 The principle, also called the law of double negation, that every proposition is logically equivalent to its double negation. Thus, the proposition that Roger is a rabbit is equivalent to the proposition that Roger is not not a rabbit. The law holds in classical logic but not for certain non-classical concepts of negation. In intuitionist logic, for example, a proposition implies, but need not be implied by, its double negation. 2 The rule of inference, also called the rule of double negation, that permits one to infer the double negation of A from A, and vice versa.  Refs.: Allusions to negation are scattered, notably in Essay 4 in WoW, but also in “Method in philosophical psychology,” and “Prejudices and predilections” (repr. in “Conception”), and under semantics and syntax. While one can draw a skull communicating that there is danger; one can then cross out the skull indicating that there is no danger. So the emissor communicates that there is no danger. Or rather, the emissor communicates that it is not the case that there is danger. Since this involves a ‘that’-clause, it is not unreasonable to speak of a ‘propositio,’ and such would be ‘abdicativa.’ In his earliest reflections on the topic, Grice draws on sub-perceptual illustrations rendered more or less as involving two items of ‘propositio dedicativa’ and their negation and privation: ‘The bell tolls in Gb” and “The pillar box is red.” For the latter, “The pillar box is not blue” can be uttered as a conclusion (“If the pillar box is red, it is not the case that the pillar box is blue.”). For the former case, “The bell tolls in Ab” may do. “If the bell tolls in Gb, it is not the case that the bell tolls in Ab.” For Grice, the métier of a propositio abidcativa has to do with the abdicatum of a conjunctum. For a more primitive rationale, Grice does not see the complete justification. That means that Grice sees that there are OPTIONS TO introducing a ‘propositio abdicativa’. These options are of two kinds. One is the ‘stroke.’ If you draw a skull, a stroke, and a skull, you communicate that it is not the case there is danger. The other involves “other than” or “incompatible.” Again, drawsing a skull and writing INCOMPATIBLE and drawing another skull and you communicate that it is not the case that there is danger. Refs.: There are specific essays of different dates, in s. V, in two separate folders, in BANC.

abductum: an implicatum is abductum, i. e., it is not something that it is inductum or deductum. It is indeed a demonstratum, an argumentum, but qua abductum. Grice favours the form ‘implicatum’ rather than ‘implicature’ in that the implicatum is strictly what follows a ‘that’-clause. Ditto for ‘abductum.’ As opposed to in-duction and de-duction, abduction refers to canons of reasoning for the discovery, as opposed to the justification, of scientific hypotheses or theories. Reichenbach distinguished the context of justification and the context of discovery, arguing that philosophy legitimately is concerned only with the former, which concerns verification and confirmation, whereas the latter is a matter for psychology. Thus he and other logical positivists claimed there are inductive logics of justification but not logics for discovery. Both hypotheticodeductive and Bayesian or other probabilistic inductive logics of justification have been proposed. Close examination of actual scientific practice increasingly reveals justificatory arguments and procedures that call into question the adequacy of such logics. N. R. Hanson distinguishes the reasons for accepting a specific hypothesis from the reasons for suggesting that the correct hypothesis will be of a particular kind. For the latter he attempted to develop logics of retroductive or abductive reasoning that stressed analogical reasoning, but did not succeed in convincing many that these logics were different in kind from logics of justification. Today few regard the search for rigorous formal logics of discovery as promising. Rather, the search has turned to looking for “logics” in some weaker sense. Heuristic procedures, strategies for discovery, and the like are explored. Others have focused on investigating rationality in the growth of scientific knowledge, say, by exploring conditions under which research traditions or programs are progressive or degenerating. Some have explored recourse to techniques from cognitive science or artificial intelligence. Claims of success generally are controversial.

abélard: Grice thought there was a good testimony to consider “Abailard” as a proto-Griceian. pierre abailard, philosopher whose writings, particularly Theologia Christiana, constitute one of the more impressive attempts of the medieval period to use logical techniques to explicate Christian dogmas. He was born of a minor noble family in Brittany and studied logic and theology under some of the most notable teachers of the early twelfth century, including Roscelin, William of Champeaux, and Anselm of Laon. He rapidly eclipsed his teachers in logic and attracted students from all over Europe. His forays into theology were less enthusiastically received. Twice his views on the Trinity were condemned as heretical. Abelard led a dramatic life punctuated by bitter disputes with his opponents and a dangerous and celebrated love affair with Héloïse. Much of this story is told in his autobiographical work, Historia calamitatum. Abelard’s two most important Griceian works in logic are his “Logica ingredientibus” and his “Dialectica.” In these treatises and others he is the first medieval Scholastic to make full use of Aristotle’s “De interpretation” and Boethius’s commentaries on it to produce a sophisticated theory of the signification of words and sentences. The theory distinguishes the signification of an expression both from what the expression names and the idea in the mind of the emissor associated with the expression. Abélard allows a role for mental images in thinking, but he carefully avoids claiming that these are what words signify. In this he is very much aware of the pitfalls of subjectivist theories of meaning. His positive doctrines on what words signify tie in closely with his views on the signification of propositions and universals. For Abelard propositions are sentences that are either true or false; what they say their dicta is what they signify and these dicta are the primary bearers of truth and falsity. Abelard developed a genuinely propositional logic, the first since the Stoics. A universal, on the other hand, is a common noun or adjective, and what it means is what the verb phrase part of a proposition signifies. This is a sort of truncated dictum, which Abelard variously called a status, nature, or property. Neither status nor dicta are things, Abelard said, but they are mind-independent objects of thought. Abelard was particularly devastating in his attacks on realist theories of universals, but his view that universals are words was not meant to deny the objectivity of our knowledge of the world. Abelard’s theories in logic and ontology went far beyond the traditional ideas that had been handed down from Aristotle through the mediation of the late ancient commentators, Boethius in particular. They could have formed the basis of a fundamentally new synthesis in Western logic, but when more of the Aristotelian corpus became available in Western Europe during the twelfth century, concentration shifted to assimilating this already fully elaborated system of ideas. Consequently, Abelard’s influence on later Scholastic thought, though noticeable, is not nearly as great as one might expect, given the acuteness and originality of his insights. 

absolutum: If we say, emissor E communicates that p, what is its relatum? Nothing. The theory of communication NEEDS to be relative. To search for the absolute in the theory of communication is otiose, for in communication there is an unavoidable relatum, which is the emissor himself. Now Grice is interested in an emissor that communicates that p is absolute. So we need absolute and meta-absolute. I.e. if the emissor can communicate that ‘p’ is absolute, he has more ground to exert his authority into inducing in his addressee that the addressee believe what he is intended to believe. The absolutum is one, unlike Grice’s absoluta, or absolutes. Trust Grice to pluralise Bradley’s absolute. While it is practical to restore the root of ‘axis’ for Grice’s value (validum, optimum), it is not easy to find a grecianism for the absolutum absolute. Lewis and Short have “absolvere,” which they render as ‘to loosen from, to make loose, set free, detach, untie (usu. trop., the fig. being derived from fetters, qs. a vinculis solvere, like “vinculis exsolvere,” Plaut. Truc. 3, 4, 10). So that makes sense. Lewis and Short also have “absolutum,” which they render as“absolute, unrestricted, unconditional,” – as in Cicero: “hoc mihi videor videre, esse quasdam cum adjunctione necessitudines, quasdam simplices et absolutas” (Inv. 2, 57, 170). Grice repatedly uses the plural ‘abosolutes,’ and occasionally the singular. Obviously, Grice has in mind the absolute-relative distinction, not wanting to be seen as relativist, unless it is a constructionist relativist. Grice refers to Bradley in ‘Prolegomena,’ and has an essay on the ‘absolutes.’ It is all back to when German philosopher F. Schiller, of Corpus, publishes “Mind!” Its frontispiece is a portrait of the absolute, “very much like the Bellman’s completely blank map in The hunting of the snark.” The absolutum is the sum of all being, an emblem of idealism. Idealism dominates Oxford for part of Grice’s career. The realist mission, headed by Wilson, is to clean up philosophy’s act Bradley’s Appearance and reality, mirrors the point of the snark. Bradley uses the example of a lump of sugar. It all begins to crumble, In Oxonian parlance, the absolute is a boo-jum, you see. Bradley is clear here, to irritate Ayer: the absolutum is, put simply, a higher unity, pure spirit. “It can never and it enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.” Especially at Corpus, tutees are aware of Hartmann’s absolutum. Barnes thinks he can destroy with his emotivism. Hartmann, otherwise a naturalist, is claims that this or that value exists, not in the realm (Reich) of nature, but as an ideal essence of a thing, but in a realm which is not less, but more real than nature. For Hartmann, if a value exists, it is not relative, but absolute, objective, and rational, and so is a value judgment. Like Grice, for Hartmann, the relativity dissolves upon conceiving and constructing a value as an absolutum, not a relativum. The essence of a thing need not reduce to a contingence. To conceive the essence of a table is to conceive what the métier of a table. Like Hartmann, Grice is very ‘systematik’ axiologist, and uses ‘relative’ variously. Already in the Oxford Philosophical Society, Grice conceives of an utterer’s meaning and his communicatum is notoriously relative. It is an act of communication relative to an agent. For Grice, there is hardly a realm of un-constructed reality, so his construction of value as an absolutum comes as no surprise. Grice is especially irritated by Julie Andrews in Noël Coward’s “Relative values” and this Oxonian cavalier attitude he perceives in Barnes and Hare, a pinko simplistic attitude against any absolute. Unlike Hartmann, Grice adopts not so much a neo-Kantian as an Ariskantian tenet. The ratiocinative part of the soul of a personal being is designated the proper judge in the power structure of the soul. Whatever is relative to this particular creature successfully attains, ipso facto, absolute value. The term’The absolute,’ used by idealists to describe the one independent reality of which all things are an expression. Kant used the adjective ‘absolute’ to characterize what is unconditionally valid. He claimed that pure reason searched for absolute grounds of the understanding that were ideals only, but that practical reason postulated the real existence of such grounds as necessary for morality. This apparent inconsistency led his successors to attempt to systematize his view of reason. To do this, Schelling introduced the term ‘the Absolute’ for the unconditioned ground and hence identity of subject and object. Schelling was criticized by Hegel, who defined the Absolute as spirit: the logical necessity that embodies itself in the world in order to achieve self-knowledge and freedom during the course of history. Many prominent nineteenthcentury British and  idealists, including Bosanquet, Royce, and Bradley, defended the existence of a quasi-Hegelian absolute.  Refs.: For a good overview of emotivism in Oxford v. Urmson’s The emotive theory of ethics. Grice, “Values, morals, absolutes, and the metaphysical,” The H. P. Grice Papers, Series V (Topical), c 9-f. 24, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

abstractum: In an emissor draws a skull to communicate that there is danger, the addressee comes to think that there is danger, in the air. Let’s formalise that proposition as “The air is dangerous.” Is that abstract? It is: it involves two predicates which may be said to denote two abstracta: the property of being air, and the property of being dangerous. So abstracta are unavoidable in a communicatum, that reaches the sophistication of requiring a ‘that’-clause.  The usual phrase in Grice is ‘abstract’ as adjective and applied to ‘entity’ as anything troublesome to nominalism. At Oxford, Grice belongs to the class for members whose class have no members. If class C and class C have the same members, they are the same. A class xx is a set just in case there is a class yy such that x∈yx∈y. A class which is not a set is an improper, not a proper class, or a well-ordered one, as Burali-Forti puts it in ‘Sulle classi ben ordinate.’ Grice reads Cantor's essay and finds an antinomy on the third page. He mmediately writes his uncle “I am reading Cantor and find an antinomy.” The antinomy is obvious and concerns the class of all classes that are not members of themselves. This obviously leads to a pragmatic contradiction, to echo Moore, since this class must be and not be a member of itself and not a member of itself. Grice had access to the Correspondence of Zermelo and re-wrote the antinomy.Which leads Grice to Austin. For Austin thinks he can lead a class, and that Saturday morning is a good time for a class of members whose classes have no members, almost an insult. Grice is hardly attached to canonicals, not even first-order predicate logic with identity and class theory. Grice sees extensionalism asa a position imbued with the spirit of nominalism yet dear to the philosopher particularly impressed by the power of class theory. But Grice is having in mind the concretum-abstractum distinction, and as an Aristotelian, he wants to defend a category as an abstractum or universalium. Lewis and Short have ‘concrescere,’ rendered as ‘to grow together; hence with the prevailing idea of uniting, and generally of soft or liquid substances which thicken; to harden, condense, curdle, stiffen, congeal, etc. (very freq., and class. in prose and poetry).’ For ‘abstractum,’ they have ‘abstrăhere, which they render as ‘to draw away from a place or person, to drag or pull away.’ The ability to see a horse (hippos) without seeing horseness (hippotes), as Plato remarks, is a matter of stupidity. Yet, perhaps bue to the commentary by his editors, Grice feels defensive about proposition. Expanding on an essay on the propositional complexum,’ the idea is that if we construct a complexum step by step, in class-theoretical terms, one may not committed to an ‘abstract entity.’ But how unabstract is class theory? Grice hardly attaches to the canonicals of first-order predicate calculus with identity together with class theory. An item i is a universalium and 'abstractum' iff i fails to occupy a region in space and time. This raises a few questions. It is conceivable that an items that is standardly regarded as an 'abstractum' may nonetheless occupy a volumes of space and time.  The school of latter-day nominalism is for ever criticised at Oxford, and Grice is no exception. The topic of the abstractum was already present in Grice’s previous generation, as in the essay by Ryle on the systematically misleading expression, and the category reprinted in Flew. For it to be, a particular concretum individuum or prima substantia has to be something, which is what an abstractum universaium provides. A universal is part of the ‘essentia’ of the particular. Ariskants motivation for for coining “to katholou” is doxastic. Aristotle claims that to have a ‘doxa’ requires there to be an abstract universalium, not apart from (“para”), but holding of (“kata”) a concretum individuum. Within the “this” (“tode”) there is an aspect of “something” (“ti.”). Aristotle uses the “hêi” (“qua”) locution, which plays a crucial role in perceiving. Ariskant’s remark that a particular horse is always a horse (with a species and a genus) may strike the non-philosopher as trivial. Grice strongly denies that its triviality is unenlightening, and he loves to quote from Plato. Liddell and Scott have “ἱππότης,” rendered as “horse-nature, the concept of horse,” Antisth. et Pl. ap. Simp.in Cat. 208.30,32, Sch. Arist Id.p.167F. Then there is the ‘commensurate universal,’ the major premise is a universal proposition. Grice provides a logical construction of such lexemes as “abstractum” and “universalium,” and “concretum” and “individuum,” or “atomon” in terms of two relations, “izzing” and “hazzing.” x is an individuum or atomon iff nothing other than x izzes x. Austin is Austin, and Strawson is Strawson. Now, x is a primum individuum, proton atomon, or prima substantia, iff x is an individuum, and nothing hazzes x.  One needs to distinguish between a singular individuum and a particular (“to kathekaston,” particulare) simpliciter. Short and Lewis have “partĭcŭlāris, e, adj.” which they render, unhelpfully, as “particular,” but also as “of or concerning a part, partial, particular.” “Propositiones aliae universales, aliae particulares, ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 35, 34:  partĭcŭlārĭter is particularly, ADogm. Plat. 3, p. 33, 32; opp. “generaliter,” Firm. Math. 1, 5 fin.; opp. “universaliter,” Aug. Retract. 1, 5 fin. Cf. Strawson, “Particular and general,” crediting Grice twice; the second time about a fine point of denotatum: ‘the tallest man that ever lived, lives, or will live.” To define a ‘particular,’ you need to introduce, as Ariskant does, the idea of predication. (∀x)(x is an individuum)≡◻(∀y)(y izzes x)⊃(x izzes y). (∀x)(x izz a particulare(≡◻(∀y)(x izzes predicable of y)⊃(x izzes y Λ y izzes x).  Once we have defined a ‘particular,’ we can go and define a ‘singulare,’ a ‘tode ti,’ a ‘this what.” (∀x)(x izzes singulare)⊃(x izzes an individuum). There’s further implicate to come. (∀x)(x izzes a particulare)⊃(x izzes an individuum)).  The concern by Grice with the abstractum as a “universalium in re” can be traced back to his reading of Aristotle’s Categoriæ, for his Lit. Hum., and later with Austin and Strawson. Anything but a ‘prima substantia,’ ‒ viz. essence, accident, attribute, etc.  ‒ may be said to belong in the realm of the abstractum or universalium qua predicable. As such, an abstractum and univeralium is not a spatio-temporal continuant. However, a category shift or ‘subjectification,’ by Grice allows a universalium as subject. The topic is approached formally by means of the notion of order. First-order predicate calculus ranges over this or that spatio-temporal continuant individual, in Strawson’s use of the term. A higher-order predicate calculus ranges over this or that abstractum, a feature, and beyond. An abstractum universalium is only referred to in a second-order predicate calculus. This is Grice’s attempt to approach Aristkant in pragmatic key. In his exploration of the abstractum, Grice is challenging extensionalism, so fashionable in the New World within The School of Latter-Day Nominalists. Grice is careful here since he is well aware that Bennett has called him a meaning-nominalist. Strictly, in Griceian parlance, an ‘abstractum is an entity object lacking spatiotemporal properties, but supposed to have being, to exist, or in medieval Scholastic terminology to subsist. Abstracta, sometimes collected under the category of universals, include mathematical objects, such as numbers, sets, and geometrical figures, propositions, properties, and relations. Abstract entities are said to be abstracted from particulars. The abstract triangle has only the properties common to all triangles, and none peculiar to any particular triangles; it has no definite color, size, or specific type, such as isosceles or scalene. Abstracta are admitted to an ontology by Quine’s criterion if they must be supposed to exist or subsist in order to make the propositions of an accepted theory true. Properties and relations may be needed to account for resemblances among particulars, such as the redness shared by all red things. Propositions as the abstract contents or meanings of thoughts and expressions of thought are sometimes said to be necessary to explain translation between languages, and other semantic properties and relations. Historically, abstract entities are associated with Plato’s realist ontology of Ideas or Forms. For Plato, these are the abstract and only real entities, instantiated or participated in by spatiotemporal objects in the world of appearance or empirical phenomena. Aristotle denied the independent existence of abstract entities, and redefined a diluted sense of Plato’s Forms as the secondary substances that inhere in primary substances or spatiotemporal particulars as the only genuine existents. The dispute persisted in medieval philosophy between realist metaphysicians, including Augustine and Aquinas, who accepted the existence of abstracta, and nominalists, such as Ockham, who maintained that similar objects may simply be referred to by the same name without participating in an abstract form. In modern philosophy, the problem of abstracta has been a point of contention between rationalism, which is generally committed to the existence of abstract entities, and empiricism, which rejects abstracta because they cannot be experienced by the senses. Berkeley and Hume argued against Locke’s theory of abstract ideas by observing that introspection shows all ideas to be particular, from which they concluded that we can have no adequate concept of an abstract entity; instead, when we reason about what we call abstracta we are actually thinking about particular ideas delegated by the mind to represent an entire class of resemblant particulars, from which we may freely substitute others if we mistakenly draw conclusions peculiar to the example chosen. Abstract propositions were defended by Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century as the meanings of thought in language and logic. Dispute persists about the need for and nature of abstract entities, but many philosophers believe they are indispensable in metaphysics.  Refs.: For pre-play group reflections see Ryle’s Categories and Systematically misleading expressions. Explorations by other members of Grice’s playgroup are Strawson, ‘Particular and general’ and Warnock, ‘Metaphysics in logic,’ The main work by Grice at Oxford on the ‘abstractum’ is with Austin (f. 15) and later with Strawson (f.23). Grice, “Aristotle’s Categoriae,” The H. P. Grice Papers, S. II, c. 6-f. 15 and c. 6, f. 23, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of California, Berkeley.

acceptum: As a meta-ethicist, like Hare, Grice is interested in providing criteria for acceptability. He proposes three formal universalizability, conceptual universalizability, and applicational universalizability. This is Grice’s Golden Rule, which is Biblical in nature. Grice needs a past participle for a ‘that’-clause of something ‘thought’. He has ‘creditum’ for what is believed, and ‘desideratum’ for what is desired. So he uses ‘acceptum’ for what is accepted, a neutral form to cover both the desideratum and the creditum. Short and Lewis have ‘accipio,’ f. ‘capio.’ Grice uses the abbreviation “Acc” for this. As he puts it in the Locke lectures: "An idea I want to explore is that we represent the sentences ‘Smith should be recovering his health by now’ and ‘Smith should join the cricket club’ as having the following structures. First, a common "rationality" operator 'Acc', to be heard as "it is reasonable that", "it is acceptABLE that", "it ought to be that", "it should be that", or in some other similar way.Next, one or other of two mode operators, which in the case of the first are to be written as '⊢' and in the case of the second are to be written as '!.’ Finally a 'radical', to be represented by 'r' or some other lower-case letter. The structure for the second is ‘Acc + ⊢ + r. For the second, ‘Acc + ! + r,’ with each symbol falling within the scope of its predecessor. Grice is not a psychologist, but he speaks of the ‘soul.’ He was a philosopher engaged in philosophical psychology. The psychological theory which Grice envisages would be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests e. g. on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to another creature because of a concern for the other creature. Within such a theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the creatures Subjects to the theory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory and so of the theory itself, motivations which the creatures would or should regard as justified.  Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, I think, can matters of evaluation, and so, of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all. If I conjecture aright, then, the entrenched system contains the materials needed to justify its own entrenchment; whereas no rival system contains a basis for the justification of anything at all. We should recall that the first rendering that Liddell and Scott give for “ψυχή” is “life;” the tripartite division of “ψ., οἱ δὲ περὶ Πλάτωνα καὶ Ἀρχύτας καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ Πυθαγόρειοι τὴν ψ. τριμερῆ ἀποφαίνονται, διαιροῦντες εἰς λογισμὸν καὶ θυμὸν καὶ ἐπιθυμίαν,” Pl.R.439e sqq.; in Arist. “ἡ ψ. τούτοις ὥρισται, θρεπτικῷ, αἰσθητικῷ, διανοητικῷ, κινήσει: πότερον δὲ τοὔτων ἕκαστόν ἐστι ψ. ἢ ψυχῆς μόριον;” de An.413b11, cf. PA641b4; “ἡ θρεπτικὴ ψ.” Id.de An.434a22, al.; And Aristotle also has Grice’s favourite, ‘psychic,’ ψυχικός , ή, όν, “of the soul or life, spiritual, opp. “σωματικός, ἡδοναί” Arist.EN1117b28. The compound “psichiologia” is first used in "Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae," (in Bozicevic-Natalis, Vita Marci Maruli Spalatensis). A footnote in “Method,” repr. in “Conception” dates Grice’s lectures at Princeton. Grice is forever grateful to Carnap for having coined ‘pirot,’ or having thought to have coined. Apparently, someone had used the expression before him to mean some sort of exotic fish. He starts by listing this or that a focal problem. The first problem is circularity. He refers to the dispositional behaviouristic analysis by Ryle. The second focal problem is the alleged analytic status of a psychological law. One problem concerns some respect for Grice’s own privileged access to this or that state and this or that avowal of this or that state being incorrigible. The fourth problem concerns the law-selection. He refers to pessimism. He talks of folk-science. D and C are is each predicate-constant in some law L in some psychological theory θ. This or that instantiable of D or C may well be a set or a property or neither. Grices way of Ramseyified naming: There is just one predicate D, such that nomological generalization L introducing D via implicit definition in theory θ obtains. Uniqueness is essential since D is assigned to a names for a particular instantiable (One can dispense with uniqueness by way of Ramseyified description discussed under ‘ramseyified description.’) Grice trusts he is not overstretching Ramsey’s original intention. He applies Ramsey-naming and Ramsey-describing to pain. He who hollers is in pain. Or rather, He who is in pain hollers. (Sufficient but not necessary). He rejects disjunctional physicalism on it sounding harsh, as Berkeley puts it, to say that Smiths brains being in such and such a state is a case of, say, judging something to be true on insufficient evidence. He criticises the body-soul identity thesis on dismissing =s main purpose, to license predicate transfers. Grice wasnt sure what his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association will be about. He chose the banal (i.e. the ordinary-language counterpart of something like a need we ascribe to a squirrel to gobble nuts) and the bizarre: the philosophers construction of need and other psychological, now theoretical terms. In the proceedings, Grice creates the discipline of Pology. He cares to mention philosophers Aristotle, Lewis, Myro, Witters, Ramsey, Ryle, and a few others. The essay became popular when, of all people, Block, cited it as a programme in functionalism, which it is Grices method in functionalist philosophical psychology. Introduces Pology as a creature-construction discipline. Repr. in “Conception,” it reached a wider audience. The essay is highly subdivided, and covers a lot of ground. Grice starts by noting that, contra Ryle, he wants to see psychological predicates as theoretical concepts. The kind of theory he is having in mind is folksy. The first creature he introduces to apply his method is Toby, a squarrel, that is a reconstructed squirrel. Grice gives some principles of Pirotology. Maxims of rational behaviour compound to form what he calls an immanuel, of which The Conversational Immanuel is a part. Grice concludes with a warning against the Devil of Scientism, but acknowledges perhaps he was giving much too credit to Myros influence on this! “Method” in “Conception,” philosophical psychology, Pirotology. The Immanuel section is perhaps the most important from the point of view of conversation as rational cooperation. For he identifies three types of generality: formal, applicational, and content-based. Also, he allows for there being different types of imannuels. Surely one should be the conversational immanuel. Ryle would say that one can have a manual, yet now know how to use it! And theres also the Witters-type problem. How do we say that the conversationalist is following the immanuel? Perhaps the statement is too strong – cf. following a rule – and Grices problems with resultant and basic procedures, and how the former derive from the latter! This connects with Chomsky, and in general with Grices antipathy towards constitutive rules! In “Uncertainty,” Grice warns that his interpretation of Prichards willing that as a state should not preclude a physicalist analysis, but in Method it is all against physicalism.  In Method, from the mundane to the recondite, he is playful enough to say that primacy is no big deal, and that, if properly motivated, he might give a reductive analysis of the buletic in terms of the doxastic. But his reductive analysis of the doxastic in terms of the buletic runs as follows: P judges that p iff P wills as follows: given any situation in which P wills some end E and here are two non-empty classes K₁ and K₂ of action types, such that: the performance by P of an action-type belonging to K₁ realises E₁ just in case p obtains, and the performance by the P of an action type belonging to of K₂ will realise E just in case p does not obtain, and here is no third non-empty class K₃ of action types such that the performance by the P of an action type belonging to  will realise E whether p is true or p is false, in such situation, the P is to will that the P performs some action type belonging to K₁. Creature construction allows for an account of freedom that will metaphysically justify absolute value. Frankfurt has become famous for his second-order and higher-order desires. Grice is exploring similar grounds in what comes out as his “Method” (originally APA presidential address, now repr. in “Conception”). acceptabilitias. Grice generalizes his desirability and credibility functions into a single acceptability. Acceptability has obviously degrees. Grice is thinking of ‘scales’ alla: must, optimal acceptability (for both modalities), should (medium acceptability), and ought (defeasible acceptability). He develops the views in The John Locke lectures, having introduced ‘accept,’ in his BA lecture on ‘Intention and Uncertainty.’ In fact, much as in “Causal Theory” he has an excursus on ‘Implication,’ here he has, also in italics, an excursus on “acceptance.” It seems that a degree of analogy between intending and believing has to be admitted; likewise the presence of a factual commitment in the case of an expression of intention. We can now use the term ‘acceptance’ to express a generic concept applying both to cases of intention and to cases of belief. He who intends to do A and he who believes that he will do A can both be said to accept (or to accept it as being the case) that he will do A. We could now attempt to renovate the three-pronged analysis discussed in Section I, replacing references in that analysis to being sure or certain that one will do A by references to accepting that one will do A. We might reasonably hope thereby to escape the objections raised in Section I, since these objections seemingly centred on special features of the notion of certainty which would NOT attach to the generic notion of acceptance. Hope that the renovated analysis will enable us to meet the sceptic will not immediately be realised, for the sceptic can still as (a) why some cases of acceptance should be specially dispensed from the need for evidential backing, and (b) if certain cases are exempt from evidential justification but not from justification, what sort of justification is here required. Some progress might be achieved by adopting a different analysis of intention in terms of acceptance. We might suggest that ‘Grice intends to go to Harborne’ is very roughly equivalent to the conjunction of ‘Grice accepts-1 that he will go to Harborne’ and ‘Grice accepts-2 that his going to Harborne will result from the effect of his acceptance-1 that he will go to Harborne. The idea is that when a case of acceptance is also a case of belief, the accepter does NOT regard his acceptance as contributing towards the realisation of the state of affairs the future the existence of which he accepts; whereas when a case of acceptance is not a case of belief but a case of intention, he does regard the acceptance as so contributing. Such an analysis clearly enables us to deal with the sceptic with regard to this question (a), viz. why some cases of acceptance (those which are cases of intention) should be specially exempt from the need of evidential backing. For if my going to Harborne is to depend causally on my acceptance that I shall-c go, the possession of satisfactory evidence that I shall-c go will involve possession of the information that I accept that I shall-c go. Obviously, then, I cannot (though others can) come to accept that I shall-c go on the basis of satisfactory evidence, for to have such evidence I should have already to have accepted that I shall-c go. I cannot decide whether or not to accept-1 that I shall-c go on the strength of evidence which includes as a datum that I do accept-1 that I shall-c go. Grice grants that we are still unable to deal with the sceptic as regards question (b), viz. what sort of justification is available for those cases of acceptance which require non-evidential justification even though they involve a factual commitment. Though it is clear that, on this analysis, one must not expect the intender to rely on evidence for his statements of what he will in fact do, we have not provided any account of the nature of the non-evidential considerations which may be adduced to justify such a statement, nor (a fortiori) of the reasons why such considerations might legitimately thought to succeed in justifying such a statement. Refs.: Grice, “Intention and uncertainty,” The British Academy, and BANC, MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library. Refs.: The obvious source is his “Method,” repr. in “Conception,” but the keyword: “philosophical psychology” is useful in the Grice papers. There is a specific essay on the power structure of the soul, The H. P. Grice Collection, BANC.

accidens:  accidentia, if there is accidentia, there is ‘essentia.’ If the Grecians felt like using the prefix ‘syn-‘ for this, why didn’t the Romans use the affix ‘cum-’? There are two: coincidentia, and concomitantia. For Grice, even English is vague here – to the point like he felt that ‘have,’ as in ‘have a property’ seems more of a proper translation of Aristotle’s ‘accidentia.’ Anything else falls under the ‘izz,’ not the ‘hazz.’ Because if the property is not accidental, the subject-item would just cease to exist, so the essential property is something the subject item IZZ, not HAZZ. One philosophical mistake: what is essential is not also accidental. Grice follows Kripke in the account of existence and essence. If Grice’s essence is his rational nature, if Grice becomes irrational, he ceases to exist. Not so for any property that Grice has which is NOT essential. An essential property is the first predicable, in that it is not one of this or that genus that is redundant. So Grice applies ‘accidental,’ like ‘essential’ to ‘attribute,’ and to attribute is to predicate. An essential attribute is manifested by an essential predicate. A non-essential predicate is an accidental attribute. There is the ‘idea’ of the ‘proprium,’ idion, with which Grice has to struggle a little. For what is the implicatum of a ‘proprium’ ascripition? “Man is a laughing animal.” Why would someone say such an idiocy in the first place?! Strictly, from a Griceian point of view, an ‘accidens’ is feature or property of a substance e.g., an organism or an artifact without which the substance could still exist. According to a common essentialist view of persons, Socrates’ size, color, and integrity are among his accidents, while his humanity is not. For Descartes, thinking is the essence of the soul, while any particular thought a soul entertains is an accident. According to a common theology, God has no accidents, since all truths about him flow by necessity from his nature. These examples suggest the diversity of traditional uses of the notion of accident. There is no uniform conception; but the Cartesian view, according to which the accidents are modes of ways of specifying the essence of a substance, is representative. An important ambiguity concerns the identity of accidents: if Plato and Aristotle have the same weight, is that weight one accident say, the property of weighing precisely 70 kilograms or two one accident for Plato, one for Aristotle? Different theorists give different answers and some have changed their minds. Issues about accidents have become peripheral in this century because of the decline of traditional concerns about substance. But the more general questions about necessity and contingency are very much alive. While not one of the labours of Grice, Accidentailism is regarded by Grice as the metaphysical thesis that the occurrence of some events is either not necessitated or not causally determined or not predictable. Many determinists have maintained that although all events are caused, some nevertheless occur accidentally, if only because the causal laws determining them might have been different. Some philosophers have argued that even if determinism is true, some events, such as a discovery, could not have been predicted, on grounds that to predict a discovery is to make the discovery. The term may also designate a theory of individuation: that individuals of the same kind or species are numerically distinct in virtue of possessing some different accidental properties. Two horses are the same in essence but numerically distinct because one of them is black, e.g., while the other is white. Accidentalism presupposes the identity of indiscernibles but goes beyond it by claiming that accidental properties account for numerical diversity within a species. Peter Abelard criticized a version of accidentalism espoused by his teacher, William of Champeaux, on the ground that accidental properties depend for their existence on the distinct individuals in which they inhere, and so the properties cannot account for the distinctness of the individuals. 

accidie also acedia, apathy, listlessness, or ennui. This condition is problematic for the internalist thesis that, necessarily, any belief that one morally ought to do something is conceptually sufficient for having motivation to do it. Grice gives the example of Ann. Ann has long believed that she ought, morally, to assist her ailing mother, and she has dutifully acted accordingly. Seemingly, she may continue to believe this, even though, owing to a recent personal tragedy, she now suffers from accidie and is wholly lacking in motivation to assist her mother.  acedia, Fr. acédie, tristesse, Gr. “ἀϰήδεια,” “ἀϰηδία,” Lat. taedium v. malaise, melancholy, spleen, dasein, desengano, oikeiosis, sorge, verguenza. Through the intermediary of monastic Lat., “acedia,” “weariness, indifference” (Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum, 10.2.3; RT: PL, vol. 49, cols. 363–69), the rich Greek concept of “akêdeia,” a privative formed on “kêdos” [ϰῆδоς], “care,” and bearing the twofold meaning of lacking care (negligence) and absence of care (from lassitude or from serenity), established well in the language —a concept that belongs simultaneously to the communal and the moral registers. The Greek was originally associated with social rituals; in philosophical Latin from Seneca on, it was related to the moral virtue of intimacy, but its contemporary usage has returned it to a collective dimension. Gr. “akêdeia” is simultaneously part of the register of the obligations owed to others and part of the register of self-esteem: this breadth of meaning determines the later variations. On the social level, the substantive kêdos, “care, concern,” is specialized as early as Homer in two particular uses: mourning, the honors rendered to the dead, and union, family relationship through marriage or through alliance; “ϰήδεια” (adj. “ϰῆδεоς”) is the attention that must be paid to the dead, as well as the concern and care for allies, characteristic of this relationship of alliance, which is distinct from that of blood and also contributes to philia [φιλία], to the well-being of the city-state (Aristotle, Politics, 9.1280b 36; see love and polis); “ὁ ϰηδεμών” refers to all those who protect, for example, tutelary gods (Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 3.3.21). Akêdês [ἀϰηδής] qualifies in an active sense, in a positive way, someone who is exempt from care and anxiety (Hesiod, Theogony, 5.489, apropos of the “invincible and impassive” Zeus, but also, negatively, the serving woman or negligent man; Homer, Odyssey, 17.319; Plato, Laws, 913c); in the passive sense, it designates a person who is neglected (Odyssey, 20.130) or abandoned without burial (like Hector, Iliad, 24.554). How can the lack of care, “akêdeia,” become a virtue of the reflexive type? There is a  twofold sense of the term (transitive: care for others; reflexive: care for oneself). The first movement toward the ethics of intimacy is determined by practical philosophy’s reflection on the finitude of human life. The event represented by death produces a sadness that seems to have no consolation. The moral reaction to situations in which one finds oneself fearing such a finitude is presented in an active and critical way in the ethics developed by Seneca in the Consolations. Grace and purity can temper sadness (“Marcum blandissimum puerum, ad cujus conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia” [Marcus, this boy, so gentle, before whom no sadness can last]; De consolatione ad Helviam, 18.4). But above all, it is the effort of reason and study that can overcome any sadness (“liberalia studia: illa sanabunt vulnus tuum, illa omnem tristitiam tibi evellent” [these studies will heal your wound, will free you from any sadness]; De consolatione ad Helviam, 17.3). This view of internal control is foundational for a style rooted in the culture of the South: the sober acceptance of death, and more generally, of finitude. Acedia is conceived as having a twofold psychological and theological meaning. First of all, it is a passion of the animus and is therefore one of the four kinds of sadness, the other three being pigritia, “laziness,” tristitia, “sadness” properly so called, and taedium, “boredom.” In Christian monasticism of the fourth and fifth centuries, especially in Cassian and the eastern desert fathers, acedia is one of the seven or eight temptations with which the monks might have to struggle at one time or another. Usually mentioned between sadness and vainglory in a list that was to become that of the “seven deadly sins,” it is characterized by a pronounced distaste for spiritual life and the eremitic ideal, a discouragement and profound boredom that lead to a state of lethargy or to the abandonment of monastic life. It was designated by the expression “noonday demon,” which is supposed to come from verse 6 of Psalm 91. Thomas Aquinas opposes acedia to the joy that is inherent in the virtue of charity and makes it a specific sin, as a sadness with regard to spiritual goods (Summa theologica, IIa, IIae, q. 35). Some place acedia among the seven deadly sins. If it is equivalent to the more widespread terms “taedium” and “pigritia”, that is because it is the result of an excess of dispersion or idle chatter, and of the sadness and indifference (incuria) produced by the difficulty of obtaining spiritual goods. Thus “desolation” is supposed also to be a term related to acedia, and is often employed in spiritual and mystical literature——and it subsists in the vocabulary of moral sentiments. The secular sense that the word has acquired can make “acedia” the result of a situation of crisis and social conflict. Acedia (derivedfrom the adjective “acedo,” from Lat. “acidus,” “acid,” bitter) may be connected with the deprivation and need to which the poor are subject. It involves the naturalization or loss of aura discussed by Walter Benjamin, who draws on Baudelaire’s notion of “spleen” and on the phenomenology of the consciousness of loss or collective distress that follows the great upheavals of modernization (Das Passagen-Werk).Refs.: Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. Vol. 5 of Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Translation by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin: The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Meltzer, Françoise. “Acedia and Melancholia.” In Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

ackrillism – after J. L. Ackrill, London-born, Oxford-educated tutee of Grice’s. Grice cites him in “Some reflections on ends and happiness.” The reference is to Ackrill’s exploration on Aristotle on happiness. Ackrill was Grice’s tutee at St. John’s where he read, as he should, for the Lit. Hum. (Phil.). Grice instilled on him a love for Aristotle, which had been instilled on Grice by Scots philosopher Hardie, Grice’s tutee at THE place to study Lit. Hum., Corpus. Grice regretted that Ackrill had to *translate* Aristotle. “Of course at Clifton and Corpus, Hardie never asked me so!” Grice thought that Aristotle was almost being ‘murdered,’ literally, by Ackrill. That’s why Grice would always quote Aristotle in the Grecian vernacular. An “ackrillism,” then, as Grice used it, is a way to turn Aristotle from one vernacular to another, “usually with an Ackrillian effect.” Griceians usually pay respect to Ackrill’s grave, which reads, in a pretty Griceian way, “Aristotelian.”

actum. Grice’s theory is action-oriented. He often used ‘pragmatic’ to that effect. This is most evident in his account of meaning. In the phrastic, “The door is closed, please,” the ultimate intention is that the recipient performs the action of closing the door. Grice saw action theory as the study of the ontological structure of human action, the process by which it originates, and the ways in which it is explained. Most human actions are acts of commission: they constitute a class of events in which a subject the agent brings about some change or changes. Thus, in moving one’s finger, one brings it about that one’s finger moves. When the change brought about is an ongoing process e.g., the continuing appearance of words on a , the behavior is called an activity writing. An action of omission occurs when an agent refrains from performing an action of commission. Since actions of commission are events, the question of their ontology is in part a matter of the general ontology of change. An important issue here is whether what occurs when an action is performed should be viewed as abstract or concrete. On the first approach, actions are understood either as proposition-like entities e.g., Booth’s moving a finger, or as a species of universal  namely, an act-type moving a finger. What “occurred” when Booth moved his finger in Ford’sTheater on April 14, 1865, is held to be the abstract entity in question, and the entity is viewed as repeatable: that is, precisely the same entity is held to have occurred on every other occasion of Booth’s moving his finger. When actions are viewed as concrete, on the other hand, Booth’s moving his finger in Ford’s Theater is understood to be a non-repeatable particular, accidental property action theory 6 4065A-   6 and the movement of the finger counts as an acttoken, which instantiates the corresponding acttype. Concrete actions are time-bound: each belongs to a single behavioral episode, and other instantiations of the same act-type count as distinct events. A second important ontological issue concerns the fact that by moving his finger, Booth also fired a gun, and killed Lincoln. It is common for more than one thing to be accomplished in a single exercise of agency, and how such doings are related is a matter of debate. If actions are understood as abstract entities, the answer is essentially foregone: there must be as many different actions on Booth’s part as there are types exemplified. But if actions are viewed as particulars the same token can count as an instance of more than one type, and identity claims become possible. Here there is disagreement. Fine-grained theories of act individuation tend to confine identity claims to actions that differ only in ways describable through different modifications of the same main verb  e.g., where Placido both sings and sings loudly. Otherwise, different types are held to require different tokens: Booth’s action of moving his finger is held to have generated or given rise to distinct actions of firing the gun and killing Lincoln, by virtue of having had as causal consequences the gun’s discharge and Lincoln’s death. The opposite, coarse-grained theory, however, views these causal relations as grounds for claiming Booth’s acts were precisely identical. On this view, for Booth to kill Lincoln was simply for him to do something that caused Lincoln’s death  which was in fact nothing more than to move his finger  and similarly for his firing the gun. There is also a compromise account, on which Booth’s actions are related as part to whole, each consisting in a longer segment of the causal chain that terminates with Lincoln’s death. The action of killing Lincoln consisted, on this view, in the entire sequence; but that of firing the gun terminated with the gun’s discharge, and that of moving the finger with the finger’s motion. When, as in Booth’s case, more than one thing is accomplished in a single exercise of agency, some are done by doing others. But if all actions were performed by performing others, an infinite regress would result. There must, then, be a class of basic actions  i.e., actions fundamental to the performance of all others, but not themselves done by doing something else. There is disagreement, however, on which actions are basic. Some theories treat bodily movements, such as Booth’s moving his finger, as basic. Others point out that it is possible to engage in action but to accomplish less than a bodily movement, as when one tries to move a limb that is restrained or paralyzed, and fails. According to these accounts, bodily actions arise out of a still more basic mental activity, usually called volition or willing, which is held to constitute the standard means for performing all overt actions. The question of how bodily actions originate is closely associated with that of what distinguishes them from involuntary and reflex bodily events, as well as from events in the inanimate world. There is general agreement that the crucial difference concerns the mental states that attend action, and in particular the fact that voluntary actions typically arise out of states of intending on the part of the agent. But the nature of the relation is difficult, and there is the complicating factor that intention is sometimes held to reduce to other mental states, such as the agent’s desires and beliefs. That issue aside, it would appear that unintentional actions arise out of more basic actions that are intentional, as when one unintentionally breaks a shoelace by intentionally tugging on it. But how intention is first tr. into action is much more problematic, especially when bodily movements are viewed as basic actions. One cannot, e.g., count Booth’s moving his finger as an intentional action simply because he intended to do so, or even on the ground if it is true that his intention caused his finger to move. The latter might have occurred through a strictly autonomic response had Booth been nervous enough, and then the moving of the finger would not have counted as an action at all, much less as intentional. Avoiding such “wayward causal chains” requires accounting for the agent’s voluntary control over what occurs in genuinely intentional action  a difficult task when bodily actions are held to be basic. Volitional accounts have greater success here, since they can hold that movements are intentional only when the agent’s intention is executed through volitional activity. But they must sidestep another threatened regress: if we call for an activity of willing to explain why Booth’s moving his finger counts as intentional action, we cannot do the same for willing itself. Yet on most accounts volition does have the characteristics of intentional behavior. Volitional theories of action must, then, provide an alternative account of how mental activity can be intentional. Actions are explained by invoking the agent’s reasons for performing them. Characteristically, a reason may be understood to consist in a positive attitude of the agent toward one or another action theory action theory 7 4065A-   7 outcome, and a belief to the effect that the outcome may be achieved by performing the action in question. Thus Emily might spend the summer in France out of a desire to learn , and a belief that spending time in France is the best way to do so. Disputed questions about reasons include how confident the agent must be that the action selected will in fact lead to the envisioned outcome, and whether obligation represents a source of motivation that can operate independently of the agent’s desires. Frequently, more than one course of action is available to an agent. Deliberation is the process of searching out and weighing the reasons for and against such alternatives. When successfully concluded, deliberation usually issues in a decision, by which an intention to undertake one of the contemplated actions is formed. The intention is then carried out when the time for action comes. Much debate has centered on the question of how reasons are related to decisions and actions. As with intention, an agent’s simply having a reason is not enough for the reason to explain her behavior: her desire to learn  notwithstanding, Emily might have gone to France simply because she was transferred there. Only when an agent does something for a reason does the reason explain what is done. It is frequently claimed that this bespeaks a causal relation between the agent’s strongest reason and her decision or action. This, however, suggests a determinist stance on the free will problem, leading some philosophers to balk. An alternative is to treat reason explanations as teleological explanations, wherein an action is held to be reasonable or justified in virtue of the goals toward which it was directed. But positions that treat reason explanations as non-causal require an alternative account of what it is to decide or act for one reason rather than another.  Grice would often wonder about the pervasiveness of the intentiona idiom in the description of action. He would use the phrase ‘action verb,’ i. e. a verb applied to an agent and describing an activity, an action, or an attempt at or a culmination of an action. Verbs applying to agents may be distinguished in two basic ways: by whether they can take the progressive continuous form and by whether or not there is a specific moment of occurrence/completion of the action named by the verb. An activity verb is one describing something that goes on for a time but with no inherent endpoint, such as ‘drive’, ‘laugh’, or ‘meditate’. One can stop doing such a thing but one cannot complete doing it. Indeed, one can be said to have done it as soon as one has begun doing it. An accomplishment verb is one describing something that goes on for a time toward an inherent endpoint, such as ‘paint’ a fence, ‘solve’ a problem, or ‘climb’ a mountain. Such a thing takes a certain time to do, and one cannot be said to have done it until it has been completed. An achievement verb is one describing either the culmination of an activity, such as ‘finish’ a job or ‘reach’ a goal; the effecting of a change, such as ‘fire’ an employee or ‘drop’ an egg; or undergoing a change, such as ‘hear’ an explosion or ‘forget’ a name. An achievement does not go on for a period of time but may be the culmination of something that does. Ryle singled out achievement verbs and state verbs see below partly in order to disabuse philosophers of the idea that what psychological verbs name must invariably be inner acts or activities modeled on bodily actions or activities. A task verb is an activity verb that implies attempting to do something named by an achievement verb. For example, to seek is to attempt to find, to sniff is to attempt to smell, and to treat is to attempt to cure. A state verb is a verb not an action verb describing a condition, disposition, or habit rather than something that goes on or takes place. Examples include ‘own’, ‘weigh’, ‘want’, ‘hate’, ‘frequent’, and ‘teetotal’. These differences were articulated by Zeno Vendler in Linguistics and Philosophy 7. Taking them into account, linguists have classified verbs and verb phrases into four main aspectual classes, which they distinguish in respect to the availability and interpretation of the simple present tense, of the perfect tenses, of the progressive construction, and of various temporal adverbials, such as adverbs like ‘yesterday’, ‘finally’, and ‘often’, and prepositional phrases like ‘for a long time’ and ‘in a while’. Many verbs belong to more than one category by virtue of having several related uses. For example, ‘run’ is both an activity and an accomplishment verb, and ‘weigh’ is both a state and an accomplishment verb. Linguists single out a class of causative verbs, such as ‘force’, ‘inspire’, and ‘persuade’, some of which are achievement and some accomplishment verbs. Such causative verbs as ‘break’, ‘burn’, and ‘improve’ have a correlative intransitive use, so that, e.g., to break something is to cause it to break. Grice denies the idea of an ‘act’ of the soul. In this way, it is interesting to contrast his views to those philosophers, even at Oxford, like Occam or Geach, who speak of an act of the soul. And then there’s act-content-object psychology, or ‘act-object psychology,’ for short, a philosophical theory that identifies in every psychological state a mental act, a lived-through phenomenological content, such as a mental image or description of properties, and an intended object that the mental act is about or toward which it is directed by virtue of its content. The distinction between the act, content, and object of thought originated with Alois Höfler’s Logik 0, written in collaboration with Meinong. But the theory is historically most often associated with its development in Kazimierz Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellung “On the Content and Object of Presentations,” 4, despite Twardowski’s acknowledgment of his debt to Höfler. Act-object psychology arose as a reaction to Franz Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis in his influential Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” 1874, in which Brentano maintains that intentionality is “the mark of the mental,” by contrast with purely physical phenomena. Brentano requires that intended objects belong immanently to the mental acts that intend them  a philosophical commitment that laid Brentano open to charges of epistemological idealism and psychologism. Yet Brentano’s followers, who accepted the intentionality of thought but resisted what they came to see as its detachable idealism and psychologism, responded by distinguishing the act-immanent phenomenological content of a psychological state from its act-transcendent intended object, arguing that Brentano had wrongly and unnecessarily conflated mental content with the external objects of thought. Twardowski goes so far as to claim that content and object can never be identical, an exclusion in turn that is vigorously challenged by Husserl in his Logische Untersuchungen “Logical Investigations,” 3, 2, and by others in the phenomenological tradition who acknowledge the possibility that a self-reflexive thought can sometimes be about its own content as intended object, in which content and object are indistinguishable. Act-object psychology continues to be of interest to contemporary philosophy because of its relation to ongoing projects in phenomenology, and as a result of a resurgence of study of the concept of intentionality and qualia in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and Gegenstandstheorie, or existent and non-existent intended object theory, in philosophical logic and semantics.  Grice was fascinated by the metaphysically wrong theory of agent-causation. He would make fun of it. His example, “The cause of the death of Charles I is decapitation; therefore, decapitation willed the death of Charles I. Grice would refer to transeunt causation in “Actions and events.” In Grice’s terms, agent causation is the convoluted idea that the primary cause of an event is a substance; more specifically, causation by a substance, as opposed to an event. Thus a brick a substance may be said to be the cause of the breaking of the glass. The expression is also used more narrowly by Reid and others for the view that an action or event is caused by an exertion of power by some agent endowed with will and understanding. Thus, a person may be said to be the cause of her action of opening the door. In this restricted sense Reid called it “the strict and proper sense”, an agent-cause must have the power to cause the action or event and the power not to cause it. Moreover, it must be “up to” the agent whether to cause the event or not to cause it. It is not “up to” the brick whether to cause or not to cause the breaking of the glass. The restricted sense of agent causation developed by Reid is closely tied to the view that the agent possesses free will. Medieval philosophers distinguished the internal activity of the agent from the external event produced by that activity. The former was called “immanent causation” and the latter “transeunt causation.” These terms have been adapted by Chisholm and others to mark the difference between agent causation and event causation. The idea is that the internal activity is agentcaused by the person whose activity it is; whereas the external event is event-caused by the internal activity of the agent.  His “Death of Charles I” example is meant as a reductio ad sbsurdum of ‘agent causation.’ The philosopher cannot possibly be meaning to communicate such absurdity. The ‘actus’ is less obviously related to the actum, but it should. When Grice says, “What is actual is not also possible” as a mistake – he is not thinking of HUMAN rational agency – but some kind of agency, though. It may be thought that ‘actum’ is still phrased after a ‘that’-clause, even if what is reported is something that is actual, e. g. It is actually raining (versus It is possibly raining in Cambridge). – potentia -- energeia, Grecian term coined by Aristotle and often tr. as ‘activity’, ‘actuality’, and even ‘act’, but more literally rendered ‘a state of functioning’. Since for Aristotle the function of an object is its telos or aim, energeia can also be described as an entelecheia or realization another coined term he uses interchangeably with energeia. So understood, it can denote either a something’s being functional, though not in use at the moment, and b something’s actually functioning, which Aristotle describes as a “first realization” and “second realization” respectively On the Soul II.5. In general, every energeia is correlative to some dunamis, a capability or power to function in a certain way, and in the central books of the Metaphysics Aristotle uses the linkage between these two concepts to explain the relation of form to matter. He also distinguishes between energeia and kinesis change or motion Metaphysics IX.6; Nicomachean Ethics X.4. A kinesis is defined by reference to its terminus e.g., learning how to multiply and is thus incomplete at any point before reaching its conclusion. An energeia, in contrast, is a state complete in itself e.g., seeing. Thus, Aristotle says that at any time that I am seeing, it is also true that I have seen; but it is not true that at any time I am learning that I have learned. In Grecian, this difference is not so much one of tense as of encrateia energeia 264   264 aspect: the perfect tense marks a “perfect” or complete state, and not necessarily prior activity.  energeticism, also called energetism or energism, the doctrine that energy is the fundamental substance underlying all change. Its most prominent champion was the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald 18532. In his address “Die Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus” “The Conquest of Scientific Materialism”, delivered at Lübeck in 5, Ostwald chastised the atomic-kinetic theory as lacking progress and claimed that a unified science, energetics, could be based solely on the concept of energy. Many of Ostwald’s criticisms of materialism and mechanistic reductionism derived from Mach. Ostwald’s attempts to deduce the fundamental equations of thermodynamics and mechanics from the principles of energy conservation and transformation were indebted to the writings of Georg Helm 18749, especially Die Lehre von Energie “The Laws of Energy,” 7 and Die Energetik “Energetics,” 8. Ostwald defended Helm’s factorization thesis that all changes in energy can be analyzed as a product of intensity and capacity factors. The factorization thesis and the attempt to derive mechanics and thermodynamics from the principles of energetics were subjected to devastating criticisms by Boltzmann and Max Planck. Boltzmann also criticized the dogmatism of Ostwald’s rejection of the atomickinetic theory. Ostwald’s program to unify the sciences under the banner of energetics withered in

additum: f. addo , dĭdi, dĭtum, 3, v. a. 2. do (addues for addideris, Paul. ex Fest. p. 27 Müll.),addition. Strawson Wiggins p. 520. The utterer implies something more or different from what he explicitly conveys. Cfr. Disimplicatum, ‘less’ under ‘different from’ How seriously are we taking the ‘more.’ Not used by Grice. They seem cross-categorial. If emissor draws a skull and then a cross he means that there is danger and death in the offing. He crosses the cross, so it means death is avoidable. Urmson says that Warnock went to bed and took off his boots. He implicates in that order. So he means MORE than the ‘ampersand.” The “and” is expanded into “and then.” But in not every case things are so easy that it’s a matter of adding stuff. Cf. summatum, conjunctum. And then there’s the ‘additive implicature.’  By uttering ‘and,’ Russell means the Boolean adition. Whitehead means ‘and then’. Whithead’s implicatum is ADDITIVE, as opposed to diaphoron. Grice considers the conceptual possibilities here: One may explicitly convey that p, and implicitly convey q, where q ADDS to p (e. g. ‘and’ implicates ‘and then’). Sometimes it does not, “He is a fine fine,” (or a ‘nice fellow,’ Lecture IV) implying, “He is a scoundrel.” Sometimes it has nothing to do with it, “The weather has been nice” implying, “you committed a gaffe.” With disimplicatum, you implicate LESS than you explicitly convey. When did you last see your father? “Yesterday night, in my drams.” Grice sums this up with the phrase, “more or other.” By explicitly conveying that p, the emissor implicates MORE OR OTHER than he explicitly conveys.

adornoian implicatum. Grice enjoyed Adorno’s explorations on the natural/non-natural distinction; adorno, t. w. a philosopher of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. With Horkheimer, Adorno gave philosophical direction to the Frankfurt School and its research projects in its Institute for Social Research. An accomplished musician and composer, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art, working to develop a non-reductionist but materialist theory of art and music in many essays. Under the influence of Walter Benjamin, he turned toward developing a “micrological” account of cultural artifacts, viewing them as “constellations” of social and historical forces. As his collaboration with Horkheimer increased, Adorno turned to the problem of a self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. Under the influence of the seemingly imminent victory of the Nazis in Europe, this analysis focused on the “entwinement of myth and Enlightenment.” The Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that instrumental reason promises the subject autonomy from the forces of nature only to enslave it again by its own repression of its impulses and inclinations. The only way around this self-domination is “non-identity thinking,” found in the unifying tendencies of a non-repressive reason. This self-defeating dialectic is represented by the striking image of Ulysses tied to the mast to survive his encounter with the Sirens. Adorno initially hoped for a positive analysis of the Enlightenment to overcome this genealogy of modern reason, but it is never developed. Instead, he turned to an increasingly pessimistic analysis of the growing reification of modern life and of the possibility of a “totally administered society.” Adorno held that “autonomous art” can open up established reality and negate the experience of reification. Aesthetic Theory develops this idea of autonomous art in terms of aesthetic form, or the capacity of the internal organization of art to restructure existing patterns of meaning. Authentic works of art have a “truth-value” in their capacity to bring to awareness social contradictions and antinomies. In Negative Dialectics 6 Adorno provides a more general account of social criticism under the “fragmenting” conditions of modern rationalization and domination. These and other writings have had a large impact on cultural criticism, particularly through Adorno’s analysis of popular culture and the “culture industry.”

æqui-pollence: term used by Grice, après Sextus Empiricus, to express the view that there are arguments of equal strength on all sides of any question and that therefore we should suspend judgment on every question that can be raised. 

æqui-probable: having the same probability. Sometimes used in the same way as ‘equipossible’, the term is associated with Laplace’s the “classical” interpretation of probability, where the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of equipossibilities favorable to the event to the total number of equipossibilities. For example, the probability of rolling an even number with a “fair” six-sided die is ½  there being three equipossibilities 2, 4, 6 favorable to even, and six equipossibilities 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in all and 3 /6 % ½. The concept is now generally thought not to be widely applicable to the interpretation of probability, since natural equipossibilities are not always at hand as in assessing the probability of a thermonuclear war tomorrow. 

æqui-valence: mutual inferability. The following are main kinds: two statements are materially equivalent provided they have the same truthvalue, and logically equivalent provided each can be deduced from the other; two sentences or words are equivalent in meaning provided they can be substituted for each other in any context without altering the meaning of that context. In truth-functional logic, two statements are logically equivalent if they can never have truthvalues different from each other. In this sense of ‘logically equivalent’ all tautologies are equivalent to each other and all contradictions are equivalent to each other. Similarly, in extensional set theory, two classes are equivalent provided they have the same numbers, so that all empty classes are regarded as equivalent. In a non-extensional set theory, classes would be equivalent only if their conditions of membership were logically equivalent or equivalent in meaning.

Grice’s æqui-vocality thesis -- aequivocation, the use of an expression in two or more different senses in a single context. For example, in ‘The end of anything is its perfection. But the end of life is death; so death is the perfection of life’, the expression ‘end’ is first used in the sense of ‘goal or purpose,’ but in its second occurrence ‘end’ means ‘termination.’ The use of the two senses in this context is an equivocation. Where the context in which the expression used is an argument, the fallacy of equivocation may be committed.

æstheticum: Grice is well aware that ‘aesthetica,’ qua discipline, was meant to refer to the ‘sensibile,’ as opposed to the ‘intellectus.’ With F. N. Sibley (who credits Grice profusely), Grice explored the ‘second-order’ quality of the so-called ‘aesthetic properties.’ It influenced Scruton. The aesthetic attitude is the appropriate attitude or frame of mind for approaching art or nature or other objects or events so that one might both appreciate its intrinsic perceptual qualities, and as a result have an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic attitude has been construed in many ways: 1 as disinterested, so that one’s experience of the work is not affected by any interest in its possible practical uses, 2 as a “distancing” of oneself from one’s own personal concerns, 3 as the contemplation of an object, purely as an object of sensation, as it is in itself, for its own sake, in a way unaffected by any cognition or knowledge one may have of it. These different notions of aesthetic attitude have at times been combined within a single theory. There is considerable doubt about whether there is such a thing as an aesthetic attitude. There is neither any special kind of action nor any special way of performing an ordinary action that ensures that we see a work as it “really is,” and that results in our having an aesthetic experience. Furthermore, there are no purely sensory experiences, divorced from any cognitive content whatsoever. Criticisms of the notion of aesthetic attitude have reinforced attacks on aesthetics as a separate field of study within philosophy. On the other hand, there’s aesthetic formalism, non-iconic, the view that in our interactions with works of art, form should be given primacy. Rather than taking ‘formalism’ as the name of one specific theory in the arts, it is better and more typical to take it to name that type of theory which emphasizes the form of the artwork. Or, since emphasis on form is something that comes in degrees, it is best to think of theories of art as ranged on a continuum of more formalist and less formalist. It should be added that theories of art are typically complex, including definitions of art, recommendations concerning what we should attend to in art, analyses of the nature of the aesthetic, recommendations concerning the making of aesthetic evaluations, etc.; and each of these components may be more formalist or less so. Those who use the concept of form mainly wish to contrast the artifact itself with its relations to entities outside itself  with its representing various things, its symbolizing various things, its being expressive of various things, its being the product of various intentions of the artist, its evoking various states in beholders, its standing in various relations of influence and similarity to preceding, succeeding, and contemporary works, etc. There have been some, however, who in emphasizing form have meant to emphasize not just the artifact but the perceptible form or design of the artifact. Kant, e.g., in his theory of aesthetic excellence, not only insisted that the only thing relevant to determining the beauty of an object is its appearance, but within the appearance, the form, the design: in visual art, not the colors but the design that the colors compose; in music, not the timbre of the individual sounds but the formal relationships among them. It comes as no surprise that theories of music have tended to be much more formalist than theories of literature and drama, with theories of the visual arts located in between. While Austin’s favourite aesthetic property is ‘dumpty,’ Grice is more open minded, and allows for more of a property or quality such as being dainty, garish, graceful, balanced, charming, majestic, trite, elegant, lifeless, ugly, or beautiful. By contrast, non-aesthetic properties are properties that require no special sensitivity or perceptiveness to perceive  such as a painting’s being predominantly blue, its having a small red square in a corner or a kneeling figure in the foreground, or that the music becomes louder at a given point. Sometimes it is argued that a special perceptiveness or taste is needed to perceive a work’s aesthetic qualities, and that this is a defining feature of a property’s being aesthetic. A corollary of this view is that aesthetic qualities cannot be defined in terms of non-aesthetic qualities, though some have held that aesthetic qualities supervene on non-aesthetic qualities. As a systematic philosopher, Grice goes back to the etymological root of the aesthetic as the philosophy of the sensible. He would make fun of the specialization. “If at the philosophy department I am introduced to Mr. Puddle, our man in nineteenth-century continental aesthetics, I can grasp he is either underdescribed or not good at nineteenth-century continental aesthetics!’ The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our adventitious ideas and experience of art and of the natural environment. It emerged as a separate field of philosophical inquiry during the eighteenth century in England and on the Continent. Recognition of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy coincided with the development of theories of art that grouped together painting, poetry, sculpture, music, and dance and often landscape gardening as the same kind of thing, les beaux arts, or the fine arts. Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry 1735 as the name for one of the two branches of the study of knowledge, i.e., for the study of sensory experience coupled with feeling, which he argued provided a different type of knowledge from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by “logic.” He derived it from the ancient Grecian aisthanomai ‘to perceive’, and “the aesthetic” has always been intimately connected with sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it arouses. Questions specific to the field of aesthetics are: Is there a special attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we should take toward works of art and the natural environment, and what is it like? Is there a distinctive type of experience, an aesthetic experience, and what is it? Is there a special object of attention that we can call the aesthetic object? Finally, is there a distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with moral, epistemic, and religious values? Some questions overlap with those in the philosophy of art, such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and whether there is a faculty of taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic character and value of natural objects or works of art. Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of art. The most central issue in the philosophy of art has been how to define ‘art’. Not all cultures have, or have had, a concept of art that coincides with the one that emerged in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What justifies our applying our concept to the things people in these other cultures have produced? There are also many pictures including paintings, songs, buildings, and bits of writing, that are not art. What distinguishes those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art from those that are not? Various answers have been proposed that identify the distinguishing features of art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and social roles or uses of the object. Since the eighteenth century there have been debates about what kinds of things count as “art.” Some have argued that architecture and ceramics are not art because their functions are primarily utilitarian, and novels were for a long time not listed among the “fine arts” because they are not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates continue to arise over new media and what may be new art forms, such as film, video, photography, performance art, found art, furniture, posters, earthworks, and computer and electronic art. Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt, feces, or various discarded and mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze. There is often an explicit rejection of craft and technique by twentieth-century artists, and the subject matter has expanded to include the banal and everyday, and not merely mythological, historical, and religious subjects as in years past. All of these developments raise questions about the relevance of the category of “fine” or “high” art. Another set of issues in philosophy of art concerns how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and understood. Some views emphasize that artworks are products of individual efforts, so that a work should be understood in light of the producer’s knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others see the meaning of a work as established by social conventions and practices of the artist’s own time, but which may not be known or understood by the producer. Still others see meaning as established by the practices of the users, even if they were not in effect when the work was produced. Are there objective criteria or standards for evaluating individual artworks? There has been much disagreement over whether value judgments have universal validity, or whether there can be no disputing about taste, if value judgments are relative to the tastes and interests of each individual or to some group of individuals who share the same tastes and interests. A judgment such as “This is good” certainly seems to make a claim about the work itself, though such a claim is often based on the sort of feeling, understanding, or experience a person has obtained from the work. A work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally distinguished from simply liking it. But is it possible to establish what sorts of knowledge or experiences any given work should provide to any suitably prepared perceiver, and what would it be to be suitably prepared? It is a matter of contention whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of its moral, political, or epistemic stance or impact. Philosophy of art has also dealt with the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, repreaesthetics aesthetics 12 4065A-   12 sentation, expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to art. Work in the field has always been influenced by philosophical theories of language or meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and continues to be heavily influenced by psychological and cultural theory, including versions of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism. Some theorists in the late twentieth century have denied that the aesthetic and the “fine arts” can legitimately be separated out and understood as separate, autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that these conceptual categories themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of cultural attitudes and power relationships. These theorists urge that aesthetics can and should be eliminated as a separate field of study, and that “the aesthetic” should not be conceived as a special kind of value. They favor instead a critique of the roles that images not only painting, but film, photography, and advertising, sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional constructions have in expressing and shaping human attitudes and experiences. 

a fortiori argument: According to Grice, an argument that moves from the premises that everything which possesses a certain characteristics will possess some further characteristics and that certain things possess the relevant characteristics to an eminent degree to the conclusion that a fortiori even more so these things will possess the further characteristics. The second premise is often left implicit – or implicated, as Grice prefers, so a fortiori arguments are often enthymemes. A favourite illustration by Grice of an a fortiori argument can be found in Plato’s Crito. We owe gratitude and respect to our parents and so should do nothing to harm them. However, athenians owe even greater gratitude and respect to the laws of Athens. Therefore, a fortiori, Athenians should do nothing to harm those laws. 

agape: Grice would often contrast ‘self-love’ with ‘agape’ and ‘benevolence.’ Strictly, agape, “a lovely Grecian word,” is best rendered as the unselfish love for all persons. An ethical theory according to which such love is the chief virtue, and actions are good to the extent that they express it, is sometimes called agapism. Agape is the Grecian word most often used for love in the New Testament, and is often used in modern languages to signify whatever sort of love the writer takes to be idealized there. In New Testament Grecian, however, it was probably a quite general word for love, so that any ethical ideal must be found in the text’s substantive claims, rather than in the linguistic meaning of the word. R.M.A. agathon, Grecian word meaning ‘a good’ or ‘the good’. From Socrates onward, agathon was taken to be a central object of philosophical inquiry; it has frequently been assumed to be the goal of all rational action. Plato in the simile of the sun in the Republic identified it with the Form of the Good, the source of reality, truth, and intelligibility. Aristotle saw it as eudaimonia, intellectual or practical virtue, a view that found its way, via Stoicism and Neoplatonism, into Christianity. Modern theories of utility can be seen as concerned with essentially the same Socratic question.

agitation: a Byzantine feeling is a Ryleian agitation. If Grice were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that ‘to feel Byzantine’ is just to have a an anti-rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that Grice is or might *be* Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticise Grice on the grounds that Grice saddles himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. And why? Well, because, alla Parsons, if a quantifier is covertly involved at all, it will only be a universal quantifier which in such a case as this is more than adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. Grice’s situation vis-a-vis the ‘proposition’ is in no way different. In the idiolect of Ryle, “a serious student of Grecian philosophy,” as Grice puts it, ‘emotion’ designates at least three or four different kinds of things, which Ryle calls an ‘inclination, or ‘motive,’ a ‘mood’, an ‘agitation,’ or a ‘commotion,’ and a ‘feeling.’ An inclination or a mood, including an agitation, is not occurrences and doest not therefore take place either publicly or privately. It is a propensity, not an act or state. An inclination is, however, a propensity of this or that kind, and the kind is important. A feeling, on the other hand, IS an occurrence, but the place that mention of it should take in a description of human behaviour is very different from that which the standard theories accord to it. A susceptibility to a specific agitation is on the same general footing with an inclination, viz. that each is a general propensity and not an occurrence. An agitation is not a motive. But an agitation does presuppose a motive, or rather an agitataion presupposes a behaviour trend of which a motive is for us the most interesting sort. There is however a matter of expression which is the source of some confusion, even among Oxonian Wilde readers, and that did confuse philosophical psychologists of the ability of G. F. Stout. An expression may signify both an inclination and an agitation. But an expression may signify anything but an agitations. Again, some other expression may signify anything but an inclination. An expression like ‘uneasy’, ‘anxious’, ‘distressed’, ‘excited’, ‘startled’ always signifies an agitations. An expression like ‘fond of fishing’, ‘keen on gardening’, ‘bent on becoming a bishop’ never signifies an agitation. But an expression like ‘love’, ‘want’, ‘desire’, ‘proud’, ‘eager,’ or many others, stands sometimes for a simple inclination and sometimes for an agitations which is resultant upon the inclinations and interferences with the exercise of it. Thus ‘hungry’ for ‘having a good appetite’ means roughly ‘is eating or would eat heartily and without sauces, etc..’ This is different from ‘hungry’ in which a person might be said to be ‘too hungry to concentrate on his work’. Hunger in this second expression is a distress, and requires for its existence the conjunction of an appetite with the inability to eat. Similarly the way in which a boy is proud of his school is different from the way in which he is speechless with pride on being unexpectedly given a place in a school team. To remove a possible misapprehension, it must be pointed out that an agitation may be quite agreeable. A man may voluntarily subject himself to suspense, fatigue, uncertainty, perplexity, fear and surprise in such practices as angling, rowing, travelling, crossword puzzles, rock-climbing and joking. That a thing like a thrill, a rapture, a surprise, an amusement and an relief is an agitation is shown by the fact that we can say that someone is too much thrilled, amused or relieved to act, think or talk coherently. It is helpful to notice that, anyhow commonly, the expression which completes  ‘pang of . . .’ or ‘chill of . . .’ denotes an agitation. A feeling, such as a man feeling Byzantine, is intrinsically connected with an agitation. But a feeling, e. g. of a man who is feeling Byzantine, is not intrinsically connected with an inclination, save in so far as the inclination is a factor in the agitation. This is no novel psychological hypothesis; It is part of the logic of our descriptions of a feeling that a feeling (such as a man feeling Byzantine) is a sign of an agitation and is not an exercise of an inclination. A feeling, such as a man feeling Byzantine, in other words, is not a thing of which it makes sense to ask from what motive it issues. The same is true, for the same reasons, of any sign of any agitation. This point shows why we were right to suggest above that a feeling (like a man feeling Byzantine) does not belong directly to a simple inclination. An inclination is a certain sort of proneness or readiness to do certain sorts of things on purpose. These things are therefore describable as being done from that motive. They are the exercises of the disposition that we call ‘a motive’. A feeling (such as a man feeling Byzantine) is not from a motive and is therefore not among the possible exercise of such a propensiy. The widespread theory that a motive such as vanity, or affection, is in the first instance a disposition to experience certain specific feeling is therefore absurd. There may be, of course, a tendency to have a feeling, such as feeling Byzantine; being vertiginous and rheumatic are such tendencies. But we do not try to modify a tendency of these kinds by a sermon. What a feeling, such as being Byzantine, does causally belong to is the agitation. A feeling (such as feeling Byzantine) is a sign of an agitation in the same sort of way as a stomach-ache is a sign of indigestion. Roughly, we do not, as the prevalent theory holds, act purposively because we experience a feeling (such as feeling Byzantine); we experience a feeling (such as feeling Byzantine), as we wince and shudder, because we are inhibited from acting purposively. A sentimentalist is a man who indulges in this or that induced feeling (such as feeling Byzantine) without acknowledging the fictitiousness of his agitation. It seems to be generally supposed that ‘pleasure’ or ‘desire’ is always used to signify a feeling. And there certainly are feelings which can be described as a feeling of pleasure or desire. Some thrills, shocks, glows and ticklings are feelings of delight, surprise, relief and amusement; and things like a hankering, an itche, a gnawing and a yearning is a sign that something is both wanted and missed. But the transports, surprises, reliefs and distresses of which such a feeling is diagnosed, or mis-diagnosed, as a sign is not itself a feeling. It is an agitation or a mood, just as are the transports and distresses which a child betrays by his skips and his whimpers. Nostalgia is an agitation and one which can be called a ‘desire’; but it is not merely a feeling or series of feelings. There is the sense of ‘pleasure’ in which it is commonly replaced by such expressions as ‘delight’, ‘transport’, ‘rapture’, ‘exultation’ and ‘joy’. These are expressions of this or that mood signifying this or that agitation. There are two quite different usages of ‘emotion’, in which we explain people’s behaviour by reference to emotions. In the first usage of ‘emotion,’ we are referring to the motives or inclinations from which more or less intelligent actions are done. In a second usage we are referring to a mood, including the agitation or perturbation of which some aimless movement may be a sign. In neither of these usages are we asserting or implicating that the overt behaviour is the effect of a felt turbulence in the agent’s stream of consciousness. In a third usage of ‘emotion’, pangs and twinges are feelings or emotions, but they are not, save per accidens, things by reference to which we explain behaviour. They are things for which diagnoses are required, not things required for the diagnoses of behaviour. Since a convulsion of merriment is not the state of mind of the sober experimentalist, the enjoyment of a joke is also not an introspectible happening. States of mind such as these more or less violent agitations can be examined only in retrospect. Yet nothing disastrous follows from this restriction. We are not shorter of information about panic or amusement than about other states of mind. If retrospection can give us the data we need for our knowledge of some states of mind, there is no reason why it should not do so for all. And this is just what seems to be suggested by the popular phrase ‘to catch oneself doing so and so’. We catch, as we pursue and overtake, what is already running away from us. I catch myself daydreaming about a mountain walk after, perhaps very shortly after, I have begun the daydream; or I catch myself humming a particular air only when the first few notes have already been hummed. Retrospection, prompt or delayed, is a genuine process and one which is exempt from the troubles ensuing from the assumption of multiply divided attention; it is also exempt from the troubles ensuing from the assumption that violent agitations could be the objects of cool, contemporary scrutiny. One may be aware that he is whistling ‘Tipperary’ and not know that he is whistling it in order to give tte appearance of a sang-froid which he does not feel. Or, again, he may be aware that he is shamming sang-froid without knowing that the tremors which he is trying to hide derive from the agitation of a guilty conscience.

agnoiologicum: Grice loved a negative prefix. He was proud that he was never vulgar in publishing, like some of his tutees – and that the number of his unpublications by far exceed the number of his publications. To refute Hampshire with this intention and certainty, he regaled the British Academy with the annual philosophical lecture on intention and Uncertainty. While Grice thought that ‘knowledge’ was overreated at Oxford (“Surely an examinee can be said to know that date of the battle of Waterloo”) he could be agnoiological at times. From Grecian agnoia, ‘ignorance’, the study of ignorance, its quality, and its conditions. And then there’s ‘agnosticism,’ from Grecian a-, ‘not’, and gnastos, ‘known’, term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 to denote the philosophical and religious attitude of those who claim that metaphysical ideas can be neither proved nor disproved. Huxley wrote, “I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objection to the doctrine.” Agnosticism is a form of skepticism applied to metaphysics, especially theism. The position is sometimes attributed to Kant, who held that we cannot have knowledge of God or immortality but must be content with faith. Agnosticism should not be confused with atheism, the belief that no god exists.

causatum:  aetiologicum: from aitia: while Grice would prefer ‘cause,’ he thought that the etymology of Grecian ‘aitia,’ in a legal context, was interesting. On top, he was dissatisfied that Foucault never realised that ‘les mots et les choses,’ etymologically, means, ‘motus et causae.’ Grecian, cause. Originally referring to responsibility for a crime, this Grecian term came to be used by philosophers to signify causality in a somewhat broader sense than the English ‘cause’  the traditional rendering of aitia  can convey. An aitia is any answer to a why-question. According to Aristotle, how such questions ought to be answered is a philosophical issue addressed differently by different philosophers. He himself distinguishes four types of answers, and thus four aitiai, by distinguishing different types of questions: 1 Why is the statue heavy? Because it is made of bronze material aitia. 2 Why did Persians invade Athens? Because the Athenians had raided their territory moving or efficient aitia. 3 Why are the angles of a triangle equal to two right angles? Because of the triangle’s nature formal aitia. 4 Why did someone walk after dinner? Because or for the sake of his health final aitia. Only the second of these would typically be called a cause in English. Though some render aitia as ‘explanatory principle’ or ‘reason’, these expressions inaptly suggest a merely mental existence; instead, an aitia is a thing or aspect of a thing. The study of the causatum in Grice is key. It appears in “Meaning,” because he starts discussing Stevenson whom Grice dubs a ‘causalist.’ It continues with Grice on ‘knowledge,’ and ‘willing’ in “Intention and Uncertainty.” Also in “Aspects of reasoning.”

albertus de saxonia: “Saxonia sounds like a large place – but we do not know where in Saxony came from – I often wonder if Albertus of Saxony is not underinformative.” – Grice. Like Grice, a terminist logician, from lower Saxony who taught in the arts faculty at Paris. Under the influence of Buridan and Nicholas of Oresme, he turned to playful dialectics. He was a founder of the “Universitas Vienna” and was bishop of Halberstadt. His works on logic include Logic, Questions on the Posterior Analytics, Sophismata, Treatise on Obligations, and Insolubilia. He also wrote questions on Aristotle’s physical works and on John of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera, and short treatises on squaring the circle and on the ratio of the diameter to the side of a square. His work is competent but rarely original. Grice read most of them, and was surprised that Albertus never coined ‘implicature’!

albertus magnus: Dominican Griceian philosopher. As a Parisian master of theology, he served on a commission that condemned the Talmud. He left Paris to found the first Dominican studium generale at Cologne. Albert was repeatedly asked to be an arbiter and peacemaker. After serving briefly as bishop of Regensburg, he was ordered to preach the crusade. He spent his last years writing in Cologne. Albert contributed to philosophy chiefly as a commentator on Aristotle, although he occasionally reached different conclusions from Aristotle. Primarily, Albert was a theologian, as is evident from his extensive commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and his commentaries on the Old and New Testaments. As a theologian, he customarily developed his thought by commenting on traditional texts. For Albert, Aristotle offered knowledge ascertainable using reason, just as Scripture, based on God’s word, tells of the supernatural. Albert saw Aristotle’s works, many newly available, as an encyclopedic compendium of information on the natural universe; included here is the study of social and political conditions and ethical obligations, for Aristotelian “natural knowledge” deals with human nature as well as natural history. Aristotle is the Philosopher; however, unlike Holy Scripture, he must be corrected in places. Like Holy Scripture, though, Aristotle is occasionally obscure. To rectify these shortcomings one must rely on other authorities: in the case of Holy Scripture, reference is to the church fathers and established interpreters; in the case of Aristotle, to the Peripatetics. The term ‘Peripatetics’ extends to modern as well as ancient authors  al-Farabi, Avicenna Ibn-Sina, and Averroes Ibn-Rushd, as well as Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias; even Seneca, Maimonides, and “our” Boethius are included. For the most part, Albert saw Plato through the eyes of Aristotle and Averroes, since apart from the Timaeus very little of Plato’s work was available in Latin. Albert considered the Liber de causis a work of Aristotle, supplemented by alFarabi, Avicenna, and al-Ghazali and tr. into Latin. When he commented on the Liber de causis, Albert was not aware that this Neoplatonic work  which speaks of the world emanating from the One as from a first cause  was based on Proclus and ultimately on Plotinus. But Albert’s student, Aquinas, who had better translations of Aristotle, recognized that the Liber de causis was not an Aristotelian work. Albert’s metaphysics, which is expounded in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics on the Liber de causis, contains profoundly contradictory elements. His inclination to synthesis led him to attempt to reconcile these elements  as on social and ecclesiastical questions he often sought peace through compromise. In his Metaphysics and Physics and in his On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle presented the world as ever-changing and taught that an unmoved mover “thought thinking itself” maintained everything in movement and animation by allowing its spiritual nature to be seen in all its cold, unapproachable beauty. The Liber de causis, on the other hand, develops the theory that the world emanates from the One, causing everything in the world in its pantheistic creativity, so that the caused world returns in mystic harmony to the One. Thus Albert’s Aristotelian commentaries culminated with his commentary on a work whose pseudo-Aristotelian character he was unable to recognize. Nevertheless, the Christian Neoplatonism that Albert placed on an Aristotelian basis was to exert an influence for centuries. In natural philosophy, Albert often arrived at views independent of Aristotle. According to Aristotle’s Physics, motion belongs to no single category; it is incomplete being. Following Avicenna and Averroes, Albert asks whether “becoming black,” e.g.  which ceases when change ceases and blackness is finally achieved  differs from blackness essentially essentia or only in its being esse. Albert establishes, contrary to Avicenna, that the distinction is only one of being. In his discussions of place and space, stimulated by Avicenna, Albert also makes an original contribution. Only two dimensions  width and breadth  are essential to place, so that a fluid in a bottle is framed by the inner surface of the bottle. According to Albert, the significance of the third dimension, depth, is more modest, but nonetheless important. Consider a bucket of water: its base is the essential part, but its round walls maintain the cohesion of the water. For Aristotle, time’s material foundation is distinct from its formal definition. Materially, the movement of the fixed stars is basic, although time itself is neither movement nor change. Rather, just as before and after are continuous in space and there are earlier and later moments in movement as it proceeds through space, so time  being the number of motion  has earlier and later moments or “nows.” The material of time consists of the uninterrupted flow of the indivisible nows, while time’s form and essential expression is number. Following al-Farabi and Avicenna, Albert’s interpretation of these doctrines emphasizes not only the uninterrupted continuity of the flow of “nows,” but also the quantity of time, i.e., the series of discrete, separate, and clearly distinct numbers. Albert’s treatment of time did not lend itself well to later consideration of time as a dimension; his concept of time is therefore not well suited to accommodate our unified concept of space-time. The use of the pseudo-Aristotelian De proprietatibus elementorum in De causis proprietatum elementorum gave Albert’s worldview a strong astrological flavor. At issue here is how the planets influence the earth and mankind. Particularly important is the influence of Jupiter and Saturn on fire and the seas; when increased, it could produce fiery conflagrations, and when circumscribed, floods. Albert was encyclopedic: a scientist and scholar as well as a philosopher and theologian. In addition to the works mentioned, he produced commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius, a Summa de creaturis, a Summa Theologica, and many other treatises. Unlike other commentators, his exposition was continuous, an extensive paraphrase; he provided a complete Latin and Christian philosophy. Even in his lifetime, he was a named authority; according to Roger Bacon, his views were often given as much weight as those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes. His students or followers include Aquinas, Ulrich of Strassburg, Theodoric of Freiberg, Giles of Lessines, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck, and H. P. Grice.   

alethic: Grice could not find a good word for ‘verum,’ and so he borrowed ‘alethic’ from, but never returned it to, von Wright. Under the alethic modalities, Grice, as historically, included the four central ways or modes in which a given proposition might be true or false: necessity, contingency, possibility, and impossibility. The term ‘alethic’ derives from Grecian aletheia, ‘truth’. These modalities, and their logical interconnectedness, can be characterized as follows. A proposition that is true but possibly false is contingently true e.g., that Aristotle taught Alexander; one that is true and not-possibly i.e., “impossibly” false is necessarily true e.g., that red things are colored. Likewise, a proposition that is false but possibly true is contingently false e.g., that there are no tigers; and one that is false and not-possibly true is necessarily false e.g., that seven and five are fourteen. Though any one of the four modalities can be defined in terms of any other, necessity and possibility are generally taken to be the more fundamental notions, and most systems of alethic modal logic take one or the other as basic. Distinct modal systems differ chiefly in regard to their treatment of iterated modalities, as in the proposition It is necessarily true that it is possibly true that it is possibly true that there are no tigers. In the weakest of the most common systems, usually called T, every iterated modality is distinct from every other. In the stronger system S4, iterations of any given modality are redundant. So, e.g., the above proposition is equivalent to It is necessarily true that it is possibly true that there are no tigers. In the strongest and most widely accepted system S5, all iteration is redundant. Thus, the two propositions above are both equivalent simply to It is possibly true that there are no tigers. 

alexanderian: samuel – what Grice called “A Balliol hegelian,” philosopher, tuteed at Balliol by A. C. Bradley, Oxford, and taught for most of his career at the  of Manchester. His aim, which he most fully realized in Space, Time, and Deity 0, was to provide a realistic account of the place of mind in nature. He described nature as a series of levels of existence where irreducible higher-level qualities emerge inexplicably when lower levels become sufficiently complex. At its lowest level reality consists of space-time, a process wherein points of space are redistributed at instants of time and which might also be called pure motion. From complexities in space-time matter arises, followed by secondary qualities, life, and mind. Alexander thought that the still-higher quality of deity, which characterizes the whole universe while satisfying religious sentiments, is now in the process of emerging from mind. 

alexanderian: related to Alexander de Aphrodisias: ““Alexander of Aphrodisias” should not be confused with Samuel Alexander, a fellow of Bradley, even if they are next in your philosophical dictionary!” – Grice. Grecian philosopher, one of the foremost commentators on Aristotle in late antiquity. He exercised considerable influence on later Grecian and Roman philosophy through to the Renaissance. On the problem of universals, Alexander endorses a brand of conceptualism: although several particulars may share a single, common nature, this nature does not exist as a universal except while abstracted in thought from the circumstances that accompany its particular instantiations. Regarding Aristotle’s notorious distinction between the “agent” and “patient” intellects in On the Soul III.5, Alexander identifies the agent intellect with God, who, as the most intelligible entity, makes everything else intelligible. As its own self-subsistent object, this intellect alone is imperishable; the human intellect, in contrast, perishes at death. Of Alexander’s many commentaries, only those on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Ad, Prior Analytics I, Topics, On the Senses, and Meterologics are extant. We also have two polemical treatises, On Fate and On Mixture, directed against the Stoics; a psychological treatise, the De anima based on Aristotle’s; as well as an assortment of essays including the De intellectu and his Problems and Solutions. Nothing is known of Alexander’s life apart from his appointment by the emperor Severus to a chair in Aristotelian philosophy between  and 209. 

hales: from Alexander of Hales. Grice called William of Occam “Occam,” William of Sherwood, “Shyrewood,” and Alexander of Hales “Hales,” – why, I wish people would call me “Harborne,” and not Grice!” – Grice. English Franciscan theologian, known as the Doctor Irrefragabilis. The first to teach theology by lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Alexander’s emphasis on speculative theology initiated the golden age of Scholasticism. Alexander wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the Gospels; his chief works include his Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum, Quaestiones disputatatae antequam esset frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales. Alexander did not complete the Summa fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV ordered the Franciscans to complete the Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of theology in 1222, Alexander played an important role in the history of Paris, writing parts of Gregory IX’s Parens scientiarum 1231. He also helped negotiate the peace between England and France. He gave up his position as canon of Lichfield and archdeacon of Coventry to become a Franciscan, the first Franciscan master of theology; his was the original Franciscan chair of theology at Paris. Among the Franciscans, his most prominent disciples include St. Bonaventure, Richard Rufus of Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he resigned his chair in theology near the end of his life.

algorithm: Grice’s term for ‘decision procedure,’ a clerical or effective procedure that can be applied to any of a class of certain symbolic inputs and that will in a finite time and number of steps eventuate in a result in a corresponding symbolic output. A function for which an algorithm sometimes more than one can be given is an algorithmic function. The following are common examples: a given n, finding the nth prime number; b differentiating a polynomial; c finding the greatest common divisor of x and y the Euclidean algorithm; and d given two numbers x, y, deciding whether x is a multiple of y. When an algorithm is used to calculate values of a numerical function, as in a, b, and c, the function can also be described as algorithmically computable, effectively computable, or just computable. Algorithms are generally agreed to have the following properties  which made them essential to the theory of computation and the development of the Church-Turing thesis  i an algorithm can be given by a finite string of instructions, ii a computation device or agent can carry out or compute in accordance with the instructions, iii there will be provisions for computing, storing, and recalling steps in a computation, iv computations can be carried out in a discrete and stepwise fashion in, say, a digital computer, and v computations can be carried out in a deterministic fashion in, say, a deterministic version of a Turing machine. 

allais’s paradox: a puzzle about rationality, discussed by H. P. Grice, “Aspects of reason,” devised by Maurice Allais b. 1. Leonard Savage  advanced the sure-thing principle, which states that a rational agent’s ranking of a pair of gambles having the same consequence in a state S agrees with her ranking of any other pair of gambles the same as the first pair except for having some other common consequence in S. Allais devised an apparent counterexample with four gambles involving a 100-ticket lottery. The table lists prizes in units of $100,000. Ticket Numbers Gambles 1 2  11 12  100 A 5 5 5 B 0 25 5 C 5 5 0 D 0 25 0 Changing A’s and B’s common consequence for tickets 12100 from 5 to 0 yields C and D respectively. Hence the sure-thing principle prohibits simultaneously preferring A to B, and D to C. Yet most people have these preferences, which seem coherent. This conflict generates the paradox. Savage presented the sure-thing principle in The Foundations of Statistics 4. Responding to preliminary drafts of that work, Allais formulated his counterexample in “The Foundations of a Positive Theory of Choice Involving Risk and a Criticism of the Postulates and Axioms of the  School” 2. 

alnwick: English Franciscan theologian. William studied under Duns Scotus at Paris, and wrote the Reportatio Parisiensia, a central source for Duns Scotus’s teaching. In his own works, William opposed Scotus on the univocity of being and haecceitas. Some of his views were attacked by Ockham.

alstonian: w. p. cites H. P. Grice as ideationist. Philosopher widely acknowledged as one of the most important contemporary epistemologists and one of the most important philosophers of religion of the twentieth century. He is particularly known for his argument that putative perception of God is epistemologically on all fours with putative perception of everyday material objects. Alston graduated from Centenary and the U.S. Army. A fine musician, he had to choose between philosophy and music. Philosophy won out; he received his Ph.D. from the  of Chicago and began his philosophical career at the  of Michigan, where he taught for twenty-two years. Since 0 he has taught at Syracuse. Although his dissertation and some of his early work were on Whitehead, he soon turned to philosophy of language Philosophy of Language, 4. Since the early 0s Alston has concentrated on epistemology and philosophy of religion. In epistemology he has defended foundationalism although not classical foundationalism, investigated epistemic justification with unusual depth and penetration, and called attention to important levels distinctions. His chief works here are Epistemic Justification, a collection of essays; and The Reliability of Sense Perception. His chief work in philosophy of religion is Divine Nature and Human Language, a collection of essays on metaphysical and epistemological topics; and Perceiving God. The latter is a magisterial argument for the conclusion that experiential awareness of God, more specifically perception of God, makes an important contribution to the grounds of religious belief. In addition to this scholarly work, Alston was a founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, a professional society with more than 1,100 members, and the founding editor of Faith and Philosophy. 

althusserian: a philosopher Grice called a ‘hegelian’. LouisL Marxist philosopher whose publication in 5 of two collections of essays, Pour Marx “For Marx” and Lire le Capital “Reading Capital”, made him a sensation in  intellectual circles and attracted a large international readership. The English translations of these texts in 9 and 0, respectively, helped shape the development of Marxist thought in the English-speaking world throughout the 0s. Drawing on the work of non-positivist  historians and philosophers of science, especially Bachelard, Althusser proclaimed the existence of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, occurring in the mid-1840s. What preceded this break was, in Althusser’s view, a prescientific theoretical humanism derived from Feuerbach and ultimately from Hegel. What followed it, Althusser maintained, was a science of history a all-things-considered reason Althusser, Louis 23 4065A-   23 development as monumental, potentially, as the rise of the new sciences of nature in the seventh century. Althusser argued that the nature and even the existence of this new kind of science had yet to be acknowledged, even by Marx himself. It therefore had to be reconstructed from Marx’s writings, Das Kapital especially, and also discerned in the political practice of Lenin and other like-minded revolutionaries who implicitly understood what Marx intended. Althusser did little, however, to elaborate the content of this new science. Rather, he tirelessly defended it programmatically against rival construals of Marxism. In so doing, he took particular aim at neo-Hegelian and “humanistic” currents in the larger Marxist culture and implicitly in the  Communist Party, to which he belonged throughout his adult life. After 8, Althusser’s influence in France faded. But he continued to teach at l’École Normale Superieure and to write, making important contributions to political theory and to understandings of “ideology” and related concepts. He also faced increasingly severe bouts of mania and depression. In 0, in what the  courts deemed an episode of “temporary insanity,” he strangled his wife. Althusser avoided prison, but spent much of the 0s in mental institutions. During this period he wrote two extraordinary memoirs, L’avenir dure longtemps “The Future Lasts Forever” and Les faits “The Facts”, published posthumously in 2.

altogether nice girl: Or Grice’s altogether nice girl. Grice quotes from the music-hall ditty, “Every [sic] nice girl loves a sailor” (WoW:33). He uses this for his account of multiple quantification. There is a reading where the emissor may implicate that every nice girl is such that he loves one sailor, viz. Grice. But if the existential quantifier is not made dominant, the uniqueness is disimplicated. Grice admits that not every nominalist will be contented with the ‘metaphysical’ status of ‘the altogether nice girl.’ The ‘one-at-a-time sailor’ is her counterpart. And they inhabit the class of LOVE.

ambrosius: saint – on altruism. known as Ambrose of Milan c.33997, Roman church leader and theologian. While bishop of Milan, he not only led the struggle against the Arian heresy and its political manifestations, but offered new models for preaching, for Scriptural exegesis, and for hymnody. His works also contributed to medieval Latin philosophy. Ambrose’s appropriation of Neoplatonic doctrines was noteworthy in itself, and it worked powerfully on and through Augustine. Ambrose’s commentary on the account of creation in Genesis, his Hexaemeron, preserved for medieval readers many pieces of ancient natural history and even some altruism Ambrose, Saint 24 4065A-   24 elements of physical explanation. Perhaps most importantly, Ambrose engaged ancient philosophical ethics in the search for moral lessons that marks his exegesis of Scripture; he also reworked Cicero’s De officiis as a treatise on the virtues and duties of Christian living.

amicus: philia and eros – Grice on Aristotle’s aporia of friendship -- Eros, the Grecian god of erotic love. Eros came to be symbolic of various aspects of love, first appearing in Hesiod in opposition to reason. In general, however, Eros was seen by Grecians e.g., Parmenides as a unifying force. In Empedocles, it is one of two external forces explaining the history of the cosmos, the other being Strife. These forces resemble the “hidden harmony” of Heraclitus. The Symposium of Plato is the best-known ancient discussion of Eros, containing speeches from various standpoints  mythical, sophistic, etc. Socrates says he has learned from the priestess Diotima of a nobler form of Eros in which sexual desire can be developed into the pursuit of understanding the Form of beauty. The contrast between agape and Eros is found first in Democritus. This became important in Christian accounts of love. In Neoplatonism, Eros referred to the mystical union with Being sought by philosophers. Eros has become important recently in the work of Continental writers. 

ammonius: saccas early third century A.D., Platonist philosopher. He apparently served early in the century as the teacher of the philosopher Origen. He attracted the attention of Plotinus, who came to the city in 232 in search of philosophical enlightenment Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3. Ammonius the epithet ‘Saccas’ seems to mean ‘the bagman’ was undoubtedly a charismatic figure, but it is not at all clear what, if any, were his distinctive doctrines, though he seems to have been influenced by Numenius. He wrote nothing, and may be thought of, in E. R. Dodds’s words, as the Socrates of Neoplatonism. 

analyticum: Porphyry couldn’t find a Latinate for ‘analyticum’ – ‘analyisis’ is like ‘se-paratio.’ But even in Grecian, ‘analysis’ and synthesis are not real opposite – since ‘synthesis’ neatly comes as ‘compositio’ -- analysis, the process of breaking up a concept, proposition, linguistic complex, or fact into its simple or ultimate constituents. That on which the analysis is done is called the analysandum, and that which does the analysis is called the analysans. A number of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, including Russell, Moore, and the early Vitters, have argued that philosophical analysis is the proper method of philosophy. But the practitioners of analytic philosophy have disagreed about what kind of thing is to be analyzed. For example, Moore tried to analyze sense-data into their constituent parts. Here the analysandum is a complex psychological fact, the having of a sense-datum. More commonly, analytic philosophers have tried to analyze concepts or propositions. This is conceptual analysis. Still others have seen it as their task to give an analysis of various kinds of sentences  e.g., those involving proper names or definite descriptions. This is linguistic analysis. Each of these kinds of analysis faces a version of a puzzle that has come to be called the paradox of analysis. For linguistic analyses, the paradox can be expressed as follows: for an analysis to be adequate, the analysans must be synonymous with the analysandum; e.g., if ‘male sibling’ is to analyze ‘brother’, they must mean the same; but if they are synonymous, then ‘a brother is a male sibling’ is synonymous with ‘a brother is a brother’; but the two sentences do not seem synonymous. Expressed as a dilemma, the paradox is that any proposed analysis would seem to be either inadequate because the analysans and the analysandum are not synonymous or uninformative because they are synonymous.  Analytic philosophy is an umbrella term currently used to cover a diverse assortment of philosophical techniques and tendencies. As in the case of chicken-sexing, it is relatively easy to identify analytic philosophy and philosophers, though difficult to say with any precision what the criteria are. Analytic philosophy is sometimes called Oxford philosophy or linguistic philosophy, but these labels are, at least, misleading. Whatever else it is, analytic philosophy is manifestly not a school, doctrine, or body of accepted propositions. At Cambridge, analytic philosophers are the intellectual heirs of Russell, Moore, and Vitters, philosophers who self-consciously pursued “philosophical analysis” in the early part of the twentieth century. Analysis, as practiced by Russell and Moore, concerned not language per se, but concepts and propositions. In their eyes, while it did not exhaust the domain of philosophy, analysis provided a vital tool for laying bare the logical form of reality. Vitters, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, contended, though obliquely, that the structure of language reveals the structure of the world; every meaningful sentence is analyzable into atomic constituents that designate the finegrained constituents of reality. This “Tractarian” view was one Vitters was to renounce in his later work, but it had considerable influence within the Vienna Circle in the 0s, and in the subsequent development of logical positivism in the 0s and 0s. Carnap and Ayer, both exponents of positivism, held that the task of philosophy was not to uncover elusive metaphysical truths, but to provide analyses of scientific sentences. Other sentences, those in ethics, for instance, were thought to lack “cognitive significance.” Their model was Russell’s theory of descriptions, which provided a technique for analyzing away apparent commitments to suspicious entities. Meanwhile, a number of former proponents of analysis, influenced by Vitters, had taken up what came to be called ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers of this persuasion focused on the role of words in the lives of ordinary speakers, hoping thereby to escape long-standing philosophical muddles. These muddles resulted, they thought, from a natural tendency, when pursuing philosophical theses, to be misled by the grammatical form of sentences in which those questions were posed. A classic illustration might be Heidegger’s supposition that ‘nothing’ must designate something, though a very peculiar something. Today, it is difficult to find much unanimity in the ranks of analytic philosophers. There is, perhaps, an implicit respect for argument and clarity, an evolving though informal agreement as to what problems are and are not tractable, and a conviction that philosophy is in some sense continuous with science. The practice of analytic philosophers to address one another rather than the broader public has led some to decry philosophy’s “professionalization” and to call for a return to a pluralistic, community-oriented style of philosophizing. Analytic philosophers respond by pointing out that analytic techniques and standards have been well represented in the history of philosophy. Analyticity. H. P. Grice, “In defence of a dogma,” in Studies in the way of words. the analyticsynthetic distinction, the distinction, made famous by Kant, according to which an affirmative subject-predicate statement proposition, judgment is called analytic if the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept, and synthetic otherwise. The statement ‘All red roses are red’ is analytic, since the concept ‘red’ is contained in the concept ‘red roses’. ‘All roses are red’ is synthetic, since the concept ‘red’ is not contained in the concept ‘roses’. The denial of an affirmative subject-predicate statement entails a contradiction if it is analytic. E.g., ‘Not all red roses are red’ entails ‘Some roses are both red and not red’. One concept may be contained in another, in Kant’s sense, even though the terms used to express them are not related as part to whole. Since ‘biped’ means ‘two-footed animal’, the concept ‘two-footed’ is contained in the concept ‘biped’. It is accordingly analytic that all bipeds are two-footed. The same analytic statement is expressed by the synonymous sentences ‘All bipeds are two-footed’ and ‘All two-footed animals are two-footed’. Unlike statements, sentences cannot be classified as analytic or synthetic except relative to an interpretation. analytical jurisprudence analyticsynthetic distinction 26 4065A-   26 Witness ‘All Russian teachers are Russian’, which in one sense expresses the analytic statement ‘All teachers that are Russian are Russian’, and in another the synthetic statement ‘All teachers of Russian are Russian’. Kant’s innovation over Leibniz and Hume lay in separating the logicosemantic analyticsynthetic distinction from the epistemological a prioria posteriori distinction and from the modalmetaphysical necessarycontingent distinction. It seems evident that any analytic statement is a priori knowable without empirical evidence and necessary something that could not be false. The converse is highly controversial. Kant and his rationalist followers maintain that some a priori and necessary statements are synthetic, citing examples from logic ‘Contradictions are impossible’, ‘The identity relation is transitive’, mathematics ‘The sum of 7 and 5 is 12’, ‘The straight line between two points is the shortest’, and metaphysics ‘Every event is caused’. Empiricists like J. S. Mill, Carnap, Ayer, and C. I. Lewis argue that such examples are either synthetic a posteriori or analytic a priori. Philosophers since Kant have tried to clarify the analyticsynthetic distinction, and generalize it to all statements. On one definition, a sentence is analytic on a given interpretation provided it is “true solely in virtue of the meaning or definition of its terms.” The truth of any sentence depends in part on the meanings of its terms. `All emeralds are green’ would be false, e.g., if ‘emerald’ meant ‘ruby’. What makes the sentence synthetic, it is claimed, is that its truth also depends on the properties of emeralds, namely, their being green. But the same holds for analytic sentences: the truth of ‘All red roses are red’ depends on the properties of red roses, namely, their being red. Neither is true solely in virtue of meaning. A more adequate generalization defines an analytic statement as a formal logical truth: one “true in virtue of its logical form,” so that all statements with the same form are true. In terms of sentences under an interpretation, an analytic truth is an explicit logical truth one whose surface structure represents its logical form or one that becomes an explicit logical truth when synonyms are substituted. The negative statement that tomorrow is not both Sunday and not Sunday is analytic by this definition, because all statements of the form : p & - p are true. Kant’s definition is obtained as a special case by stipulating that the predicate of an affirmative subjectpredicate statement is contained in the subject provided the statement is logically true. On a third generalization, ‘analytic’ denotes any statement whose denial entails a contradiction. Subject S contains predicate P provided being S entails being P. Whether this is broader or narrower than the second generalization depends on how ‘entailment’, ‘logical form’, and ‘contradiction’ are defined. On some construals, ‘Red is a color’ counts as analytic on the third generalization its denial entails ‘Something is and is not a color’ but not on the second ‘red’ and ‘colored’ are logically unstructured, while the rulings are reversed for a counterfactual conditional like ‘If this were a red rose it would be red’. Following Quine, many have denied any distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Some arguments presume the problematic “true by meaning” definition. Others are that: 1 the distinction cannot be defined without using related notions like ‘meaning’, ‘concept’, and ‘statement’, which are neither extensional nor definable in terms of behavior; 2 some statements like ‘All cats are animals’ are hard to classify as analytic or synthetic; and 3 no statement allegedly is immune from rejection in the face of new empirical evidence. If these arguments were sound, however, the distinction between logical truths and others would seem equally dubious, a conclusion seldom embraced. Some describe a priori truths, both synthetic and analytic, as conceptual truths, on the theory that they are all true in virtue of the nature of the concepts they contain. Conceptual truths are said to have no “factual content” because they are about concepts rather than things in the actual world. While it is natural to classify a priori truths together, the proffered theory is questionable. As indicated above, all truths hold in part because of the identity of their concepts, and in part because of the nature of the objects they are about. It is a fact that all emeralds are emeralds, and this proposition is about emeralds, not concepts.

analyticum-a-priori: For Grice, an oxymoron, since surely ‘analyticum-a-posteriori’ is an oxymoron. R. A. Wollheim. London-born philosopher, BPhil Oxon, Balliol (under D. Marcus) and All Souls.  Examined by H. P. Grice. “What’s two times two?” Wollheim treasured that examination. It was in the context of a discussion of J. S. Mill and I. Kant, for whom addition and multiplication are ‘synthetic’ – a priori for Kant, a posteriori for Mill. Grice was trying to provide a counterexample to Mill’s thesis that all comes via deduction or induction.

necessitatum: ananke, when feeling very Grecian, Grice would use ‘ananke,’ instead of ‘must,’ which he thought too English! Grecian, necessity. The term was used by early Grecian philosophers for a constraining or moving natural force. In Parmenides frg. 8, line 30 ananke encompasses reality in limiting bonds; according to Diogenes Laertius, Democrianamnesis ananke 27 4065A-   27 tus calls the vortex that generates the cosmos ananke; Plato Timaeus 47e ff. refers to ananke as the irrational element in nature, which reason orders in creating the physical world. As used by Aristotle Metaphysics V.5, the basic meaning of ‘necessary’ is ‘that which cannot be otherwise’, a sense that includes logical necessity. He also distinguishes Physics II.9 between simple and hypothetical necessity conditions that must hold if something is to occur. 

anaxagoras: Grecian and pre-Griceian philosopher who was the first of the pre-Socratics to teach in Athens c.480450, where he influenced leading intellectuals such as Pericles and Euripides. He left Athens when he was prosecuted for impiety. Writing in response to Parmenides, he elaborated a theory of matter according to which nothing comes into being or perishes. The ultimate realities are stuffs such as water and earth, flesh and bone, but so are contraries such as hot and cold, likewise treated as stuffs. Every phenomenal substance has a portion of every elemental stuff, and there are no minimal parts of anything, but matter takes on the phenomenal properties of whatever predominates in the mixture. Anaxagoras posits an indefinite number of elemental stuffs, in contrast to his contemporary Empedocles, who requires only four elements; but Anaxagoras follows Parmenides more rigorously, allowing no properties or substances to emerge that were not already present in the cosmos as its constituents. Thus there is no ultimate gap between appearance and reality: everything we perceive is real. In Anaxagoras’s cosmogony, an initial chaos of complete mixture gives way to an ordered world when noûs mind begins a vortex motion that separates cosmic masses of ether the bright upper air, air, water, and earth. Mind is finer than the stuffs and is found in living things, but it does not mix with stuffs. Anaxagoras’s theory of mind provides the first hint of a mindmatter dualism. Plato and Aristotle thought his assigning a cosmic role to mind made him sound like “a sober man” among his contemporaries, but they were disappointed that he did not exploit his idea to provide teleological explanations of natural phenomena. 

anaximander: Grecian and pre-Griceian philosopher and cosmologist, reputedly the student and successor of Thales in the Milesian school. He described the cosmos as originating from apeiron the boundless by a process of separating off; a disk-shaped earth was formed, surrounded by concentric heavenly rings of fire enclosed in air. At “breathing holes” in the air we see jets of fire, which are the stars, moon, and sun. The earth stays in place because there is no reason for it to tend one way or another. The seasons arise from alternating periods where hot and dry or wet and anaphor Anaximander 28 4065A-   28 cold powers predominate, governed by a temporal process figuratively portrayed as the judgment of Time. Anaximander drew a map of the world and explained winds, rain, and lightning by naturalistic hypotheses. He also described the emergence of life in a way that prefigures the theory of evolution. Anaximander’s interest in cosmology and cosmogony and his brilliant conjectures set the major questions for later preSocratics. 

anaximenes: of Miletus: Grecian and  pre-Griceian philosopher, a pre-Socratic who, following in the tradition of the Milesians Thales and Anaximander, speculated about cosmology and meteorology. The source arche of the cosmos is air aer, originally mist, which by a process of rarefaction becomes fire, and by a process of condensation becomes wind, clouds, water, earth, and stones. Air is divine and causes life. The earth is flat and rides on a cushion of air, while a heavenly firmament revolves about it like a felt cap. Anaximenes also explained meteorological phenomena and earthquakes. Although less innovative than his predecessor Anaximander, he made progress in naturalistic explanations by appealing to a quantitative process of rarefaction and condensation rather than to mythical processes involving quasi-personal agents.

ancestry: Studied by H. P. Grice. Of a given relation R, the relation also called the transitive closure of R that relates one given individual to a second if and only if the first can be “reached” from the second by repeated “applications” of the given relation R. The “ancestor” relation is the ancestral of the parent relation since one person is an ancestor of a second if the first is a parent of the second or the first is a parent of a parent of the second or the first is a parent of a parent of a parent of the second, and so on. Frege discovered a simple method of giving a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the ancestral of a given relation in terms of the relation itself plus logical concepts. This method is informally illustrated as follows. In order for one person A to be an ancestor of a second person B it is necessary and sufficient for A to have every property that belongs to every parent of B and that belongs to every parent of any person to whom it belongs. This and other similar methods made possible the reduction of all numerical concepts to those of zero and successor, which Frege then attempted to reduce to concepts of pure logic. Frege’s definition of the ancestral has become a paradigm in modern analytic philosophy as well as a historical benchmark of the watershed between traditional logic and modern logic. It demonstrates the exactness of modern logical analysis and, in comparison, the narrowness of traditional logic. 

andronicus: Grecian philosopher, a leading member of the Lyceum who was largely responsible for establishing the canon of Aristotle’s works still read today. He also edited the works of Theophrastus. At the time, Aristotle was known primarily for his philosophical dialogues, only fragments of which now survive; his more methodical treatises had stopped circulating soon after his death. By producing the first systematic edition of Aristotle’s corpus, Andronicus revived study of the treatises, and the resulting critical debates dramatically affected the course of philosophy. Little is recorded about Andronicus’s labors; but besides editing the texts and discussing titles, arrangement, and authenticity, he sought to explicate and assess Aristotle’s thought. In so doing, he and his colleagues initiated the exegetical tradition of Aristotelian commentaries. Nothing he wrote survives; a summary account of emotions formerly ascribed to him is spurious. 

angst: Grice discusses this as an ‘implicatural emotion.’ G. term for a special form of anxiety, an emotion seen by existentialists as both constituting and revealing the human condition. Angst plays a key role in the writings of Heidegger, whose concept is closely related to Kierkegaard’s angest and Sartre’s angoisse. The concept is first treated in this distinctive way in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety 1844, where anxiety is described as “the dizziness of freedom.” Anxiety here represents freedom’s self-awareness; it is the psychological precondition for the individual’s attempt to become autonomous, a possibility that is seen as both alluring and disturbing. 

animal: pirotese. Durrell’s Family Conversations. Durrelly’s family conversation. When H. P. Grice was presented with an ‘overview’ of his oeuvre for PGRICE (Grandy and Warner, 1986), he soon found out.  “There’s something missing.”  Indeed, there is a very infamous objection, Grice thought, which is not mentioned by ‘Richards,’ as he abbreviates Richard Grandy and Richard Warner’s majestically plural ‘overview,’ which seems to Grice to be one to which Grice must respond. And he shall! The objection Grice states as follows. One of the leading strands in Grice’s reductive analysis of the circumstances or scenario in which an emissor (E) communicates that p is that the scenario, call it “C,” is not to be regarded exclusively, “or even primarily,” as a ‘feature’ of an E that is using what philosophers of language (since Plato’s “Cratylus”) have been calling ‘language’ (glossa, la lingua latina, la lingua italiana, la langue française, the English tongue, de nederlands taal, die Deutsche Sprache, etc.). The emissum (e) may be an ‘utterance’ which is not ‘linguistic.’ Grice finds the issue crucial after discussing the topic with his colleague at Berkeley, Davidson. For Davidson reminds Grice: “[t]here is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers […] have supposed” (Davidson, 1986: 174). “I’m happy you say ‘many,’ Davidson,” Grice commented. Grice continues formulating what he obviously found to be an insidious, fastidious, objection. There are many instances of “NOTABLY NON-‘linguistic’” vehicles or devices of communication, within a communication-system, even a one-off system, which fulfil this or that communication-function. I am using ‘communication-function’ alla Grice (1961:138, repr. 1989:235). These vehicles or devices are mostly syntactically un-structured or amorphous – Grice’s favourite example being a ‘sort of hand-wave’ meaning that it is not the case that the emissor knows the route or that the emissor is about to leave his addressee (1967:VI, repr. 1989:126).  Sometimes, a device may exhibit at least “some rudimentary syntactic” structure – as Grice puts it, giving a nod to Morris’s tripartite semiotics -- in that we may perhaps distinguish and identify a ‘totum’ or complexum (say, Plato’s ‘logos’) from a pars or simplex (say, Plato’s ‘onoma’ and ‘rhema’). Grice’s intention-based reductive analysis of a communicatum, based on Aristotle, Locke, and Peirce, is designed, indeed its very raison d'être being, to allow for the possibility that a non-“linguistic,” and, further, indeed a non-“conventional” 'utterance,’ perhaps unrepeatable token, not even manifesting any degree of syntactic structure, but a block of an amorphous signal, be within the ‘repertoire’ of ‘procedures,’ perhaps unrepeatable ones, of this or that organism, or creature, or agent, even if not relying on any apparatus for communication of the kind that that we may label ‘linguistic’ or otherwise ‘conventional,’ will count as an emissor E ‘doing’ this or that ‘thing,’ thereby ‘communicating’ that p. To provide for this conceptual scenario, it is plainly necessary, Grice grants, that the key ingredient in any representation or conceptualization, or reductive analysis of ‘communicating,’ viz. intending that p, for Grice, should be a ‘state’ of the emissor’s “soul” (Grice is translating Grecian ψυχή the capacity for which does not require what we may label the ‘possession’ of, shall we say, ‘faculty,’ of what philosophers since Cratylus have been calling ‘γλῶσσα Ἑλληνίδα,’ ‘lingua latina,’ ‘lingua italiana,’ ‘langue française,’ ‘English tongue,’ ‘Nederlands taal,’ ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’ (Grice always congratulated Kant for never distinguishing between ‘die Deutsche Sprache’ and ‘Sprache’ as ‘eine Fakultät.’). Now a philosopher, relying on this or that neo-Prichardian reductive analysis of ‘intending that p,’ (Oxonian Grice will quote Oxonian if he can) may not be willing to allow the possibility of such, shall we grant, pre-linguistic intending that p, or non-linguistic intending that p. Surely, if the emissor E realizes that his addressee or recipient R does not ‘share’ say, what the Germans call ‘die Deutsche Sprache,” E may still communicate, by doing so-and-so, that such-and-such, viz. p. E may make this sort of hand wave communicating that E knows the route or that E is about to leave R. Against that objection, Grice surely wins the day. There’s nothing in Prichard account of ‘willing that p,’ itself a borrowing from William James (“I will that the distant table slides over the floor toward me. It does not.”) which is about ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’ But Grice hastens to declare that winning ‘the’ day may not be winning ‘all’ day. And that is because of Oxonian philosophy being what it is. Because, as far as Grice’s Oxonian explorations on communication go, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves – ending with a a clause which closes the succession o-- designed to thwart this or that scenario, later deemed illegitimate, involving two rational agents where the emissor E relies on an ‘inference-element’ that it is not the case that E intends his recipient R will recogise – Grice is led to narrow the ‘intending’ the reductive analysis of ‘Emissor E communicates that p’ to C-intending.  Grice expects that whatever may be the case in general with regard to ‘intending,’ C-intending seems for some reason to Grice to be unsophisticatedly, viz. plainly, too sophisticated a ‘state’ of a soul (or ψυχή) to be found in an organism, ‘pirot,’ creature, that we may not want to deem ‘rational,’ or as the Germans would say, a creature that is plainly destitute of “Die Deutsche Sprache.” We seem to be needing a pirot to be “very intelligent, indeed rational.” (Who other than Grice would genially combine Locke with Carnap?). Some may regret, Grice admits, that his unavoidable rear-guard action just undermines the raison d'etre of his campaign. However, Grice goes on to provide an admittedly brief reply which will have to suffice under the circumstances. There is SOME limit for Oxonian debate! A full treatment that would satisfy Grice requires delving deep into crucial problems about the boundary between vicious and virtuous conceptual circularity. Which is promising. It is not something UNATTAINABLE a priori – and there is nothing wrong with leaving it for the morrow. It reduces to the philosopher trying to show himself virtuously circular, if not, like Lear, spherical. But why need the circle be virtuous. Well, as August would put it, unless a ‘circulus’ is not ‘virtuosus,’ one would hardly deem it a ‘circulus’ in the first place. A circle is virtuous if it is not a bad circle. One may even say, with The Carpenter, that, like a cabbage or a king, if a circle is not virtuous is not even a circle! (Grice 2001:35). In this case, to borrow from former Oxonian student S. R. Schiffer, we need the ‘virtuous circle’ because we are dealing with ‘a loop’ (Schiffer, 1988:v) -- a ‘conceptual loop,’ that is. Schiffer is not interested in ‘communicating;’ only ‘meaning,’ but his point can be easily transliterated. Schiffer is saying that ‘U,’ or utterer, our ‘E,’ means that p’ surely relies on ‘U intends that p,’ but mind the loop: ‘U intends that p’ may rely on ‘U means that p.’In Grice’s most generic, third-person terms, we have a creature, call it a pirot, P1, that, by doing thing D1, communicates that p. We are talking of Grice qua ethologist, who OBSERVES the scenario. As it happens, Grice’s favourite pirot is the parrot, and call Grice a snob, but his favourite parrot was Prince Maurice’s Parrot. Prince Maurice’s Parrot. Grice reads Locke, and adapts it slightly.  “Since I think I may be confident, that, whoever should see a CREATURE of his own shape or make, though it had no more reason all its life than a PARROT, would call him still A MAN; or whoever should hear a parrot discourse, reason, and philosophise, would call or think it nothing but a PARROT; and say, the one was A DULL IRRATIONAL MAN, and the other A VERY INTELLIGENT RATIONAL PARROT. “A relation we have in an author of great note, is sufficient to countenance the supposition of A RATIONAL PARROT. “The author’s words are as follows.”““I had a mind to know, from Prince Maurice's own mouth, the account of a common, but much credited story, that I had heard so often from many others, of a parrot he has, that speaks, and asks, and answers common questions, like A REASONABLE CREATURE.””““So that those of his train there generally conclude it to be witchery or possession; and one of his chaplains, would never from that time endure A PARROT, but says all PARROTS have a devil in them.””““I had heard many particulars of this story, and as severed by people hard to be discredited, which made me ask Prince Maurice what there is of it.””““Prince Maurice says, with his usual plainness and dryness in talk, there is something true, but a great deal false of what is reported.””““I desired to know of him what there was of the first. Prince Maurice tells me short and coldly, that he had HEARD of such A PARROT; and though he believes nothing of it, and it was a good way off, yet he had so much curiosity as to send for the parrot: that it was a very great parrot; and when the parrot comes first into the room where Prince Maurice is, with a great many men about him, the parrot says presently, ‘What a nice company is here.’”” ““ One of the men asks the parrot, ‘What thinkest thou that man is?,’ ostending his finger, and pointing to Prince Maurice.”“The parrot answers, ‘Some general -- or other.’ When the man brings the parrot close to Prince Maurice, Prince Maurice asks the parrot, ‘D'ou venez-vous?’”““The parrot answers, ‘De Marinnan.’ Then Prince Maurice goes on, and poses a second question to the parrot.””““‘A qui estes-vous?’ The Parrot answers: ‘A un Portugais.’”““Prince Maurice then asks a third question: ‘Que fais-tu la?’““The parrot answers: “Je garde les poulles.’ Prince Maurice smiles, which pleases the Parrot.”““Prince Maurice, violating a Griceian maxim, and being just informed that p, asks whether p. This is incidentally the Prince’s fourth question to the parrot – the first idiotic one. ‘Vous gardez les poulles?’”” ““The Parrot answers, ‘Oui, moi; et je scai bien faire.’ Then the parrott appeals to Peirce’s iconic system and makes the chuck four or five times that a man uses to make to chickens when a man calls them. I set down the words of this worthy dialogue in French, just as Prince Maurice said them to me. I ask Prince Maurice in what ‘tongue’ the parrot speaks.””““Prince Maurice says that the parrot speaks in the Brazilian tongue.””““ I ask Prince William whether he understands the Brazilian tongue.”” ““Prince Maurice says: No, but he has taken care to have TWO interpreters by him, the one a Dutchman that spoke the Brazilian tongue, and the other a Brazilian that spoke the Dutch tongue; that Prince Maurice asked them separately and privately, and both of them AGREED in telling Prince Maurice just the same thing that the parrot had said.””““I could not but tell this ODD story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the first hand, and what may pass for a good one; for I dare say Prince Maurice at least believed himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest and pious man.””““I leave it to naturalists to reason, and to other men to believe, as they please upon it. However, it is not, perhaps, amiss to relieve or enliven a busy scene sometimes with such digressions, whether to the purpose or no.””Locke takes care “that the reader should have the story at large in the author's own words, because he seems to me not to have thought it incredible.”“For it cannot be imagined that so able a man as he, who had sufficiency enough to warrant all the testimonies he gives of himself, should take so much pains, in a place where it had nothing to do, to pin so close, not only on a man whom he mentions as his friend, but on a prince in whom he acknowledges very great honesty and piety, a story which, if he himself thought incredible, he could not but also think RIDICULOUS.”“Prince Maurice, it is plain, who vouches this story, and our author, who relates it from him, both of them call this talker A PARROT.”Locke asks “any one else who thinks such a story fit to be told, whether, if this PARROT, and all of its kind, had always talked, as we have a prince's word for it this one did,- whether, I say, they would not have passed for a race of RATIONAL ANIMALS; but yet, whether, for all that, they would have been allowed to be MEN, and not PARROTS?”“For I presume it is not the idea of A THINKING OR RATIONAL BEING alone that makes the idea of A MAN in most people's sense: but of A BODY, so and so shaped, joined to it: and if that be the idea of a MAN, the same successive body not shifted all at once, must, as well as THE SAME IMMATERIAL SPIRIT, go to the making of the same MAN.”So back to Grice’s pirotology, or Pirotologia. But first a precis Grice needs a dossier with a précis, so that he can insert the parrot’s conversational implicata – and Prince Maurice’s. PARROT: What a nice company is here.MAN (pointing to Prince Maurice): What thinkest thou that man is?PARROT: Some general -- or other. Grice’s gloss: The he parrot displays what Grice calls ‘up-take.’ The parrot recognizes the man’s c-intention. So far is ability to display uptake.PRINCE MAURICE: D'ou venez-vous?PARROT: De Marinnan.PRINCE MAURICE: A qui estes-vous?PARROT: A un Portugais.PRINCE MAURICE: Que fais-tu la?PARROT: Je garde les poulles.PRINCE MAURICE SMILES and flouts a Griceian maxim: Vous gardez les poulles?PARROT (losing patience, and grasping the Prince’s implicature that he doubts it): Oui, moi. Et je scai bien faire.Grice’s gloss: The Parrott appeals to Peirce’s iconic system and makes the chuck five times that a man uses to make to chickens when a man calls them.According to his “most recent speculations” about communication, Grice goes on in his ‘Reply to Richards,’ one should distinguish, as he engages in a bit of legalese, between two sides of the scenario under conceptual reduction, E communicates that p. One side is the ‘de facto’ side, a side which, as in name implies, in fact contains any communication-relevant feature which obtains or is present in the circumstances. But then there is a ‘de jure’ side to the scenario, viz. the nested C-intending which is only deemed to be present, as a vicious circle with good intentions may become a virtuous one. By the ‘nesting,’ Grice means the three sub-intentions, involved in a scenario where Emissor E communicates that (psi*) p, reducible to the Emissor E c-intending that A recognises that E psi-s that p.First, there is the ‘exhibitive’ intention, C1. Emissor E intends A to recognise that A psi-s that p.Second, there is the ‘reflexive’ intention, C2.Emissor intends that A recognise C1 by A recognising C2Third, there is the ‘openness’ intention, C3. There is no inference-element which is C-constitutive such that Emissor relies on it and yet does not intend A to recognise.The “de jure” side to the state of affairs involves self-reference But since this self-referential circle, a mere ‘loop,’ is meant to BLOCK an utterly vicious circle of a regressus ad infinitum (or ‘ho eis apeiron ekballon,’ if you must), the self-referential circle may well be deemed virtuous. The ‘de jure’ side to the scenario is trying to save state of affairs which in, in Grice’s words, “infinitely complex,” and such that no reasonable philosopher should expect to be realised ‘de facto.’ “In which case,” Grice remarks, “it seems to serve little, if any, purpose” to assume that this very INCONCEIVABLE ‘de facto’ instantiation of a ‘de jure’ ascription of an emissor communicating that p would only be detectable, as it isn’t, by appeal to something like ‘die Deutsche Sprache’!“At its most meagre,” to use Grice’s idiom, the ‘de facto’ side should consist, merely, in any pre-rational ‘counterpart’ to the state of affairs describable by having an Emissor E communicating that p,This might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance – our doing D1 -- in order thereby to get some recipient creature R, our second pirot, P2, to think or want some particular thing, our p. This meagre condition hardly involves reference to anything like ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’Let’s reformulate the condition.It’s just a pirot, at a ‘pre-rational’ level. The pirot does a thing T IN ORDER THEREBY to get some other pirot to think or do some particular thing. To echo Hare,Die Tur ist geschlossen, ja.Die Tur ist geschlossen, bitte.Grice continues as a corollary: “Maybe in a less straightforward instance of “Emissor E communicates that p” there is actually present the C-intention whose feasibility as an ‘intention’ suggests some ability to use ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’And if it does, Grice adds, it looks like anything like ‘die Deutsche Sprache’ ends up being an aid to the conceptualizing about communication, not communication itself! ReferencesDavidson, Donald 1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs, in Grandy and Warner, pp. 157-74.Durrell, My family and other animals. Grandy, R. E. and R. O. Warner. 1986. Philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. Grice, H. P. 1986. Reply to Richards, in Grandy and Warner, pp. 45-106Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Grice, H. P. 2001. Aspects of reason. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. Locke, J. 1690. An essay concerning humane [sic] understanding. Oxford: The Bodleian. Schiffer, S. R. 1988. Meaning. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.

animatum: Grice thinks of communication as what he calls ‘soul-to-soul transfer.’ Very Aristotelian.  Grice was interested in what he called the ‘rational soul’ (psyche logike). In an act of communication, Emissor communicates that p, there is a psi involved, therefore a soul, therefore what the Romans called an ‘anima,’ and the Greeks called the ‘psyche.’ For surely there can be no psi-transmission without a psi. Grice loved to abbreviate this as the psi, since Lady Asquith, who was a soul, would not have desired any less from Grice. Grice, like Plato and Aristotle, holds a tripartite theory of the soul. Where, ‘part’ (Aristotelian ‘meros’) is taken very seriously. Anything thought. From ‘psyche,’ anima. Grice uses the symbol of the letter psi here which he renders as ‘animatum.’ Why Grice prefers ‘soul’ to mind. The immortality of a the chicken soul. By Shropshire. Shropshire claims that the immortality of the soul is proved by the fact that, if you cut off a chicken's head, the chicken will run round the yard for a quarter of an hour before dropping. Grice has an an 'expansion' of Shropshire's ingenious argument.If the soul is not dependent on the body, it is immortal. If the soul is dependent on the body, it is dependent on that part of the body in which it is located. If the soul is located in the body, it is located in the head. If the chicken's soul were located in its head, the chicken's soul would be destroyed if the head were rendered inoperative by removal from the body. The chicken runs round the yard after head-removal. It could do this only if animated, and controlled by its soul. So the chicken's soul is not located in, and not dependent on, the chicken's head. So the chicken's soul is not dependent on the chicken's body. So the chicken's soul is immortal. end p.11 If the chicken's soul is immortal, a fortiori the human soul is immortal. So the soul is immortal. The question I now ask myself is this: why is it that I should be quite prepared to believe that the Harvard students ascribed their expansion of Botvinnik's proof, or at least some part of it, to Botvinnik (as what he had in mind), whereas I have no inclination at all to ascribe any part of my expansion to Shropshire? Considerations which at once strike me as being likely to be relevant are: (1) that Botvinnik's proof without doubt contained more steps than Shropshire's claim; (2) that the expansion of Botvinnik's proof probably imported, as extra premisses, only propositions which are true, and indeed certain; whereas my expansion imports premisses which are false or dubious; (3) that Botvinnik was highly intelligent and an accomplished logician; whereas Shropshire was neither very intelligent nor very accomplished as a philosopher. No doubt these considerations are relevant, though one wonders whether one would be much readier to accord Shropshire's production the title of 'reasoning' if it had contained some further striking 'deductions', such as that since the soul is immortal moral principles have absolute validity; and one might also ask whether the effect of (3) does not nullify that of (2), since, if Shropshire was stupid, why should not one ascribe to him a reconstructed argument containing plainly unacceptable premisses? But, mainly, I would like some further light on the following question: if such considerations as those which I have just mentioned are relevant, why are they relevant? I should say a word about avowals. The following contention might be advanced. If you want to know whether someone R, who has produced what may be an incomplete piece of reasoning, has a particular completion in mind, the direct way to find out is to ask him. That would settle the matter. If, however, you are unable to ask him, then indirect methods will have to be used, which may well be indecisive. Indeterminacy springs merely from having to rely on indirect methods. I have two comments to make. First: it end p.12 is far from clear to what extent avowals do settle the matter. Anyone who has taught philosophy is familiar with the situation in which, under pressure to expand an argument they have advanced, students, particularly beginners, make statements which, one is inclined to say, misrepresent their position. This phenomenon is perhaps accounted for by my much more important second point: that avowals in this kind of context generally do not have the character which one might without reflection suppose them to have; they are not so much reportive as constructive. If I ask someone if he thinks that so-and-so is a consequence of such-and-such, what I shall receive will be primarily a defence of this supposition, not a report on what, historically, he had in mind in making it. We are in general much more interested in whether an inferential step is a good one to make than we are in what a particular person had in mind at the actual moment at which he made the step. One might perhaps see an analogy between avowals in this area and the specification of plans. If someone has propounded a plan for achieving a certain objective, and I ask him what he proposes to do in such-and-such a contingency, I expect him to do the best he can to specify for me a way of meeting that contingency, rather than to give a historically correct account of what thoughts he had been entertaining. This feature of what I might call inferential avowals is one for which we shall have to account.Let us take stock. The thesis which we proposed for examination has needed emendation twice, once in the face of the possibility of bad reasoning, and once to allow for informal and incomplete reasoning. The reformulation needed to accommodate the latter is proving difficult to reach. Let us take s and s′ to be sequences consisting of a set of premisses and a conclusion (or, perhaps it would be better to say, a set of propositions and a further proposition), or a sequence (sorites) of such sequences. (This is not fully accurate, but will serve.) Let us suppose that x has produced s (in speech or in thought). Let "formally cogent" mean "having true premisses, and being such that steps from premisses to conclusions are formally valid". (1) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by x" as "x thinks s to be formally cogent", because if s is an incomplete piece of reasoning s is not, and could not reasonably be thought by x to be, formally cogent. end p.13 (2) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by x" as "(∃s′) (s′ is an expansion of s and s′ is formally cogent)" because (a) it does not get in the idea that x thinks s′ formally cogent and (b) it would exclude bad reasoning. (3) We cannot define "s is a piece of reasoning by x" as "x thinks that (∃s′) (s′ is an expansion of s and s′ is formally cogent)", for this is too weak, and would allow as reasoning any case in which x believed (for whatever reason, or lack of reason) that an informal sequence had some formally cogent expansion or other. (Compare perhaps Shropshire.).” In Latin indeed, ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ make a world of a difference, as Shropshire well knows. Psyche transliterates as ‘anima’ only; ‘animus’ the Greeks never felt the need for. Of course a chicken is an animal, as in man. “Homo animalis rationalis.” Grice prefers ‘human,’ but sometimes he uses ‘animal,’ as opposed to ‘vegetal, sometimes, when considering stages of freedom. A stone (mineral) displays a ‘free’ fall, which is metabolical. And then, a vegetable is less free than an animal, which can move, and a non-human animal (that Grice calls ‘a beast’) is less free than man, who is a rational animal. Grice notes that back in the day, when the prince came from a hunt, “I brought some animals,” since these were ‘deer,’ ‘deer’ was taken as meaning ‘animal,’ when the implicatum was very much cancellable. The Anglo-Saxons soon dropped the ‘deer’ and adopted the Latinate ‘animal.’ They narrowed the use of ‘deer’ for the ‘cervus cervus.’ But not across the North Sea where the zoo is still called a ‘deer-garden.’ When Aelfric studied philosophy he once thought man was a rational deer.

annullatum -- annullability: a synonym for ‘cancellability,’ used in “Causal.” Perhaps clear than ‘cancel.’ The etymology seems clear, because it involves the negative – “Cancel” seems like a soft sophisticated way of annulling, render something nix. Short and Lewis has ‘nullus’ as ne-ullus, not any, none, no. which is indeed a diminutive for ‘unus,’ [for unulus, dim. of unus], any, any one (usu. in neg. sentences; corresp. with aliquis in affirmations).

anniceris: Grecian and pre-Griceian philosopher, vide. H. P. Grice, “Pleasure.” A pupil of Antipater, he established a separate branch of the Cyrenaic school known as the Anniceraioi. He subscribed to typical Cyrenaic hedonism, arguing that the end of each action should be one’s own pleasure, since we can know nothing of others’ experiences. He tempered the implications of hedonism with the claim that a wise man attaches weight to respect for parents, patriotism, gratitude, and friendship, perhaps influencing Epicurus in this regard. Anniceris also played down the Cyrenaic stress on the intellect’s role in hedonistic practical rationality, taking the Aristotelian view that cultivation of the right habits is indispensable. 

anscombe: H. P. Grice, “Reply to G. E. M. Anscombe.” Anscombe: Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret, Irish philosopher who has held positions at Oxford and Cambridge, best known for her work in the philosophy of mind and for her editions and translations of Vitters’s later writings. Anscombe studied philosophy with Vitters and became closely associated with him, writing An Introduction to Vitters’s Tractatus 9. She is married to Peter Geach. Anscombe’s first major work was Intention 7. She argues that the concept of intention is central to our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. The basic case is that of the intentions with which we act. These are identified by the reasons we give in answer to why-questions concerning our actions. Such reasons usually form a hierarchy that constitutes a practical syllogism of which action itself is the conclusion. Hence our intentions are a form of active practical knowledge that normally leads to action. Anscombe compares the direction of fit of this kind of knowledge with a shopping list’s relation to one’s purchases, and contrasts it with the direction of fit characteristic of a list of these purchases drawn up by an observer of the shopper. She maintains that the deep mistake of modern i.e., post-medieval philosophy has been to think that all knowledge is of this latter, observational, type. This conception of active knowledge expressed through an agent’s intentions conflicts with the passive conception of rationality characteristic of Hume and his followers, and Anscombe develops this challenge in papers critical of the isought distinction of Hume and his modern successors. In a famous paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy” 8, she also argues that ought-statements make sense only in the context of a moral theology that grounds morality in divine commands. Since our culture rejects this theology, it is no surprise that “modern moral philosophers” cannot find much sense in them. We should therefore abandon them and return to the older conceptions of practical rationality and virtue. These conceptions, and the associated conception of natural law, provide the background to an uncompromising defense of traditional Catholic morality concerning sexuality, war, and the importance of the distinction between intention and foresight. Anscombe has never been afraid of unpopular positions  philosophical and ethical. Her three volumes of Collected Papers 1 include a defense of singular causation, an attack on the very idea of a subject of thought, and a critique of pacifism. She is one of the most original and distinctive English philosophers of her generation. 

anselmus:  “I would call him ‘Canterbury,’ only he was an Italian!” – H. P. Grice. Saint, called Anselm of Canterbury, philosopher theologian. A Benedictine monk and the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury, he is best known for his distinctive method  fides quaerens intellectum; his “ontological” argument for the existence of God in his treatise Proslogion; and his classic formulation of the satisfaction theory of the Atonement in the Cur Deus homo. Like Augustine before him, Anselm is a Christian Platonist in metaphysics. He argues that the most accessible proofs of the existence of God are through value theory: in his treatise Monologion, he deploys a cosmological argument, showing the existence of a source of all goods, which is the Good per se and hence supremely good; that same thing exists per se and is the Supreme Being. In the Proslogion, Anselm begins with his conception of a being a greater than which cannot be conceived, and mounts his ontological argument that a being a greater than which cannot be conceived exists in the intellect, because even the fool understands the phrase when he hears it; but if it existed in the intellect alone, a greater could be conceived that existed in reality. This supremely valuable object is essentially whatever it is  other things being equal  that is better to be than not to be, and hence living, wise, powerful, true, just, blessed, immaterial, immutable, and eternal per se; even the paradigm of sensory goods  Beauty, Harmony, Sweetness, and Pleasant Texture, in its own ineffable manner. Nevertheless, God is supremely simple, not compounded of a plurality of excellences, but “omne et unum, totum et solum bonum,” a being a more delectable than which cannot be conceived. Everything other than God has its being and its well-being through God as efficient cause. Moreover, God is the paradigm of all created natures, the latter ranking as better to the extent that they more perfectly resemble God. Thus, it is better to be human than to be horse, to be horse than to be wood, even though in comparison with God everything else is “almost nothing.” For every created nature, there is a that-for-which-it-ismade ad quod factum est. On the one hand, Anselm thinks of such teleology as part of the internal structure of the natures themselves: a creature of type F is a true F only insofar as it is/does/exemplifies that for which F’s were made; a defective F, to the extent that it does not. On the other hand, for Anselm, the telos of a created nature is that-for-which-God-made-it. Because God is personal and acts through reason and will, Anselm infers that prior in the order of explanation to creation, there was, in the reason of the maker, an exemplar, form, likeness, or rule of what he was going to make. In De veritate Anselm maintains that such teleology gives rise to obligation: since creatures owe their being and well-being to God as their cause, so they owe their being and well-being to God in the sense of having an obligation to praise him by being the best beings they can. Since every creature is of some nature or other, each can be its best by being that-for-which-God-made-it. Abstracting from impediments, non-rational natures fulfill this obligation and “act rightly” by natural necessity; rational creatures, when they exercise their powers of reason and will to fulfill God’s purpose in creating them. Thus, the goodness of a creature how good a being it is is a function of twin factors: its natural telos i.e., what sort of imitation of divine nature it aims for, and its rightness in exercising its natural powers to fulfill its telos. By contrast, God as absolutely independent owes no one anything and so has no obligations to creatures. In De casu diaboli, Anselm underlines the optimism of his ontology, reasoning that since the Supreme Good and the Supreme Being are identical, every being is good and every good a being. Two further conclusions follow. First, evil is a privation of being, the absence of good in something that properly ought to have it e.g., blindness in normally sighted animals, injustice in humans or angels. Second, since all genuine powers are given to enable a being to fulfill its natural telos and so to be the best being it can, all genuine metaphysically basic powers are optimific and essentially aim at goods, so that evils are merely incidental side effects of their operation, involving some lack of coordination among powers or between their exercise and the surrounding context. Thus, divine omnipotence does not, properly speaking, include corruptibility, passibility, or the ability to lie, because the latter are defects and/or powers in other things whose exercise obstructs the flourishing of the corruptible, passible, or potential liar. Anselm’s distinctive action theory begins teleologically with the observation that humans and angels were made for a happy immortality enjoying God, and to that end were given the powers of reason to make accurate value assessments and will to love accordingly. Anselm regards freedom and imputability of choice as essential and permanent features of all rational beings. But freedom cannot be defined as a power for opposites the power to sin and the power not to sin, both because neither God nor the good angels have any power to sin, and because sin is an evil at which no metaphysically basic power can aim. Rather, freedom is the power to preserve justice for its own sake. Choices and actions are imputable to an agent only if they are spontaneous, from the agent itself. Creatures cannot act spontaneously by the necessity of their natures, because they do not have their natures from themselves but receive them from God. To give them the opportunity to become just of themselves, God furnishes them with two motivaAnselm Anselm 31   31 tional drives toward the good: an affection for the advantageous affectio commodi or a tendency to will things for the sake of their benefit to the agent itself; and an affection for justice affectio justitiae or a tendency to will things because of their own intrinsic value. Creatures are able to align these drives by letting the latter temper the former or not. The good angels, who preserved justice by not willing some advantage possible for them but forbidden by God for that time, can no longer will more advantage than God wills for them, because he wills their maximum as a reward. By contrast, creatures, who sin by refusing to delay gratification in accordance with God’s will, lose both uprightness of will and their affection for justice, and hence the ability to temper their pursuit of advantage or to will the best goods. Justice will never be restored to angels who desert it. But if animality makes human nature weaker, it also opens the possibility of redemption. Anselm’s argument for the necessity of the Incarnation plays out the dialectic of justice and mercy so characteristic of his prayers. He begins with the demands of justice: humans owe it to God to make all of their choices and actions conform to his will; failure to render what was owed insults God’s honor and makes the offender liable to make satisfaction; because it is worse to dishonor God than for countless worlds to be destroyed, the satisfaction owed for any small sin is incommensurate with any created good; it would be maximally indecent for God to overlook such a great offense. Such calculations threaten certain ruin for the sinner, because God alone can do/be immeasurably deserving, and depriving the creature of its honor through the eternal frustration of its telos seems the only way to balance the scales. Yet, justice also forbids that God’s purposes be thwarted through created resistance, and it was divine mercy that made humans for a beatific immortality with him. Likewise, humans come in families by virtue of their biological nature which angels do not share, and justice allows an offense by one family member to be compensated by another. Assuming that all actual humans are descended from common first parents, Anselm claims that the human race can make satisfaction for sin, if God becomes human and renders to God what Adam’s family owes. When Anselm insists that humans were made for beatific intimacy with God and therefore are obliged to strive into God with all of their powers, he emphatically includes reason or intellect along with emotion and will. God, the controlling subject matter, is in part permanently inaccessible to us because of the ontological incommensuration between God and creatures and our progress is further hampered by the consequences of sin. Our powers will function best, and hence we have a duty to follow right order in their use: by submitting first to the holistic discipline of faith, which will focus our souls and point us in the right direction. Yet it is also a duty not to remain passive in our appreciation of authority, but rather for faith to seek to understand what it has believed. Anselm’s works display a dialectical structure, full of questions, objections, and contrasting opinions, designed to stir up the mind. His quartet of teaching dialogues  De grammatico, De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli as well as his last philosophical treatise, De concordia, anticipate the genre of the Scholastic question quaestio so dominant in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His discussions are likewise remarkable for their attention to modalities and proper-versus-improper linguistic usage. 

antilogismus: an inconsistent triad of propositions, two of which are the premises of a valid categorical syllogism and the third of which is the contradictory of the conclusion of this valid categorical syllogism. An antilogism is a special form of antilogy or self-contradiction. 

antinomianism: as a Kantian, Grice overused the idea of a nomos or law, and then there’s antinominaism, the view that one is not bound by moral law; specifically, the view that Christians are by grace set free from the need to observe moral laws. During the Reformation, antinomianism was believed by some but not Martin Luther to follow from the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

antiochus: Grecian philosopher and the last prominent member of the New Academy. He played the major role in ending its two centuries of Skepticism and helped revive interest in doctrines from the Old Academy, as he called Plato, Aristotle, and their associates. The impulse for this decisive shift came in epistemology, where the Skeptical Academy had long agreed with Stoicism that knowledge requires an infallible “criterion of truth” but disputed the Stoic claim to find this criterion in “cognitive perception.” Antiochus’s teacher, Philo of Larissa, broke with this tradition and proposed that perception need not be cognitive to qualify as knowledge. Rejecting this concession, Antiochus offered new arguments for the Stoic claim that some perception is cognitive, and hence knowledge. He also proposed a similar accommodation in ethics, where he agreed with the Stoics that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness but insisted with Aristotle that virtue is not the only good. These and similar attempts to mediate fundamental disputes have led some to label Antiochus an eclectic or syncretist; but some of his proposals, especially his appeal to the Old Academy, set the stage for Middle Platonism, which also sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle. No works by Antiochus survive, but his students included many eminent Romans, most notably Cicero, who summarizes Antiochus’s epistemology in the Academica, his critique of Stoic ethics in De finibus IV, and his purportedly Aristotelian ethics in De finibus V. 

anti-realism: If Grice was a realist, he hated anti-realism, the rejection, in one or another form or area of inquiry, of realism, the view that there are knowable mind-independent facts, objects, or properties. Metaphysical realists make the general claim that there is a world of mind-independent objects. Realists in particular areas make more specific or limited claims. Thus moral realists hold that there are mind-independent moral properties, mathematical realists that there are mind-independent mathematical facts, scientific realists that scientific inquiry reveals the existence of previously unknown and unobservable mind-independent entities and properties. Antirealists deny either that facts of the relevant sort are mind-independent or that knowledge of such facts is possible. Berkeley’s subjective idealism, which claims that the world consists only of minds and their contents, is a metaphysical anti-realism. Constructivist anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that the world consists only of mental phenomena, but claim that it is constituted by, or constructed from, our evidence or beliefs. Many philosophers find constructivism implausible or even incoherent as a metaphysical doctrine, but much more plausible when restricted to a particular domain, such as ethics or mathematics. Debates between realists and anti-realists have been particularly intense in philosophy of science. Scientific realism has been rejected both by constructivists such as Kuhn, who hold that scientific facts are constructed by the scientific community, and by empiricists who hold that knowledge is limited to what can be observed. A sophisticated version of the latter doctrine is Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, which allows scientists free rein in constructing scientific models, but claims that evidence for such models confirms only their observable implications. 

apagoge: distinguished by Grice from both ‘epagoge,’ and his favoured ‘diagoge.’ A shifting of the basis of argument: hence of argument based on a probable or agreed assumption, Arist.APr.69a20, cf. Anon.in SE65.35; reduction, “ἡ εἰς τὸ ἀδύνατον ἀ.” reductio per impossibile, APr. 29b6; “ἡ ἀ. μετάβασίς ἐστιν ἀπ᾽ ἄλλου προβλήματος ἢ θεωρήματος ἐπ᾽ ἄλλο, οὗ γνωσθέντος ἢ πορισθέντος καὶ τὸ προκείμενον ἔσται καταφανές” Procl. in Euc.p.212F.; τῶν ἀπορουμένων διαγραμμάτων τὴν ἀ. ποιήσασθαι ib. p.213F. b. reduction of a disputant (cf. ἀπάγω v. 1c), “ἡ ἐπὶ τὸ ἄδηλον ἀ.” S.E.P.2.234.

apocatastasis: a branch of Grice’s eschatology -- from Grecian, ‘reestablishment’, the restoration of all souls, including Satan’s and his minions’, in the kingdom of God. God’s goodness will triumph over evil, and through a process of spiritual education souls will be brought to repentance and made fit for divine life. The theory originates with Origen but was also held by Gregory of Nyssa. In modern times F. D. Maurice 180572 and Karl Barth 6 8 held this position. 

aporia: cf. aporetic, cognate with porosity. No porosity, and you get an impasse. While aware of Baker’s and Deutsch’s treatment of the ‘aporia’ in Aristotle’s account of ‘philos,’ Grice explores ‘aporia’ in Plato in the Thrasymachus on ‘legal justice’ prior to ‘moral justice’ in Republic. in Dialectic, question for discussion, difficulty, puzzle, “ἀπορίᾳ σχόμενος” Pl.Prt.321c; ἀ. ἣν ἀπορεῖς ib.324d; “ἡ ἀ. ἰσότης ἐναντίων λογισμῶν” Arist. Top.145b1, al.; “ἔχει ἀπορίαν περί τινος” Id.Pol.1285b28; “αἱ μὲν οὖν ἀ. τοιαῦταί τινες συμβαίνουσιν” Id.EN1146b6; “οὐδεμίαν ποιήσει ἀ.” Id.Metaph.1085a27; ἀ. λύειν, διαλύειν, Id.MM 1201b1, Metaph.1062b31; “ἀπορίᾳ ἀπορίαν λύειν” D.S.1.37.Discussion with the Sophist Thrasymachus can only lead to aporia. And the more I trust you, the more I sink into an aporia of sorts. —Aha! roared Thrasymachus to everyone's surprise. There it is! Socratic aporia is back! Charge! neither Socrates' company nor Socrates himself gives any convincing answer. So, he says, finding himself in a real aporia, he visits Thrasymachus as well, and ... I argue that a combination of these means in form that I call “provocative-aporetic” better accounts for the means that Plato uses to exert a protreptic effect on readers. Aporia is a simultaneously intellectual and affective experience, and the way that readers choose to respond to aporia has a greater protreptic effect than either affective or intellectual means alone. When Socrates says he can 'transfer' the use of "just" to things related to the 'soul,' what kind of conversational game is that? Grice took Socrates's manoeuvre very seriously.Socrates relies on the tripartite theory of the soul. Plato, actually -- since Socrates is a drammatis persona! In "Philosophical Eschatology, Metaphysics, and Plato's Republic," H. P. Grice's purpose is to carry out a provocative-aporetic reading Book I Grice argues that it is a dispute between two ways of understanding 'just' which causes the aporia when Socrates tries to analyse 'just.' Although Socrates will not argue for the complexity and tripartition of the soul until Bk. IV, we can at least note the contrast with Thrasymachus' “idealize user” theory.For Socrates, agents are complex, and justice coordinates the parts of the agent.For Thrasymachus, agents are simple “users,” and justice is a tool for use. (2 - 3) Justice makes its possessor happy; the function (telos, metier) argument. To make the argument that justice is an excellence (virtus, arete) of soul (psyche) that makes its possessor happy, Socrates relies on a method for discovering the function (ἔργον, ergon, 352e1, cf. telos, metier, causa finalis) of any object whatsoever. Socrates begins by differentiating between an exclusive functions and an optimal function, so that we may discover the functions in different types of objects, i.e., natural and artificial objects. We can say an object performs some function (ergon) if one of the following conditions holds.If the object is the only one that can do the work in question, or If it is the object that does that work best.Socrates then provides examples from different part-whole complexes to make his point. The eye's exclusive function is to see, because no other organ is specialized so as to perform just that function. A horse's work is to carry riders into battle. Even though this might not be a horse's EXCLUSIVE function, it may be its “optimal” function in that the horse is best suited or designed by God to the task. Finally, the pruning knife is best for tending to vines, not because it cannot cut anything else, but because it is optimally suited for that task. Socrates' use of the pruning knife of as an example of a thing's function resembles a return to the technē model, since a craftsman must make the knife for a gardener to Socrates asks, “Would you define this as the function of a horse and of anything else, as that which someone does either through that thing alone, or best?” (...τοῦτο ἄν θείης καὶ ἵππου καὶ ἄλλου ὁτουοῦν ἔργον, ὅ ἄν ἤ μόνῳ ἐκείνῳ ποιῇ τις ἤ ἄριστα; 352e1-2) Thrasymachus agrees to this definition of function. 91 use.But his use of the eye — a bodily organ — should dissuade us from this view. One may use these examples to argue that Socrates is in fact offering a new method to investigate the nature of justice: 1) Find out what the functions of such objects are2) determine (by observation, experiment, or even thought experiment) cases where objects of such a kind perform their functions well and cases where they perform them poorly; and 3) finally find out the qualities that enable them to perform such functions well (and in the absence of which they perform poorly), and these are their virtues.A crucial difference between this method and technē model of justice lies in the interpretation that each assigns to the realm of human artifacts. Polemarchus and Thrasymachus both assume that the technē is unique as a form of knowledge for the power and control that it offers users. In Polemarchus' case, the technē of justice, “helping friends and harming enemies,” may be interpreted as a description of a method for gaining political power within a traditional framework of communal life, which assumes the oikos as the basic unit of power. Those families that help their friends and harm their enemies thrive. Thrasymachus, on the other hand, emphasizes the ways that technai grant users the power to exploit nature to further their own, distinctively individual ends. Thus, the shepherd exploits the sheep to make a livelihood for himself. Socrates' approach differs from these by re-casting “mastery” over nature as submission to norms that structure the natural world. For example, many factors contribute to making This points to a distinction Socrates draws in Book X between producers and users of artifacts. He uses the example of the blacksmith who makes a bridle and the horseman who uses the bridle to argue that production and use correspond to two gradations of knowledge (601c). The ultimate purpose of the example is to provide a metaphor — using the craft analogy — for identifying gradations of knowledge on a copy-original paradigm of the form-participant relation. the pruning knife the optimal tool for cutting vines: the shape of the human hand, the thickness and shape of the vines, and the metal of the blade. Likewise, in order for horses to optimally perform their “work,” they must be "healthy" and strong. The conditions that bring about their "health" and strength are not up to us, however."Control” only comes about through the recognition of natural norms. Thus technē is a type of knowledge that coordinates structures in nature.It is not an unlimited source of power. Socrates' inclusion of the human soul (psyche) among those things that have a function is the more controversial aspect of function argument.Socrates says that the functions (erga) of the soul (psyche) are “to engage in care-taking, ruling, and deliberation” and, later, simply that the ergon (or function) of the soul (or psyche) is “to live” (τὸ ζῆν, "to zen," 353d6). But the difficulty seems to be this: the functions of pruning knives, horses, and bodily organs are determined with respect to a limited and fairly unambiguous context that is already defined for them. But what is this context with respect to the soul (psyche) of a human individual? One answer might be that the social world — politics — provides the context that defines the soul's function, just as the needs of the human organism define the context in which the eye can perform a function. But here a challenger might reply that in aristocracies, oligarchies, and democracies, “care-taking, ruling, and deliberation” are utilized for different ends.In these contexts, individual souls might have different functions, according to the “needs” that these different regimes have. Alternatively, one might deny altogether that the human soul has a function: the distinctive feature of human beings might be their position “outside” of nature. Thus, even if Socrates' description of the soul's function is accurate, it is too general to be really informative.Socrates must offer more details for the function argument to be convincing. Nonetheless, the idea that justice is a condition that lets the soul perform its functions is a significant departure from the technē model of justice, and one that will remain throughout the argument of the Republic. […] τὸ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι καὶ ἄρχειν καὶ βουλεύεσθαι (353d3). As far as Bk. I is concerned, “justice” functions as a place-holder for that condition of the soul which permits the soul to perform its functions well. What that condition is, however, remains unknown.For this reason, Plato has Socrates concludes Bk. I by likening himself to a “glutton” (ὥσπερ οἱ λίχνοι, 354b1), who takes another dish before “moderately enjoying the previous” serving (πρὶν τοῦ προτέρου μετρίως ἀπολαύσαι, 354b2-3). For Socrates wants to know what effects the optimal condition of soul brings about before knowing what the condition itself is. Thus Bk. I concludes in "aporia," but not in a way that betrays the dialogue's lack of unity.The “separatist” thesis concerning Bk. I goes back to Hermann in "Geschichte und System der Platonischen Philosophie." One can argue on behalf of the “separatist” view as well. One can argue against the separatist thesis, even granting some evidence in favour of the separatist thesis. To the contrary, the "aporia" clearly foreshadows the argument that Socrates makes about the soul in Bk. IV, viz. that the soul (psyche) is a complex whole of parts -- an implicatum in the “justice is stronger” argument -- and that 'just' is the condition that allows this complex whole be integrated to an optimal degree. Thus, Bk. I does not conclude negatively, but rather provides the resources for going beyond the "technē" model of justice, which is the primary cause of Polemarchus's and Thrasymachus's encounter with "aporia" in Bk. I. Throughout conversation of "The Republic," Socrates does not really alter the argument he gives for justice in Bk. I, but rather states the same argument in a different way.  My gratitude to P. N. Moore. Refs: Wise guys and smart alecks in Republic 1 and 2; Proleptic composition in the Republic, or why Bk. 1 was never a separate dialogue, The Classical Quarterly; "Socrates: ironist and moral philosopher." Strictly an ‘aporia’ in Griceian, is a ‘puzzle’, ‘question for discussion’, ‘state of perplexity’. The aporetic method  the raising of puzzles without offering solutions  is typical of the elenchus in the early Socratic dialogues of Plato. These consist in the testing of definitions and often end with an aporia, e.g., that piety is both what is and what is not loved by the gods. Compare the paradoxes of Zeno, e.g., that motion is both possible and impossible. In Aristotle’s dialectic, the resolution of aporiai discovered in the views on a subject is an important source of philosophical understanding. The beliefs that one should love oneself most of all and that self-love is shameful, e.g., can be resolved with the right understanding of ‘self’. The possibility of argument for two inconsistent positions was an important factor in the development of Skepticism. In modern philosophy, the antinomies that Kant claimed reason would arrive at in attempting to prove the existence of objects corresponding to transcendental ideas may be seen as aporiai. 

applicatum. While Bennett uses the rather ‘abusive’ “nominalist” to refer to Grice, Grice isn’t. It’s all about the ‘applied.’ Grice thinks a rational creature – not a parrot, but a rational intelligent pirot – can have an abstract idea. So there is this “Communication Device,” with capital C and capital D. The emissor APPLIES it to a given occasion. Cf. complete and incomplete. What’s the antonym of applied? Plato’s idea! applied – grice used ‘applied’ for ‘meaning’ – but ‘applied’ can be used in other contxts too. In ethics, the domain of ethics that includes professional ethics, such as business ethics, engineering ethics, and medical ethics, as well as practical ethics such as environmental ethics, which is applied, and thus practical as opposed to theoretical, but not focused on any one discipline. One of the major disputes among those who work in applied ethics is whether or not there is a general and universal account of morality applicable both to the ethical issues in the professions and to various practical problems. Some philosophers believe that each of the professions or each field of activity develops an ethical code for itself and that there need be no apellatio applied ethics 34   34 close relationship between e.g. business ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics. Others hold that the same moral system applies to all professions and fields. They claim that the appearance of different moral systems is simply due to certain problems being more salient for some professions and fields than for others. The former position accepts the consequence that the ethical codes of different professions might conflict with one another, so that a physician in business might find that business ethics would require one action but medical ethics another. Engineers who have been promoted to management positions sometimes express concern over the tension between what they perceive to be their responsibility as engineers and their responsibility as managers in a business. Many lawyers seem to hold that there is similar tension between what common morality requires and what they must do as lawyers. Those who accept a universal morality hold that these tensions are all resolvable because there is only one common morality. Underlying both positions is the pervasive but false view of common morality as providing a unique right answer to every moral problem. Those who hold that each profession or field has its own moral code do not realize that common morality allows for conflicts of duties. Most of those who put forward moral theories, e.g., utilitarians, Kantians, and contractarians, attempt to generate a universal moral system that solves all moral problems. This creates a situation that leads many in applied ethics to dismiss theoretical ethics as irrelevant to their concerns. An alternative view of a moral theory is to think of it on the model of a scientific theory, primarily concerned to describe common morality rather than generate a new improved version. On this model, it is clear that although morality rules out many alternatives as unacceptable, it does not provide unique right answers to every controversial moral question. On this model, different fields and different professions may interpret the common moral system in somewhat different ways. For example, although deception is always immoral if not justified, what counts as deception is not the same in all professions. Not informing a patient of an alternative treatment counts as deceptive for a physician, but not telling a customer of an alternative to what she is about to buy does not count as deceptive for a salesperson. The professions also have considerable input into what special duties are incurred by becoming a member of their profession. Applied ethics is thus not the mechanical application of a common morality to a particular profession or field, but an independent discipline that clarifies and analyzes the practices in a field or profession so that common morality can be applied. 

a priori: Obviously contrasted to ‘a posteriori,’ but not necessarily in termporal terms -- Grice was fascinated by the apriori, both analytic but more so the synthetic. He would question his children’s playmates with things like, “Can a sweater be green and red all over? No striped allowed.” a priori, prior to or independent of experience; contrasted with ‘a posteriori’ empirical. These two terms are primarily used to mark a distinction between 1 two modes of epistemic justification, together with derivative distinctions between 2 kinds of propositions, 3 kinds of knowledge, and 4 kinds of argument. They are also used to indicate a distinction between 5 two ways in which a concept or idea may be acquired. 1 A belief or claim is said to be justified a priori if its epistemic justification, the reason or warrant for thinking it to be true, does not depend at all on sensory or introspective or other sorts of experience; whereas if its justification does depend at least in part on such experience, it is said to be justified a posteriori or empirically. This specific distinction has to do only with the justification of the belief, and not at all with how the constituent concepts are acquired; thus it is no objection to a claim of a priori justificatory status for a particular belief that experience is required for the acquisition of some of the constituent concepts. It is clear that the relevant notion of experience includes sensory and introspective experience, as well as such things as kinesthetic experience. Equally clearly, to construe experience in the broadest possible sense of, roughly, a conscious undergoing of any sort would be to destroy the point of the distinction, since even a priori justification presumably involves some sort of conscious process of awareness. The construal that is perhaps most faithful to the traditional usage is that which construes experience as any sort of cognitive input that derives, presumably causally, from features of the actual world that may not hold in other possible worlds. Thus, e.g., such things as clairvoyance or telepathy, if they were to exist, would count as forms of experience and any knowledge resulting therefrom as a posteriori; but the intuitive apprehension of properties or numbers or other sorts of abstract entities that are the same in all possible worlds, would not. Understood in this way, the concept of a priori justification is an essentially negative concept, specifying as it does what the justification of the belief does not depend on, but saying nothing a priori a priori 35   35 about what it does depend on. Historically, the main positive conception was that offered by proponents of rationalism such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, according to which a priori justification derives from the intuitive apprehension of necessary facts pertaining to universals and other abstract entities. Although Kant is often regarded as a rationalist, his restriction of substantive a priori knowledge to the world of appearances represents a major departure from the main rationalist tradition. In contrast, proponents of traditional empiricism, if they do not repudiate the concept of a priori justification altogether as does Quine, typically attempt to account for such justification by appeal to linguistic or conceptual conventions. The most standard formulation of this empiricist view a development of the view of Hume that all a priori knowledge pertains to “relations of ideas” is the claim typical of logical positivism that all a priori knowable claims or propositions are analytic. A rationalist would claim in opposition that at least some a priori claims or propositions are synthetic. 2 A proposition that is the content of an a priori justified belief is often referred to as an a priori proposition or an a priori truth. This usage is also often extended to include any proposition that is capable of being the content of such a belief, whether it actually has this status or not. 3 If, in addition to being justified a priori or a posteriori, a belief is also true and satisfies whatever further conditions may be required for it to constitute knowledge, that knowledge is derivatively characterized as a priori or a posteriori empirical, respectively. Though a priori justification is often regarded as by itself guaranteeing truth, this should be regarded as a further substantive thesis, not as part of the very concept of a priori justification. Examples of knowledge that have been classically regarded as a priori in this sense are mathematical knowledge, knowledge of logical truths, and knowledge of necessary entailments and exclusions of commonsense concepts ‘Nothing can be red and green all over at the same time’, ‘If A is later than B and B is later than C, then A is later than C’; but many claims of metaphysics, ethics, and even theology have also been claimed to have this status. 4 A deductively valid argument that also satisfies the further condition that each of the premises or sometimes one or more particularly central premises are justified a priori is referred to as an a priori argument. This label is also sometimes applied to arguments that are claimed to have this status, even if the correctness of this claim is in question. 5 In addition to the uses just catalogued that derive from the distinction between modes of justification, the terms ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ are also employed to distinguish two ways in which a concept or idea might be acquired by an individual person. An a posteriori or empirical concept or idea is one that is derived from experience, via a process of abstraction or ostensive definition. In contrast, an a priori concept or idea is one that is not derived from experience in this way and thus presumably does not require any particular experience to be realized though the explicit realization of such a concept might still require experience as a “trigger”. The main historical account of such concepts, again held mainly by rationalists, construes them as innate, either implanted in the mind by God or, in the more contemporary version of the claim held by Chomsky, Fodor, and others, resulting from evolutionary development. Concepts typically regarded as having this sort of status include the concepts of substance, causation, God, necessity, infinity, and many others. Empiricists, in contrast, typically hold that all concepts are derived from experience. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The synthetic a priori.”

aquinas: --a strange genitive for “Aquino,” the little village where the saint was born. while Grice, being C. of E., would avoid Aquinas like the rats, he was aware of Aquinas’s clever ‘intention-based semantics’ in his commentary of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione. Saint Thomas 122574,  philosopher-theologian, the most influential thinker of the medieval period. He produced a powerful philosophical synthesis that combined Aristotelian and Neoplatonic elements within a Christian context in an original and ingenious way. Life and works. Thomas was born at Aquino castle in Roccasecca, Italy, and took early schooling at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino. He then studied liberal arts and philosophy at the  of Naples 123944 and joined the Dominican order. While going to Paris for further studies as a Dominican, he was detained by his family for about a year. Upon being released, he studied with the Dominicans at Paris, perhaps privately, until 1248, when he journeyed to a priori argument Aquinas, Saint Thomas 36   36 Cologne to work under Albertus Magnus. Thomas’s own report reportatio of Albertus’s lectures on the Divine Names of Dionysius and his notes on Albertus’s lectures on Aristotle’s Ethics date from this period. In 1252 Thomas returned to Paris to lecture there as a bachelor in theology. His resulting commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard dates from this period, as do two philosophical treatises, On Being and Essence De ente et essentia and On the Principles of Nature De principiis naturae. In 1256 he began lecturing as master of theology at Paris. From this period 125659 date a series of scriptural commentaries, the disputations On Truth De veritate, Quodlibetal Questions VIIXI, and earlier parts of the Summa against the Gentiles Summa contra gentiles; hereafter SCG. At different locations in Italy from 1259 to 1269, Thomas continued to write prodigiously, including, among other works, the completion of the SCG; a commentary on the Divine Names; disputations On the Power of God De potentia Dei and On Evil De malo; and Summa of Theology Summa theologiae; hereafter ST, Part I. In January 1269, he resumed teaching in Paris as regent master and wrote extensively until returning to Italy in 1272. From this second Parisian regency date the disputations On the Soul De anima and On Virtues De virtutibus; continuation of ST; Quodlibets IVI and XII; On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas; most if not all of his commentaries on Aristotle; a commentary on the Book of Causes Liber de causis; and On the Eternity of the World De aeternitate mundi. In 1272 Thomas returned to Italy where he lectured on theology at Naples and continued to write until December 6, 1273, when his scholarly work ceased. He died three months later en route to the Second Council of Lyons. Doctrine. Aquinas was both a philosopher and a theologian. The greater part of his writings are theological, but there are many strictly philosophical works within his corpus, such as On Being and Essence, On the Principles of Nature, On the Eternity of the World, and the commentaries on Aristotle and on the Book of Causes. Also important are large sections of strictly philosophical writing incorporated into theological works such as the SCG, ST, and various disputations. Aquinas clearly distinguishes between strictly philosophical investigation and theological investigation. If philosophy is based on the light of natural reason, theology sacra doctrina presupposes faith in divine revelation. While the natural light of reason is insufficient to discover things that can be made known to human beings only through revelation, e.g., belief in the Trinity, Thomas holds that it is impossible for those things revealed to us by God through faith to be opposed to those we can discover by using human reason. For then one or the other would have to be false; and since both come to us from God, God himself would be the author of falsity, something Thomas rejects as abhorrent. Hence it is appropriate for the theologian to use philosophical reasoning in theologizing. Aquinas also distinguishes between the orders to be followed by the theologian and by the philosopher. In theology one reasons from belief in God and his revelation to the implications of this for created reality. In philosophy one begins with an investigation of created reality insofar as this can be understood by human reason and then seeks to arrive at some knowledge of divine reality viewed as the cause of created reality and the end or goal of one’s philosophical inquiry SCG II, c. 4. This means that the order Aquinas follows in his theological Summae SCG and ST is not the same as that which he prescribes for the philosopher cf. Prooemium to Commentary on the Metaphysics. Also underlying much of Aquinas’s thought is his acceptance of the difference between theoretical or speculative philosophy including natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics and practical philosophy. Being and analogy. For Aquinas the highest part of philosophy is metaphysics, the science of being as being. The subject of this science is not God, but being, viewed without restriction to any given kind of being, or simply as being Prooemium to Commentary on Metaphysics; In de trinitate, qu. 5, a. 4. The metaphysician does not enjoy a direct vision of God in this life, but can reason to knowledge of him by moving from created effects to awareness of him as their uncreated cause. God is therefore not the subject of metaphysics, nor is he included in its subject. God can be studied by the metaphysician only indirectly, as the cause of the finite beings that fall under being as being, the subject of the science. In order to account for the human intellect’s discovery of being as being, in contrast with being as mobile studied by natural philosophy or being as quantified studied by mathematics, Thomas appeals to a special kind of intellectual operation, a negative judgment, technically named by him “separation.” Through this operation one discovers that being, in order to be realized as such, need not be material and changAquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 37   37 ing. Only as a result of this judgment is one justified in studying being as being. Following Aristotle and Averroes, Thomas is convinced that the term ‘being’ is used in various ways and with different meanings. Yet these different usages are not unrelated and do enjoy an underlying unity sufficient for being as being to be the subject of a single science. On the level of finite being Thomas adopts and adapts Aristotle’s theory of unity by reference to a first order of being. For Thomas as for Aristotle this unity is guaranteed by the primary referent in our predication of being  substance. Other things are named being only because they are in some way ordered to and dependent on substance, the primary instance of being. Hence being is analogous. Since Thomas’s application of analogy to the divine names presupposes the existence of God, we shall first examine his discussion of that issue. The existence of God and the “five ways.” Thomas holds that unaided human reason, i.e., philosophical reason, can demonstrate that God exists, that he is one, etc., by reasoning from effect to cause De trinitate, qu. 2, a. 3; SCG I, c. 4. Best-known among his many presentations of argumentation for God’s existence are the “five ways.” Perhaps even more interesting for today’s student of his metaphysics is a brief argument developed in one of his first writings, On Being and Essence c.4. There he wishes to determine how essence is realized in what he terms “separate substances,” i.e., the soul, intelligences angels of the Christian tradition, and the first cause God. After criticizing the view that created separate substances are composed of matter and form, Aquinas counters that they are not entirely free from composition. They are composed of a form or essence and an act of existing esse. He immediately develops a complex argument: 1 We can think of an essence or quiddity without knowing whether or not it actually exists. Therefore in such entities essence and act of existing differ unless 2 there is a thing whose quiddity and act of existing are identical. At best there can be only one such being, he continues, by eliminating multiplication of such an entity either through the addition of some difference or through the reception of its form in different instances of matter. Hence, any such being can only be separate and unreceived esse, whereas esse in all else is received in something else, i.e., essence. 3 Since esse in all other entities is therefore distinct from essence or quiddity, existence is communicated to such beings by something else, i.e., they are caused. Since that which exists through something else must be traced back to that which exists of itself, there must be some thing that causes the existence of everything else and that is identical with its act of existing. Otherwise one would regress to infinity in caused causes of existence, which Thomas here dismisses as unacceptable. In qu. 2, a. 1 of ST I Thomas rejects the claim that God’s existence is self-evident to us in this life, and in a. 2 maintains that God’s existence can be demonstrated by reasoning from knowledge of an existing effect to knowledge of God as the cause required for that effect to exist. The first way or argument art. 3 rests upon the fact that various things in our world of sense experience are moved. But whatever is moved is moved by something else. To justify this, Thomas reasons that to be moved is to be reduced from potentiality to actuality, and that nothing can reduce itself from potency to act; for it would then have to be in potency if it is to be moved and in act at the same time and in the same respect. This does not mean that a mover must formally possess the act it is to communicate to something else if it is to move the latter; it must at least possess it virtually, i.e., have the power to communicate it. Whatever is moved, therefore, must be moved by something else. One cannot regress to infinity with moved movers, for then there would be no first mover and, consequently, no other mover; for second movers do not move unless they are moved by a first mover. One must, therefore, conclude to the existence of a first mover which is moved by nothing else, and this “everyone understands to be God.” The second way takes as its point of departure an ordering of efficient causes as indicated to us by our investigation of sensible things. By this Thomas means that we perceive in the world of sensible things that certain efficient causes cannot exercise their causal activity unless they are also caused by something else. But nothing can be the efficient cause of itself, since it would then have to be prior to itself. One cannot regress to infinity in ordered efficient causes. In ordered efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediary, and the intermediary is the cause of the last whether the intermediary is one or many. Hence if there were no first efficient cause, there would be no intermediary and no last cause. Thomas concludes from this that one must acknowledge the existence of a first efficient cause, “which everyone names God.” The third way consists of two major parts. Some Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 38   38 textual variants have complicated the proper interpretation of the first part. In brief, Aquinas appeals to the fact that certain things are subject to generation and corruption to show that they are “possible,” i.e., capable of existing and not existing. Not all things can be of this kind revised text, for that which has the possibility of not existing at some time does not exist. If, therefore, all things are capable of not existing, at some time there was nothing whatsoever. If that were so, even now there would be nothing, since what does not exist can only begin to exist through something else that exists. Therefore not all beings are capable of existing and not existing. There must be some necessary being. Since such a necessary, i.e., incorruptible, being might still be caused by something else, Thomas adds a second part to the argument. Every necessary being either depends on something else for its necessity or it does not. One cannot regress to infinity in necessary beings that depend on something else for their necessity. Therefore there must be some being that is necessary of itself and that does not depend on another cause for its necessity, i.e., God. The statement in the first part to the effect that what has the possibility of not existing at some point does not exist has been subject to considerable dispute among commentators. Moreover, even if one grants this and supposes that every individual being is a “possible” and therefore has not existed at some point in the past, it does not easily follow from this that the totality of existing things will also have been nonexistent at some point in the past. Given this, some interpreters prefer to substitute for the third way the more satisfactory versions found in SCG I ch. 15 and SCG II ch. 15. Thomas’s fourth way is based on the varying degrees of perfection we discover among the beings we experience. Some are more or less good, more or less true, more or less noble, etc., than others. But the more and less are said of different things insofar as they approach in varying degrees something that is such to a maximum degree. Therefore there is something that is truest and best and noblest and hence that is also being to the maximum degree. To support this Thomas comments that those things that are true to the maximum degree also enjoy being to the maximum degree; in other words he appeals to the convertibility between being and truth of being. In the second part of this argument Thomas argues that what is supremely such in a given genus is the cause of all other things in that genus. Therefore there is something that is the cause of being, goodness, etc., for all other beings, and this we call God. Much discussion has centered on Thomas’s claim that the more and less are said of different things insofar as they approach something that is such to the maximum degree. Some find this insufficient to justify the conclusion that a maximum must exist, and would here insert an appeal to efficient causality and his theory of participation. If certan entities share or participate in such a perfection only to a limited degree, they must receive that perfection from something else. While more satisfactory from a philosophical perspective, such an insertion seems to change the argument of the fourth way significantly. The fifth way is based on the way things in the universe are governed. Thomas observes that certain things that lack the ability to know, i.e., natural bodies, act for an end. This follows from the fact that they always or at least usually act in the same way to attain that which is best. For Thomas this indicates that they reach their ends by “intention” and not merely from chance. And this in turn implies that they are directed to their ends by some knowing and intelligent being. Hence some intelligent being exists that orders natural things to their ends. This argument rests on final causality and should not be confused with any based on order and design. Aquinas’s frequently repeated denial that in this life we can know what God is should here be recalled. If we can know that God exists and what he is not, we cannot know what he is see, e.g., SCG I, c. 30. Even when we apply the names of pure perfections to God, we first discover such perfections in limited fashion in creatures. What the names of such perfections are intended to signify may indeed be free from all imperfection, but every such name carries with it some deficiency in the way in which it signifies. When a name such as ‘goodness’, for instance, is signified abstractly e.g., ‘God is goodness’, this abstract way of signifying suggests that goodness does not subsist in itself. When such a name is signified concretely e.g., ‘God is good’, this concrete way of signifying implies some kind of composition between God and his goodness. Hence while such names are to be affirmed of God as regards that which they signify, the way in which they signify is to be denied of him. This final point sets the stage for Thomas to apply his theory of analogy to the divine names. Names of pure perfections such as ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘being’, etc., cannot be applied to God with Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 39   39 exactly the same meaning they have when affirmed of creatures univocally, nor with entirely different meanings equivocally. Hence they are affirmed of God and of creatures by an analogy based on the relationship that obtains between a creature viewed as an effect and God its uncaused cause. Because some minimum degree of similarity must obtain between any effect and its cause, Thomas is convinced that in some way a caused perfection imitates and participates in God, its uncaused and unparticipated source. Because no caused effect can ever be equal to its uncreated cause, every perfection that we affirm of God is realized in him in a way different from the way we discover it in creatures. This dissimilarity is so great that we can never have quidditative knowledge of God in this life know what God is. But the similarity is sufficient for us to conclude that what we understand by a perfection such as goodness in creatures is present in God in unrestricted fashion. Even though Thomas’s identification of the kind of analogy to be used in predicating divine names underwent some development, in mature works such as On the Power of God qu. 7, a. 7, SCG I c.34, and ST I qu. 13, a. 5, he identifies this as the analogy of “one to another,” rather than as the analogy of “many to one.” In none of these works does he propose using the analogy of “proportionality” that he had previously defended in On Truth qu. 2, a. 11. Theological virtues. While Aquinas is convinced that human reason can arrive at knowledge that God exists and at meaningful predication of the divine names, he does not think the majority of human beings will actually succeed in such an effort SCG I, c. 4; ST IIIIae, qu. 2, a. 4. Hence he concludes that it was fitting for God to reveal such truths to mankind along with others that purely philosophical inquiry could never discover even in principle. Acceptance of the truth of divine revelation presupposes the gift of the theological virtue of faith in the believer. Faith is an infused virtue by reason of which we accept on God’s authority what he has revealed to us. To believe is an act of the intellect that assents to divine truth as a result of a command on the part of the human will, a will that itself is moved by God through grace ST II IIae, qu. 2, a. 9. For Thomas the theological virtues, having God the ultimate end as their object, are prior to all other virtues whether natural or infused. Because the ultimate end must be present in the intellect before it is present to the will, and because the ultimate end is present in the will by reason of hope and charity the other two theological virtues, in this respect faith is prior to hope and charity. Hope is the theological virtue through which we trust that with divine assistance we will attain the infinite good  eternal enjoyment of God ST IIIIae, qu. 17, aa. 12. In the order of generation, hope is prior to charity; but in the order of perfection charity is prior both to hope and faith. While neither faith nor hope will remain in those who reach the eternal vision of God in the life to come, charity will endure in the blessed. It is a virtue or habitual form that is infused into the soul by God and that inclines us to love him for his own sake. If charity is more excellent than faith or hope ST II IIae, qu. 23, a. 6, through charity the acts of all other virtues are ordered to God, their ultimate end qu. 23, a. 8. 

arbitrium: arminius, Jacobus 15601609, Dutch theologian who, as a Dutch Reformed pastor and later professor at the  of Leiden, challenged Calvinist orthodoxy on predestination and free will. After his death, followers codified Arminius’s views in a document asserting that God’s grace is necessary for salvation, but not irresistible: the divine decree depends on human free choice. This became the basis for Arminianism, which was condemned by the Dutch ReAristotle, commentaries on Arminius, Jacobus 51   51 formed synod but vigorously debated for centuries among Protestant theologians of different denominations. The term ‘Arminian’ is still occasionally applied to theologians who defend a free human response to divine grace against predestinationism.

arcesilaus: Grecian, pre-Griceian, sceptic philosopher, founder of the Middle Academy. Influenced by Socratic elenchus, he claimed that, unlike Socrates, he was not even certain that he was certain of nothing. He shows the influence of Pyrrho in attacking the Stoic doctrine that the subjective certainty of the wise is the criterion of truth. At the theoretical level he advocated epoche, suspension of rational judgment; at the practical, he argued that eulogon, probability, can justify action  an early version of coherentism. His ethical views were not extreme; he held, e.g., that one should attend to one’s own life rather than external objects. Though he wrote nothing except verse, he led the Academy into two hundred years of Skepticism.

archytas: Grecian, pre-Griceian, Pythagorean philosopher from Tarentum in southern Italy. He was elected general seven times and sent a ship to rescue Plato from Dionysius II of Syracuse in 361. He is famous for solutions to specific mathematical problems, such as the doubling of the cube, but little is known about his general philosophical principles. His proof that the numbers in a superparticular ratio have no mean proportional has relevance to music theory, as does his work with the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means. He gave mathematical accounts of the diatonic, enharmonic, and chromatic scales and developed a theory of acoustics. Fragments 1 and 2 and perhaps 3 are authentic, but most material preserved in his name is spurious. 

aretaic: sometimes used by Grice for ‘virtuosum’. arete, ancient Grecian term meaning ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence’. In philosophical contexts, the term was used mainly of virtues of human character; in broader contexts, arete was applicable to many different sorts of excellence. The cardinal virtues in the classical period were courage, wisdom, temperance sophrosune, piety, and justice. Sophists such as Protagoras claimed to teach such virtues, and Socrates challenged their credentials for doing so. Several early Platonic dialogues show Socrates asking after definitions of virtues, and Socrates investigates arete in other dialogues as well. Conventional views allowed that a person can have one virtue such as courage but lack another such as wisdom, but Plato’s Protagoras shows Socrates defending his thesis of the unity of arete, which implies that a person who has one arete has them all. Platonic accounts of the cardinal virtues with the exception of piety are given in Book IV of the Republic. Substantial parts of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle are given over to discussions of arete, which he divides into virtues of character and virtues of intellect. This discussion is the ancestor of most modern theories of virtue ethics. 

argumentum: “I thought I saw an argument, it turned to be some soap” (Dodgson). Term that Grice borrows from (but “never returned” to) Boethius, the Roman philosopher. Strictly, Grice is interested in the ‘arguer.’ Say Blackburn goes to Grice and, not knowing Grice speaks English, writes a skull. Blackburn intends Grice to think that there is danger, somewhere, even deadly danger. So there is arguing on Blackburn’s part. And there is INTENDED arguing on Blackburn’s recipient, Grice, as it happens. For Grice, the truth-value of “Blackburn communicates (to Grice) that there is danger” does not REQUIRE the uptake.” “Why, one must just as well require that Jones GETS his job to deem Smith having GIVEN it to him if that’s what he’s promised. The arguer is invoked in a self-psi-transmission. For he must think P, and he must think C, and he must think that P yields C. And this thought that C must be CAUSED by the fact that he thinks that P yields C. -- f. argŭo , ŭi, ūtum (ŭĭtum, hence arguiturus, Sall. Fragm. ap. Prisc. p. 882 P.), 3, v. a. cf. ἀργής, white; ἀργός, bright; Sanscr. árgunas, bright; ragatas, white; and rag, to shine (v. argentum and argilla); after the same analogy we have clarus, bright; and claro, to make bright, to make evident; and the Engl. clear, adj., and to clear = to make clear; v. Georg Curtius p. 171.  I. A.. In gen., to make clear, to show, prove, make known, declare, assert, μηνύειν: “arguo Eam me vidisse intus,” Plaut. Mil. 2, 3, 66: “non ex auditu arguo,” id. Bacch. 3, 3, 65: “M. Valerius Laevinus ... speculatores, non legatos, venisse arguebat,” Liv. 30, 23: “degeneres animos timor arguit,” Verg. A. 4, 13: “amantem et languor et silentium Arguit,” Hor. Epod. 11, 9; id. C. 1, 13, 7.—Pass., in a mid. signif.: “apparet virtus arguiturque malis,” makes itself known, Ov. Tr. 4, 3, 80: “laudibus arguitur vini vinosus Homerus,” betrays himself, Hor. Ep. 1, 19, 6.— B. Esp. a. With aliquem, to attempt to show something, in one's case, against him, to accuse, reprove, censure, charge with: Indicāsse est detulisse; “arguisse accusāsse et convicisse,” Dig. 50, 16, 197 (cf. Fest. p. 22: Argutum iri in discrimen vocari): tu delinquis, ego arguar pro malefactis? Enn. (as transl. of Eurip. Iphig. Aul. 384: Εἶτ̓ ἐγὼ δίκην δῶ σῶν κακῶν ὁ μὴ σφαλείς) ap. Rufin. § “37: servos ipsos neque accuso neque arguo neque purgo,” Cic. Rosc. Am. 41, 120: “Pergin, sceleste, intendere hanc arguere?” Plaut. Mil. 2, 4, 27; 2, 2, 32: “hae tabellae te arguunt,” id. Bacch. 4, 6, 10: “an hunc porro tactum sapor arguet oris?” Lucr. 4, 487: “quod adjeci, non ut arguerem, sed ne arguerer,” Vell. 2, 53, 4: “coram aliquem arguere,” Liv. 43, 5: “apud praefectum,” Tac. A. 14, 41: “(Deus) arguit te heri,” Vulg. Gen. 31, 42; ib. Lev. 19, 17; ib. 2 Tim. 4, 2; ib. Apoc. 3, 19 al.— b. With the cause of complaint in the gen.; abl. with or without de; with in with abl.; with acc.; with a clause as object; or with ut (cf. Ramsh. p. 326; Zumpt, § 446). (α). With gen.: “malorum facinorum,” Plaut. Ps. 2, 4, 56 (cf. infra, argutus, B. 2.): “aliquem probri, Stupri, dedecoris,” id. Am. 3, 2, 2: “viros mortuos summi sceleris,” Cic. Rab. Perd. 9, 26: “aliquem tanti facinoris,” id. Cael. 1: “criminis,” Tac. H. 1, 48: “furti me arguent,” Vulg. Gen. 30, 33; ib. Eccl. 11, 8: “repetundarum,” Tac. A. 3, 33: “occupandae rei publicae,” id. ib. 6, 10: “neglegentiae,” Suet. Caes. 53: “noxae,” id. Aug. 67: “veneni in se comparati,” id. Tib. 49: “socordiae,” id. Claud. 3: “mendacii,” id. Oth. 10: “timoris,” Verg. A. 11, 384: “sceleris arguemur,” Vulg. 4 Reg. 7, 9; ib. Act. 19, 40 al.— (β). With abl.: “te hoc crimine non arguo,” Cic. Verr. 2, 5, 18; Nep. Paus. 3 fin.— (γ). With de: “de eo crimine, quo de arguatur,” Cic. Inv 2, 11, 37: “de quibus quoniam verbo arguit, etc.,” id. Rosc. Am. 29 fin.: “Quis arguet me de peccato?” Vulg. Joan. 8, 46; 16, 8.— (δ). With in with abl. (eccl. Lat.): “non in sacrificiis tuis arguam te,” Vulg. Psa. 49, 8.—（ε) With acc.: quid undas Arguit et liquidam molem camposque natantīs? of what does he impeach the waves? etc., quid being here equivalent to cujus or de quo, Lucr. 6, 405 Munro.—（ζ) With an inf.-clause as object: “quae (mulier) me arguit Hanc domo ab se subripuisse,” Plaut. Men. 5, 2, 62; id. Mil. 2, 4, 36: “occidisse patrem Sex. Roscius arguitur,” Cic. Rosc. Am. 13, 37: “auctor illius injuriae fuisse arguebatur?” Cic. Verr. 2, 1, 33: “qui sibimet vim ferro intulisse arguebatur,” Suet. Claud. 16; id. Ner. 33; id. Galb. 7: “me Arguit incepto rerum accessisse labori,” Ov. M. 13, 297; 15, 504.—（η) With ut, as in Gr. ὡς (post-Aug. and rare), Suet. Ner. 7: “hunc ut dominum et tyrannum, illum ut proditorem arguentes,” as being master and tyrant, Just. 22, 3.— II. Transf. to the thing. 1. To accuse, censure, blame: “ea culpa, quam arguo,” Liv. 1, 28: “peccata coram omnibus argue,” Vulg. 1 Tim. 5, 20: “tribuni plebis dum arguunt in C. Caesare regni voluntatem,” Vell. 2, 68; Suet. Tit. 5 fin.: “taciturnitatem pudoremque quorumdam pro tristitiā et malignitate arguens,” id. Ner. 23; id. Caes. 75: “arguebat et perperam editos census,” he accused of giving a false statement of property, census, id. Calig. 38: “primusque animalia mensis Arguit imponi,” censured, taught that it was wrong, Ov. M. 15, 73: “ut non arguantur opera ejus,” Vulg. Joan. 3, 20.— 2. Trop., to denounce as false: “quod et ipsum Fenestella arguit,” Suet. Vit. Ter. p. 292 Roth.—With reference to the person, to refute, confute: “aliquem,” Suet. Calig. 8.—Hence, argūtus , a, um, P. a. A. Of physical objects, clear. 1. To the sight, bright, glancing, lively: “manus autem minus arguta, digitis subsequens verba, non exprimens,” not too much in motion, Cic. de Or. 3, 59, 220 (cf. id. Or. 18, 59: nullae argutiae digitorum, and Quint. 11, 3, 119-123): “manus inter agendum argutae admodum et gestuosae,” Gell. 1, 5, 2: “et oculi nimis arguti, quem ad modum animo affecti sumus, loquuntur,” Cic. Leg. 1, 9, 27: “ocelli,” Ov. Am. 3, 3, 9; 3, 2, 83: “argutum caput,” a head graceful in motion, Verg. G. 3, 80 (breve, Servius, but this idea is too prosaic): aures breves et argutae, ears that move quickly (not stiff, rigid), Pall. 4, 13, 2: “argutā in soleā,” in the neat sandal, Cat. 68, 72.— 2. a.. To the hearing, clear, penetrating, piercing, both of pleasant and disagreeable sounds, clear-sounding, sharp, noisy, rustling, whizzing, rattling, clashing, etc. (mostly poet.): linguae, Naev. ap. Non. p. 9, 24: “aves,” Prop. 1, 18, 30: “hirundo,” chirping, Verg. G. 1, 377: “olores,” tuneful, id. E. 9, 36: ilex, murmuring, rustling (as moved by the wind), id. ib. 7, 1: “nemus,” id. ib. 8, 22 al.—Hence, a poet. epithet of the musician and poet, clear-sounding, melodious: “Neaera,” Hor. C. 3, 14, 21: “poëtae,” id. Ep. 2, 2, 90: “fama est arguti Nemesis formosa Tibullus,” Mart. 8, 73, 7: forum, full of bustle or din, noisy, Ov. A.A. 1, 80: “serra,” grating, Verg. G. 1, 143: “pecten,” rattling, id. ib. 1, 294; id. A. 7, 14 (cf. in Gr. κερκὶς ἀοιδός, Aristoph. Ranae, v. 1316) al.—Hence, of rattling, prating, verbose discourse: “sine virtute argutum civem mihi habeam pro preaeficā, etc.,” Plaut. Truc. 2, 6, 14: “[Neque mendaciloquom neque adeo argutum magis],” id. Trin. 1, 2, 163 Ritschl.— b. Trop., of written communications, rattling, wordy, verbose: “obviam mihi litteras quam argutissimas de omnibus rebus crebro mittas,” Cic. Att. 6, 5: vereor, ne tibi nimium arguta haec sedulitas videatur, Cael. ap. Cic. Fam. 8, 1. —Transf. to omens, clear, distinct, conclusive, clearly indicative, etc.: “sunt qui vel argutissima haec exta esse dicant,” Cic. Div. 2, 12 fin.: “non tibi candidus argutum sternuit omen Amor?” Prop. 2, 3, 24.— 3. To the smell; sharp, pungent: “odor argutior,” Plin. 15, 3, 4, § 18.— 4. To the taste; sharp, keen, pungent: “sapor,” Pall. 3, 25, 4; 4, 10, 26.— B. Of mental qualities. 1. In a good sense, bright, acute, sagacious, witty: “quis illo (sc. Catone) acerbior in vituperando? in sententiis argutior?” Cic. Brut. 17, 65: “orator,” id. ib. 70, 247: “poëma facit ita festivum, ita concinnum, ita elegans, nihil ut fieri possit argutius,” id. Pis. 29; so, “dicta argutissima,” id. de Or. 2, 61, 250: “sententiae,” id. Opt. Gen. 2: “acumen,” Hor. A. P. 364: “arguto ficta dolore queri,” dexterously-feigned pain, Prop. 1, 18, 26 al.— 2. In a bad sense, sly, artful, cunning: “meretrix,” Hor. S. 1, 10, 40: calo. id. Ep. 1, 14, 42: “milites,” Veg. Mil. 3, 6.—As a pun: ecquid argutus est? is he cunning? Ch. Malorum facinorum saepissime (i.e. has been accused of), Plaut. Ps. 2, 4, 56 (v. supra, I. B. a.).—Hence, adv.: argūtē (only in the signif. of B.). a. Subtly, acutely: “respondere,” Cic. Cael. 8: “conicere,” id. Brut. 14, 53: “dicere,” id. Or. 28, 98.—Comp.: “dicere,” Cic. Brut. 11, 42.— Sup.: “de re argutissime disputare,” Cic. de Or. 2, 4, 18.— b. Craftily: “obrepere,” Plaut. Trin. 4, 2, 132; Arn. 5, p. 181. For Grice, an argumentum is a sequence of statements such that some of them the premises purport to give reason to accept another of them, the conclusion. Since we speak of bad arguments and weak arguments, the premises of an argument need not really support the conclusion, but they must give some appearance of doing so or the term ‘argument’ is misapplied. Logic is mainly concerned with the question of validity: whether if the premises are true we would have reason to accept the conclusion. A valid argument with true premises is called sound. A valid deductive argument is one such that if we accept the premises we are logically bound to accept the conclusion and if we reject the conclusion we are logically bound to reject one or more of the premises. Alternatively, the premises logically entail the conclusion. A good inductive argument  some would reserve ‘valid’ for deductive arguments  is one such that if we accept the premises we are logically bound to regard the conclusion as probable, and, in addition, as more probable than it would be if the premises should be false. A few arguments have only one premise and/or more than one conclusion. 

ariskant: Two of Grice’s main tutees were respectively Aristotelian and Kantian scholars: Ackrill and Strawson. Grice, of course, read Ariskant in the vernacular. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Francis Haywood. William Pickering. 1838. critick of pure reason. (first English translation) Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. 1855 – via Project Gutenberg.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. 1873.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Friedrich Max Müller. The Macmillan Company. 1881. (Introduction by Ludwig Noiré)Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Palgrave Macmillan. 1929. ISBN 1-4039-1194-0. Archived from the original on 2009-04-27.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Wolfgang Schwartz. Scientia Verlag und Antiquariat. 1982. ISBN 978-3-5110-9260-3.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Hackett Publishing. 1996. ISBN 978-0-87220-257-3.Critique of Pure Reason, Abridged. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Hackett Publishing. 1999. ISBN 978-1-6246-6605-6.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge University Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-5216-5729-7.Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Marcus Weigelt. Penguin Books. 2007. ISBN 978-0-1404-4747-7. Grice’s favourite philosopher is Ariskant. One way to approach Grice’s meta-philosophy is by combining teleology with deontology. Eventually, Grice embraces a hedonistic eudaimonism, if rationally approved. Grice knows how to tutor in philosophy: he tutor on Kant as if he is tutoring on Aristotle, and vice versa. His tutees would say, Here come [sic] Kantotle. Grice is obsessed with Kantotle. He would teach one or the other as an ethics requirement. Back at Oxford, the emphasis is of course Aristotle, but he is aware of some trends to introduce Kant in the Lit.Hum. curriculum, not with much success. Strawson does his share with the pure reason in Kant in The bounds of sense, but White professors of moral philosophy are usually not too keen on the critique by Kant of practical reason. Grice is fascinated that an Irishman, back in 1873, cares to translate (“for me”) all that Kant has to say about the eudaimonism and hedonism of Aristotle. An Oxonian philosopher is expected to be a utilitarian, as Hare is, or a Hegelian, and that is why Grice prefers, heterodoxical as he is, to be a Kantian rationalist instead. But Grice cannot help being Aristotelian, Hardie having instilled the “Eth. Nich.” on him at Corpus. While he can’t read Kant in German, Grice uses Abbott’s Irish vernacular. Note the archaic metaphysic sic in singular.  More Kant. Since Baker can read the vernacular even less than Grice, it may be good to review the editions. It all starts when Abbott thinks that his fellow Irishmen are unable to tackle Kant in the vernacular. Abbott’s thing comes out in 1873: Kant’s critique of practical reason and other works on the theory of tthics, with Grice quipping. Oddly, I prefer his other work! Grice collaborates with Baker mainly on work on meta-ethics seen as an offspring, alla Kant, of philosophical psychology. Akrasia or egkrateia is one such topic. Baker contributes to PGRICE, a festschrift for Grice, with an essay on the purity, and alleged lack thereof, of this or that morally evaluable motive – rhetorically put: do ones motives have to be pure? For Grice morality cashes out in self-love, self-interest, and desire. Baker also contributes to a volume on Grice’s honour published by Palgrave, Meaning and analysis: essays on Grice. Baker organises of a symposium on the thought of Grice for the APA, the proceedings of which published in The Journal of Philosophy, with Bennett as chair, contributions by Baker and Grandy, commented by Stalnaker andWarner. Grice explores with Baker problems of egcrateia and the reduction of duty to self-love and interest.  Aristotle: preeminent Grecian philosopher born in Stagira, hence sometimes called the Stagirite. Aristotle came to Athens as a teenager and remained for two decades in Plato’s Academy. Following Plato’s death in 347, Aristotle traveled to Assos and to Lesbos, where he associated with Theophrastus and collected a wealth of biological data, and later to Macedonia, where he tutored Alexander the Great. In 335 he returned to Athens and founded his own philosophical school in the Lyceum. The site’s colonnaded walk peripatos conferred on Aristotle and his group the name ‘the Peripatetics’. Alexander’s death in 323 unleashed antiMacedonian forces in Athens. Charged with impiety, and mindful of the fate of Socrates, Aristotle withdrew to Chalcis, where he died. Chiefly influenced by his association with Plato, Aristotle also makes wide use of the preSocratics. A number of works begin by criticizing and, ultimately, building on their views. The direction of Plato’s influence is debated. Some scholars see Aristotle’s career as a measured retreat from his teacher’s doctrines. For others he began as a confirmed anti-Platonist but returned to the fold as he matured. More likely, Aristotle early on developed a keenly independent voice that expressed enduring puzzlement over such Platonic doctrines as the separate existence of Ideas and the construction of physical reality from two-dimensional triangles. Such unease was no doubt heightened by Aristotle’s appreciation for the evidential value of observation as well as by his conviction that long-received and well-entrenched opinion is likely to contain at least part of the truth. Aristotle reportedly wrote a few popular works for publication, some of which are dialogues. Of these we have only fragments and reports. Notably lost are also his lectures on the good and on the Ideas. Ancient cataloguers also list under Aristotle’s name some 158 constitutions of Grecian states. Of these, only the Constitution of Athens has survived, on a papyrus discovered in 0. What remains is an enormous body of writing on virtually every topic of philosophical significance. Much of it consists of detailed lecture notes, working drafts, and accounts of his lectures written by others. Although efforts may have been under way in Aristotle’s lifetime, Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first century B.C., is credited with giving the Aristotelian corpus its present organization. Virtually no extant manuscripts predate the ninth century A.D., so the corpus has been transmitted by a complex history of manuscript transcription. In 1831 the Berlin Academy published the first critical edition of Aristotle’s work. Scholars still cite Aristotle by , column, and line of this edition. Logic and language. The writings on logic and language are concentrated in six early works: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. Known since late antiquity as the Organon, these works share a concern with what is now called semantics. The Categories focuses on the relation between uncombined terms, such as ‘white’ or ‘man’, and the items they signify; On Interpretation offers an account of how terms combine to yield simple statements; Prior Analytics provides a systematic account of how three terms must be distributed in two categorical statements so as to yield logically a third such statement; Posterior Analytics specifies the conditions that categorical statements must meet to play a role in scientific explanation. The Topics, sometimes said to include Sophistical Refutations, is a handbook of “topics” and techniques for dialectical arguments concerning, principally, the four predicables: accident what may or may not belong to a subject, as sitting belongs to Socrates; definition what signifies a subject’s essence, as rational animal is the essence of man; proprium what is not in the essence of a subject but is unique to or counterpredicable of it, as all and only persons are risible; and genus what is in the essence of subjects differing in species, as animal is in the essence of both men and oxen. Categories treats the basic kinds of things that exist and their interrelations. Every uncombined term, says Aristotle, signifies essentially something in one of ten categories  a substance, a quantity, a quality, a relative, a place, a time, a position, a having, a doing, or a being affected. This doctrine underlies Aristotle’s admonition that there are as many proper or per se senses of ‘being’ as there are categories. In order to isolate the things that exist primarily, namely, primary substances, from all other things and to give an account of their nature, two asymmetric relations of ontological dependence are employed. First, substance ousia is distinguished from the accidental categories by the fact that every accident is present in a substance and, therefore, cannot exist without a substance in which to inhere. Second, the category of substance itself is divided into ordinary individuals or primary substances, such as Socrates, and secondary substances, such as the species man and the genus animal. Secondary substances are said of primary substances and indicate what kind of thing the subject is. A mark of this is that both the name and the definition of the secondary substance can be predicated of the primary substance, as both man and rational animal can be predicated of Socrates. Universals in non-substance categories are also said of subjects, as color is said of white. Therefore, directly or indirectly, everything else is either present in or said of primary substances and without them nothing would exist. And because they are neither present in a subject nor said of a subject, primary substances depend on nothing else for their existence. So, in the Categories, the ordinary individual is ontologically basic. On Interpretation offers an account of those meaningful expressions that are true or false, namely, statements or assertions. Following Plato’s Sophist, a simple statement is composed of the semantically heterogeneous parts, name onoma and verb rhema. In ‘Socrates runs’ the name has the strictly referential function of signifying the subject of attribution. The verb, on the other hand, is essentially predicative, signifying something holding of the subject. Verbs also indicate when something is asserted to hold and so make precise the statement’s truth conditions. Simple statements also include general categorical statements. Since medieval times it has become customary to refer to the basic categoricals by letters: A Every man is white, E No man is white, I Some man is white, and O Not every man is white. On Interpretation outlines their logical relations in what is now called the square of opposition: A & E are contraries, A & O and E & I are contradictories, and A & I and E & O are superimplications. That A implies I reflects the no longer current view that Aristotle Aristotle 45   45 all affirmative statements carry existential import. One ambition of On Interpretation is a theory of the truth conditions for all statements that affirm or deny one thing or another. However, statements involving future contingencies pose a special problem. Consider Aristotle’s notorious sea battle. Either it will or it will not happen tomorrow. If the first, then the statement ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is now true. Hence, it is now fixed that the sea battle occur tomorrow. If the second, then it is now fixed that the sea battle not occur tomorrow. Either way there can be no future contingencies. Although some hold that Aristotle would embrace the determinism they find implicit in this consequence, most argue either that he suspends the law of excluded middle for future contingencies or that he denies the principle of bivalence for future contingent statements. On the first option Aristotle gives up the claim that either the sea battle will happen tomorrow or not. On the second he keeps the claim but allows that future contingent statements are neither true nor false. Aristotle’s evident attachment to the law of excluded middle, perhaps, favors the second option. Prior Analytics marks the invention of logic as a formal discipline in that the work contains the first virtually complete system of logical inference, sometimes called syllogistic. The fact that the first chapter of the Prior Analytics reports that there is a syllogism whenever, certain things being stated, something else follows of necessity, might suggest that Aristotle intended to capture a general notion of logical consequence. However, the syllogisms that constitute the system of the Prior Analytics are restricted to the basic categorical statements introduced in On Interpretation. A syllogism consists of three different categorical statements: two premises and a conclusion. The Prior Analytics tells us which pairs of categoricals logically yield a third. The fourteen basic valid forms are divided into three figures and, within each figure, into moods. The system is foundational because second- and third-figure syllogisms are reducible to first-figure syllogisms, whose validity is self-evident. Although syllogisms are conveniently written as conditional sentences, the syllogistic proper is, perhaps, best seen as a system of valid deductive inferences rather than as a system of valid conditional sentences or sentence forms. Posterior Analytics extends syllogistic to science and scientific explanation. A science is a deductively ordered body of knowledge about a definite genus or domain of nature. Scientific knowledge episteme consists not in knowing that, e.g., there is thunder in the clouds, but rather in knowing why there is thunder. So the theory of scientific knowledge is a theory of explanation and the vehicle of explanation is the first-figure syllogism Barbara: If 1 P belongs to all M and 2 M belongs to all S, then 3 P belongs to all S. To explain, e.g., why there is thunder, i.e., why there is noise in the clouds, we say: 3H Noise P belongs to the clouds S because 2H Quenching of fire M belongs to the clouds S and 1H Noise P belongs to quenching of fire M. Because what is explained in science is invariant and holds of necessity, the premises of a scientific or demonstrative syllogism must be necessary. In requiring that the premises be prior to and more knowable than the conclusion, Aristotle embraces the view that explanation is asymmetrical: knowledge of the conclusion depends on knowledge of each premise, but each premise can be known independently of the conclusion. The premises must also give the causes of the conclusion. To inquire why P belongs to S is, in effect, to seek the middle term that gives the cause. Finally, the premises must be immediate and non-demonstrable. A premise is immediate just in case there is no middle term connecting its subject and predicate terms. Were P to belong to M because of a new middle, M1, then there would be a new, more basic premise, that is essential to the full explanation. Ultimately, explanation of a received fact will consist in a chain of syllogisms terminating in primary premises that are immediate. These serve as axioms that define the science in question because they reflect the essential nature of the fact to be explained  as in 1H the essence of thunder lies in the quenching of fire. Because they are immediate, primary premises are not capable of syllogistic demonstration, yet they must be known if syllogisms containing them are to constitute knowledge of the conclusion. Moreover, were it necessary to know the primary premises syllogistically, demonstration would proceed infinitely or in a circle. The first alternative defeats the very possibility of explanation and the second undermines its asymmetric character. Thus, the primary premises must be known by the direct grasp of the mind noûs. This just signals the appropriate way for the highest principles of a science to be known  even demonstrable propositions can be known directly, but they are explained only when located within the structure of the relevant science, i.e., only when demonstrated syllogistically. Although all sciences exhibit the same formal structure and use Aristotle Aristotle 46   46 certain common principles, different sciences have different primary premises and, hence, different subject matters. This “one genus to one science” rule legislates that each science and its explanations be autonomous. Aristotle recognizes three kinds of intellectual discipline. Productive disciplines, such as house building, concern the making of something external to the agent. Practical disciplines, such as ethics, concern the doing of something not separate from the agent, namely, action and choice. Theoretical disciplines are concerned with truth for its own sake. As such, they alone are sciences in the special sense of the Posterior Analytics. The three main kinds of special science are individuated by their objects  natural science by objects that are separate but not changeless, mathematics by objects that are changeless but not separate, and theology by separate and changeless objects. The mathematician studies the same objects as the natural scientist but in a quite different way. He takes an actual object, e.g. a chalk figure used in demonstration, and abstracts from or “thinks away” those of its properties, such as definiteness of size and imperfection of shape, that are irrelevant to its standing as a perfect exemplar of the purely mathematical properties under investigation. Mathematicians simply treat this abstracted circle, which is not separate from matter, as if it were separate. In this way the theorems they prove about the object can be taken as universal and necessary. Physics. As the science of nature physis, physics studies those things whose principles and causes of change and rest are internal. Aristotle’s central treatise on nature, the Physics, analyzes the most general features of natural phenomena: cause, change, time, place, infinity, and continuity. The doctrine of the four causes is especially important in Aristotle’s work. A cause aitia is something like an explanatory factor. The material cause of a house, for instance, is the matter hyle from which it is built; the moving or efficient cause is the builder, more exactly, the form in the builder’s soul; the formal cause is its plan or form eidos; and the final cause is its purpose or end telos: provision of shelter. The complete explanation of the coming to be of a house will factor in all of these causes. In natural phenomena efficient, formal, and final causes often coincide. The form transmitted by the father is both the efficient cause and the form of the child, and the latter is glossed in terms of the child’s end or complete development. This explains why Aristotle often simply contrasts matter and form. Although its objects are compounds of both, physics gives priority to the study of natural form. This accords with the Posterior Analytics’ insistence that explanation proceed through causes that give the essence and reflects Aristotle’s commitment to teleology. A natural process counts essentially as the development of, say, an oak or a man because its very identity depends on the complete form realized at its end. As with all things natural, the end is an internal governing principle of the process rather than an external goal. All natural things are subject to change kinesis. Defined as the actualization of the potential qua potential, a change is not an ontologically basic item. There is no category for changes. Rather, they are reductively explained in terms of more basic things  substances, properties, and potentialities. A pale man, e.g., has the potentiality to be or become tanned. If this potentiality is utterly unactualized, no change will ensue; if completely actualized, the change will have ended. So the potentiality must be actualized but not, so to speak, exhausted; i.e., it must be actualized qua potentiality. Designed for the ongoing operations of the natural world, the Physics’ definition of change does not cover the generation and corruption of substantial items themselves. This sort of change, which involves matter and elemental change, receives extensive treatment in On Generation and Corruption. Aristotle rejects the atomists’ contention that the world consists of an infinite totality of indivisible atoms in various arrangements. Rather, his basic stuff is uniform elemental matter, any part of which is divisible into smaller such parts. Because nothing that is actually infinite can exist, it is only in principle that matter is always further dividable. So while countenancing the potential infinite, Aristotle squarely denies the actual infinite. This holds for the motions of the sublunary elemental bodies earth, air, fire, and water as well as for the circular motions of the heavenly bodies composed of a fifth element, aether, whose natural motion is circular. These are discussed in On the Heavens. The four sublunary elements are further discussed in Meteorology, the fourth book of which might be described as an early treatise on chemical combination. Psychology. Because the soul psyche is officially defined as the form of a body with the potentiality for life, psychology is a subfield of natural science. In effect, Aristotle applies the Aristotle Aristotle 47   47 apparatus of form and matter to the traditional Grecian view of the soul as the principle and cause of life. Although even the nutritive and reproductive powers of plants are effects of the soul, most of his attention is focused on topics that are psychological in the modern sense. On the Soul gives a general account of the nature and number of the soul’s principal cognitive faculties. Subsequent works, chiefly those collected as the Parva naturalia, apply the general theory to a broad range of psychological phenomena from memory and recollection to dreaming, sleeping, and waking. The soul is a complex of faculties. Faculties, at least those distinctive of persons, are capacities for cognitively grasping objects. Sight grasps colors, smell odors, hearing sounds, and the mind grasps universals. An organism’s form is the particular organization of its material parts that enable it to exercise these characteristic functions. Because an infant, e.g., has the capacity to do geometry, Aristotle distinguishes two varieties of capacity or potentiality dynamis and actuality entelecheia. The infant is a geometer only in potentiality. This first potentiality comes to him simply by belonging to the appropriate species, i.e., by coming into the world endowed with the potential to develop into a competent geometer. By actualizing, through experience and training, this first potentiality, he acquires a first actualization. This actualization is also a second potentiality, since it renders him a competent geometer able to exercise his knowledge at will. The exercise itself is a second actualization and amounts to active contemplation of a particular item of knowledge, e.g. the Pythagorean theorem. So the soul is further defined as the first actualization of a complex natural body. Faculties, like sciences, are individuated by their objects. Objects of perception aisthesis fall into three general kinds. Special proper sensibles, such as colors and sounds, are directly perceived by one and only one sense and are immune to error. They demarcate the five special senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Common sensibles, such as movement and shape, are directly perceived by more than one special sense. Both special and common sensibles are proper objects of perception because they have a direct causal effect on the perceptual system. By contrast, the son of Diares is an incidental sensible because he is perceived not directly but as a consequence of directly perceiving something else that happens to be the son of Diares  e.g., a white thing. Aristotle calls the mind noûs the place of forms because it is able to grasp objects apart from matter. These objects are nothing like Plato’s separately existing Forms. As Aristotelian universals, their existence is entailed by and depends on their having instances. Thus, On the Soul’s remark that universals are “somehow in the soul” only reflects their role in assuring the autonomy of thought. The mind has no organ because it is not the form or first actualization of any physical structure. So, unlike perceptual faculties, it is not strongly dependent on the body. However, the mind thinks its objects by way of images, which are something like internal representations, and these are physically based. Insofar as it thus depends on imagination phantasia, the mind is weakly dependent on the body. This would be sufficient to establish the naturalized nature of Aristotle’s mind were it not for what some consider an incurably dualist intrusion. In distinguishing something in the mind that makes all things from something that becomes all things, Aristotle introduces the notorious distinction between the active and passive intellects and may even suggest that the first is separable from the body. Opinion on the nature of the active intellect diverges widely, some even discounting it as an irrelevant insertion. But unlike perception, which depends on external objects, thinking is up to us. Therefore, it cannot simply be a matter of the mind’s being affected. So Aristotle needs a mechanism that enables us to produce thoughts autonomously. In light of this functional role, the question of active intellect’s ontological status is less pressing. Biology. Aristotle’s biological writings, which constitute about a quarter of the corpus, bring biological phenomena under the general framework of natural science: the four causes, form and matter, actuality and potentiality, and especially the teleological character of natural processes. If the Physics proceeds in an a priori style, the History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals achieve an extraordinary synthesis of observation, theory, and general scientific principle. History of Animals is a comparative study of generic features of animals, including analogous parts, activities, and dispositions. Although its morphological and physiological descriptions show surprisingly little interest in teleology, Parts of Animals is squarely teleological. Animal parts, especially organs, are ultimately differentiated by function rather than morphology. The composition of, e.g., teeth and flesh is determined by their role in the overall functioning of the organism and, hence, requires Aristotle Aristotle 48   48 teleology. Generation of Animals applies the formmatter and actualitypotentiality distinctions to animal reproduction, inheritance, and the development of accidental characteristics. The species form governs the development of an organism and determines what the organism is essentially. Although in the Metaphysics and elsewhere accidental characteristics, including inherited ones, are excluded from science, in the biological writings form has an expanded role and explains the inheritance of non-essential characteristics, such as eye color. The more fully the father’s form is imposed on the minimally formed matter of the mother, the more completely the father’s traits are passed on to the offspring. The extent to which matter resists imposition of form determines the extent to which traits of the mother emerge, or even those of more distant ancestors. Aristotle shared the Platonists’ interest in animal classification. Recent scholarship suggests that this is less an interest in elaborating a Linnean-style taxonomy of the animal kingdom than an interest in establishing the complex differentiae and genera central to definitions of living things. The biological works argue, moreover, that no single differentia could give the whole essence of a species and that the differentiae that do give the essence will fall into more than one division. If the second point rejects the method of dichotomous division favored by Plato and the Academy, the first counters Aristotle’s own standard view that essence can be reduced to a single final differentia. The biological sciences are not, then, automatically accommodated by the Posterior Analytics model of explanation, where the essence or explanatory middle is conceived as a single causal property. A number of themes discussed in this section are brought together in a relatively late work, Motion of Animals. Its psychophysical account of the mechanisms of animal movement stands at the juncture of physics, psychology, and biology. Metaphysics. In Andronicus’s edition, the fourteen books now known as the Metaphysics were placed after the Physics, whence comes the word ‘metaphysics’, whose literal meaning is ‘what comes after the physics’. Aristotle himself prefers ‘first philosophy’ or ‘wisdom’ sophia. The subject is defined as the theoretical science of the causes and principles of what is most knowable. This makes metaphysics a limiting case of Aristotle’s broadly used distinction between what is better known to us and what is better known by nature. The genus animal, e.g., is better known by nature than the species man because it is further removed from the senses and because it can be known independently of the species. The first condition suggests that the most knowable objects would be the separately existing and thoroughly non-sensible objects of theology and, hence, that metaphysics is a special science. The second condition suggests that the most knowable objects are simply the most general notions that apply to things in general. This favors identifying metaphysics as the general science of being qua being. Special sciences study restricted modes of being. Physics, for instance, studies being qua having an internal principle of change and rest. A general science of being studies the principles and causes of things that are, simply insofar as they are. A good deal of the Metaphysics supports this conception of metaphysics. For example, Book IV, on the principle of non-contradiction, and Book X, on unity, similarity, and difference, treat notions that apply to anything whatever. So, too, for the discussion of form and actuality in the central books VII, VIII, and IX. Book XII, on the other hand, appears to regard metaphysics as the special science of theology. Aristotle himself attempts to reconcile these two conceptions of metaphysics. Because it studies immovable substance, theology counts as first philosophy. However, it is also general precisely because it is first, and so it will include the study of being qua being. Scholars have found this solution as perplexing as the problem. Although Book XII proves the causal necessity for motion of an eternal substance that is an unmoved mover, this establishes no conceptual connection between the forms of sensible compounds and the pure form that is the unmoved mover. Yet such a connection is required, if a single science is to encompass both. Problems of reconciliation aside, Aristotle had to face a prior difficulty concerning the very possibility of a general science of being. For the Posterior Analytics requires the existence of a genus for each science but the Metaphysics twice argues that being is not a genus. The latter claim, which Aristotle never relinquishes, is implicit in the Categories, where being falls directly into kinds, namely, the categories. Because these highest genera do not result from differentiation of a single genus, no univocal sense of being covers them. Although being is, therefore, ambiguous in as many ways as there are categories, a thread connects them. The ontological priority accorded primary substance in the Categories is made part of the very definition of non-substantial entities Aristotle Aristotle 49   49 in the Metaphysics: to be an accident is by definition to be an accident of some substance. Thus, the different senses of being all refer to the primary kind of being, substance, in the way that exercise, diet, medicine, and climate are healthy by standing in some relation to the single thing health. The discovery of focal meaning, as this is sometimes called, introduces a new way of providing a subject matter with the internal unity required for science. Accordingly, the Metaphysics modifies the strict “one genus to one science” rule of the Posterior Analytics. A single science may also include objects whose definitions are different so long as these definitions are related focally to one thing. So focal meaning makes possible the science of being qua being. Focal meaning also makes substance the central object of investigation. The principles and causes of being in general can be illuminated by studying the principles and causes of the primary instance of being. Although the Categories distinguishes primary substances from other things that are and indicates their salient characteristics e.g., their ability to remain one and the same while taking contrary properties, it does not explain why it is that primary substances have such characteristics. The difficult central books of the Metaphysics  VII, VIII, and IX  investigate precisely this. In effect, they ask what, primarily, about the Categories’ primary substances explains their nature. Their target, in short, is the substance of the primary substances of the Categories. As concrete empirical particulars, the latter are compounds of form and matter the distinction is not explicit in the Categories and so their substance must be sought among these internal structural features. Thus, Metaphysics VII considers form, matter, and the compound of form and matter, and quickly turns to form as the best candidate. In developing a conception of form that can play the required explanatory role, the notion of essence to ti en einai assumes center stage. The essence of a man, e.g., is the cause of certain matter constituting a man, namely, the soul. So form in the sense of essence is the primary substance of the Metaphysics. This is obviously not the primary substance of the Categories and, although the same word eidos is used, neither is this form the species of the Categories. The latter is treated in the Metaphysics as a kind of universal compound abstracted from particular compounds and appears to be denied substantial status. While there is broad, though not universal, agreement that in the Metaphysics form is primary substance, there is equally broad disagreement over whether this is particular form, the form belonging to a single individual, or species form, the form common to all individuals in the species. There is also lively discussion concerning the relation of the Metaphysics doctrine of primary substance to the earlier doctrine of the Categories. Although a few scholars see an outright contradiction here, most take the divergence as evidence of the development of Aristotle’s views on substance. Finally, the role of the central books in the Metaphysics as a whole continues to be debated. Some see them as an entirely selfcontained analysis of form, others as preparatory to Book XII’s discussion of non-sensible form and the role of the unmoved mover as the final cause of motion. Practical philosophy. Two of Aristotle’s most heralded works, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, are treatises in practical philosophy. Their aim is effective action in matters of conduct. So they deal with what is up to us and can be otherwise because in this domain lie choice and action. The practical nature of ethics lies mainly in the development of a certain kind of agent. The Nicomachean Ethics was written, Aristotle reminds us, “not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good.” One becomes good by becoming a good chooser and doer. This is not simply a matter of choosing and doing right actions but of choosing or doing them in the right way. Aristotle assumes that, for the most part, agents know what ought to be done the evil or vicious person is an exception. The akratic or morally weak agent desires to do other than what he knows ought to be done and acts on this desire against his better judgment. The enkratic or morally strong person shares the akratic agent’s desire but acts in accordance with his better judgment. In neither kind of choice are desire and judgment in harmony. In the virtuous, on the other hand, desire and judgment agree. So their choices and actions will be free of the conflict and pain that inevitably accompany those of the akratic and enkratic agent. This is because the part of their soul that governs choice and action is so disposed that desire and right judgment coincide. Acquiring a stable disposition hexis of this sort amounts to acquiring moral virtue ethike arete. The disposition is concerned with choices as would be determined by the person of practical wisdom phronesis; these will be actions lying between extreme alternatives. They will lie in a mean  popularly called the “golden mean”  relative to the talents and stores of the agent. Choosing in this way is not easily done. It involves, for instance, feeling anger or extending Aristotle Aristotle 50   50 generosity at the right time, toward the right people, in the right way, and for the right reasons. Intellectual virtues, such as excellence at mathematics, can be acquired by teaching, but moral virtue cannot. I may know what ought to be done and even perform virtuous acts without being able to act virtuously. Nonetheless, because moral virtue is a disposition concerning choice, deliberate performance of virtuous acts can, ultimately, instill a disposition to choose them in harmony and with pleasure and, hence, to act virtuously. Aristotle rejected Plato’s transcendental Form of the Good as irrelevant to the affairs of persons and, in general, had little sympathy with the notion of an absolute good. The goal of choice and action is the human good, namely, living well. This, however, is not simply a matter of possessing the requisite practical disposition. Practical wisdom, which is necessary for living well, involves skill at calculating the best means to achieve one’s ends and this is an intellectual virtue. But the ends that are presupposed by deliberation are established by moral virtue. The end of all action, the good for man, is happiness eudaimonia. Most things, such as wealth, are valued only as a means to a worthy end. Honor, pleasure, reason, and individual virtues, such as courage and generosity, are deemed worthy in their own right but they can also be sought for the sake of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia alone can be sought only for its own sake. Eudaimonia is not a static state of the soul but a kind of activity energeia of the soul  something like human flourishing. The happy person’s life will be selfsufficient and complete in the highest measure. The good for man, then, is activity in accordance with virtue or the highest virtue, should there be one. Here ‘virtue’ means something like excellence and applies to much besides man. The excellence of an ax lies in its cutting, that of a horse in its equestrian qualities. In short, a thing’s excellence is a matter of how well it performs its characteristic functions or, we might say, how well it realizes its nature. The natural functions of persons reside in the exercise of their natural cognitive faculties, most importantly, the faculty of reason. So human happiness consists in activity in accordance with reason. However, persons can exercise reason in practical or in purely theoretical matters. The first suggests that happiness consists in the practical life of moral virtue, the second that it consists in the life of theoretical activity. Most of the Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to the moral virtues but the final book appears to favor theoretical activity theoria as the highest and most choiceworthy end. It is man’s closest approach to divine activity. Much recent scholarship is devoted to the relation between these two conceptions of the good, particularly, to whether they are of equal value and whether they exclude or include one another. Ethics and politics are closely connected. Aristotle conceives of the state as a natural entity arising among persons to serve a natural function. This is not merely, e.g., provision for the common defense or promotion of trade. Rather, the state of the Politics also has eudaimonia as its goal, namely, fostering the complete and selfsufficient lives of its citizens. Aristotle produced a complex taxonomy of constitutions but reduced them, in effect, to three kinds: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Which best serves the natural end of a state was, to some extent, a relative matter for Aristotle. Although he appears to have favored democracy, in some circumstances monarchy might be appropriate. The standard ordering of Aristotle’s works ends with the Rhetoric and the Poetics. The Rhetoric’s extensive discussion of oratory or the art of persuasion locates it between politics and literary theory. The relatively short Poetics is devoted chiefly to the analysis of tragedy. It has had an enormous historical influence on aesthetic theory in general as well as on the writing of drama.  Refs.: The obvious keyword is “Kant,” – especially in the Series III on the doctrines, in collaboration with Baker. There are essays on the Grundlegung, too. The keyword for “Kantotle,” and the keywords for ‘free,’ and ‘freedom,’ and ‘practical reason,’ and ‘autonomy, are also helpful. Some of this material in “Actions and events,” “The influence of Kant on Aristotle,” by H. P. Grice, John Locke Scholar (failed), etc., Oxford (Advisor: J. Dempsey). The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

arbor griceiana: When Kant introduces the categoric imperative in terms of the ‘maxim’ he does  not specify which. He just goes, irritatingly, “Make the maxim of your conduct a law of nature.” This gave free rein to Grice to multiply maxims as much as he wished. If he was an occamist about senses, he certainly was an anti-occamist about maxims. The expression Strawson and Wiggins use (p. 520) is “ramification.”So Grice needs just ONE principle – indeed the idea of principles, in plural, is self-contradictory. For whch ‘first’ is ‘first’? Eventually, he sticks with the principle of conversational co-operation. And the principle of conversational co-operation, being Ariskantian, and categoric, even if not ‘moral,’ “ramifies into” the maxims. This is important. While an ‘ought’ cannot be derived from an ‘is,’ an ‘ought’ can yield a sub-ought. So whatever obligation the principle brings, the maxim inherit. The maxim is also stated categoric. But it isn’t. It is a ‘counsel of prudence,’ and hypothetical in nature – So, Grice is just ‘playing Kant,’ but not ‘being’ Kant. The principle states the GOAL (not happiness, unless we call it ‘conversational eudaemonia’). In any case, as Hare would agree, there is ‘deontic derivability.’ So if the principle ramifies into the maxims, the maxims are ‘deductible’ from the principle. This deductibility is obvious in terms of from generic to specific. The principle merely enjoins to make the conversational move as is appropriate. Then, playing with Kant, Grice chooses FOUR dimensions. Two correspond to the material: the quale and the quantum. The quale relates to affirmation and negation, and Grice uses ‘false,’ which while hardly conceptually linked to ‘negation,’ it relates in common parlance. So you have things like a prohibition to say the ‘false’ (But “it is raining” can be false, and it’s affirmative). The quantum relates to what Grice calls ‘informative CONTENT.’ He grants that the verb ‘inform’ already ENTAILS the candour that quality brings. So ‘fortitude’ seems a better way to qualify this dimension. Make the strongest conversational move. The clash with the quality is obvious – “provided it’s not false.” The third dimension relates two two materials. Notably the one by the previous conversationalist and your own. If A said, “She is an old bag.” B says, “The weather’s been delightful.” By NOT relating the ‘proposition’ “The weather has been delightful” to “She is an old bag.” He ‘exploits’ the maxim. This is not a concept in Kant. It mocks Kant. But yet, ‘relate!’ does follow from the principle of cooperation. So, there is an UNDERLYING relation, as Hobbes noted, when he discussed a very distantly related proposition concerning the history of Rome, and expecting the recipient to “only connect.” So the ‘exploitation’ is ‘superficial,’ and applies to the explicatum. Yet, the emissor does communicate that the weather has been delightful. Only there is no point in informing the recipient about it, unless he is communicating that the co-conversationalist has made a gaffe. Finally, the category of ‘modus’ Grice restricts to the ‘forma,’ not the ‘materia.’ “Be perspicuous” is denotically entailed by “Make your move appropriate.” This is the desideratum of clarity. The point must be ‘explicit.’  This is Strawson and Wiggins way of putting this. It’s a difficult issue. What the connection is between Grice’s principle of conversational helpfulness and the attending conversational maxims. Strawson and Wiggins state that Grice should not feel the burden to make the maxims ‘necessarily independent.’

The image of the ramification is a good one – Grice called it ‘arbor griceiana.’

arisktant: Grice’s composite for Kant and Aristotle -- Grice as an Aristotelian commentator – in “Aristotle on the multiplicity of being,” – Grice would comment on Aristotle profusely at Oxford. One of his favourite tutees was J. L. Ackrill – but he regretted that, of all things Ackrill could do, he decided “to translate Aristotle into the vernacular!” -- commentaries on Aristotle, the term commonly used for the Grecian commentaries on Aristotle that take up about 15,000 s in the Berlin Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 29, still the basic edition of them. Only in the 0s did a project begin, under the editorship of Richard Sorabji, of King’s , London, to translate at least the most significant portions of them into English. They had remained the largest corpus of Grecian philosophy not tr. into any modern language. Most of these works, especially the later, Neoplatonic ones, are much more than simple commentaries on Aristotle. They are also a mode of doing philosophy, the favored one at this stage of intellectual history. They are therefore important not only for the understanding of Aristotle, but also for both the study of the pre-Socratics and the Hellenistic philosophers, particularly the Stoics, of whom they preserve many fragments, and lastly for the study of Neoplatonism itself  and, in the case of John Philoponus, for studying the innovations he introduces in the process of trying to reconcile Platonism with Christianity. The commentaries may be divided into three main groups. 1 The first group of commentaries are those by Peripatetic scholars of the second to fourth centuries A.D., most notably Alexander of Aphrodisias fl. c.200, but also the paraphraser Themistius fl. c.360. We must not omit, however, to note Alexander’s predecessor Aspasius, author of the earliest surviving commentary, one on the Nicomachean Ethics  a work not commented on again until the late Byzantine period. Commentaries by Alexander survive on the Prior Analytics, Topics, Metaphysics IV, On the Senses, and Meteorologics, and his now lost ones on the Categories, On the Soul, and Physics had enormous influence in later times, particularly on Simplicius. 2 By far the largest group is that of the Neoplatonists up to the sixth century A.D. Most important of the earlier commentators is Porphyry 232c.309, of whom only a short commentary on the Categories survives, together with an introduction Isagoge to Aristotle’s logical works, which provoked many commentaries itself, and proved most influential in both the East and through Boethius in the Latin West. The reconciling of Plato and Aristotle is largely his work. His big commentary on the Categories was of great importance in later times, and many fragments are preserved in that of Simplicius. His follower Iamblichus was also influential, but his commentaries are likewise lost. The Athenian School of Syrianus c.375437 and Proclus 41085 also commented on Aristotle, but all that survives is a commentary of Syrianus on Books III, IV, XIII, and XIV of the Metaphysics. It is the early sixth century, however, that produces the bulk of our surviving commentaries, originating from the Alexandrian school of Ammonius, son of Hermeias c.435520, but composed both in Alexandria, by the Christian John Philoponus c.490575, and in or at least from Athens by Simplicius writing after 532. Main commentaries of Philoponus are on Categories, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul III, and Physics; of Simplicius on Categories, Physics, On the Heavens, and perhaps On the Soul. The tradition is carried on in Alexandria by Olympiodorus c.495565 and the Christians Elias fl. c.540 and David an Armenian, nicknamed the Invincible, fl. c.575, and finally by Stephanus, who was brought by the emperor to take the chair of philosophy in Constantinople in about 610. These scholars comment chiefly on the Categories and other introductory material, but Olympiodorus produced a commentary on the Meteorologics. Characteristic of the Neoplatonists is a desire to reconcile Aristotle with Platonism arguing, e.g., that Aristotle was not dismissing the Platonic theory of Forms, and to systematize his thought, thus reconciling him with himself. They are responding to a long tradition of criticism, during which difficulties were raised about incoherences and contradictions in Aristotle’s thought, and they are concerned to solve these, drawing on their comprehensive knowledge of his writings. Only Philoponus, as a Christian, dares to criticize him, in particular on the eternity of the world, but also on the concept of infinity on which he produces an ingenious argument, picked up, via the Arabs, by Bonaventure in the thirteenth century. The Categories proves a particularly fruitful battleground, and much of the later debate between realism and nominalism stems from arguments about the proper subject matter of that work. The format of these commentaries is mostly that adopted by scholars ever since, that of taking command theory of law commentaries on Aristotle 159   159 one passage, or lemma, after another of the source work and discussing it from every angle, but there are variations. Sometimes the general subject matter is discussed first, and then details of the text are examined; alternatively, the lemma is taken in subdivisions without any such distinction. The commentary can also proceed explicitly by answering problems, or aporiai, which have been raised by previous authorities. Some commentaries, such as the short one of Porphyry on the Categories, and that of Iamblichus’s pupil Dexippus on the same work, have a “catechetical” form, proceeding by question and answer. In some cases as with Vitters in modern times the commentaries are simply transcriptions by pupils of the lectures of a teacher. This is the case, for example, with the surviving “commentaries” of Ammonius. One may also indulge in simple paraphrase, as does Themistius on Posterior Analysis, Physics, On the Soul, and On the Heavens, but even here a good deal of interpretation is involved, and his works remain interesting. An important offshoot of all this activity in the Latin West is the figure of Boethius c.480524. It is he who first transmitted a knowledge of Aristotelian logic to the West, to become an integral part of medieval Scholasticism. He tr. Porphyry’s Isagoge, and the whole of Aristotle’s logical works. He wrote a double commentary on the Isagoge, and commentaries on the Categories and On Interpretation. He is dependent ultimately on Porphyry, but more immediately, it would seem, on a source in the school of Proclus. 3 The third major group of commentaries dates from the late Byzantine period, and seems mainly to emanate from a circle of scholars grouped around the princess Anna Comnena in the twelfth century. The most important figures here are Eustratius c.10501120 and Michael of Ephesus originally dated c.1040, but now fixed at c.1130. Michael in particular seems concerned to comment on areas of Aristotle’s works that had hitherto escaped commentary. He therefore comments widely, for example, on the biological works, but also on the Sophistical Refutations. He and Eustratius, and perhaps others, seem to have cooperated also on a composite commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, neglected since Aspasius. There is also evidence of lost commentaries on the Politics and the Rhetoric. The composite commentary on the Ethics was tr. into Latin in the next century, in England, by Robert Grosseteste, but earlier than this translations of the various logical commentaries had been made by James of Venice fl. c.1130, who may have even made the acquaintance of Michael of Ephesus in Constantinople. Later in that century other commentaries were being tr. from Arabic versions by Gerard of Cremona d.1187. The influence of the Grecian commentary tradition in the West thus resumed after the long break since Boethius in the sixth century, but only now, it seems fair to say, is the full significance of this enormous body of work becoming properly appreciated. 

armstrong: d. m. “Meaning and communication,” on H. P. Grice -- philosopher of mind and metaphysician, and until his retirement Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney, noted for his allegiance to a physicalist account of consciousness and to a realist view of properties conceived as universals. A Materialist Theory of the Mind 8 develops a scientifically motivated version of the view that mental states are identical with physical states of the central nervous system. Universals and Scientific Realism 8 and What Is a Law of Nature? argue that a scientifically adequate ontology must include universals in order to explain the status of natural laws. Armstrong contends that laws must be construed as expressing relations of necessitation between universals rather than mere regularities among particulars. However, he is only prepared to acknowledge the existence of such universals as are required for the purposes of scientific explanation. Moreover, he adopts an “immanent” or “Aristotelian” as opposed to a “transcendent” or “Platonic” realism, refusing to accept the existence of uninstantiated universals and denying that universals somehow exist “outside” space and time. More recently, Armstrong has integrated his scientifically inspired physicalism and property realism within the overall framework of an ontology of states of affairs, notably in A World of States of Affairs. Here he advocates the truthmaker principle that every truth must be made true by some existing state of affairs and contends that states of affairs, rather than the universals and particulars that he regards as their constituents, are the basic building blocks of reality. Within this ontology, which in some ways resembles that of Vitters’s Tractatus, necessity and possibility are accommodated by appeal to combinatorial principles. As Armstrong explains in A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility, this approach offers an ontologically economical alternative to the realist conception of possible worlds defended by David Lewis. 

arnauld: “Have you ever been to Port Royale? I haven’t!” – Grice. Grice enjoyed the “Logique de Port-Royal.” Antoine: philosopher, perhaps the most important and best-known intellectual associated with the Jansenist community at Port-Royal, as well as a staunch and orthodox champion of Cartesian philosophy. His theological writings defend the Augustinian doctrine of efficacious grace, according to which salvation is not earned by one’s own acts, but granted by the irresistible grace of God. He also argues in favor of a strict contritionism, whereby one’s absolution must be based on a true, heartfelt repentance, a love of God, rather than a selfish fear of God’s punishment. These views brought him and Port-Royal to the center of religious controversy in seventeenth-century France, as Jansenism came to be perceived as a subversive extension of Protestant reform. Arnauld was also constantly engaged in philosophical disputation, and was regarded as one of the sharpest and most philosophically acute thinkers of his time. His influence on several major philosophers of the period resulted mainly from his penetrating criticism of their systems. In 1641, Arnauld was asked to comment on Descartes’s Meditations. The objections he sent  regarding, among other topics, the representational nature of ideas, the circularity of Descartes’s proofs for the existence of God, and the apparent irreconcilability of Descartes’s conception of material substance with the Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation  were considered by Descartes to be the most intelligent and serious of all. Arnauld offered his objections in a constructive spirit, and soon became an enthusiastic defender of Descartes’s philosophy, regarding it as beneficial both to the advancement of human learning and to Christian piety. He insists, for example, that the immortality of the soul is well grounded in Cartesian mind body dualism. In 1662, Arnauld composed with Pierre Nicole the Port-Royal Logic, an influential treatise on language and reasoning. After several decades of theological polemic, during which he fled France to the Netherlands, Arnauld resumed his public philosophical activities with the publication in 1683 of On True and False Ideas and in 1685 of Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New System of Nature and Grace. These two works, opening salvos in what would become a long debate, constitute a detailed attack on Malebranche’s theology and its philosophical foundations. In the first, mainly philosophical treatise, Arnauld insists that ideas, or the mental representations that mediate human knowledge, are nothing but acts of the mind that put us in direct cognitive and perceptual contact with things in the world. Malebranche, as Arnauld reads him, argues that ideas are immaterial but nonmental objects in God’s understanding that we know and perceive instead of physical things. Thus, the debate is often characterized as between Arnauld’s direct realism and Malebranche’s representative theory. Such mental acts also have representational content, or what Arnauld following Descartes calls “objective reality.” This content explains the act’s intentionality, or directedness toward an object. Arnauld would later argue with Pierre Bayle, who came to Malebranche’s defense, over whether all mental phenomena have intentionality, as Arnauld believes, or, as Bayle asserts, certain events in the soul e.g., pleasures and pains are non-intentional. This initial critique of Malebranche’s epistemology and philosophy of mind, however, was intended by Arnauld only as a prolegomenon to the more important attack on his theology; in particular, on Malebranche’s claim that God always acts by general volitions and never by particular volitions. This view, Arnauld argues, undermines the true Catholic system of divine providence and threatens the efficacy of God’s will by removing God from direct governance of the world. In 1686, Arnauld also entered into discussions with Leibniz regarding the latter’s Discourse on Metaphysics. In the ensuing correspondence, Arnauld focuses his critique on Leibniz’s concept of substance and on his causal theory, the preestablished harmony. In this exchange, like the one with Malebranche, Arnauld is concerned to preserve what he takes to be the proper way to conceive of God’s freedom and providence; although his remarks on substance in which he objects to Leibniz’s reintroduction of “substantial forms” is also clearly motivated by his commitment to a strict Cartesian ontology  bodies are nothing more than extension, devoid of any spiritual element. Most of his philosophical activity in the latter half of the century, in fact, is a vigorous defense of Cartesianism, particularly on theological grounds e.g., demonstrating the consistency between Cartesian metaphysics and the Catholic dogma of real presence in the Eucharist, as it became the object of condemnation in both Catholic and Protestant circles.

atomism: the theory, originated by Leucippus and elaborated by Democritus, that the ultimate realities are atoms and the void. The theory was later used by Epicurus as the foundation for a philosophy stressing ethical concerns, Epicureanism. 

arrow’s paradox – discussed by Grice in “Conversational reason.” Also called Arrow’s impossibility theorem, a major result in social choice theory, named for its discoverer, economist Kenneth Arrow. It is intuitive to suppose that the preferences of individuals in a society can be expressed formally, and then aggregated into an expression of social preferences, a social choice function. Arrow’s paradox is that individual preferences having certain well-behaved formalizations demonstrably cannot be aggregated into a similarly well-behaved social choice function satisfying four plausible formal conditions: 1 collective rationality  any set of individual orderings and alternatives must yield a social ordering; 2 Pareto optimality  if all individuals prefer one ordering to another, the social ordering must also agree; 3 non-dictatorship  the social ordering must not be identical to a particular individual’s ordering; and 4 independence of irrelevant alternatives  the social ordering depends on no properties of the individual orderings other than the orders themselves, and for a given set of alternatives it depends only on the orderings of those particular alternatives. Most attempts to resolve the paradox have focused on aspects of 1 and 4. Some argue that preferences can be rational even if they are intransitive. Others argue that cardinal orderings, and hence, interpersonal comparisons of preference intensity, are relevant. 

ascriptum: ascriptivism, the theory that to call an action voluntary is not to describe it as caused in a certain way by the agent who did it, but to express a commitment to hold the agent responsible for the action. Ascriptivism is thus a kind of noncognitivism as applied to judgments about the voluntariness of acts. Introduced by Hart in “Ascription of Rights and Responsibilities,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 9, ascriptivism was given its name and attacked in Geach’s “Ascriptivism,” Philosophical Review 0. Hart recanted in the Preface to his Punishment and Responsibility 8. 

associatum -- associationism: discussed by Grice as an example of a propositional complexum -- the psychological doctrine that association is the sole or primary basis of learning as well as of intelligent thought and behavior. Association occurs when one type of thought, idea, or behavior follows, or is contingent upon, another thought, idea, or behavior or external event, and the second somehow bonds with the first. If the idea of eggs is paired with the idea of ham, then the two ideas may become associated. Associationists argue that complex states of mind and mental processes can be analyzed into associated elements. The complex may be novel, but the elements are products of past associations. Associationism often is combined with hedonism. Hedonism explains why events associate or bond: bonds are forged by pleasant experiences. If the pleasantness of eating eggs is combined with the pleasantness of eating ham, then ideas of ham and eggs associate. Bonding may also be explained by various non-hedonistic principles of association, as in Hume’s theory of the association of ideas. One of these principles is contiguity in place or time. Associationism contributes to the componential analysis of intelligent, rational activity into non-intelligent, non-rational, mechanical processes. People believe as they do, not because of rational connections among beliefs, but because beliefs associatively bond. Thus one may think of London when thinking of England, not because one possesses an inner logic of geographic beliefs from which one infers that London is in England. The two thoughts may co-occur because of contiguity or other principles. Kinds of associationism occur in behaviorist models of classical and operant conditioning. Certain associationist ideas, if not associationism itself, appear in connectionist models of cognition, especially the principle that contiguities breed bonding. Several philosophers and psychologists, including Hume, Hartley, and J. S. Mill among philosophers and E. L. Thorndike 18749 and B. F. Skinner 490 among psychologists, are associationists. 

attenuatum – attenuated cases of communication -- Borderline – case -- degenerate case, an expression used more or less loosely to indicate an individual or class that falls outside of a given background class to which it is otherwise very closely related, often in virtue of an ordering of a more comprehensive class. A degenerate case of one class is often a limiting case of a more comprehensive class. Rest zero velocity is a degenerate case of motion positive velocity while being a limiting case of velocity. The circle is a degenerate case of an equilateral and equiangular polygon. In technical or scientific contexts, the conventional term for the background class is often “stretched” to cover otherwise degenerate cases. A figure composed of two intersecting lines is a degenerate case of hyperbola in the sense of synthetic geometry, but it is a limiting case of hyperbola in the sense of analytic geometry. The null set is a degenerate case of set in an older sense but a limiting case of set in a modern sense. A line segment is a degenerate case of rectangle when rectangles are ordered by ratio of length to width, but it is not a limiting case under these conditions. 

attributum: attribution theory, a theory in social psychology concerned with how and why ordinary people explain events. People explain by attributing causal powers to certain events rather than others. The theory attempts to describe and clarify everyday commonsense explanation, to identify criteria of explanatory success presupposed by common sense, and to compare and contrast commonsense explanation with scientific explanation. The heart of attribution theory is the thesis that people tend to attribute causal power to factors personally important to them, which they believe covary with alleged effects. For example, a woman may designate sexual discrimination as the cause of her not being promoted in a corporation. Being female is important to her and she believes that promotion and failure covary with gender. Males get promoted; females don’t. Causal attributions tend to preserve self-esteem, reduce cognitive dissonance, and diminish the attributor’s personal responsibility for misdeeds. When attributional styles or habits contribute to emotional ill-being, e.g. to chronic, inappropriate feelings of depression or guilt, attribution theory offers the following therapeutic recommendation: change attributions so as to reduce emotional ill-being and increase well-being. Hence if the woman blames herself for the failure, and if self-blame is part of her depressive attributional style, she would be encouraged to look outside herself, perhaps to sexual discrimination, for the explanation.

augustinus -- ugustinian semiotics -- Augustine, Saint, known as Augustine of Hippo 354430, Christian philosopher and church father, one of the chief sources of Christian thought in the West; his importance for medieval and modern European philosophy is impossible to describe briefly or ever to circumscribe. Matters are made more difficult because Augustine wrote voluminously and dialectically as a Christian theologian, treating philosophical topics for the most part only as they were helpful to theology  or as corrected by it. Augustine fashioned the narrative of the Confessions 397400 out of the events of the first half of his life. He thus supplied later biographers with both a seductive selection of biographical detail and a compelling story of his successive conversions from adolescent sensuality, to the image-laden religion of the Manichaeans, to a version of Neoplatonism, and then to Christianity. The story is an unexcelled introduction to Augustine’s views of philosophy. It shows, for instance, that Augustine received very little formal education in philosophy. He was trained as a rhetorician, and the only philosophical work that he mentions among his early reading is Cicero’s lost Hortensius, an exercise in persuasion to the study of philosophy. Again, the narrative makes plain that Augustine finally rejected Manichaeanism because he came to see it as bad philosophy: a set of sophistical fantasies without rational coherence or explanatory force. More importantly, Augustine’s final conversion to Christianity was prepared by his reading in “certain books of the Platonists” Confessions 7.9.13. These Latin translations, which seem to have been anthologies or manuals of philosophic teaching, taught Augustine a form of Neoplatonism that enabled him to conceive of a cosmic hierarchy descending from an immaterial, eternal, and intelligible God. On Augustine’s judgment, philosophy could do no more than that; it could not give him the power to order his own life so as to live happily and in a stable relation with the now-discovered God. Yet in his first years as a Christian, Augustine took time to write a number of works in philosophical genres. Best known among them are a refutation of Academic Skepticism Contra academicos, 386, a theodicy De ordine, 386, and a dialogue on the place of human choice within the providentially ordered hierarchy created by God De libero arbitrio, 388/39. Within the decade of his conversion, Augustine was drafted into the priesthood 391 and then consecrated bishop 395. The thirty-five years of his life after that consecration were consumed by labors on behalf of the church in northern Africa and through the Latin-speaking portions of the increasingly fragmented empire. Most of Augustine’s episcopal writing was polemical both in origin and in form; he composed against authors or movements he judged heretical, especially the Donatists and Pelagians. But Augustine’s sense of his authorship also led him to write works of fundamental theology conceived on a grand scale. The most famous of these works, beyond the Confessions, are On the Trinity 399412, 420, On Genesis according to the Letter 40115, and On the City of God 41326. On the Trinity elaborates in subtle detail the distinguishable “traces” of Father, Son, and Spirit in the created world and particularly in the human soul’s triad of memory, intellect, and will. The commentary on Genesis 13, which is meant to be much more than a “literal” commentary in the modern sense, treats many topics in philosophical psychology and anthropology. It also teaches such cosmological doctrines as the “seed-reasons” rationes seminales by which creatures are given intelligible form. The City of God begins with a critique of the bankruptcy of pagan civic religion and its attendant philosophies, but it ends with the depiction of human history as a combat between forces of self-love, conceived as a diabolic city of earth, and the graced love of God, which founds that heavenly city within which alone peace is possible. attributive pluralism Augustine 60   60 A number of other, discrete doctrines have been attached to Augustine, usually without the dialectical nuances he would have considered indispensable. One such doctrine concerns divine “illumination” of the human intellect, i.e., some active intervention by God in ordinary processes of human understanding. Another doctrine typically attributed to Augustine is the inability of the human will to do morally good actions without grace. A more authentically Augustinian teaching is that introspection or inwardness is the way of discovering the created hierarchies by which to ascend to God. Another authentic teaching would be that time, which is a distension of the divine “now,” serves as the medium or narrative structure for the creation’s return to God. But no list of doctrines or positions, however authentic or inauthentic, can serve as a faithful representation of Augustine’s thought, which gives itself only through the carefully wrought rhetorical forms of his texts. 

austinian: J.: discussed by Grice in his explorations on moral versus legal right. English legal philosopher known especially for his command theory of law. His career as a lawyer was unsuccessful but his reputation as a scholar was such that on the founding of  , London, he was offered the chair of jurisprudence. In 1832 he published the first ten of his lectures, compressed into six as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Although he published a few papers, and his somewhat fragmentary Lectures on Jurisprudence 1863 was published posthumously, it is on the Province that his reputation rests. He and Bentham his friend, London neighbor, and fellow utilitarian were the foremost English legal philosophers of their time, and their influence on the course of legal philosophy endures. Austin held that the first task of legal philosophy, one to which he bends most of his energy, is to make clear what laws are, and if possible to explain why they are what they are: their rationale. Until those matters are clear, legislative proposals and legal arguments can never be clear, since irrelevant considerations will inevitably creep in. The proper place for moral or theological considerations is in discussion of what the positive law ought to be, not of what it is. Theological considerations reduce to moral ones, since God can be assumed to be a good utilitarian. It is positive laws, “that is to say the laws which are simply and strictly so called, . . . which form the appropriate matter of general and particular jurisprudence.” They must also be distinguished from “laws metaphorical or figurative.” A law in its most general senseis “a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him.” It is a command, however phrased. It is the commands of men to men, of political superiors, that form the body of positive law. General or comparative jurisprudence, the source of the rationale, if any, of particular laws, is possible because there are commands nearly universal that may be attributed to God or Nature, but they become positive law only when laid down by a ruler. The general model of an Austinian analytic jurisprudence built upon a framework of definitions has been widely followed, but cogent objections, especially by Hart, have undermined the command theory of law. 

austin:  Grice referred to him as “Austin the younger,” in opposition to “Austin the elder” – (Austin never enjoyed the joke). j. l. H. P. Grice, “The Austinian Code.” English philosopher, a leading exponent of postwar “linguistic” philosophy. Educated primarily as a classicist at Shrewsbury and Balliol , Oxford, he taught philosophy at Magdalen . During World War II he served at a high level in military intelligence, which earned him the O.B.E., Croix de Guerre, and Legion of Merit. In 2 he became White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, and in 5 and 8 he held visiting appointments at Harvard and Berkeley, respectively. In his relatively brief career, Austin published only a few invited papers; his influence was exerted mainly through discussion with his colleagues, whom he dominated more by critical intelligence than by any preconceived view of what philosophy should be. Unlike some others, Austin did not believe that philosophical problems all arise out of aberrations from “ordinary language,” nor did he necessarily find solutions there; he dwelt, rather, on the authority of the vernacular as a source of nice and pregnant distinctions, and held that it deserves much closer attention than it commonly receives from philosophers. It is useless, he thought, to pontificate at large about knowledge, reality, or existence, for example, without first examining in detail how, and when, the words ‘know’, ‘real’, and ‘exist’ are employed in daily life. In Sense and Sensibilia 2; compiled from lecture notes, the sense-datum theory comes under withering fire for its failings in this respect. Austin also provoked controversy with his well-known distinction between “performative” and “constative” utterances ‘I promise’ makes a promise, whereas ‘he promised’ merely reports one; he later recast this as a threefold differentiation of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary “forces” in utterance, corresponding roughly to the meaning, intention, and consequences of saying a thing, in one context or another. Though never very stable or fully worked out, these ideas have since found a place in the still-evolving study of speech acts. 

austinian code, The: The jocular way by Grice to refer to ‘The Master,’ whom he saw wobble on more than one occasion. Grice has mixed feelings (“or fixed meelings, if you prefer”) about Austin. Unlike Austin, Grice is a Midlands scholarship boy, and ends up in Corpus. One outcome of this, as he later reminisced is that Austin never cared to invite him to the Thursday-evenings at All Souls – “which was alright, I suppose, in that the number was appropriately restricted to seven.” But Grice confessed that he thought it was because “he had been born on the wrong side of the tracks.” After the war, Grice would join what Grice, in fun, called “the Playgroup,” which was anything BUT. Austin played the School Master, and let the kindergarten relax in the sun! One reason Grice avoided publication was the idea that Austin would criticise him. Austin never cared to recognise Grice’s “Personal Identity,” or less so, “Meaning.” He never mentioned his “Metaphysics” third programme lecture – but Austin never made it to the programme. Grice socialized very well with who will be Austin’s custodians, in alphabetical order, Urmson and Warnock – “two charmers.” Unlike Austin, Urmson and Warnock were the type of person Austin would philosophise with – and he would spend hours talking about visa with Warnock. Upon Austin’s demise, Grice kept with the ‘play group’, which really became one! Grice makes immense references to Austin. Austin fits Grice to a T, because of the ‘mistakes’ he engages in. So, it is fair to say that Grice’s motivation for the coinage of implicature was Austin (“He would too often ignore the distinction between what a ‘communicator’ communicates and what his expression, if anything, does.”). So Grice attempts an intention-based account of the communicator’s message. Within this message, there is ONE aspect that can usually be regarded as being of ‘philosophical interest.’ The ‘unnecessary implicature’ is bound to be taken Austin as part of the ‘philosophical interesting’ bit when it isn’t. So Grice is criticizing Austin for providing the wrong analysis for the wrong analysandum. Grice refers specifically to the essays in “Philosophical Papers,” notably “Other Minds” and “A Plea for Excuses.” But he makes a passing reference to “Sense and Sensibilia,” whose tone Grice dislikes, and makes a borrowing or two from the ‘illocution,’ never calling it by that name. At most, Grice would adapt Austin’s use of ‘act.’ But his rephrase is ‘conversational move.’ So Grice would say that by making a conversational ‘move,’ the conversationalist may be communicating TWO things. He spent some type finding a way to conceptualise this. He later came with the metaphor of the FIRST-FLOOR act, the MEZZANINE act, and the SECOND-FLOOR act. This applies to Fregeianisms like ‘aber,’ but it may well apply to Austinian-code type of utterances.

austinianism: Grice felt sorry for Nowell-Smith, whom he calls the ‘straight-man’ for the comedy double act with Austin at the Play Groups. “I would say ‘on principle’” – “I would say, ‘no, thanks.” “I don’t understand Donne.” “It’s perfectly clear to me.” By using Nowell-Sith, Grice is implicating that Austin had little manners in the ‘play group,’ “And I wasn’t surprised when Nowell-Smith left Oxford for good, almost.” Not quite, of course. After some time in the extremely fashionable Canterbury, Nowell-Smith returns to Oxford. Vide: nowell-smithianism.

autarkia: Grecian for ‘self-sufficiency,’ from ‘auto-‘, self, and ‘arkhe,’ principium. Autarkia was widely regarded as a mark of the human good, happiness eudaimonia. A life is self-sufficient when it is worthy of choice and lacks nothing. What makes a life self-sufficient  and thereby happy  was a matter of controversy. Stoics maintained that the mere possession of virtue would suffice; Aristotle and the Peripatetics insisted that virtue must be exercised and even, perhaps, accompanied by material goods. There was also a debate among later Grecian thinkers over whether a self-sufficient life is solitary or whether only life in a community can be self-sufficient. 

avenarius, R. philosopher: an influence on Ayer, who thinks he is following British empiricism! Avenarius was born in Paris and educated at the  of Leipzig. He became a professor at Leipzig and succeeded Windelband at the  of Zürich in 1877. For a time he was editor of the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. His earliest work was Über die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus 1868. His major work, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung Critique of Pure Experience, 2 vols., 890, was followed by his last study, Der menschliche Weltbegriffe 1. In his post-Kantian Kritik Avenarius presented a radical positivism that sought to base philosophy on scientific principles. This “empirio-criticism” emphasized “pure experience” and descriptive and general definitions of experience. Metaphysical claims to transcend experience were rejected as mere creations of the mind. Like Hume, Avenarius denied the ontological validity of substance and causality. Seeking a scientific empiricism, he endeavored to delineate a descriptive determination of the form and content of pure experience. He thought that the subject-object dichotomy, the separation of inner and outer experiences, falsified reality. If we could avoid “introjecting” feeling, thought, and will into experience and thereby splitting it into subject and object, we could attain the original “natural” view of the world. Although Avenarius, in his Critique of Pure Experience, thought that changes in brain states parallel states of consciousness, he did not reduce sensations or states of consciousness to physiological changes in the brain. Because his theory of pure experience undermined dogmatic materialism, Lenin attacked his philosophy in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism 2. His epistemology influenced Mach and his emphasis upon pure experience had considerable influence on James.

awareness: an Anglo-Saxon, “sort of,” term Grice liked – for Grice, awareness means the doxastic attitude prefixed to any other state -- consciousness, a central feature of our lives that is notoriously difficult to characterize. You experience goings-on in the world, and, turning inward “introspecting”, you experience your experiencing. Objects of awareness can be external or internal. Pressing your finger on the edge of a table, you can be aware of the table’s edge, and aware of the feeling of pressure though perhaps not simultaneously. Philosophers from Locke to Nagel have insisted that our experiences have distinctive qualities: there is “something it is like” to have them. It would seem important, then, to distinguish qualities of objects of which you are aware from qualities of your awareness. Suppose you are aware of a round, red tomato. The tomato, but not your awareness, is round and red. What then are the qualities of your awareness? Here we encounter a deep puzzle that divides theorists into intransigent camps. Some materialists, like Dennett, insist that awareness lacks qualities or lacks qualities distinct from its objects: the qualities we attribute to experiences are really those of experienced objects. This opens the way to a dismissal of “phenomenal” qualities qualia, qualities that seem to have no place in the material world. Others T. Nagel, Ned Block regard such qualities as patently genuine, preferring to dismiss any theory unable to accommodate them. Convinced that the qualities of awareness are ineliminable and irreducible to respectable material properties, some philosophers, following Frank Jackson, contend they are “epiphenomenal”: real but causally inefficacious. Still others, including Searle, point to what they regard as a fundamental distinction between the “intrinsically subjective” character of awareness and the “objective,” “public” character of material objects, but deny that this yields epiphenomenalism. 

axioma – Porphyry translated this as ‘principium,’ but Grice was not too happy about it! Referred to by Grice in his portrayal of the formalists in their account of an ‘ideal’ language. He is thinking Peano, Whitehead, and Russell. – the axiomatic method, originally, a method for reorganizing the accepted propositions and concepts of an existent science in order to increase certainty in the propositions and clarity in the concepts. Application of this method was thought to require the identification of 1 the “universe of discourse” domain, genus of entities constituting the primary subject matter of the science, 2 the “primitive concepts” that can be grasped immediately without the use of definition, 3 the “primitive propositions” or “axioms”, whose truth is knowable immediately, without the use of deduction, 4 an immediately acceptable “primitive definition” in terms of primitive concepts for each non-primitive concept, and 5 a deduction constructed by chaining immediate, logically cogent inferences ultimately from primitive propositions and definitions for each nonprimitive accepted proposition. Prominent proponents of more or less modernized versions of the axiomatic method, e.g. Pascal, Nicod 34, and Tarski, emphasizing the critical and regulatory function of the axiomatic method, explicitly open the possibility that axiomatization of an existent, preaxiomatic science may lead to rejection or modification of propositions, concepts, and argumentations that had previously been accepted. In many cases attempts to realize the ideal of an axiomatic science have resulted in discovery of “smuggled premises” and other previously unnoted presuppositions, leading in turn to recognition of the need for new axioms. Modern axiomatizations of geometry are much richer in detail than those produced in ancient Greece. The earliest extant axiomatic text is based on an axiomatization of geometry due to Euclid fl. 300 B.C., which itself was based on earlier, nolonger-extant texts. Archimedes 287212 B.C. was one of the earliest of a succession of postEuclidean geometers, including Hilbert, Oswald Veblen 00, and Tarski, to propose modifications of axiomatizations of classical geometry. The traditional axiomatic method, often called the geometric method, made several presuppositions no longer widely accepted. The advent of non-Euclidean geometry was particularly important in this connection. For some workers, the goal of reorganizing an existent science was joined to or replaced by a new goal: characterizing or giving implicit definition to the structure of the subject matter of the science. Moreover, subsequent innovations in logic and foundations of mathematics, especially development of syntactically precise formalized languages and effective systems of formal deductions, have substantially increased the degree of rigor attainable. In particular, critical axiomatic exposition of a body of scientific knowledge is now not thought to be fully adequate, however successful it may be in realizing the goals of the original axiomatic method, so long as it does not present the underlying logic including language, semantics, and deduction system. For these and other reasons the expression ‘axiomatic method’ has undergone many “redefinitions,” some of which have only the most tenuous connection with the original meaning.  The term ‘axiom’ has been associated to different items by philosophers. There’s the axiom of comprehension, also called axiom of abstraction, the axiom that for every property, there is a corresponding set of things having that property; i.e., f DA x x 1 A È f x, where f is a property and A is a set. The axiom was used in Frege’s formulation of set theory and is the axiom that yields Russell’s paradox, discovered in 1. If fx is instantiated as x 2 x, then the result that A 1 A È A 2 A is easily obtained, which yields, in classical logic, the explicit contradiction A 1 A & A 2 A. The paradox can be avoided by modifying the comprehension axiom and using instead the separation axiom, f DA x x 1 A Èfx & x 1 B. This yields only the result that A 1 A ÈA 2 A & A 1 B, which is not a contradiction. The paradox can also be avoided by retaining the comprehension axiom but restricting the symbolic language, so that ‘x 1 x’ is not a meaningful formula. Russell’s type theory, presented in Principia Mathematica, uses this approach.  Then there’s the axiom of consistency, an axiom stating that a given set of sentences is consistent. Let L be a formal language, D a deductive system for L, S any set of sentences of L, and C the statement ‘S is consistent’ i.e., ‘No contradiction is derivable from S via D’. For certain sets S e.g., the theorems of D it is interesting to ask: Can C be expressed in L? If so, can C be proved in D? If C can be expressed in L but not proved in D, can C be added consistently to D as a new axiom? Example from Gödel: Let L and D be adequate for elementary number theory, and S be the axioms of D; then C can be expressed in L but not proved in D, but can be added as a new axiom to form a stronger system D’. Sometimes we can express in L an axiom of consistency in the semantic sense i.e., ‘There is a universe in which all the sentences in S are true’. Trivial example: suppose the only non-logical axiom in D is ‘For any two sets B and B’, there exists the union of B and B’ ’. Then C might be ‘There is a set U such that, for any sets B and B’ in U, there exists in U the union of B and B’ ’. 

ayerianism:  a. j. , philosopher of Swiss ancestry, one of the most important of the Oxford logical positivists. He continued to occupy a dominant place in analytic philosophy as he gradually modified his adherence to central tenets of the view. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and, after a brief period at the  of Vienna, became a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church in 3. After the war he returned to Oxford as fellow and dean of Wadham . He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the  of London 659, Wykeham Professor of Logic in the  of Oxford and a fellow of New  978, and a fellow of Wolfson , Oxford 883. Ayer was knighted in 3 and was a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. His early work clearly and forcefully developed the implications of the positivists’ doctrines that all cognitive statements are either analytic and a priori, or synthetic, contingent, and a posteriori, and that empirically meaningful statements must be verifiable must admit of confirmation or disconfirmation. In doing so he defended reductionist analyses of the self, the external world, and other minds. Value statements that fail the empiricist’s criterion of meaning but defy naturalistic analysis were denied truth-value and assigned emotive meaning. Throughout his writings he maintained a foundationalist perspective in epistemology in which sense-data later more neutrally described occupied not only a privileged epistemic position but constituted the subject matter of the most basic statements to be used in reductive analyses. Although in later works he significantly modified many of his early views and abandoned much of their strict reductionism, he remained faithful to an empiricist’s version of foundationalism and the basic idea behind the verifiability criterion of meaning. His books include Language, Truth and Logic; The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge; The Problems of Knowledge; Philosophical Essays; The Concept of a Person; The Origins of Pragmatism; Metaphysics and Common Sense; Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage; The Central Questions of Philosophy; Probability and Evidence; Philosophy in the Twentieth Century; Russell; Hume; Freedom and Morality, Ludwig Vitters; and Voltaire. Born of Swiss parentage in London, “Freddie” got an Oxford educated, and though he wanted to be a judge, he read Lit. Hum (Phil.). He spent three months in Vienna, and when he returned, Grice called him ‘enfant terrible.’ Ayer would later cite Grice in the Aristotelian symposium on the Causal Theory of Perception. But the type of subtlety in conversational implicature that Grice is interested goes over Freddie’s head. (“That,” or he was not interested.” Grice was glad that Oxford was ready to attack Ayer on philosophical grounds, and he later lists Positivism as a ‘monster’ on his way to the City of Eternal Truth. “Verificationism” was anti-Oxonian, in being mainly anti-Bradleyian, who is recognised by every Oxonian philosopher as “one of the clearest and subtlest prosists in English, and particularly Oxonian, philosophy.” Ayer later became the logic professor at Oxford – which is now taught no longer at the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy, but the Department of Mathematics!

babbage: discussed by Grice in his functionalist approach to philosophical psychology. English applied mathematician, inventor, and expert on machinery and manufacturing. His chief interest was in developing mechanical “engines” to compute tables of functions. Until the invention of the electronic computer, printed tables of functions were important aids to calculation. Babbage invented the difference engine, a machine that consisted of a series of accumulators each of which, in turn, transmitted its contents to its successor, which added to them to its own contents. He built only a model, but George and Edvard Scheutz built difference engines that were actually used. Though tables of squares and cubes could be calculated by a difference engine, the more commonly used tables of logarithms and of trigonometric functions could not. To calculate these and other useful functions, Babbage conceived of the analytical engine, a machine for numerical analysis. The analytical engine was to have a store memory and a mill arithmetic unit. The store was to hold decimal numbers on toothed wheels, and to transmit them to the mill and back by means of wheels and toothed bars. The mill was to carry out the arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mechanically, greatly extending the technology of small calculators. The operations of the mill were to be governed by pegged drums, derived from the music box. A desired sequence of operations would be punched on cards, which would be strung together like the cards of a Jacquard loom and read by the machine. The control mechanisms could branch and execute a different sequence of cards when a designated quantity changed sign. Numbers would be entered from punched cards and the answers punched on cards. The answers might also be imprinted on metal sheets from which the calculated tables would be printed, thus avoiding the errors of proofreading. Although Babbage formulated various partial plans for the analytical engine and built a few pieces of it, the machine was never realized. Given the limitations of mechanical computing technology, building an analytical engine would probably not have been an economical way to produce numerical tables. The modern electronic computer was invented and developed completely independently of Babbage’s pioneering work. Yet because of it, Babbage’s work has been publicized and he has become famous. 

bachelard: g., philosopher of applied rationalism, enjoyed by Grice. philosopher of science and literary analyst. His philosophy of science developed, e.g., in The New Scientific Spirit, 4, and Rational Materialism, 3 began from reflections on the relativistic and quantum revolutions in twentieth-century physics. Bachelard viewed science as developing through a series of discontinuous changes epistemological breaks. Such breaks overcome epistemological obstacles: methodological and conceptual features of commonsense or outdated science that block the path of inquiry. Bachelard’s emphasis on the discontinuity of scientific change strikingly anticipated Thomas Kuhn’s focus, many years later, on revolutionary paradigm change. However, unlike Kuhn, Bachelard held to a strong notion of scientific progress across revolutionary discontinuities. Although each scientific framework rejects its predecessors as fundamentally erroneous, earlier frameworks may embody permanent achievements that will be preserved as special cases within subsequent frameworks. Newton’s laws of motion, e.g., are special limit-cases of relativity theory. Bachelard based his philosophy of science on a “non-Cartesian epistemology” that rejects Descartes’s claim that knowledge must be founded on incorrigible intuitions of first truths. All knowledge claims are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Similarly, he rejected a naive realism that defines reality in terms of givens of ordinary sense experience and ignores the ontological constructions of scientific concepts and instrumentation. He maintained, however, that denying this sort of realism did not entail accepting idealism, which makes only the mental ultimately real. Instead he argued for an “applied rationalism,” which recognizes the active role of reason in constituting objects of knowledge while admitting that any constituting act of reason must be directed toward an antecedently given object. Although Bachelard denied the objective reality of the perceptual and imaginative worlds, he emphasized their subjective and poetic significance. Complementing his writings on science are a series of books on imagination and poetic imagery e.g., The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 8; The Poetics of Space, 7 which subtly unpack the meaning of archetypal in Jung’s sense images. He put forward a “law of the four elements,” according to which all images can be related to the earth, air, fire, and water posited by Empedocles as the fundamental forms of matter. Together with Georges Canguilhem, his successor at the Sorbonne, Bachelard had an immense impact on several generations of  students of philosophy. He and Canguilhem offered an important alternative to the more fashionable and widely known phenomenology and existentialism and were major influences on among others Althusser and Foucault. 

baconian – “You can tell when a contitnental philosopher knows about insular philosopher when they can tell one bacon from the other.” – H. P. Grice. Francis: English philosopher, essayist, and scientific methodologist. In politics Bacon rose to the position of lord chancellor. In 1621 he retired to private life after conviction for taking bribes in his official capacity as judge. Bacon championed the new empiricism resulting from the achievements of early modern science. He opposed alleged knowledge based on appeals to authority, and on the barrenness of Scholasticism. He thought that what is needed is a new attitude and methodology based strictly on scientific practices. The goal of acquiring knowledge is the good of mankind: knowledge is power. The social order that should result from applied science is portrayed in his New Atlantis1627. The method of induction to be employed is worked out in detail in his Novum Organum 1620. This new logic is to replace that of Aristotle’s syllogism, as well as induction by simple enumeration of instances. Neither of these older logics can produce knowledge of actual natural laws. Bacon thought that we must intervene in nature, manipulating it by means of experimental control leading to the invention of new technology. There are well-known hindrances to acquisition of knowledge of causal laws. Such hindrances false opinions, prejudices, which “anticipate” nature rather than explain it, Bacon calls idols idola. Idols of the tribe idola tribus are natural mental tendencies, among which are the idle search for purposes in nature, and the impulse to read our own desires and needs into nature. Idols of the cave idola specus are predispositions of particular individuals. The individual is inclined to form opinions based on idiosyncrasies of education, social intercourse, reading, and favored authorities. Idols of the marketplace idola fori Bacon regards as the most potentially dangerous of all dispositions, because they arise from common uses of language that often result in verbal disputes. Many words, though thought to be meaningful, stand for nonexistent things; others, although they name actual things, are poorly defined or used in confused ways. Idols of the theater idola theatri depend upon the influence of received theories. The only authority possessed by such theories is that they are ingenious verbal constructions. The aim of acquiring genuine knowledge does not depend on superior skill in the use of words, but rather on the discovery of natural laws. Once the idols are eliminated, the mind is free to seek knowledge of natural laws based on experimentation. Bacon held that nothing exists in nature except bodies material objects acting in conformity with fixed laws. These laws are “forms.” For example, Bacon thought that the form or cause of heat is the motion of the tiny particles making up a body. This form is that on which the existence of heat depends. What induction seeks to show is that certain laws are perfectly general, universal in application. In every case of heat, there is a measurable change in the motion of the particles constituting the moving body. Bacon thought that scientific induction proceeds as follows. First, we look for those cases where, given certain changes, certain others invariably follow. In his example, if certain changes in the form motion of particles take place, heat always follows. We seek to find all of the “positive instances” of the form that give rise to the effect of that form. Next, we investigate the “negative instances,” cases where in the absence of the form, the qualitative change does not take place. In the operation of these methods it is important to try to produce experimentally “prerogative instances,” particularly striking or typical examples of the phenomenon under investigation. Finally, in cases where the object under study is present to some greater or lesser degree, we must be able to take into account why these changes occur. In the example, quantitative changes in degrees of heat will be correlated to quantitative changes in the speed of the motion of the particles. This method implies that backward causation Bacon, Francis 68   68 in many cases we can invent instruments to measure changes in degree. Such inventions are of course the hoped-for outcome of scientific inquiry, because their possession improves the lot of human beings. Bacon’s strikingly modern but not entirely novel empiricist methodology influenced nineteenth-century figures e.g., Sir John Herschel and J. S. Mill who generalized his results and used them as the basis for displaying new insights into scientific methodology. 

baconian: “You can tell when a continental philosopher knows the first thing about insular philosophy when they can tell one bacon from the other” – H. P. Grice. R., English philosopher who earned the honorific title of Doctor Mirabilis. He was one of the first medievals in the Latin West to lecture and comment on newly recovered work by Aristotle in natural philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. Born in Somerset and educated at both Oxford  and the  of Paris, he became by 1273 a master of arts at Paris, where he taught for about ten years. In 1247 he resigned his teaching post to devote his energies to investigating and promoting topics he considered neglected but important insofar as they would lead to knowledge of God. The English “experimentalist” Grosseteste, the man Peter of Maricourt, who did pioneering work on magnetism, and the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum influenced Roger’s new perspective. By 1257, however, partly from fatigue, Roger had put this work aside and entered the Franciscan order in England. To his dismay, he did not receive within the order the respect and freedom to write and teach he had expected. During the early 1260s Roger’s views about reforming the  curriculum reached Cardinal Guy le Gos de Foulques, who, upon becoming Pope Clement IV in 1265, demanded to see Roger’s writings. In response, Roger produced the Opus maius 1267  an encyclopedic work that argues, among other things, that 1 the study of Hebrew and Grecian is indispensable for understanding the Bible, 2 the study of mathematics encompassing geometry, astronomy, and astrology is, with experimentation, the key to all the sciences and instrumental in theology, and 3 philosophy can serve theology by helping in the conversion of non-believers. Roger believed that although the Bible is the basis for human knowledge, we can use reason in the service of knowledge. It is not that rational argument can, on his view, provide fullblown proof of anything, but rather that with the aid of reason one can formulate hypotheses about nature that can be confirmed by experience. According to Roger, knowledge arrived at in this way will lead to knowledge of nature’s creator. All philosophical, scientific, and linguistic endeavors are valuable ultimately for the service they can render to theology. Roger summarizes and develops his views on these matters in the Opus minus and the Opus tertium, produced within a year of the Opus maius. Roger was altogether serious in advocating curricular change. He took every opportunity to rail against many of his celebrated contemporaries e.g., Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas for not being properly trained in philosophy and for contributing to the demise of theology by lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences instead of the Bible. He also wrote both Grecian and Hebrew grammars, did important work in optics, and argued for calendar reform on the basis of his admittedly derivative astronomical research. One should not, however, think that Roger was a good mathematician or natural scientist. He apparently never produced a single theorem or proof in mathematics, he was not always a good judge of astronomical competence he preferred al-Bitruji to Ptolemy, and he held alchemy in high regard, believing that base metals could be turned into silver and gold. Some have gone so far as to claim that Roger’s renown in the history of science is vastly overrated, based in part on his being confusedly linked with the fourteenthcentury Oxford Calculators, who do deserve credit for paving the way for certain developments in seventeenth-century science. Roger’s devotion to curricular reform eventually led to his imprisonment by Jerome of Ascoli the future Pope Nicholas IV, probably between 1277 and 1279. Roger’s teachings were said to have contained “suspect novelties.” Judging from the date of his imprisonment, these novelties may have been any number of propositions condemned by the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, in 1277. But his imprisonment may also have had something to do with the anger he undoubtedly provoked by constantly abusing the members of his order regarding their approach to education, or with his controversial Joachimite views about the apocalypse and the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Given Roger’s interest in educational reform and his knack for systematization, it is not unlikely that he was abreast of and had something to say about most of the central philosophical issues of the day. If so, his writings could be an important source of information about thirteenth-century Scholastic philosophy generally. In this connection, recent investigations have revealed, e.g., that he may well have played an important role in the development of logic and philosophy of language during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the course of challenging the views of certain people some of whom have been tentatively identified as Richard of Cornwall, Lambert of Auxerre, Siger of Brabant, Henry of Ghent, Boethius of Dacia, William Sherwood, and the Magister Abstractionum on the nature of signs and how words function as signs, Roger develops and defends views that appear to be original. The pertinent texts include the Sumule dialectices c.1250, the De signis part of Part III of the Opus maius, and the Compendium studii theologiae 1292. E.g., in connection with the question whether Jesus could be called a man during the three-day entombment and, thus, in connection with the related question whether man can be said to be animal when no man exists, and with the sophism ‘This is a dead man, therefore this is a man’, Roger was not content to distinguish words from all other signs as had been the tradition. He distinguished between signs originating from nature and from the soul, and between natural signification and conventional ad placitum signification which results expressly or tacitly from the imposition of meaning by one or more individuals. He maintained that words signify existing and non-existing entities only equivocally, because words conventionally signify only presently existing things. On this view, therefore, ‘man’ is not used univocally when applied to an existing man and to a dead man. 

bona fides: good faith (bona fides) vs. bad faith (mala fides) 1 dishonest and blameworthy instances of self-deception; 2 inauthentic and self-deceptive refusal to admit to ourselves and others our full freedom, thereby avoiding anxiety in making decisions and evading responsibility for actions and attitudes Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 3; 3 hypocrisy or dishonesty in speech and conduct, as in making a promise without intending to keep it. One self-deceiving strategy identified by Sartre is to embrace other people’s views in order to avoid having to form one’s own; another is to disregard options so that one’s life appears predetermined to move in a fixed direction. Occasionally Sartre used a narrower, fourth sense: self-deceptive beliefs held on the basis of insincere and unreasonable interpretations of evidence, as contrasted with the dishonesty of “sincerely” acknowledging one truth “I am disposed to be a thief” in order to deny a deeper truth “I am free to change”. 

bain: a., philosopher and reformer, biographer of James Mill 2 and J. S. Mill 2 and founder of the first psychological journal, Mind 1876, to which Grice submitted his “Personal identity.” In the development of psychology, Bain represents in England alongside Continental thinkers such as Taine and Lotze the final step toward the founding of psychology as a science. His significance stems from his wish to “unite psychology and physiology,” fulfilled in The Senses and the Intellect 1855 and The Emotions and the Will 1859, abridged in one volume, Mental and Moral Science 1868. Neither Bain’s psychology nor his physiology were particularly original. His psychology came from English empiricism and associationism, his physiology from Johannes Muller’s 180158 Elements of Physiology 1842. Muller was an early advocate of the reflex, or sensorimotor, conception of the nervous system, holding that neurons conduct sensory information to the brain or motor commands from the brain, the brain connecting sensation with appropriate motor response. Like Hartley before him, Bain grounded the laws of mental association in the laws of neural connection. In opposition to faculty psychology, Bain rejected the existence of mental powers located in different parts of the brain On the Study of Character, 1861. By combining associationism with modern physiology, he virtually completed the movement of philosophical psychology toward science. In philosophy, his most important concept was his analysis of belief as “a preparation to act.” By thus entwining conception and action, he laid the foundation for pragmatism, and for the focus on adaptive behavior central to modern psychology. 

banez, D. philosopher known for his disputes with Molina concerning divine grace, or grice. Against Molina he held physical predetermination, the view that God physically determines the secondary causes of human action. This renders grace intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. He is also known for his understanding of the centrality of the act of existence esse in Thomistic metaphysics. Bañez’s most important works are his commentaries on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption. 

barthesian: semiotic: r.  post-structuralist literary critic and essayist. Born in Cherbourg, he suffered from numerous ailments as a child and spent much of his early life as a semiinvalid. After leaving the military, he took up several positions teaching subjects like classics, grammar, and philology. His interest in linguistics finally drew him to literature, and by the mid-0s he had already published what would become a classic in structural analysis, The Elements of Semiology. Its principal message is that words are merely one kind of sign whose meaning lies in relations of difference between them. This concept was later amended to include the reading subject, and the structuring effect that the subject has on the literary work  a concept expressed later in his S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes’s most mature contributions to the post-structuralist movement were brilliant and witty interpretations of visual, tactile, and aural sign systems, culminating in the publication of several books and essays on photography, advertising, film, and cuisine. 

bite off more than you can chew: To bite is the function of the FRONT teeth (incisors and canines); the back teeth (molars) CHEW, crush, or grind. So the relation is Russellian.  1916 G. B. Shaw Pygmalion 195 The mistake we describe metaphorically as ‘biting off more than they can chew’.  a1960 J. L. Austin Sense & Sensibilia (1962) i. 1 They [sc. doctrines] all bite off more than they can chew. While the NED would not DARE define this obviousness, the OED does not. to undertake too much, to be too ambitious – “irrational” simpliciter for Grice (WoW).

basilides: philosopher, he improved on Valentinus’s doctrine of emanations, positing 365 the number of days in a year levels of existence in the Pleroma the fullness of the Godhead, all descending from the ineffable Father. He taught that the rival God was the God of the Jews the God of the Old Testament, who created the material world. Redemption consists in the coming of the first begotten of the Father, Noûs Mind, in human form in order to release the spiritual element imprisoned within human bodies. Like other gnostics he taught that we are saved by knowledge, not faith. He apparently held to the idea of reincarnation before the restoration of all things to the Pleroma. 

basis: basing relation, also called basis relation, the relation between a belief or item of knowledge and a second belief or item of knowledge when the latter is the ground basis of the first. It is clear that some knowledge is indirect, i.e., had or gained on the basis of some evidence, as opposed to direct knowledge, which assuming there is any is not so gained, or based. The same holds for justified belief. In one broad sense of the term, the basing relation is just the one connecting indirect knowledge or indirectly justified belief to the evidence: to give an account of either of the latter is to give an account of the basing relation. There is a narrower view of the basing relation, perhaps implicit in the first. A person knows some proposition P on the basis of evidence or reasons only if her belief that P is based on the evidence or reasons, or perhaps on the possession of the evidence or reasons. The narrow basing relation is indicated by this question: where a belief that P constitutes indirect knowledge or justification, what is it for that belief to be based on the evidence or reasons that support the knowledge or justification? The most widely favored view is that the relevant belief is based on evidence or reasons only if the belief is causally related to the belief or reasons. Proponents of this causal view differ concerning what, beyond this causal relationship, is needed by an account of the narrow basing relation. 

batailleian communicatum: g., philosopher and novelist with enormous influence on post-structuralist thought. By locating value in expenditure as opposed to accumulation, Bataille inaugurates the era of the death of the subject. He insists that individuals must transgress the limits imposed by subjectivity to escape isolation and communicate. Bataille’s prewar philosophical contributions consist mainly of short essays, the most significant of which have been collected in Visions of Excess. These essays introduce the central idea that base matter disrupts rational subjectivity by attesting to the continuity in which individuals lose themselves. Inner Experience, Bataille’s first lengthy philosophical treatise, was followed by Guilty 4 and On Nietzsche 5. Together, these three works constitute Bataille’s Summa Atheologica, which explores the play of the isolation and the dissolution of beings in terms of the experience of excess laughter, tears, eroticism, death, sacrifice, poetry. The Accursed Share 9, which he considered his most important work, is his most systematic account of the social and economic implications of expenditure. In Erotism 7 and The Tears of Eros 1, he focuses on the excesses of sex and death. Throughout his life, Bataille was concerned with the question of value. He located it in the excess that lacerates individuals and opens channels of communication. 

bath: Grice never referred to William of Occam as “William” (“that would be rude”). Similarlly, his Adelard of Bath is referred to as “Bath.” (“Sometimes I wish people would refer to me as “Harborne” but that was the day!”). “Of course, it is amusing to refer to adelard as “Bath” since he was only there for twelve years! But surely to call him “Oxford” would be supernumerary!”. Grice found inspiration on Adelard’s “On the same and the different,” and he was pleased that he had been educated not far from Bath, at Clifton! Adelard is Benedictine monk notable for his contributions to the introduction of Arabic science in the West. After studying at Tours, he taught at Laon, then spent seven years traveling in Italy, possibly Spain, and Cilicia and Syria, before returning to England. In his dialogue On the Same and the Different, he remarks, concerning universals, that the names of individuals, species, and genera are imposed on the same essence regarded in different respects. He also wrote Seventy-six Questions on Nature, based on Arabic learning; works on the use of the abacus and the astrolabe; a work on falconry; and translations of Abu Ma’shar’s Arabic active euthanasia Adelard of Bath 9 4065A-   9 Shorter Introduction to Astronomy, al-Khwarizmi’s fl. c.830 astronomical tables, and Euclid’s Elements.

baumgarten: a. g. – Grice loved his coinage of ‘aesthetics’-- Alexander Gottlieb 171462, G. philosopher. Born in Berlin, he was educated in Halle and taught at Halle 173840 and Frankfurt an der Oder 174062. Baumgarten was brought up in the Pietist circle of A. H. Francke but adopted the anti-Pietist rationalism of Wolff. He wrote textbooks in metabasic particular Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 73   73 physics Metaphysica, 1739 and ethics Ethica Philosophica, 1740; Initia Philosophiae Practicae Prima [“First Elements of Practical Philosophy”], 1760 on which Kant lectured. For the most part, Baumgarten did not significantly depart from Wolff, although in metaphysics he was both further and yet closer to Leibniz than was Wolff: unlike Leibniz, he argued for real physical influx, but, unlike Wolff, he did not restrict preestablished harmony to the mindbody relationship alone, but paradoxically reextended it to include all relations of substances. Baumgarten’s claim to fame, however, rests on his introduction of the discipline of aesthetics into G. philosophy, and indeed on his introduction of the term ‘aesthetics’ as well. Wolff had explained pleasure as the response to the perception of perfection by means of the senses, in turn understood as clear but confused perception. Baumgarten subtly but significantly departed from Wolff by redefining our response to beauty as pleasure in the perfection of sensory perception, i.e., in the unique potential of sensory as opposed to merely conceptual representation. This concept was first introduced in his dissertation Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus “Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry,” 1735, which defined a poem as a “perfect sensate discourse,” and then generalized in his twovolume but still incomplete Aesthetica 1750 58. One might describe Baumgarten’s aesthetics as cognitivist but no longer rationalist: while in science or logic we must always prefer discursive clarity, in art we respond with pleasure to the maximally dense or “confused” intimation of ideas. Baumgarten’s theory had great influence on Lessing and Mendelssohn, on Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas, and even on the aesthetics of Hegel. 

bayle: p., Grice on longitudinal history of philosophy. philosopher who also pioneered in disinterested, critical history. A Calvinist forced into exile in 1681, Bayle nevertheless rejected the prevailing use of history as an instrument of partisan or sectarian interest. He achieved fame and notoriety with his multivolume Dictionnaire historique et critique 1695. For each subject covered, Bayle provided a biographical sketch and a dispassionate examination of the historical record and interpretive controversies. He also repeatedly probed the troubled and troubling boundary between reason and faith philosophy and religion. In the article “David,” the seemingly illicit conduct of God’s purported agent yielded reflections on the morals of the elect and the autonomy of ethics. In “Pyrrho,” Bayle argued that self-evidence, the most plausible candidate for the criterion of truth, is discredited by Christianity because some self-evident principles contradict essential Christian truths and are therefore false. Finally, provoking Leibniz’s Theodicy, Bayle argued, most relentlessly in “Manichaeans” and “Paulicians,” that there is no defensible rational solution to the problem of evil. Bayle portrayed himself as a Christian skeptic, but others have seen instead an ironic critic of religion  a precursor of the  Enlightenment. Bayle’s purely philosophical reflections support his self-assessment, since he consistently maintains that philosophy achieves not comprehension and contentment, but paradox and puzzlement. In making this case he proved to be a superb critic of philosophical systems. Some examples are “Zeno of Elea”  on space, time, and motion; “Rorarius”  on mind and body and animal mechanism; and “Spinoza”  on the perils of monism. Bayle’s skepticism concerning philosophy significantly influenced Berkeley and Hume. His other important works include Pensées diverses de la comète de 1683 1683; Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus Christ: contrain les d’entrer 1686; and Réponse aux questions d’un provincial1704; and an early learned periodical, the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1684 87. 

beattie, j. Common-sense – H. P. Grice, “The so-called English common-sense,” Beattie: j. philosopher and poet who, in criticizing Hume, widened the latter’s audience. A member of the Scottish school of common sense philosophy along with Oswald and Reid, Beattie’s major work was An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth 1771, in which he criticizes Hume for fostering skepticism and infidelity. His positive view was that the mind possesses a common sense, i.e., a power for perceiving self-evident truths. Common sense is instinctive, unalterable by education; truth is what common sense determines the mind to believe. Beattie cited Hume and then claimed that his views led to moral and religious evils. When Beattie’s Essay was tr. into G. 1772, Kant could read Hume’s discussions of personal identity and causation. Since these topics were not covered in Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Beattie provided Kant access to two issues in the Treatises of Human Nature critical to the development of transcendental idealism.

beccaria, c.  philosopher – Referred to by H. P. Grice in his explorations on moral versus legal right, studied in Parma and Pavia and taught political economy in Milan. Here, he met Pietro and Alessandro Verri and other Milanese intellectuals attempting to promote political, economical, and judiciary reforms. His major work, Dei delitti e delle pene “On Crimes and Punishments,” 1764, denounces the contemporary methods in the administration of justice and the treatment of criminals. Beccaria argues that the highest good is the greatest happiness shared by the greatest number of people; hence, actions against the state are the most serious crimes. Crimes against individuals and property are less serious, and crimes endangering public harmony are the least serious. The purposes of punishment are deterrence and the protection of society. However, the employment of torture to obtain confessions is unjust and useless: it results in acquittal of the strong and the ruthless and conviction of the weak and the innocent. Beccaria also rejects the death penalty as a war of the state against the individual. He claims that the duration and certainty of the punishment, not its intensity, most strongly affect criminals. Beccaria was influenced by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. His major work was tr. into many languages and set guidelines for revising the criminal and judicial systems of several European countries.

actum: -- behaviourism. Grice was amused that what Ryle thought was behaviouristic was already pervaded wiith mentalistic talk! Referred to by H. P. Grice in his criticism of Gilbert Ryle. Ironically, Chomsky misjudged Grice as a behaviourist, but Chomsky’s critique was demolished by P. Suppes, broadly, the view that behavior is fundamental in understanding mental phenomena. The term applies both to a scientific research Beauvoir, Simone de behaviorism 76   76 program in psychology and to a philosophical doctrine. Accordingly, we distinguish between scientific psychological, methodological behaviorism and philosophical logical, analytical behaviorism. Scientific behaviorism. First propounded by the  psychologist J. B. Watson who introduced the term in 3 and further developed especially by C. L. Hull, E. C. Tolman, and B. F. Skinner, it departed from the introspectionist tradition by redefining the proper task of psychology as the explanation and prediction of behavior  where to explain behavior is to provide a “functional analysis” of it, i.e., to specify the independent variables stimuli of which the behavior response is lawfully a function. It insisted that all variables  including behavior as the dependent variable  must be specifiable by the experimental procedures of the natural sciences: merely introspectible, internal states of consciousness are thus excluded from the proper domain of psychology. Although some behaviorists were prepared to admit internal neurophysiological conditions among the variables “intervening variables”, others of more radical bent e.g. Skinner insisted on environmental variables alone, arguing that any relevant variations in the hypothetical inner states would themselves in general be a function of variations in past and present environmental conditions as, e.g., thirst is a function of water deprivation. Although some basic responses are inherited reflexes, most are learned and integrated into complex patterns by a process of conditioning. In classical respondent conditioning, a response already under the control of a given stimulus will be elicited by new stimuli if these are repeatedly paired with the old stimulus: this is how we learn to respond to new situations. In operant conditioning, a response that has repeatedly been followed by a reinforcing stimulus reward will occur with greater frequency and will thus be “selected” over other possible responses: this is how we learn new responses. Conditioned responses can also be unlearned or “extinguished” by prolonged dissociation from the old eliciting stimuli or by repeated withholding of the reinforcing stimuli. To show how all human behavior, including “cognitive” or intelligent behavior, can be “shaped” by such processes of selective reinforcement and extinction of responses was the ultimate objective of scientific behaviorism. Grave difficulties in the way of the realization of this objective led to increasingly radical liberalization of the distinctive features of behaviorist methodology and eventually to its displacement by more cognitively oriented approaches e.g. those inspired by information theory and by Chomsky’s work in linguistics. Philosophical behaviorism. A semantic thesis about the meaning of mentalistic expressions, it received its most sanguine formulation by the logical positivists particularly Carnap, Hempel, and Ayer, who asserted that statements containing mentalistic expressions have the same meaning as, and are thus translatable into, some set of publicly verifiable confirmable, testable statements describing behavioral and bodily processes and dispositions including verbalbehavioral dispositions. Because of the reductivist concerns expressed by the logical positivist thesis of physicalism and the unity of science, logical behaviorism as some positivists preferred to call it was a corollary of the thesis that psychology is ultimately via a behavioristic analysis reducible to physics, and that all of its statements, like those of physics, are expressible in a strictly extensional language. Another influential formulation of philosophical behaviorism is due to Ryle The Concept of Mind, 9, whose classic critique of Cartesian dualism rests on the view that mental predicates are often used to ascribe dispositions to behave in characteristic ways: but such ascriptions, for Ryle, have the form of conditional, lawlike statements whose function is not to report the occurrence of inner states, physical or non-physical, of which behavior is the causal manifestation, but to license inferences about how the agent would behave if certain conditions obtained. To suppose that all declarative uses of mental language have a fact-stating or -reporting role at all is, for Ryle, to make a series of “category mistakes”  of which both Descartes and the logical positivists were equally guilty. Unlike the behaviorism of the positivists, Ryle’s behaviorism required no physicalistic reduction of mental language, and relied instead on ordinary language descriptions of human behavior. A further version of philosophical behaviorism can be traced to Vitters Philosophical Investigations, 3, who argues that the epistemic criteria for the applicability of mentalistic terms cannot be private, introspectively accessible inner states but must instead be intersubjectively observable behavior. Unlike the previously mentioned versions of philosophical behaviorism, Vitters’s behaviorism seems to be consistent with metaphysical mindbody dualism, and is thus also non-reductivist. behaviorism behaviorism 77   77 Philosophical behaviorism underwent severe criticism in the 0s and 0s, especially by Chisholm, Charles Taylor, Putnam, and Fodor. Nonetheless it still lives on in more or less attenuated forms in the work of such diverse philosophers as Quine, Dennett, Armstrong, David Lewis, U. T. Place, and Dummett. Though current “functionalism” is often referred to as the natural heir to behaviorism, functionalism especially of the Armstrong-Lewis variety crucially differs from behaviorism in insisting that mental predicates, while definable in terms of behavior and behavioral dispositions, nonetheless designate inner causal states  states that are apt to cause certain characteristic behaviors.   -- behavior therapy, a spectrum of behavior modification techniques applied as therapy, such as aversion therapy, extinction, modeling, redintegration, operant conditioning, and desensitization. Unlike psychotherapy, which probes a client’s recollected history, behavior therapy focuses on immediate behavior, and aims to eliminate undesired behavior and produce desired behavior through methods derived from the experimental analysis of behavior and from reinforcement theory. A chronic problem with psychotherapy is that the client’s past is filtered through limited and biased recollection. Behavior therapy is more mechanical, creating systems of reinforcement and conditioning that may work independently of the client’s long-term memory. Collectively, behavior-therapeutic techniques compose a motley set. Some behavior therapists adapt techniques from psychotherapy, as in covert desensitization, where verbally induced mental images are employed as reinforcers. A persistent problem with behavior therapy is that it may require repeated application. Consider aversion therapy. It consists of pairing painful or punishing stimuli with unwelcome behavior. In the absence, after therapy, of the painful stimulus, the behavior may recur because association between behavior and punishment is broken. Critics charge that behavior therapy deals with immediate disturbances and overt behavior, to the neglect of underlying problems and irrationalities.  Behaviourism. Chomsky, a. n. – cites H. P. Grice as “A. P. Grice” -- preeminent  philosopher, and political activist who has spent his professional career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky’s best-known scientific achievement is the establishment of a rigorous and philosophically compelling foundation for the scientific study of the grammar of natural language. With the use of tools from the study of formal languages, he gave a far more precise and explanatory account of natural language grammar than had previously been given Syntactic Structures, 7. He has since developed a number of highly influential frameworks for the study of natural language grammar e.g., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 5; Lectures on Government and Binding, 1; The Minimalist Program, 5. Though there are significant differences in detail, there are also common themes that underlie these approaches. Perhaps the most central is that there is an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans, and the purpose of linguistic inquiry is to describe the initial state of the language learner, and account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms. On Chomsky’s conception of linguistics, languages are structures in the brains of individual speakers, described at a certain level of abstraction within the theory. These structures occur within the language faculty, a hypothesized module of the human brain. Universal Grammar is the set of principles hard-wired into the language faculty that determine the class of possible human languages. This conception of linguistics involves several influential and controversial theses. First, the hypothesis of a Universal Grammar entails the existence of innate linguistic principles. Secondly, the hypothesis of a language faculty entails that our linguistic abilities, at least so far as grammar is concerned, are not a product of general reasoning processes. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, since having one of these structures is an intrinsic property of a speaker, properties of languages so conceived are determined solely by states of the speaker. On this individualistic conception of language, there is no room in scientific linguistics for the social entities determined by linguistic communities that are languages according to previous anthropological conceptions of the discipline. Many of Chomsky’s most significant contributions to philosophy, such as his influential rejection of behaviorism “Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language, 9, stem from his elaborations and defenses of the above consequences cf. also Cartesian Linguistics, 6; Reflections on Language, 5; Rules and Representations, 0; Knowledge of Language, 6. Chomsky’s philosophical writings are characterized by an adherence to methodological naturalism, the view that the mind should be studied like any other natural phenomenon. In recent years, he has also argued that reference, in the sense in which it is used in the philosophy of language, plays no role in a scientific theory of language “Language and Nature,” Mind, 5. 

beneke: a Kantian commentator beloved by Grice (“if only because he could read Kant in the vernacular!”)-- philosopher who was influenced by Herbart and English empiricism and criticized rationalistic metaphysics. He taught at Berlin and published some eighteen books in philosophy. His major work was Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft 1833. He wrote a critical study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and another on his moral theory; other works included Psychologie Skizzen 1825, Metaphysik und Religionphilosophie 1840, and Die neue Psychologie 1845. The “new psychology” developed by Beneke held that the hypostatization of “faculties” led to a mythical psychology. He proposed a method that would yield a natural science of the soul or, in effect, an associationist psychology. Influenced by the British empiricists, he conceived the elements of mental life as dynamic, active processes or impulses Trieben. These “elementary faculties,” originally activated by stimuli, generate the substantial unity of the nature of the psychic by their persistence as traces, as well as by their reciprocal adjustment in relation to the continuous production of new forces. In what Beneke called “pragmatic psychology,” the psyche is a bundle of impulses, forces, and functions. Psychological theory should rest on inductive analyses of the facts of inner perception. This, in turn, is the foundation of the philosophical disciplines of logic, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. In this regard, Beneke held a psychologism. He agreed with Herbart that psychology must be based on inner experience and must eschew metaphysical speculation, but rejected Hebart’s mathematical reductionism. Beneke sought to create a “pragmatic philosophy” based on his psychology. In his last years he contributed to pedagogic theory. 

benthamian: -- semiotics -- j. Engish philosopher of ethics and political-legal theory. Born in London, he entered Queen’s, Oxford, at age 12, and after graduation entered Lincoln’s Inn to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1767 but never practiced. He spent his life writing, advocating changes along utilitarian lines maximal happiness for everyone affected of the whole legal system, especially the criminal law. He was a strong influence in changes of the British law of evidence; in abolition of laws permitting imprisonment for indebtedness; in the belief, basic Bentham, Jeremy 79   79 reform of Parliamentary representation; in the formation of a civil service recruited by examination; and in much else. His major work published during his lifetime was An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789. He became head of a “radical” group including James Mill and J. S. Mill, and founded the Westminster Review and  , London where his embalmed body still reposes in a closet. He was a friend of Catherine of Russia and John Quincy Adams, and was made a citizen of France in 1792. Pleasure, he said, is the only good, and pain the only evil: “else the words good and evil have no meaning.” He gives a list of examples of what he means by ‘pleasure’: pleasures of taste, smell, or touch; of acquiring property; of learning that one has the goodwill of others; of power; of a view of the pleasures of those one cares about. Bentham was also a psychological hedonist: pleasures and pains determine what we do. Take pain. Your state of mind may be painful now at the time just prior to action because it includes the expectation of the pain say of being burned; the present pain or the expectation of later pain  Bentham is undecided which motivates action to prevent being burned. One of a person’s pleasures, however, may be sympathetic enjoyment of the well-being of another. So it seems one can be motivated by the prospect of the happiness of another. His psychology here is not incompatible with altruistic motivation. Bentham’s critical utilitarianism lies in his claim that any action, or measure of government, ought to be taken if and only if it tends to augment the happiness of everyone affected  not at all a novel principle, historically. When “thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and wrong . . . have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.” Bentham evidently did not mean this statement as a purely linguistic point about the actual meaning of moral terms. Neither can this principle be proved; it is a first principle from which all proofs proceed. What kind of reason, then, can he offer in its support? At one point he says that the principle of utility, at least unconsciously, governs the judgment of “every thinking man . . . unavoidably.” But his chief answer is his critique of a widely held principle that a person properly calls an act wrong if when informed of the facts he disapproves of it. Bentham cites other language as coming to the same thesis: talk of a “moral sense,” or common sense, or the understanding, or the law of nature, or right reason, or the “fitness of things.” He says that this is no principle at all, since a “principle is something that points out some external consideration, as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation. . . .” The alleged principle also allows for widespread disagreement about what is moral. So far, Bentham’s proposal has not told us exactly how to determine whether an action or social measure is right or wrong. Bentham suggests a hedonic calculus: in comparing two actions under consideration, we count up the pleasures or pains each will probably produce  how intense, how long-lasting, whether near or remote, including any derivative later pleasures or pains that may be caused, and sum them up for all persons who will be affected. Evidently these directions can provide at best only approximate results. We are in no position to decide whether one pleasure for one hour is greater than another pleasure for half an hour, even when they are both pleasures of one person who can compare them. How much more when the pleasures are of different persons? Still, we can make judgments important for the theory of punishment: whether a blow in the face with no lasting damage for one person is more or less painful than fifty lashes for his assailant! Bentham has been much criticized because he thought that two pleasures are equal in value, if they are equally intense, enduring, etc. As he said, “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.” It has been thought e.g., by J. S. Mill that some pleasures, especially intellectual ones, are higher and deserve to count more. But it may be replied that the so-called higher pleasures are more enduring, are less likely to be followed by satiety, and open up new horizons of enjoyment; and when these facts are taken into account, it is not clear that there is need to accord higher status to intellectual pleasures as such. A major goal of Bentham’s was to apply to the criminal law his principle of maximizing the general utility. Bentham thought there should be no punishment of an offense if it is not injurious to someone. So how much punishment should there be? The least amount the effect of which will result in a greater degree of happiness, overall. The benefit of punishment is primarily deterrence, by attaching to the thought of a given act the thought of the painful sanction  which will deter both the past and prospective lawbreakers. The punishment, then, must be severe enough to outweigh the benefit of the offense to the agent, making allowance, by addition, for the uncertainty that the punishment will actually occur. There are some harmful acts, however, that it is Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, Jeremy 80   80 not beneficial to punish. One is an act needful to produce a greater benefit, or avoid a serious evil, for the agent. Others are those which a penal prohibition could not deter: when the law is unpublished or the agent is insane or an infant. In some cases society need feel no alarm about the future actions of the agent. Thus, an act is criminal only if intentional, and the agent is excused if he acted on the basis of beliefs such that, were they true, the act would have caused no harm, unless these beliefs were culpable in the sense that they would not have been held by a person of ordinary prudence or benevolence. The propriety of punishing an act also depends somewhat on its motive, although no motive e.g., sexual desire, curiosity, wanting money, love of reputation  is bad in itself. Yet the propriety of punishment is affected by the presence of some motivations that enhance public security because it is unlikely that they  e.g., sympathetic concern or concern for reputation  will lead to bad intentional acts. When a given motive leads to a bad intention, it is usually because of the weakness of motives like sympathy, concern for avoiding punishment, or respect for law. In general, the sanction of moral criticism should take lines roughly similar to those of the ideal law. But there are some forms of behavior, e.g., imprudence or fornication, which the law is hardly suited to punish, that can be sanctioned by morality. The business of the moral philosopher is censorial: to say what the law, or morality, ought to be. To say what is the law is a different matter: what it is is the commands of the sovereign, defined as one whom the public, in general, habitually obeys. As consisting of commands, it is imperatival. The imperatives may be addressed to the public, as in “Let no one steal,” or to judges: “Let a judge sentence anyone who steals to be hanged.” It may be thought that there is a third part, an explanation, say, of what is a person’s property; but this can be absorbed in the imperatival part, since the designations of property are just imperatives about who is to be free to do what. Why should anyone obey the actual laws? Bentham’s answer is that one should do so if and only if it promises to maximize the general happiness. He eschews contract theories of political obligation: individuals now alive never contracted, and so how are they bound? He also opposes appeal to natural rights. If what are often mentioned as natural rights were taken seriously, no government could survive: it could not tax, require military service, etc. Nor does he accept appeal to “natural law,” as if, once some law is shown to be immoral, it can be said to be not really law. That would be absurd. 

berdyaevian: n., philosopher studied by H. P. Grice for his ‘ontological Marxism,’ he began as a “Kantian Marxist” in epistemology, ethical theory, and philosophy of history, but soon turned away from Marxism although he continued to accept Marx’s critique of capitalism toward a theistic philosophy of existence stressing the values of creativity and “meonic” freedom  a freedom allegedly prior to all being, including that of God. In exile after 2, Berdyaev appears to have been the first to grasp clearly in the early 0s that the Marxist view of historical time involves a morally unacceptable devaluing and instrumentalizing of the historical present including living persons for the sake of the remote future end of a perfected communist society. Berdyaev rejects the Marxist position on both Christian and Kantian grounds, as a violation of the intrinsic value of human persons. He sees the historical order as marked by inescapable tragedy, and welcomes the “end of history” as an “overcoming” of objective historical time by subjective “existential” time with its free, unobjectified creativity. For Berdyaev the “world of objects”  physical things, laws of nature, social institutions, and human roles and relationships  is a pervasive threat to “free spiritual creativity.” Yet such creativity appears to be subject to inevitable frustration, since its outward embodiments are always “partial and fragmentary” and no “outward action” can escape ultimate “tragic failure.” Russian Orthodox traditionalists condemned Berdyaev for claiming that all creation is a “divine-human process” and for denying God’s omnipotence, but such Western process theologians as Hartshorne find Berdyaev’s position highly congenial. 

bergmann: g. infamous for calling H. P. Grice “one of them English futilitarians” -- philosopher, the youngest member of the Vienna Circle. Born in Vienna, he received his doctorate in mathematics in 8 from the  of Vienna. Originally influenced by logical positivism, he became a phenomenalist who also posited mental acts irreducible to sense-data see his The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, 4. Although he eventually rejected phenomenalism, his ontology of material objects remained structurally phenomenalistic. Bergmann’s world is one of momentary bare i.e. natureless particulars exemplifying phenomenally simple Berdyaev, Nicolas Bergmann, Gustav 81   81 universals, relational as well as non-relational. Some of these universals are non-mental, such as color properties and spatial relations, while others, such as the “intentional characters” in virtue of which some particulars mental acts intend or represent the facts that are their “objects,” are mental. Bergmann insisted that the world is independent of both our experience of it and our thought and discourse about it: he claimed that the connection of exemplification and even the propositional connectives and quantifiers are mind-independent. See Meaning and Existence, 9; Logic and Reality, 4; and Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong, 7. Such extreme realism produced many criticisms of his philosophy that are only finally addressed in Bergmann’s recently, and posthumously, published book, New Foundations of Ontology 2, in which he concedes that his atomistic approach to ontology has inevitable limitations and proposes a way of squaring this insight with his thoroughgoing realism. 

bergson: Philosopher of central European ancestry born in Paris. The surname literally means, ‘the son of the mountain,’ -- cited by H. P. Grice in “Personal identity,” philosopher, the most influential of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Paris and educated at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he began his teaching career at Clermont-Ferrand in 4 and was called in 0 to the Collège de France, where his lectures enjoyed unparalleled success until his retirement in 1. Ideally placed in la belle époque of prewar Paris, his ideas influenced a broad spectrum of artistic, literary, social, and political movements. In 8 he received the Légion d’honneur and was admitted into the  Academy. From 2 through 5 he participated in the League of Nations, presiding over the creation of what was later to become UNESCO. Forced by crippling arthritis into virtual seclusion during his later years, Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 8. Initially a disciple of Spencer, Bergson broke with him after a careful examination of Spencer’s concept of time and mechanistic positivism. Following a deeply entrenched tradition in Western thought, Spencer treats time on an analogy with space as a series of discrete numerical units: instants, seconds, minutes. When confronted with experience, however  especially with that of our own psychological states  such concepts are, Bergson concludes, patently inadequate. Real duration, unlike clock time, is qualitative, dynamic, irreversible. It cannot be “spatialized” without being deformed. It gives rise in us, moreover, to free acts, which, being qualitative and spontaneous, cannot be predicted. Bergson’s dramatic contrast of real duration and geometrical space, first developed in Time and Free Will 0, was followed in 6 by the mind body theory of Matter and Memory. He argues here that the brain is not a locale for thought but a motor organ that, receiving stimuli from its environment, may respond with adaptive behavior. To his psychological and metaphysical distinction between duration and space Bergson adds, in An Introduction to Metaphysics 3, an important epistemological distinction between intuition and analysis. Intuition probes the flow of duration in its concreteness; analysis breaks up duration into static, fragmentary concepts. In Creative Evolution 7, his best-known work, Bergson argues against both Lamarck and Darwin, urging that biological evolution is impelled by a vital impetus or élan vital that drives life to overcome the downward entropic drift of matter. Biological organisms, unlike dice, must compete and survive as they undergo permutations. Hence the unresolved dilemma of Darwinism. Either mutations occur one or a few at a time in which case how can they be “saved up” to constitute new organs? or they occur all at once in which case one has a “miracle”. Bergson’s vitalism, popular in literary circles, was not accepted by many scientists or philosophers. His most general contention, however  that biological evolution is not consistent with or even well served by a mechanistic philosophy  was broadly appreciated and to many seemed convincing. This aspect of Bergson’s writings influenced thinkers as diverse as Lloyd Morgan, Alexis Carrel, Sewall Wright, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and A. N. Whitehead. The contrasts in terms of which Bergson developed his thought duration/space, intuition/ analysis, life/entropy are replaced in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 2 by a new duality, that of the “open” and the “closed.” The Judeo-Christian tradition, he contends, if it has embraced in its history both the open society and the closed society, exhibits in its great saints and mystics a profound opening out of the human spirit toward all humanity. Bergson’s distinction between the open and the closed society was popularized by Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies. While it has attracted serious criticism, Bergson’s philosophy has also significantly affected subsequent thinkers. Novelists as diverse as Bergson, Henri Louis Bergson, Henri Louis 82   82 Nikos Kazantzakis, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner; poets as unlike as Charles Péguy, Robert Frost, and Antonio Machado; and psychologists as dissimilar as Pierre Janet and Jean Piaget were to profit significantly from his explorations of duration, conceptualization, and memory. Both  existentialism and  process philosophy bear the imprint of his thought. 

berkeleyianism: g., -- H. P. Grice thought he had found in Berkeley a good test for the Austinian code – If something sounds harsh to Berkeley it sounds harsh. Irish philosopher and bishop in the Anglican Church of Ireland, one of the three great British empiricists along with Locke and Hume. He developed novel and influential views on the visual perception of distance and size, and an idealist metaphysical system that he defended partly on the seemingly paradoxical ground that it was the best defense of common sense and safeguard against skepticism. Berkeley studied at Trinity , Dublin, from which he graduated at nineteen. He was elected to a fellowship at Trinity in 1707, and did the bulk of his philosophical writing between that year and 1713. He was made dean of Derry in 1724, following extensive traveling on the Continent; he spent the years 172832 in Rhode Island, waiting in vain for promised Crown funds to establish a  in Bermuda. He was made bishop of Cloyne, Ireland, in 1734, and he remained there as a cleric for nearly the remainder of his life. Berkeley’s first major publication, the Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision 1709, is principally a work in the psychology of vision, though it has important philosophical presuppositions and implications. Berkeley’s theory of vision became something like the received view on the topic for nearly two hundred years and is a landmark work in the history of psychology. The work is devoted to three connected matters: how do we see, or visually estimate, the distances of objects from ourselves, the situation or place at which objects are located, and the magnitude of such objects? Earlier views, such as those of Descartes, Malebranche, and Molyneux, are rejected on the ground that their answers to the above questions allow that a person can see the distance of an object without having first learned to correlate visual and other cues. This was supposedly done by a kind of natural geometry, a computation of the distance by determining the altitude of a triangle formed by light rays from the object and the line extending from one retina to the other. On the contrary, Berkeley holds that it is clear that seeing distance is something one learns to do through trial and error, mainly by correlating cues that suggest distance: the distinctness or confusion of the visual appearance; the feelings received when the eyes turn; and the sensations attending the straining of the eyes. None of these bears any necessary connection to distance. Berkeley infers from this account that a person born blind and later given sight would not be able to tell by sight alone the distances objects were from her, nor tell the difference between a sphere and a cube. He also argues that in visually estimating distance, one is really estimating which tangible ideas one would likely experience if one were to take steps to approach the object. Not that these tangible ideas are themselves necessarily connected to the visual appearances. Instead, Berkeley holds that tangible and visual ideas are entirely heterogeneous, i.e., they are numerically and specifically distinct. The latter is a philosophical consequence of Berkeley’s theory of vision, which is sharply at odds with a central doctrine of Locke’s Essay, namely, that some ideas are common to both sight and touch. Locke’s doctrines also receive a great deal of attention in the Principles of Human Knowledge 1710. Here Berkeley considers the doctrine of abstract general ideas, which he finds in Book III of Locke’s Essay. He argues against such ideas partly on the ground that we cannot engage in the process of abstraction, partly on the ground that some abstract ideas are impossible objects, and also on the ground that such ideas are not needed for either language learning or language use. These arguments are of fundamental importance for Berkeley, since he thinks that the doctrine of abstract ideas helps to support metaphysical realism, absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time Principles, 5, 100, 11011, as well as the view that some ideas are common to sight and touch New Theory, 123. All of these doctrines Berkeley holds to be mistaken, and the first is in direct conflict with his idealism. Hence, it is important for him to undermine any support these doctrines might receive from the abstract ideas thesis. Berkeleyan idealism is the view that the only existing entities are finite and infinite perceivers each of which is a spirit or mental substance, and entities that are perceived. Such a thesis implies that ordinary physical objects exist if and only if they are perceived, something Berkeley encapsulates in the esse est percipi principle: for all senBerkeley, George Berkeley, George 83   83 sible objects, i.e., objects capable of being perceived, their being is to be perceived. He gives essentially two arguments for this thesis. First, he holds that every physical object is just a collection of sensible qualities, and that every sensible quality is an idea. So, physical objects are just collections of sensible ideas. No idea can exist unperceived, something everyone in the period would have granted. Hence, no physical object can exist unperceived. The second argument is the socalled master argument of Principles 2224. There Berkeley argues that one cannot conceive a sensible object existing unperceived, because if one attempts to do this one must thereby conceive that very object. He concludes from this that no such object can exist “without the mind,” that is, wholly unperceived. Many of Berkeley’s opponents would have held instead that a physical object is best analyzed as a material substratum, in which some sensible qualities inhere. So Berkeley spends some effort arguing against material substrata or what he sometimes calls matter. His principal argument is that a sensible quality cannot inhere in matter, because a sensible quality is an idea, and surely an idea cannot exist except in a mind. This argument would be decisive if it were true that each sensible quality is an idea. Unfortunately, Berkeley gives no argument whatever for this contention in the Principles, and for that reason Berkeleyan idealism is not there well founded. Nor does the master argument fare much better, for there Berkeley seems to require a premise asserting that if an object is conceived, then that object is perceived. Yet such a premise is highly dubious. Probably Berkeley realized that his case for idealism had not been successful, and certainly he was stung by the poor reception of the Principles. His next book, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous 1713, is aimed at rectifying these matters. There he argues at length for the thesis that each sensible quality is an idea. The master argument is repeated, but it is unnecessary if every sensible quality is an idea. In the Dialogues Berkeley is also much concerned to combat skepticism and defend common sense. He argues that representative realism as held by Locke leads to skepticism regarding the external world and this, Berkeley thinks, helps to support atheism and free thinking in religion. He also argues, more directly, that representative realism is false. Such a thesis incorporates the claim that somesensible ideas represent real qualities in objects, the so-called primary qualities. But Berkeley argues that a sensible idea can be like nothing but another idea, and so ideas cannot represent qualities in objects. In this way, Berkeley eliminates one main support of skepticism, and to that extent helps to support the commonsensical idea that we gain knowledge of the existence and nature of ordinary physical objects by means of perception. Berkeley’s positive views in epistemology are usually interpreted as a version of foundationalism. That is, he is generally thought to have defended the view that beliefs about currently perceived ideas are basic beliefs, beliefs that are immediately and non-inferentially justified or that count as pieces of immediate knowledge, and that all other justified beliefs in contingent propositions are justified by being somehow based upon the basic beliefs. Indeed, such a foundationalist doctrine is often taken to help define empiricism, held in common by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. But whatever the merits of such a view as an interpretation of Locke or Hume, it is not Berkeley’s theory. This is because he allows that perceivers often have immediate and noninferential justified beliefs, and knowledge, about physical objects. Hence, Berkeley accepts a version of foundationalism that allows for basic beliefs quite different from just beliefs about one’s currently perceived ideas. Indeed, he goes so far as to maintain that such physical object beliefs are often certain, something neither Locke nor Hume would accept. In arguing against the existence of matter, Berkeley also maintains that we literally have no coherent concept of such stuff because we cannot have any sensible idea of it. Parity of reasoning would seem to dictate that Berkeley should reject mental substance as well, thereby threatening his idealism from another quarter. Berkeley is sensitive to this line of reasoning, and replies that while we have no idea of the self, we do have some notion of the self, that is, some lessthan-complete concept. He argues that a person gains some immediate knowledge of the existence and nature of herself in a reflex act; that is, when she is perceiving something she is also conscious that something is engaging in this perception, and this is sufficient for knowledge of that perceiving entity. To complement his idealism, Berkeley worked out a version of scientific instrumentalism, both in the Principles and in a later Latin work, De Motu 1721, a doctrine that anticipates the views of Mach. In the Dialogues he tries to show how his idealism is consistent with the biblical account of the creation, and consistent as well with common sense. Berkeley, George Berkeley, George 84   84 Three later works of Berkeley’s gained him an enormous amount of attention. Alciphron 1734 was written while Berkeley was in Rhode Island, and is a philosophical defense of Christian doctrine. It also contains some additional comments on perception, supplementing earlier work on that topic. The Analyst 1734 contains trenchant criticism of the method of fluxions in differential calculus, and it set off a flurry of pamphlet replies to Berkeley’s criticisms, to which Berkeley responded in his A Defense of Free Thinking in Mathematics. Siris 1744 contains a detailed account of the medicinal values of tar-water, water boiled with the bark of certain trees. This book also contains a defense of a sort of corpuscularian philosophy that seems to be at odds with the idealism elaborated in the earlier works for which Berkeley is now famous. In the years 170708, the youthful Berkeley kept a series of notebooks in which he worked out his ideas in philosophy and mathematics. These books, now known as the Philosophical Commentaries, provide the student of Berkeley with the rare opportunity to see a great philosopher’s thought in development.  H. P. Grice was a member of the Oxford Berkeley Society. The Bishop and The Cricketer Agree: It Does Sound Harsh! When "The Times" published a note on Grice, anonymous, as obituaries should be, but some suspect P. F. S.) it went, "H. P. Grice, professional philosopher and amateur cricketer."Surely P. F. S. may have been involved, since some always preferred the commuted conjunction: "H. P. Grice, cricketer -- and philosopher."At one time, to be a 'professional' cricketer was a no-no.At one time, to be a 'professional' philosopher was a no-no -- witness Socrates!But you never know.It's TOTALLY different when it comes to BISHOPS!Grice loved that phrase, "sounds harsh." "The Austinian in the Bishop."Bishop Berkeley and H. P. Grice -- Two Ways of Representing: Likeness Or Not.Bishop Berkeley’s views on representation, broadly construed, relate to H. P. Grice’s views on representation, broadly construed.In essay, “Berkeley: An Interpretation,” Kenneth Winkler argues that Bishop Berkeley sees representation as working in one of two ways.Representation works either in the same way that an expression signifies an idea (Grice’s non-iconic) or by means of resemblance (Grice’s iconic).But we need to explore that distinction.This all relates to Bishop Berkeley’s and Grice’s views on language, their theory of resemblance, and the role that representation plays in their philosophiesmore widely.It is interesting to consider, of course, Berkeley’s predecessors (e.g., Descartes, Locke, that Grice revered in the choice of the title of his compilation of essays, “Studies in THE WAY OF WORDS,” or WoW for short), Bishop Berkeley’s contemporaries (e.g., William King, Anthony Collins), and subsequent thinkers (e.g. Hume, Shepherd, and of course Grice) accepted this distinction – and their connection to the development of both Bishoop Berkeley’s and Grice’s thought.Some philosophers connect Bishop Berkeley and Grice to non-canonical figures or those which defend novel interpretations of Berkeley’s or Grice’s own thought.Which ARE Bishop Berkeley’s and Grice’s view on the connection between representation and resemblance?Is Winkler right to attribute two types of representation to Berkeley? Could Winkler’s observations have a bearing on Grice?Do Bishop Berkeley’s and Grice’s contemporaries accept the distinction between signification and representation? (Grice’s favourite example: “A cricket team may do for England what England cannot do: engage in a game of cricket.”)Grice explores this in the “Valediction” to his “Way of Words”:“We might we well advised,” Grice says, “to consider more closely the nature of representation and its connection with meaning, and to do so in the light of three perhaps not implausible suppositions.”(1) that representation by means of verbal formulation is an artificial and noniconic mode of representation.(2) that to replace an iconic system by a noniconic system will be to introduce a new and more powerful extension of the original system, one which can do everything the former system can do and more besides.(3) that every artificial  or noniconic system is based on an antecedent NATURAL iconic system.Descriptive representation must look back to and in part do the work of prior iconic representation.That work will consist in the representation of objects and situations in the world in something like the way in which a team of North Oxfordshire cricketers may represent, say North Oxfordshire. The cricketers do on behalf of North Oxfordshire something that North Oxfordshire cannot do for itself, namely engage in a game of cricket.“Similarly, our representations (initially iconic but also noniconic) enable objects and situations in the world to do something which objects and situations cannot do for themselves, namely govern our actions and behaviour.”Etc.Grice loved to quote the Bishop on this or that ‘sounding harsh.’ “Surely, the Bishop would agree with me that it sounds harsh to say that Smith’s brain’s s being in such and such a state at noon is a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence."We hope neither will agree THIS sounds harsh, either, as North-Oxfordshire engaging in a game of cricket does not really, either.

berlin: “If Berlin and I have something in common is a tutor!” – H. P. Grice. Berlin: I. Russian-born philosopher and historian of ideas. He is widely acclaimed for his doctrine of radical objective pluralism; his writings on liberty; his modification, refinement, and defense of traditional liberalism against the totalitarian doctrines of the twentieth century not least Marxism-Leninism; and his brilliant and illuminating studies in the history of ideas from Machiavelli and Vico to Marx and Sorel. A founding father with Austin, Ayer, and others of Oxford philosophy in the 0s, he published several influential papers in its general spirit, but, without abandoning its empirical approach, he came increasingly to dissent from what seemed to him its unduly barren, doctrinaire, and truthdenying tendencies. From the 0s onward he broke away to devote himself principally to social and political philosophy and to the study of general ideas. His two most important contributions in social and political theory, brought together with two other valuable essays in Four Essays on Liberty 9, are “Historical Inevitability” 4 and his 8 inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The first is a bold and decisive attack on historical determinism and moral relativism and subjectivism and a ringing endorsement of the role of free will and responsibility in human history. The second contains Berlin’s enormously influential attempt to distinguish clearly between “negative” and “positive” liberty. Negative liberty, foreshadowed by such thinkers as J. S. Mill, Constant, and above all Herzen, consists in making minimal assumptions about the ultimate nature and needs of the subject, in ensuring a minimum of external interference by authority of any provenance, and in leaving open as large a field for free individual choice as is consonant with a minimum of social organization and order. Positive liberty, associated with monist and voluntarist thinkers of all kinds, not least Hegel, the G. Idealists, and their historical progeny, begins with the notion of self-mastery and proceeds to make dogmatic and far-reaching metaphysical assumptions about the essence of the subject. It then deduces from these the proper paths to freedom, and, finally, seeks to drive flesh-and-blood individuals down these preordained paths, whether they wish it or not, within the framework of a tight-knit centralized state under the irrefragable rule of rational experts, thus perverting what begins as a legitimate human ideal, i.e. positive self-direction and self-mastery, into a tyranny. “Two Concepts of Liberty” also sets out to disentangle liberty in either of these senses from other ends, such as the craving for recognition, the need to belong, or human solidarity, fraternity, or equality. Berlin’s work in the history of ideas is of a piece with his other writings. Vico and Herder 6 presents the emergence of that historicism and pluralism which shook the two-thousand-yearold monist rationalist faith in a unified body of truth regarding all questions of fact and principle in all fields of human knowledge. From this profound intellectual overturn Berlin traces in subsequent volumes of essays, such as Against the Current 9, The Crooked Timber of Humanity 0, and The Sense of Reality 6, the growth of some of the principal intellectual movements that mark our era, among them nationalism, fascism, relativism, subjectivism, nihilism, voluntarism, and existentialism. He also presents with persuasiveness and clarity that peculiar objective pluralism which he identified and made his own. There is an irreducible plurality of objective human values, many of which are incompatible with one another; hence the ineluctable need for absolute choices by individuals and groups, a need that confers supreme value upon, and forms one of the major justifications of, his conception of negative liberty; Berlin, Isaiah Berlin, Isaiah 85   85 hence, too, his insistence that utopia, namely a world where all valid human ends and objective values are simultaneously realized in an ultimate synthesis, is a conceptual impossibility. While not himself founder of any definable school or movement, Berlin’s influence as a philosopher and as a human being has been immense, not least on a variety of distinguished thinkers such as Stuart Hampshire, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Richard Wollheim, Gerry Cohen, Steven Lukes, David Pears, and many others. His general intellectual and moral impact on the life of the twentieth century as writer, diplomat, patron of music and the arts, international academic elder statesman, loved and trusted friend to the great and the humble, and dazzling lecturer, conversationalist, and animateur des idées, will furnish inexhaustible material to future historians. 

bernardus: chartrensis. of Chartres,, philosopher. He was first a teacher 111419 and later chancellor 116 of the cathedral school at Chartres, which was then an active center of learning in the liberal arts and philosophy. Bernard himself was renowned as a grammarian, i.e., as an expositor of difficult texts, and as a teacher of Plato. None of his works has survived whole, and only three fragments are preserved in works by others. He is now best known for an image recorded both by his student, John of Salisbury, and by William of Conches. In Bernard’s image, he and all his medieval contemporaries were in relation to the ancient authors like “dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants.” John of Salisbury takes the image to mean both that the medievals could see more and further than the ancients, and that they could do so only because they had been lifted up by such powerful predecessors.

bernardus: of Clairvaux, Saint – Grice’s personal saint, seeing that St. John’s was originally a Cistercian monastery almost burned by Henry VIII. Cistercian monk, mystic, and religious leader. He is most noted for his doctrine of Christian humility and his depiction of the mystical experience, which exerted considerable influence on later Christian mystics. Educated in France, he entered the monastery at Cîteaux in 1112, and three years later founded a daughter monastery at Clairvaux. According to Bernard, honest self-knowledge should reveal the extent to which we fail to be what we should be in the eyes of God. That selfknowledge should lead us to curb our pride and so become more humble. Humility is necessary for spiritual purification, which in turn is necessary for contemplation of God, the highest form of which is union with God. Consistent with orthodox Christian doctrine, Bernard maintains that mystical union does not entail identity. One does not become God; rather, one’s will and God’s will come into complete conformity. 

bernoulli’s theorem: studied by Grice in his “Probability, Desirability, Credibility” -- also called the weak law of large numbers, the principle that if a series of trials is repeated n times where a there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1, on each trial, b the probability p of 0 is the same on each trial, and c this probability is independent of the outcome of other trials, then, for arbitrary positive e, as the number n of trials is increased, the probability that the absolute value Kr/n  pK of the difference between the relative frequency r/n of 0’s in the n trials and p is less than e approaches 1. The first proof of this theorem was given by Jakob Bernoulli in Part IV of his posthumously published Ars Conjectandi of 1713. Simplifications were later constructed and his result has been generalized in a series of “weak laws of large numbers.” Although Bernoulli’s theorem derives a conclusion about the probability of the relative frequency r/n of 0’s for large n of trials given the value of p, in Ars Conjectandi and correspondence with Leibniz, Bernoulli thought it could be used to reason from information about r/n to the value of p when the latter is unknown. Speculation persists as to whether Bernoulli anticipated the inverse inference of Bayes, the confidence interval estimation of Peirce, J. Neyman, and E. S. Pearson, or the fiducial argument of R. A. Fisher. 

Bertrand’s box paradox: studied by Grice in his “Probability, Desirability, Credibility” -- a puzzle concerning conditional probability. Imagine three boxes with two drawers apiece. Each drawer of the first box contains a gold medal. Each drawer of the second contains a silver medal. One drawer of the third contains a gold medal, and the other a silver medal. At random, a box is selected and one of its drawers is opened. If a gold medal appears, what is the probability that the third box was selected? The probability seems to be ½, because the box is either the first or the third, and they seem equally probable. But a gold medal is less probable from the third box than from the first, Bernard of Chartres Bertrand’s box paradox 86   86 so the third box is actually less probable than the first. By Bayes’s theorem its probability is 1 /3. Joseph Bertrand, a  mathematician, published the paradox in Calcul des probabilités Calculus of Probabilities, 9. 

Bertrand’s paradox: an inconsistency arising from the classical definition of an event’s probability as the number of favorable cases divided by the number of possible cases. Given a circle, a chord is selected at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of an equilateral triangle inscribed in the circle? The event has these characterizations: 1 the apex angle of an isosceles triangle inscribed in the circle and having the chord as a leg is less than 60°, 2 the chord intersects the diameter perpendicular to it less than ½ a radius from the circle’s center, and 3 the chord’s midpoint lies within a circle concentric with the original and of ¼ its area. The definition thus suggests that the event’s probability is 1 /3, 1 /2, and also ¼. Joseph Bertrand, a  mathematician, published the paradox in Calcul des probabilités 9. 

Beth’s definability theorem: Grice loved an emplicit definition. a theorem for first-order logic. A theory defines a term t implicitly if and only if an explicit definition of the term, on the basis of the other primitive concepts, is entailed by the theory. A theory defines a term implicitly if any two models of the theory with the same domain and the same extension for the other primitive terms are identical, i.e., also have the same extension for the term. An explicit definition of a term is a sentence that states necessary and sufficient conditions for the term’s applicability. Beth’s theorem was implicit in a method to show independence of a term that was first used by the  logician Alessandro Padoa. Padoa suggested, in 0, that independence of a primitive algebraic term from the other terms occurring in a set of axioms can be established by two true interpretations of the axioms that differ only in the interpretation of the term whose independence has to be proven. He claimed, without proof, that the existence of two such models is not only sufficient for, but also implied by, independence. Tarski first gave a proof of Beth’s theorem in 6 for the logic of the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell, but the result was only obtained for first-order logic in 3 by E. Beth. In modern expositions Beth’s theorem is a direct implication of Craig’s interpolation theorem. In a variation on Padoa’s method, Karel de Bouvère described in 9 a one-model method to show indefinability: if the set of logical consequences of a theory formulated in terms of the remaining vocabulary cannot be extended to a model of the full theory, a term is not explicitly definable in terms of the remaining vocabulary. In the philosophy of science literature this is called a failure of Ramsey-eliminability of the term. 

bi-conditional: As Grice notes, ‘if’ is the only non-commutative operator; so trust Mill to make it commutative, “if p, q, then if q, p.” Cited by Strawson after ‘if,’ but dismissed by Grice in  his list of ‘formal devices’ as ‘too obvious.’ --  the logical operator, usually written with a triple-bar sign S or a doubleheaded arrow Q, used to indicate that two propositions have the same truth-value: that either both are true or else both are false. The term also designates a proposition having this sign, or a natural language expression of it, as its main connective; e.g., P if and only if Q. The truth table for the biconditional is The biconditional is so called because its application is logically equivalent to the conjunction ‘P-conditional-Q-and-Q-conditional-P’.  According to Pears, and rightly, too, ‘if’ conversationally implicates ‘iff.’

black box – used by Grice in his method in philosophical psychology -- a hypothetical unit specified only by functional role, in order to explain some effect or behavior. The term may refer to a single entity with an unknown structure, or unknown internal organization, which realizes some known function, or to any one of a system of such entities, whose organization and functions are inferred from the behavior of an organism or entity of which they are constituents. Within behaviorism and classical learning theory, the basic functions were taken to be generalized mechanisms governing the relationship of stimulus to response, including reinforcement, inhibition, extinction, and arousal. The organism was treated as a black box realizing these functions. Within cybernetics, though there are no simple inputoutput rules describing the organism, there is an emphasis on functional organization and feedback in controlling behavior. The components within a cybernetic system are treated as black boxes. In both cases, the details of underlying structure, mechanism, and dynamics are either unknown or regarded as unimportant. 

Blackburn’s skull. Blackburn's "one-off predicament" of communicating without a shared language illustrates how Grice's theory can be applied to iconic signals such as the drawing of a skull to wam of danger. See his Spreading the Word. III. 112.

blindsight: studied by Grice and Warnock, “Visa.” -- a residual visual capacity resulting from lesions in certain areas of the brain the striate cortex, area 17. Under routine clinical testing, persons suffering such lesions appear to be densely blind in particular regions of the visual field. Researchers have long recognized that, in primates, comparable lesions do not result in similar deficits. It has seemed unlikely that this disparity could be due to differences in brain function, however. And, indeed, when human subjects are tested in the way non-human subjects are tested, the disparity vanishes. Although subjects report that they can detect nothing in the blind field, when required to “guess” at properties of items situated there, they perform remarkably well. They seem to “know” the contents of the blind field while remaining unaware that they know, often expressing astonishment on being told the results of testing in the blind field. 

bloch: e., philosopher studied by H. P. Grice for his “ontological marxism.” influenced by Marxism, his views went beyond Marxism as he matured. He fled G.y in the 0s, but returned after World War II to a professorship in East G.y, where his increasingly unorthodox ideas were eventually censured by the Communist authorities, forcing a move to West G.y in the 0s. His major work, The Principle of Hope 459, is influenced by G. idealism, Jewish mysticism, Neoplatonism, utopianism, and numerous other sources besides Marxism. Humans are essentially unfinished, moved by a cosmic impulse, “hope,” a tendency in them to strive for the as-yet-unrealized, which manifests itself as utopia, or vision of future possibilities. Despite his atheism, Bloch wished to retrieve the sense of self-transcending that he saw in the religious and mythical traditions of humankind. His ideas have consequently influenced theology as well as philosophy, e.g. the “theology of hope” of Jurgen Moltmann.

blondel: m. cf. Hampshire, “Thought and action,” philosopher who discovered the deist background of human action. In his main work, Action 3, 2d rev. ed. 0, Blondel held that action is part of the very nature of human beings and as such becomes an object of philosophy; through philosophy, action should find its meaning, i.e. realize itself rationally. An appropriate phenomenology of action through phenomenological description uncovers the phenomenal level of action but points beyond it. Such a supraphenomenal sense of action provides it a metaphysical status. This phenomenology of action rests on an immanent dialectics of action: a gap between the aim of the action and its realization. This gap, while dissatisfying to the actor, also drives him toward new activities. The only immanent solution of this dialectics and its consequences is a transcendent one. We have to realize that we, like other humans, cannot grasp our own activities and must accept our limitations and our finitude as well as the insufficiency of our philosophy, which is now understood as a philosophy of insufficiency and points toward the existence of the supernatural element in every human act, namely God. Human activity is the outcome of divine grace. Through action bit Blondel, Maurice 90   90 one touches the existence of God, something not possible by logical argumentation. In the later phase of his development Blondel deserted his early “anti-intellectualism” and stressed the close relation between thought and action, now understood as inseparable and mutually interrelated. He came to see philosophy as a rational instrument of understanding one’s actions as well as one’s insufficiency.

bodin: j., Discussed by H. P. Grice in his exploration on legal versus moral right. -- philosopher whose philosophy centers on the concept of sovereignty. His Six livres de la république 1577 defines a state as constituted by common public interests, families, and the sovereign. The sovereign is the lawgiver, who stands beyond the absolute rights he possesses; he must, however, follow the law of God, natural law, and the constitution. The ideal state was for Bodin a monarchy that uses aristocratic and democratic structures of government for the sake of the common good. In order to achieve a broader empirical picture of politics Bodin used historical comparisons. This is methodologically reflected in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem 1566. Bodin was clearly a theorist of absolutism. As a member of the Politique group he played a practical role in emancipating the state from the church. His thinking was influenced by his experience of civil war. In his Heptaplomeres posthumous he pleaded for tolerance with respect to all religions, including Islam and Judaism. As a public prosecutor, however, he wrote a manual for judges in witchcraft trials De la démonomanie des sorciers, 1580. By stressing the peacemaking role of a strong state Bodin was a forerunner of Hobbes. 

boehme: j. Cited by Grice in “From Genesis to Revelations” -- protestant speculative mystic. Influenced especially by Paracelsus, Boehme received little formal education, but was successful enough as a shoemaker to devote himself to his writing, explicating his religious experiences. He published little in his lifetime, though enough to attract charges of heresy from local clergy. He did gather followers, and his works were published after his death. His writings are elaborately symbolic rather than argumentative, but respond deeply to fundamental problems in the Christian worldview. He holds that the Godhead, omnipotent will, is as nothing to us, since we can in no way grasp it. The Mysterium Magnum, the ideal world, is conceived in God’s mind through an impulse to self-revelation. The actual world, separate from God, is created through His will, and seeks to return to the peace of the Godhead. The world is good, as God is, but its goodness falls away, and is restored at the end of history, though not entirely, for some souls are damned eternally. Human beings enjoy free will, and create themselves through rebirth in faith. The Fall is necessary for the selfknowledge gained in recovery from it. Recognition of one’s hidden, free self is a recognition of God manifested in the world, so that human salvation completes God’s act of self-revelation. It is also a recognition of evil rooted in the blind will underlying all individual existence, without which there would be nothing except the Godhead. Boehme’s works influenced Hegel and the later Schelling. 

bœthius: Grice loved Boethius – “He made Aristotle intelligible at Clifton!” -- Anicius Manlius Severinus, Roman philosopher and Aristotelian translator and commentator. He was born into a wealthy patrician family in Rome and had a distinguished political career under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric before being arrested and executed on charges of treason. His logic and philosophical theology contain important contributions to the philosophy of the late classical and early medieval periods, and his translations of and commentaries on Aristotle profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, particularly in the medieval Latin West. His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, composed during his imprisonment, is a moving reflection on the nature of human happiness and the problem of evil and contains classic discussions of providence, fate, chance, and the apparent incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free choice. He was known during his own lifetime, however, as a brilliant scholar whose knowledge of the Grecian language and ancient Grecian philosophy set him apart from his Latin contemporaries. He conceived his scholarly career as devoted to preserving and making accessible to the Latin West the great philosophical achievement of ancient Greece. To this end he announced an ambitious plan to translate into Latin and write commenbodily continuity Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 91   91 taries on all of Plato and Aristotle, but it seems that he achieved this goal only for Aristotle’s Organon. His extant translations include Porphyry’s Isagoge an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories and Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. He wrote two commentaries on the Isagoge and On Interpretation and one on the Categories, and we have what appear to be his notes for a commentary on the Prior Analytics. His translation of the Posterior Analytics and his commentary on the Topics are lost. He also commented on Cicero’s Topica and wrote his own treatises on logic, including De syllogismis hypotheticis, De syllogismis categoricis, Introductio in categoricos syllogismos, De divisione, and De topicis differentiis, in which he elaborates and supplements Aristotelian logic. Boethius shared the common Neoplatonist view that the Platonist and Aristotelian systems could be harmonized by following Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy and Plato in metaphysics and theology. This plan for harmonization rests on a distinction between two kinds of forms: 1 forms that are conjoined with matter to constitute bodies  these, which he calls “images” imagines, correspond to the forms in Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of corporeal substances; and 2 forms that are pure and entirely separate from matter, corresponding to Plato’s ontologically separate Forms. He calls these “true forms” and “the forms themselves.” He holds that the former, “enmattered” forms depend for their being on the latter, pure forms. Boethius takes these three sorts of entities  bodies, enmattered forms, and separate forms  to be the respective objects of three different cognitive activities, which constitute the three branches of speculative philosophy. Natural philosophy is concerned with enmattered forms as enmattered, mathematics with enmattered forms considered apart from their matter though they cannot be separated from matter in actuality, and theology with the pure and separate forms. He thinks that the mental abstraction characteristic of mathematics is important for understanding the Peripatetic account of universals: the enmattered, particular forms found in sensible things can be considered as universal when they are considered apart from the matter in which they inhere though they cannot actually exist apart from matter. But he stops short of endorsing this moderately realist Aristotelian account of universals. His commitment to an ontology that includes not just Aristotelian natural forms but also Platonist Forms existing apart from matter implies a strong realist view of universals. With the exception of De fide catholica, which is a straightforward credal statement, Boethius’s theological treatises De Trinitate, Utrum Pater et Filius, Quomodo substantiae, and Contra Euthychen et Nestorium show his commitment to using logic and metaphysics, particularly the Aristotelian doctrines of the categories and predicables, to clarify and resolve issues in Christian theology. De Trinitate, e.g., includes a historically influential discussion of the Aristotelian categories and the applicability of various kinds of predicates to God. Running through these treatises is his view that predicates in the category of relation are unique by virtue of not always requiring for their applicability an ontological ground in the subjects to which they apply, a doctrine that gave rise to the common medieval distinction between so-called real and non-real relations. Regardless of the intrinsic significance of Boethius’s philosophical ideas, he stands as a monumental figure in the history of medieval philosophy rivaled in importance only by Aristotle and Augustine. Until the recovery of the works of Aristotle in the mid-twelfth century, medieval philosophers depended almost entirely on Boethius’s translations and commentaries for their knowledge of pagan ancient philosophy, and his treatises on logic continued to be influential throughout the Middle Ages. The preoccupation of early medieval philosophers with logic and with the problem of universals in particular is due largely to their having been tutored by Boethius and Boethius’s Aristotle. The theological treatises also received wide attention in the Middle Ages, giving rise to a commentary tradition extending from the ninth century through the Renaissance and shaping discussion of central theological doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation.