Modio: Frontespizio interno
della sua opera più nota, Il Convito overo del peso della moglie. Giovanni
Battista Modio (talvolta anche noto coi nomi Gio. Battista Modio e
Giovambattista Modio, nella versione latinizzata Iohannis Baptista Madius
oppure Io. Baptista Madius; Santa Severina, dopo il 1500Roma, 12 settembre
1560) medico, filosofo, scrittore, biografo e letterato italiano; fu tra i primi
seguaci di Filippo Neri. Originario di
Santa Severina, borgo collinare della Calabria Ulteriore, fu avviato agli studi
di filosofia presso l'Archiginnasio di Napoli; in seguito passò a Roma, dove si
avviò agli studi in medicina divenendo allievo di Francesco Fusconi fino al
1553, anno della morte di quest'ultimo.
In quegli anni Modio iniziò a frequentare gli ambienti accademici, dove
entrò in contatto con alcuni dei maggiori esponenti di spicco di quell'epoca
come Francesco Maria Molza e Claudio Tolomei.
Pubblicò la sua prima opera letteraria più famosa dal titolo Il convito,
overo del peso della moglie, un dialogo diegetico ambientato a Roma durante il
carnevale della città capitolina del 1554, in cui viene trattato il tema delle
corna durante un convivio presieduto dall'allora vescovo di Piacenza Catalano
Trivulzio e a cui parteciparono anche Lattanzio Gambara, Jacopo Marmitta,
Trifone Benci, Gabriele Selvago, Antonio Francesco Raineri e Giovanni Paolo
Cesario. Fu altresì grande estimatore
degli scritti di Alessandro Piccolomini.
Durante la stesura in lingua volgare di un Operetta de’ Sogni, il Modio
si ammalò di febbre altissima; si spense dopo qualche giorno a Roma il 12
settembre 1560, nella tenuta di palazzo Ricci in via Giulia. Opere Giovanni Battista Modio, Il convito,
overo del peso della moglie, Roma, per Valerio, e Luigi Dorici fratelli Bressani,
1554. Giovanni Battista Modio, Il Tevere ... Dove si ragiona in generale della
natura di tutte le acque, et in particolare di quella del fiume di Roma, Roma,
appresso a Vincenzo Luchini, 1556. Giovanni Battista Modio, Origine del
proverbio che si suol dire "anzi corna che croci", Roma, A. degli
Antonii, 1558. Jacopone da Todi, I Cantici del beato Iacopone da Todi, con
diligenza ristampati, con la gionta di alcuni discorsi sopra di essi. Et con la
vita sua nuovamente posta in luce, Giovanni Battista Modio, Roma, appresso Hi
Salviano, 1558. Note Prospetto autore,
su edit16.iccu..it. 7 dicembre . Modio,
Il Tevere, cit., c. 45r Anno di
pubblicazione della medesima opera. Altri progetti Collabora a Wikisource
Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Giovanni Battista Modio Gennaro Cassiani, Giovanni Battista Modio, in
Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
Moiso: Francesco Moiso (Torino), filosofo. Esperto
di storia della filosofia e della scienza di fama internazionale, ha insegnato
nelle Torino, Macerata e Milano (1991-2001). Le sue ricerche hanno riguardato
la filosofia post-kantiana, con particolare attenzione al pensiero di Salomon
Maimon, l'idealismo tedesco, con ricerche su Kant, Fichte, Schelling e Hegel,
Goethe e l'età goethiana, Achim von Arnim, il concetto di esperienza ed
esperimento nel Romanticismo, la filosofia di Nietzsche nel suo rapporto con le
scienze, il pensiero di Ernst Mach e di Ortega y Gasset. È stato membro della
Schelling Kommission per l'edizione critica delle opere di Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling. Ha partecipato alla Enciclopedia Multimediale delle Scienze
Filosofiche di Rai Educational con due interventi sulla La filosofia della
natura tedesca e sulla "Scienza specialistica e visione della natura
nell’età goethiana". Presso l'Udine è stato istituito il CIRMCentro
Interdipartimentale di Ricerca sulla Morfologia “Francesco Moiso”.
Fondamentali, tra le altre opere, per la ricerca filosofico-scientifica le 210
pagine dedicate a Magnetismus, Elektrizität, Galvanismus, in F.W.J. Schelling,
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ergänzungsband zu Werke Band 5. bis 9.
Wissenschaftshistorischer Bericht zu Schellings naturphilosophischen Schriften
1797-1800, Stuttgart, Frommann-Holzboog, 1994,
165-375 e le oltre 100 pagine dedicate a Preformazione ed epigenesi
nell'età goethiana, in Il problema del vivente tra Settecento e Ottocento.
Aspetti filosofici, biologici e medici, V Verra, Roma, Istituto della
Enciclopedia Italiana (1992), 119-220.
Caratteristica degli studi di Moiso è la connessione tra ricerca
storico-filosofica e impianto teoretico, fatto particolarmente evidente nel
volume su Schelling del 1991. Monografie La filosofia di Salomone Maimon,
Milano, Mursia, 1972 Natura e cultura nel primo Fichte, Milano, Mursia, 1979
Vita natura libertà: Schelling, 1795-1809, Milano, Mursia, 1990 Preformazione
ed epigenesi nell'età goethiana, in II problema del vivente tra Settecento e
Ottocento. Aspetti filosofici, biologici e medici, V Verra, Roma, Istituto
della Enciclopedia Italiana (1992), 119-220.
Magnetismus, Elektrizität, Galvanismus, in F.W.J. Schelling,
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ergänzungsband zu Werke Band 5. bis 9.
Wissenschaftshistorischer Bericht zu Schellings naturphilosophischen Schriften
1797-1800, Stuttgart, Frommann-Holzboog, 1994,
165-375. Nietzsche e le scienze, Milano, Cuem, 1999. Goethe tra arte e
scienza, Milano, Cuem, 2001. Goethe: la natura e le sue forme, edizione postuma
Cornelia Diekamp, Milano, Mimesis, 2002. La filosofia della mitologia di F.W.J.
Schelling, Matteo Vincenzo d'Alfonso, Milano, Mimesis, (prima edizione 1991). Altre opere Schellings
Elektrizitätslehre 1797-1799, in: Heckmann, Reinhard; Krings, Hermann; Meyer,
Rudolf W. (Hg.): Natur und Subjetivität. Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der
Naturphilosophie des jungen Schelling, Stuttgart 1985, 59-97. Die Hegelsche Theorie der Physik und
der Chemie in ihrer Beziehung zu Schellings Naturphilosophie, in Hegels
Philosophie der Natur, hrsg. von R.-P. Horstmann und M.J. Petry. Stuttgart
1986, 54-87. Il nulla e l'assoluto. La
Wissenschaftslehre 1805 e Philosophie und Religion, in "Annuario
Filosofico", 4(1988), 179-245.
Teleologia dopo Kant, In: Giudizio e interpretazione in Kant. atti del Convegno
Internazionale per il II Centenario della Critica del Giudizio di Immanuel Kant
(Macerata, 3-5 ottobre 1990, Genova 1992,
37-94 Idee in Schelling, in IDEAVI Colloquio InternazionaleRoma, 5-7
gennaio 1989. M. Fattori e M. Bianchi, Olschki ed, Firenze 1990, 329-392.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, "Ricerche filosofiche sull'essenza
della libertà umana: e gli oggetti che vi sono connessi", Commentario A.
Pieper e O. Höffe, edizione italiana F. Moiso e F, Viganò, Milano, Guerini e
Associati, 1995. Introduzione. Le Ricerche: una svolta nel pensiero di
Schelling?, in *Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, "Ricerche filosofiche
sull'essenza della libertà umana: e gli oggetti che vi sono connessi",
Commentario A. Pieper e O. Höffe, edizione italiana F. Moiso e F, Viganò,
Milano, Guerini e Associati, 1995,
13-27. Dio come persona, in *Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling,
"Ricerche filosofiche sull'essenza della libertà umana: e gli oggetti che
vi sono connessi", Commentario A. Pieper e O. Höffe, edizione italiana F.
Moiso e F, Viganò, Milano, Guerini e Associati, 1995, 273-299. De Candolle et Goethe. Botanique et
Philosophie de la Nature entre la France et l'Allemagne, in Sciences et
techniques en perspective, 1.1 (1997): 85-123. Kants naturphilosophisches Erbe
bei Schelling und von Arnim, In "Fessellos durch die Systeme".
frühromantisches Naturdenken im Umfeld von Arnim, Ritter und Schelling,
StuttgartBad Cannstatt 1997, 203-274. La
Naturphilosophie e i paradossi dell'infinito, in: "Romanticismo e
modernità", Torino 1997, 143-205.
La scoperta dell’osso intermascellare e la questione del tipo osteologico, in
G. Giorello, A. Grieco (eds.), Goethe scienziato, 298–337. Torino, Einaudi, 1998. Schelling:
l'antico nella filosofia dell'arte, in "Rivista di estetica", Torino,
10(1999), 25-48. Arnims Kraftlehre, in:
"Frische Jugend, reich an Hoffen"Der junge Arnim. Zernikower
Kolloquium der Internationalen Arnim-Gesellschaft, Tübingen 2000, 85-120 Ortega y Gasset pensatore e narratore
dell'Europa(Milano, 1314 novembre 1998, Gargnano del Garda, 16-18 novembre
1998) Milano: Cisalpino, 2001 (Acme / Quaderni; 48) E ho visto le idee
addirittura con gli occhi, in: Goethe: la natura e le sue forme (Atti del
Convegno Arte, scienza e natura in Goethe; Torino 2000), Milano, Mimesis, 2002,
Cornelia Diekamp, 9-17.
Experientia/experimentum nel Romanticismo, in M. Veneziani (ed.), Experientia,
Firenze: Olschki, 2002, 435-522.
L'albero della malattia. Motivi della medicina in età romantica, in Atti della
sofferenza. Atti del seminario di studi. Udine 18-19 novembre 1999, C. Casale e
G. Garelli, Itinerari, La percezione del
fenomeno originario e la sua descrizione, in: Arte, scienza e natura in Goethe.
Torino 2005, 293-310 R. Pettoello, Francesco Moiso, In memoriam,
"Acme", LV (2002) 1, 321-322.
D'Alfonso, Matteo V., In guisa di introduzione. L'interpretazione moisiana
della "filosofia della luce" di Fichte, in "Rivista di storia
della filosofia" (2002). Marco Ivaldo, La fichtiana dottrina della scienza
1805 e l'interpretazione di Francesco Moiso, In memoria di Francesco Moiso. La
filosofia della natura, in "Annuario Filosofico", N. 19 (2003) Paul
Ziche, "Un terzo più alto, la loro sintesi comune". Teorie della
mediazione in Schelling, In memoria di Francesco Moiso. La filosofia della
natura, in "Annuario Filosofico", N. 19 (2003) Stefano Poggi, Dopo Schelling,
dopo Goethe. Francesco Moiso lettore di Mach, in In memoria di Francesco Moiso.
La filosofia della natura, in "Annuario Filosofico", N. 19 (2003)
Federico Vercellone, Da Goethe a Nietzsche. Francesco Moiso tra morfologia ed
ermeneutica, in In memoria di Francesco Moiso. La filosofia della natura, in
"Annuario Filosofico", N. 19 (2003) P. Giordanetti, "Francesco
Moiso interprete di Kant", in Rivista di storia della filosofia, n. 2-3,
2004, 559-578. Gian Franco Frigo, Natura
della forma e storicità della sua comprensione, in Francesco Moiso:
testimonianze di colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005, Dietrich von
Engelhardt, La responsabilità dell'uomo per la natura nel pensiero degli
scienziati romantici intorno al 1800, in Francesco Moiso: testimonianze di
colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005,
29-48 Flavio Cuniberto, Corpo e mistero, in Francesco Moiso:
testimonianze di colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005, 49-52 Matteo Vincenzo d'Alfonso, I corsi di
Francesco Moiso: una lezione di ricerca, in Francesco Moiso: testimonianze di
colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005,
53.62 Piero Giordanetti, Francesco Moiso e il kantismo di Nietzsche, in
Francesco Moiso: testimonianze di colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben,
2005, 63-68 Luca Guzzardi, Tra filosofia
della natura e morfologia dei saperi: un ruolo per l'enciclopedismo, in
Francesco Moiso: testimonianze di colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005,
69-80. Federica Viganò, Morfologia e filosofia: la filosofia della natura come
"tropica" del reale, in Francesco Moiso: testimonianze di colleghi e
allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005, 81-94
Andrea Potestio (Tesi di laurea su Lo Schelling di Heidegger), in Francesco
Moiso: testimonianze di colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005, 95-98. Alessandro Mainardi (Tesi di laurea su
L'estetica pittorica di Caspar David Friedrich), in Francesco Moiso:
testimonianze di colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005, 99-102. Alessio Cazzaniga (Tesi di laurea su
La filosofia dell'evoluzione di Miguel de Unamuno), in Francesco Moiso:
testimonianze di colleghi e allievi, Torino, Trauben, 2005, 103 ss., La natura osservata e compresa:
saggi in memoria di Francesco Moiso, Federica Viganò, Milano, Guerini, 2005 N.
Moro, In ricordo di Francesco Moiso, in "Rivista di Storia della
Filosofia", 2 (), 391-392. Joerg
Jantzen, In memoriam: Francesco Moiso verstorben In ricordo di Francesco Moiso.
Università degli Studi di Milano, Sala Crociera Alta, 16 novembre Francesco Moiso, La rivoluzione di
Lavoisier, in Enciclopedia Multimediale delle Scienze Filosofiche Francesco
Moiso, Goethe e la natura, in Enciclopedia Multimediale delle Scienze
Filosofiche Francesco Moiso, Goethe poeta e scienziato, in Enciclopedia
Multimediale delle Scienze Filosofiche Francesco Moiso, La riculturalizzazione
della scienza, in Enciclopedia Multimediale delle Scienze Filosofiche
PHILOSOPHIEIN DER MITTE EUROPÄISCHER KULTUR Die Philosophie des Deutschen
Idealismus im europäischen Vergleich: Entstehung, Rezeption, Wechselwirkung und
heutige Wege und Ziele der Forschung Socrates–Erasmus Intensivprogramm 19992002
Schelling. Edition und Archiv Scheda biografica sul sito delle edizioni Mimesis
Citazioni di opere di Francesco Moiso su Google Scholar Citazioni di Francesco
Moiso su Google Citazioni di Francesco Moiso sul sito della Bayerische Akademie
der WissenschaftenSchellingEdition und Archiv.
Moleschott Jacob
Moleschott Jacopo Moleschott Dr. Jacob
Moleschott Senatore del Regno d'Italia LegislatureXIII Dati generali UniversitàFreiherr-vom-Stein-Gymnasium
Professionefisiologo e filosofo Jakob Moleschott (Hertogenbosch), filosofo. Naturalizzato
italiano. Fu senatore del regno d'Italia nella XIII legislatura. Jacobus
Albertus Willebrordus Moleschott nasce a Hertogenbosch il 9 agosto del 1822, di
famiglia agiata e di confessione cattolica. Moleschott vive la sua infanzia
circondato da giardini in cui ama osservare composizioni floreali di ogni
genere, dedicandosi alla lettura generalmente durante le ore serali. A quattro
anni è perfettamente in grado di leggere, a otto anni il suo cuore di olandese
si è già acceso agli interessi della rivoluzione belga del 1830. Il padre,
anch'egli dottore, figlio di un importante farmacista, è dedito all'attività
professionale dedicandosi all'educazione del figlio nella biblioteca privata di
famiglia durante la sera. Jacob Moleschott si trasferisce a Kleve per
frequentare il liceo ginnasio. Contrariamente a quanto si dice di lui,
Moleschott non si considera un ragazzo prodigio, l'allora quindicenne futuro
dottore si dedica incessantemente agli studi classici e umanistici,
approfondendo la conoscenza della lingua latina e tedesca. Sotto la guida del
Prof. Fleischer viene educato soprattutto ai classici romani; spesso accompagna
il professore in lunghe passeggiate che hanno come scopo di discussione
argomenti prettamente filosofici. Colpito fortemente dalle parole del
professore: «Non reputo nessuno al di sopra e al di sotto di me.» comincia a
seguire una dottrina liberale che è ben lontana dall'insegnamento teologico
materno. Dopo la laurea in medicina conseguita ad Heidelberg nel 1845 egli vi
ritorna nel 1847 come docente di fisiologia. Interessato fin da giovane anche
alla filosofia, pubblica nel 1852 l'opera scientifico-filosofica dal titolo Der
Kreislauf des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig's chemische Briefe
(ed. Zabern, Mainz, 1852) tradotto in italiano con Circolazione della vita:
risposte fisiologiche alle lettere sulla chimica di Liebig e poi semplificato
in Il circolo della vita. Costruisce un rapporto di amicizia con i suoi
professori contribuendo a diverse scoperte importanti, quale l'utilizzo di
sostanze organiche della terra da parte delle piante, oscurando la teoria del
dr. Liebig che aveva ipotizzato il contrario. Sostiene l'esame di abilitazione
professionale a Leida e inizia l'esercizio della professione medica a Utrecht.
Nonostante fosse tornato in patria, Moleschott è dell'idea che i Paesi Bassi
avrebbero dovuto cominciare ad affiancarsi all'idea tedesca d'insegnamento
della medicina, cercando di apprendere da essa i segreti e le meraviglie del
sistema di ricerca dell'"oltre Reno". Non ha mai visto realizzare il
suo sogno, disgustato soprattutto dal nepotismo che nei Paesi Bassi ormai va
sviluppandosi sempre di più. Nonostante gli avessero proposto il ruolo di
lettore per la medicina legale decide di abbandonare i Paesi Bassi,
ritenendo: «Questa disciplina non avrebbe mai potuto attrarmi, neppure se
fossi rimasto volentieri a Utrecht. Essa obbliga i suoi cultori a esercitarla
senza dedicarsi ad alcuna investigazione, senz'altre vedute». Senza
indugiare Moleschott si trasferisce nuovamente a Heidelberg dove gli viene
offerta prima la possibilità d'insegnare anatomia comparata, poi la cattedra di
chimica fisiologica. Durante tutto il suo periodo tedesco Moleschott tende ad
accrescere sempre di più la sua conoscenza riguardo alla filosofia, essendo
altresì sicuro che, insieme alla medicina, formano un bipolo inscindibile;
solamente espandendo la conoscenza in entrambi i campi si può giungere a un
miglioramento della conoscenza. L'Heidelberg è ricca di laboratori occupati per
la ricerca in altri campi, Moleschott è solito tenere saltuariamente lezioni di
chimica applicata alla fisiologia in casa sua, dove era riuscito ad allestire
un piccolo laboratorio, fornendosi degli attrezzi necessari a piccole
sperimentazioni e dimostrazioni. Durante la sua permanenza a Heidelberg scrive
Le lettere fisiologiche, dove tratta dai temi di fisiologia e chimica, ai temi
sul materialismo. Essendo i temi materialisti di spiccata crudezza, ripresi nel
libro da lui scritto, Circolazioni della vita, Moleschott fu presto allontanato
dall'università con l'accusa di fuorviare le menti giovani e portarle ad
un'accettazione inconfutabile della non esistenza di Dio. Nonostante le risposte
contrarie all'accusa di studenti che seguono attentamente il corso, con
rammarico il "medico materialista" lascia la Germania e si
trasferisce in Svizzera, subentrando al prof. Karl Ludwig come insegnante di
fisiologia presso l'Zurigo. L'ormai trentenne Moleschott sbalordisce il
pubblico zurighese con i suoi trattati di fisiologia meccanica, guadagnandosi
un rapporto di amicizia, e di stima incondizionata, con il professore di
lettere Francesco De Sanctis che lo definirà: «...autonomo e bastante a se stesso,
che ha nella natura i suoi fini e i suoi mezzi le leggi del suo sviluppo, della
sua grandezza e della sua decadenza come uomo e come società». Non
attribuisce a Moleschott la parola materialista; il medico credeva ciecamente
nell'esistenza dello spirito nell'uomo, rimarcando però un'assenza di nesso tra
spirito e Dio. Nel 1860 gli viene offerta la cattedra di fisiologia all'Torino:
egli accetta e si trasferisce quindi in questa città, dove insegna dal 1861 al
1870. Diventato cittadino italiano, egli associa all'attività accademica quella
politica. Passa poi ad insegnare all'Roma e diventa senatore del regno nel
1876. Fu membro della Massoneria. Muore nella capitale nel maggio
1893. Il pensiero materialista Durante tutto il periodo dello sviluppo
industriale, che ha interessato l'Europa intorno ai primi decenni del secondo
Ottocento, Jakob Moleschott è stato considerato il teorico dello sviluppo
tecnologico in ambito scientifico. Molte furono le critiche avanzate al
fisiologo olandese, il quale, secondo Liebig, dopo i primi consensi in ambito
fisiologico, mosse l'accusa di "dilettantismo" a quest'ultimo,
appoggiato da moltissimi prestigiosi ricercatori dell'epoca. Secondo Lange,
l'atteggiamento degli oppositori di Moleschott si riferisce all'attitudine
mentale di quest'ultimo nel campo della ricerca; utilizzando le sue
parole: «Se i risultati della ricerca potessero essere interpretati solo
dagli inventori […] si metterebbe in pericolo il concatenamento sistematico
delle scienze e della cultura superiore dello spirito in generale. […] Colui
che percorre attentamente tutto il dominio delle scienze della natura per farsi
un'idea dell'insieme, apprezzerà spesso l'importanza di un fatto isolato meglio
di colui che lo ha scoperto.» Moleschott venne, dunque, considerato più
un cultore della scienza medica che uno scienziato. Uomo di scienza, medico e,
in particolare, fisiologo, Moleschott possiede anche una mente filosofica.
Egli stesso dirà «La fisiologia, intesa come fisica e chimica applicate alla biologia,
è per se stessa scienza filosofica, atta a consentire una concezione unitaria
della natura» (J. Moleschott, Circolazione della vita). La materia è dunque
scientificamente conosciuta nella sua essenza: essa è eterna e dotata di forze
e questa forza è presente sia in ambito fisico, che chimico, che biologico. La
cosiddetta forza vitale non è assolutamente immateriale per Moleschott, anzi,
egli la considera proprietà della materia, un prodotto di conversioni tra altre
forze materiali. La conversione e riconversione di tali forme di forza crea
dinamicità intrinseca, ovvero la vita, ed essa è perennemente continua e
incessantemente in circolazione. Differente è nel modo in cui colpisce gli
esseri viventi e esseri non viventi: i primi acquisiscono irritabilità, psichicità,
sensazione, movimento, i secondi invece acquisiscono essenzialmente fisicità e
chimismo. Il principio fondamentale su cui si basa la teoria materialista del
celebre fisiologo si trova nella perenne metamorfosi: ovvero la perenne
trasformazione non solo nel campo della chimica, del magnetismo,
dell'elettricità, della cinematica e della dinamica, ma anche attraverso
l'azione della coppia nascita-morte. Nel pensiero di Moleschott il ricambio
organico consiste in un vai e vieni bilanciato tra nascita e morte, quindi, tra
vita e non vita. Vita e morte sono due modi di essere materiali in continuo e
reciproco scambio; «...la vita si rigenera attraverso la morte, che è garanzia
della vita» (J. Moleschott, Circolazione della vita). Tutto ciò viene spiegato
attraverso un semplice processo; in natura gli organismi in decomposizione
fecondano il terreno e questo a sua volta produce e nutre nuovi organismi.
Nonostante la forte tendenza al pensiero materialista utilizza nei suoi libri
un'intonazione tutt'altro che distaccata, quasi romantica. La natura è il luogo
della circolazione della materia e quindi della vita, entrambe vi circolano
animandola, e la loro eterna circolazione è considerata l'anima del mondo.
Elementi triadici sono compresenti nella teoria del materialismo di Moleschott.
La grande triade materialistaforma, composizione e funzionee della conoscenza
scientificachimica, fisica, morfologia, fisiologia- sono fra loro strettamente
integrate. Anima del mondo, ciclicità, polarità, triadismi, metamorfosi sono
tutti moduli operanti del nucleo teorico del "materialismo
scientifico". Opere Kritische Betrachtung von Liebig's Theorie der
Pflanzenernährung, mit besonderer Angabe der empirisch constatirten Thatsachen,
Harlem, Erben F. Bohn, 1845. Die Physiologie der Nahrungsmittel. Ein Handbuch
der Diätetik, Darmstadt, C.W. Leske, 1850. Physiologie des Stoffwechsels in
Pflanzen und Thieren, Erlangen, F. Enke, 1851. Licht und Leben. Rede beim
Antritt des öffentlichen Lehramts zur Erforschung der Natur des Menschen an der
Züricher Hochschule, Frankfurt a. M., Meidinger, 1856. Physiologisches
Skizzenbuch, Gießen, Roth, 1860. Pathologie und Physiologie. Vortrag bei der
Wiedereröffnung der Vorlesungen über Physiologie an der Turiner Hochschule am
2. Dezember 1865 gehalten, Gießen, Roth, 1866. La circolazione della vita,
traduzione di Cesare Lombroso, Milano, G. Brigola, 1869. Dell'alimentazione.
Trattato popolare, traduzione di Giuseppe Bellucci, Milano, Treves, 1871.
Untersuchungen zur Naturlehre des Menschen und der Thiere, Frankfurt a. M.,
Meidinger, 1857-1892. Per gli amici miei. Ricordi autobiografici, traduzione di
Elsa Patrizi-Moleschott, Palermo, Milano, R. Sandron, 1902. Note G. Cosmacini, Il medico materialista. Vita e
pensiero di Jakob Moleschott13. G. Cosmacini,
Il medico materialista. Vita e pensiero di Jakob Moleschott35. J. Moleschott, Circolazione della vita. G. Cosmacini, Il medico materialista. Vita e
pensiero di Jakob Moleschott61. Aldo A.
Mola,Storia della Massoneria in Italia dal 1717 al , Bompiani/Giunti,
Firenze-Milano, 160. A. Lange, Storia
del materialismo. G. Cosmacini, Il
medico materialista. Vita e pensiero di Jakob Moleschott156. Marcel Desittere, Un carteggio privato della
famiglia Moleschott conservato a Bologna, in «Filologia critica», XXVIII, fasc.
1 (2003), 96-113. Giorgio Cosmacini, Il
medico materialista. Vita e pensiero di Jakob Moleschott, RomaBari, Laterza,
2005. Alessandra Gissi, MOLESCHOTT, Jacob, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 75, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana, . 2 novembre . Altri progetti
Collabora a Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Jacob
Moleschott Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o
altri file su Jacob Moleschott Jacob
Moleschott, su Treccani.itEnciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana. Jacob Moleschott, in
Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. (IT, DE, FR) Jacob Moleschott, su
hls-dhs-dss.ch, Dizionario storico della Svizzera. Jacob Moleschott, su Enciclopedia
Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Opere di Jacob Moleschott, su openMLOL, Horizons Unlimited srl. Opere di
Jacob Moleschott, . Jacob Moleschott, su
Senatori d'Italia, Senato della Repubblica.
Fondo speciale Jacob Moleschott. Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio di
Bologna, su badigit.comune.bologna.it. Scheda sul sito dell'Accademia delle
Scienze di Torino, su torinoscienza.it.
Mondin: Battista Mondin (Monte di Malo), filosofo.
Dottore di Filosofia e Religione a Harvard. È stato decano della Facoltà di
Filosofia presso la Pontificia Università Urbaniana di Roma. Mondin membro
della Congregazione dei Missionari Saveriani. Nei suoi studi, le principali
figure di riferimento sono state Tommaso d'Aquino e Paul Tillich, da cui ha
tratto l'ideale di un accordo e di un mutuo sostegno tra filosofia e
teologia. Pubblicazioni Etica Etica e politica Filosofia Antropologia
filosofica. Manuale di filosofia sistematica La Metafisica di S. Tommaso
D'Aquino e i suoi interpreti Storia dell'antropologia filosofica Antropologia
filosofica e filosofia della cultura e dell'educazione Epistemologia e
cosmologia Logica, semantica e gnoseologia Ontologia e metafisica Storia della
metafisica (1) Storia della metafisica (2) Storia della metafisica (3)
Ermeneutica, metafisica, analogia in s. Tommaso History of mediaeval philosophy
(A) Storia della filosofia medievale Dizionario enciclopedico di filosofia,
teologia e morale Il sistema filosofico di Tommaso d'Aquino Corso di storia
della filosofia (1) Corso di storia della filosofia (2) Corso di storia della
filosofia (3) L'uomo: chi è? Introduzione alla filosofia. Problemi, sistemi,
filosofi La filosofia dell'essere di S. Tommaso d'Aquino Teologia Maria madre
della Chiesa. Piccolo trattato di mariologia Battista Mondin, Il ritorno degli
angeli : trattato di angelologia, Roma, Pro Sanctitate, Ospitato su archive.is.
Dizionario storico e teologico delle missioni Dizionario enciclopedico del
pensiero di san Tommaso d'Aquino (PDF online) Essere cristiani oggi. Guida al
cristianesimo Il problema di Dio. Filosofia della religione e teologia
filosofica La cristologia di san Tommaso d'Aquino. Origine, dottrine
principali, attualità Storia della teologia (1) Storia della teologia (2)
Storia della teologia (3) Storia della teologia (4) Gli abitanti del cielo Gesù
Cristo salvatore dell'uomo La chiesa sacramento d'amore La trinità mistero
d'amore Dizionario dei teologi Introduzione alla teologia Dio: chi è? Elementi
di teologia filosofica Scienze umane e teologia Cultura, marxismo e cristianesimo
I teologi della liberazione Il problema del linguaggio teologico dalle origini
ad oggi Filosofia e cristianesimo I teologi della speranza I grandi teologi Professore(1)
I grandi teologi Professore(2) I teologi della morte di Dio Dizionario enciclopedico
di filosofia, teologia e morale. Software Filosofia della cultura e dei valori
Le realtà ultime e la speranza cristiana Religione Nuovo dizionario
enciclopedico dei papi. Storia e insegnamenti Commento al Corpus Paulinum
(expositio et lectura super epistolas Pauli apostoli) (2) The Popes of the
modern Ages. From Pius IX to John Paul II La chiesa primizia del regno.
Trattato di ecclesiologia Mito e religioni. Introduzione alla mitologia
religiosa e alle nuove religioni L'uomo secondo il disegno di Dio. Trattato di
antropologia teologica Preesistenza, sopravvivenza, reincarnazione Teologie
della prassi L'eresia del nostro secolo Società Storia dell'antropologia
filosofica Antropologia filosofica. L'uomo: un progetto impossibile?
Philosophical anthropology Una nuova cultura per una nuova società Note In ricordo di padre Battista Mondin. Altri
progetti Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio su Battista Mondin Un tomista ed "oltre" del XX
secolo: Battista Mondin di Pierino Montini, Congresso tomista internazionale,
Roma 2003, nel sito "E- Aquinas" Studium thomisticum virtuale. Filosofia
Filosofo del XX secoloTeologi italiani 1926
29 luglio 29 gennaio Parma
Montani: Pietro Montani
(Teramo), filosofo. Allievo di Emilio Garroni, è Professore di Estetica alla
Sapienza Roma, è stato Directeur d'Études Associé presso all'EHESS di Parigi e
ha insegnato Estetica al Centro sperimentale di cinematografia di Roma. La sua
ricerca si concentra oggi principalmente sui temi di filosofia della
tecnica. Allievo di Emilio Garroni, per Montani l'estetica non va
considerata come filosofia dell'arte, ma come una teoria della sensibilità
umana, che ha la peculiarità di essere aperta agli stimoli del mondo esterno.
La riflessione di Montani si snoda in diversi passaggi e attraverso il
confronto con alcuni dei protagonisti della filosofia, della linguistica, della
semiotica e della teoria del cinema del Novecento, avendo sempre come punto di
riferimento la filosofia critica di Kant. Pensiero Ermeneutica e
filosofia critica Nel 1985 Montani pubblica Il debito del linguaggio, in cui,
partendo dal confronto con le teorie strutturaliste, in particolare quelle di
Roman Jakobson e Jan Mukarovsky, mostra come la questione del significato del
testo poetico non possa essere risolta mediante l'individuazione del codice
linguistico o semiotico di riferimento, ma rimandi ad una condizione estetica
della significazione. Questo tema viene ulteriormente approfondito da Montani
in Estetica ed ermeneutica. In questo testo Montani, prendendo le mosse dalla
filosofia critica kantiana, propone di ripensare la veritànel senso
heideggeriano della a-letheia, del dis-velamento dell'essere come una
situazione ermeneutica strettamente legata all'effettiva esperienza del
soggetto, seguendo la rilettura della filosofia di Heidegger proposta da Hans
Georg Gadamer. Il cinema sovietico La formazione e il pensiero di Montani
sono stati segnati dal suo interesse per il cinema e in particolare per due
autori sovietici: Dziga Vertov e Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn. Di entrambi ha
curato l'edizione italiana degli scritti. Verso una teoria
dell'immaginazione Nel testo L'immaginazione narrativa (Guerini 1999) Montani
coniuga l'interesse per il cinema con quello più strettamente filosofico per il
tema dell'immaginazione. Montani propone di considerare l'immaginazione nei
termini in cui, in Tempo e racconto, Paul Ricœur parla della narrazione, ovvero
come di un processo di “rifigurazione” dell'esperienza del tempo da parte
dell'uomo. Per Ricoeur la narrazione ha il potere di far fare al lettore
esperienza di un tempo propriamente umano. Montani fa propria la tesi di
Ricoeur, applicandola però, all'ambito della narrazione cinematografica.
Montani ritiene che il territorio dell'immaginazione in cui lavora il cinema
sia quello dell'intreccio tra finzione e testimonianza, tra la costruzione
dell'intreccio narrativo e la documentazione del reale. La trasformazione
dell'esperienza del tempo avviene, così, ad un livello più profondo e
creativo. Tecnica ed estetica Con Bioestetica si inaugura la fase più
recente del pensiero di Montani, dedicata all'approfondimento del rapporto tra
tecnica e estetica. Attraverso il paradigma della bioestetica Montani propone
di leggere i fenomeni di biopotere che caratterizzano l'epoca contemporanea a
partire dalla loro natura innanzitutto tecnica ed estetica, cioè a partire dal
fatto che la sensibilità dell'essere umano viene sempre più orientata ed
organizzata tecnicamente. Il biopotere consiste proprio nella capacità di
canalizzare la sensibilità umana. In L'immaginazione intermediale Montani
prende in analisi i modi in cui il cinema risponde alle forme di
anestetizzazione. Prendendo le mosse dalla spettacolarizzazione della politica
emersa in seguito all'attentato delle Torri Gemelle, Montani introduce il
concetto di "autenticazione dell'immagine", che non consiste
nell'accertamento del referente fattuale dell'immagine (il vero, il reale) ma
nella rigenerazione di un orizzonte di senso condiviso, la capacità di riferimento
dell'esperienza e del linguaggio, in un'epoca caratterizzata da crescenti
fenomeni di “indifferenza referenziale” La riflessione sul rapporto tra
estetica e tecnica continua in Tecnologie della sensibilità, in cui viene
teorizzata l'esistenza di una terza funzione dell'immaginazione: accanto a
quella produttiva e riproduttiva vi è una funzione interattiva. L'immaginazione
interattiva diventa il paradigma attraverso cui leggere l'epoca contemporanea,
attraversata profondamente da fenomeni dell'interattività digitale e dalla
proliferazione di ambienti virtuali Opere 1985 Il debito del linguaggio:
il problema dell'autoriflessività estetica nel segno, nel teesto e nel
discorso, Marsilio, Venezia; 1993 Fuori campo: studi sul cinema e l'estetica,
Quattroventi, Urbino; 1996 Estetica ed ermeneutica: senso, contingenza, verità,
Laterza, Roma-Bari; 1999 L'immaginazione narrativa: il racconto del cinema
oltre i confini dello spazio letterario, Guerini e associati, Milano; 2002 Arte
e verità dall'antichità alla filosofia contemporanea: un'introduzione
all'estetica,con A. Ardovino e D. Guastini, Laterza, Roma-Bari; 2004 L'estetica
contemporanea: il destino delle arti nella tarda modernitàMontani, Carocci,
Roma; 2005 Lo stato dell'arte: l'esperienza estetica nell'era della tecnica, M.
Carboni e P. Montani, Laterza, Roma-Bari; 2007 Bioestetica: senso comune,
tecnica e arte nell'età della globalizzazione, Carocci, Roma; Bioesthétique,
[trad. francese di J.-C. Cavallin] Vrin, Paris ; L'immaginazione intermediale: perlustrare,
rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile, Laterza, Roma-Bari; Tecnologie della sensibilità. Estetica e
immaginazione interattiva, Cortina, Milano. Note P. Montani, Il senso, Rai Scuola, su
raiscuola.rai.it. I percorsi
dell'immaginazione. Studi in onore di Pietro Montani., Pellegrini, . Rinaldo Censi, Cine-occhi e cine-pugni: due
modi di intendere il cinema, su Nazione Indiana, 10 febbraio . 26 aprile . L'immaginazione estatica. Estetica, tecnica e
biopolitica, su giornaledifilosofia.net. 2 luglio . Alessandra Campo, Biopolitica come
an-estetizzazione. Il significato estetico della biopolitica, su
sintesidialettica.it. 2 luglio . P.
Montani, L'immaginazione intermediale, Laterza, , 7-9.
P. Montani, L'immaginazione intermediale, Laterza, , 21-24.
Anna Li Vigni, Gli occhiali per immaginare, Il Sole 24 Ore. 2 luglio
. La vita immersa nell’estetica del
virtuale, su ilmanifesto.it.
montinari Mazzino
Montinari Karl-Heinz Hahn / Mazzino Montinari: Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce
Homo, Faksimileausgabe, Lipsia / Wiesbaden 1985. «Nelle istituzioni esistenti,
sostenute da immani forze di produzione e di distruzione, viene assimilata e
mercificata ogni e qualsiasi protesta, persino quella dei Lumpen, ogni
tentativo di lasciare la «nave dei folli». Se il metodo di Nietzsche può ancora
aiutarci, allora l'unica forza che ci è rimasta è quella della cultura, della
ragione.» Mazzino Montinari (Lucca), filosofo. È considerato uno dei
massimi editori e interpreti dell'opera di Friedrich Nietzsche. Ha
definitivamente dimostrato che Nietzsche non ha mai scritto un'opera dal titolo
La volontà di potenza e che le cinque diverse compilazioni che la sorella del
filosofo e altri editori dilettanti hanno pubblicato sotto questo titolo sono
testi del tutto inaffidabili per comprendere il pensiero di Nietzsche. Magnifying
glass icon mgx2.svgElisabeth Förster-Nietzsche § Nietzsche-Archiv. Si era
formato alla Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa e all'Pisa, presso la quale si
laureò nel 1949 con una tesi di filosofia della storia sui movimenti ereticali
a Lucca. Caduto il fascismo, divenne un attivista del Partito comunista
italiano, presso il quale si occupava della traduzione di scritti dal tedesco.
Nel 1953, mentre visitava la Germania Est per motivi di ricerca, fu testimone
della rivolta del '53. Successivamente, in seguito alla repressione della
Rivoluzione ungherese del 1956, si allontanò dall'ortodossia marxista e dalla
carriera nel partito. Mantenne tuttavia la sua iscrizione al PCI, e rimase
fedele agli ideali del socialismo. Tra il 1950 ed il 1957 collaborò con le
Edizioni Rinascita, e per un anno fu direttore dell'omonima libreria in
Roma. Alla fine degli anni 1950, con Giorgio Colli, iniziò a preparare
una traduzione italiana delle opere di Nietzsche. Dopo averne rivisto la raccolta
di opere e manoscritti in Weimar, Colli e Montinari decisero di iniziarne una
nuova edizione critica. Essa divenne lo standard per gli studiosi, e fu
pubblicata in italiano da Adelphi, in francese da Éditions Gallimard (Parigi),
in tedesco da Walter de Gruyter e in olandese da Sun (tradotta da Michel van
Nieuwstadt). Per questo lavoro fu preziosa l'abilità di Montinari nel decifrare
la scrittura a mano (praticamente incomprensibile) di Nietzsche, fino a quel
momento trascritta solo da "Peter Gast“ (pseudonimo di Heinrich
Köselitz). La prima pagina del manoscritto di Ecce Homo. Nel 1972
fondò la rivista internazionale Nietzsche-Studien di cui fu coeditore fino alla
morte. Attraverso le sue traduzioni ed i suoi commenti di Nietzsche, Montinari
diede un contributo fondamentale alla ricerca storica e filosofica, inserendo
Nietzsche nel contesto del proprio tempo. Opere Che cosa ha veramente
detto Nietzsche, di Mazzino Montinari, Roma, Ubaldini, ripubblicato come Che
cosa ha detto Nietzsche, di Mazzino Montinari, Giuliano Campioni, Milano,
Adelphi, trad. tedesca: Friedrich Nietzsche: eine Einführung. de Gruyter,
Berlin & New York (Darstellung von
Nietzsches Leben und Werk mit Ansätzen zu Deutung und Auseinandersetzung.)
traduzione francese: Friedrich Nietzsche, di Mazzino Montinari, Paolo D'Iorio,
traduzione di Nathalie Ferrand, Pubblicato da Presses Universitaires de France,
trad. inglese: Reading Nietzsche, di
Mazzino Montinari, tradotto da Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois Press, trad. spagnola: Lo que dijo Nietzsche,
G.Campioni, Ediciones Salamandra, Barcelona, 2003221. Su Nietzsche, di Mazzino
Montinari, Roma, Editori Riuniti, Nietzsche lesen. de Gruyter, Berlin & New
York (Sammlung von Aufsätzen zu
unterschiedlichen Themen der Nietzsche-Forschung.) « La volonté de puissance »
n'existe pas, choix d'articles établi et postfacé par Paolo D'Iorio, traduit de
l'italien par Patricia Farazzi et Michel Valensi, Paris, Éditions de l'éclat,
1996, 192. Disponibile anche
all'indirizzo lyber-eclat.net/lyber/montinari/volonte.html. Curatele: edizioni
critiche Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Teoria della Natura, raccolta di testi e trad.
M. Montinari, Torino, Boringhieri, 1958; Milano, SE, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lettere a Erwin Rohde,
M. Montinari, Torino, Boringhieri, Friedrich Nietzsche, Opere, M. Montinari,
Giorgio Colli, trad. di M. Montinari, L. Amoroso et all., Milano, Adelphi, Friedrich Nietzsche, Il caso Wagner:
Crepuscolo degli idoli; L'anticristo; Scelta di frammenti postumi, 1887-1888,
Sossio Giametta, Ferruccio Masini, M. Montinari, Giorgio Colli, Milano, Arnoldo
Mondadori Editore, 1975 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo; Ditirambi di Dioniso;
Nietzsche contra Wagner; Poesie e scelta di frammenti postumi (1888-1889),
Roberto Calasso e M. Montinari, Giorgio Colli, Milano, A. Mondadori, 1977
Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer come educatore, M. Montinari e Giorgio Colli,
Milano, Adelphi, Epistolario di Friedrich Nietzsche, María Ludovica Pampaloni
Fama, Milano, Adelphi, [curatela,
postumo] Friedrich Nietzsche, Scritti giovanili, Giorgio Colli, Mario Carpitella, M. Montinari,
trad. di Mario Carpitella, Milano, Adelphi, Arthur Schopenhauer, La vista e i
colori-Carteggio con Goethe, M. Montinari, Abscondita, 2002 In lingua tedesca Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke:
kritische Gesamtausgabe, Giorgio Colli, M. Montinari, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter,
Walter de Gruyter, Nietzsche
Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Giorgio Colli, Norbert Miller, M.
Montinari, Annemarie Pieper, Renate Müller-Buck, collaboratore Norbert Miller
Annemarie Pieper, Renate Müller-Buck, Walter de Gruyter, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Giorgio Colli e M. Montinari,
Walter de Gruyter, Nietzsche-studien: Internationales Jahrbuch Für Die
Nietzsche-Forschung, di M. Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wolfgang
Müller-Lauter, Heinz Wenzel, Walter de Gruyter, Heinrich Heine, Späte Prosa, 1847-1856:
Säkularausgabe, Hans Böhm, M. Montinari, Helmut Brandt, Akademie-Verlag, 1988
[Originale disponibile presso la University of California] In lingua slovacca
Zarathusztra az Ím ígyen szólva Zarathusztra előtt, di M. Montinari, Ildikó
Várnagy, Gábor Romhányi Török Note Nota
introduttiva a Genealogia della morale (di Friedrich Nietzsche), pagg. XIX-XX. Mazzino Montinari, "La Volonté de
puissance" n'existe pas, Editions de l'Eclat, Nietzsche e Van Gogh, due cardini del pensiero
occidentale moderno di Mirko Bettozzi (Liberaldemocaratici.it), su
liberaldemocratici.it. 27 ottobre 2008 5 marzo ). «Tant qu'il ne fut pas possible aux chercheurs
les plus sérieux d'accéder à l'ensemble des manuscrits de Nietzsche, on savait
seulement de façon vague que La Volonté de puissance n'existait pas comme telle
(...) Nous souhaitons que le jour nouveau, apporté par les inédits, soit celui
du retour à Nietzsche.» (Gilles Deleuze)
Aveva infatti ottenuto una borsa di studio della Scuola Normale
Superiore a Francoforte sul Meno.
Rinascita OnLine Che era stato il
suo maestro negli anni 1940. Sito
ufficiale Walter de Gruyter GmbH &
Co. K, su degruyter.com. 19 ottobre 2008 23 agosto 2008). Cenni biografici Nietzsche-Studien Slovak Library Full Record, di ricerca su cataloghi e raccolte di
biblioteche slovacche[collegamento interrotto]
Giuliano Campioni, «MONTINARI, Mazzino», Dizionario Biografico degli
ItalianiVolume 76 (), Istituto dell'Enciclopedia italiana Treccani Giuliano
Campioni, Mazzino Montinari in den Jahren 1943 bis 1963, in "Nietzsche-Studien",
Giuliano Campioni,"Die Kunst, gut zu lesen". Mazzino Montinari und
das Handwerk des Philologen, in "Nietzsche-Studien", B Giuliana
Lanata, Esercizi di memoria, Bari, Levante Editori, 1989 (notizie su M. M.
nell'articolo su Giorgio Colli anche a proposito dell'Enciclopedia di autori
classici, Editore Boringhieri, progettata e diretta da Colli e a cui
M.M.collaborò) Paolo D’Iorio (éd.), Mazzino Montinari. L'arte di leggere
Nietzsche, Firenze, Ponte alle grazie, 1992,
95. Giuliano Campioni, Leggere Nietzsche. Alle origini dell'edizione
critica Colli-Montinari. Con lettere e testi inediti, Pisa ETS 1992, Mazzino
Montinari: l'arte di leggere Nietzsche Paolo D'Iorio, Pubblicato da Ponte alle
grazie, Studi germanici — Di Istituto italiano di studi germanici — Pubblicato
da Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 2001, Originale disponibile presso la l'Università
della Virginia — Sezione 1, pag. 7 "Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche", di
Francesca Tuca Giuliano Campioni, Da Lucca a Weimar: Mazzino Montinari e
Nietzsche in Nietzsche. Edizioni e interpretazioni, Maria Cristina Fornari,
ETS, Pisa Giuliano Campioni,Die "ideelle Bibliothek Nietzsches". Von
Charles Andler zu Mazzino Montinari in Zur unterirdischen Wirkung von Dynamit
(Nietzsche), Michael Knoche, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2006 Giuliano
Campioni,“Der Karren unserer Arbeit”. Sechzehn Briefe von Mazzino Montinari an
Delio Cantimori, in «Nietzsche-Studien», 36, 2007 Gilles Deleuze Nietzsche-Archiv Pensiero di
Schopenhauer Roberto Roscani Torino#Filosofi Altri progetti Collabora a
Wikiquote Citazionio su Mazzino Montinari
Giuliano Campioni, Mazzino Montinari, in Dizionario biografico degli
italiani, 76, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana, . Opere di Mazzino Montinari, .
Centro interdipartimentale di studi Colli-Montinari su Nietzsche e la
Cultura Europea — Pisa, Lecce, Padova e Firenze (Centronietzsche.net), su
centronietzsche.net.
moramarco: Michele
Moramarco (Reggio nell'Emilia), filosofo. Esponente italiano della Massoneria
tradizionale e assertore di una sintesi religiosa tra Mazdeismo e
Cristianesimo. Discende da un'antica famiglia di Altamura, di ascendenze latino-germaniche,
cresciuta e ramificatasi durante il dominio dei Farnese. Studioso di
Massoneria, ha scritto la Nuova Enciclopedia Massonica in tre volumi
(1989-1995, seconda ed. 1997), importante testo di ricerca massonologica. Un
suo precedente volume, La Massoneria ieri e oggi (1977), fu tra i primi,
sull'argomento, pubblicati in Russia dopo il crollo del regime sovietico, che
aveva proscritto le Logge. Iniziato nel Grande Oriente d'Italia il 10
dicembre 1975, divenne Maestro Venerabile della Loggia Intelletto e Amore n.
723, e nel 1986 ricevette la decorazione all'Ordine di Giordano Bruno,
conferita a quanti si distinguono nello studio e nella diffusione degli ideali
massonici. Nel 1983 fu il coordinatore scientifico del Convegno
Internazionale 250 anni di Massoneria in Italia, al quale parteciparono
studiosi quali Paolo Ungari, Alessandro Bausani, Aldo A. Mola, Alberto Basso,
Fabio Roversi Monaco, Paolo Ricca. Il convegno fiorentino costituì la prima
risposta pubblica, da parte della Comunione massonica di Palazzo Giustiniani,
alle degenerazioni della P2. Nello stesso anno, in qualità di Garante
d'Amicizia tra il Grande Oriente d'Italia e la Grand Lodge of South Africa,
richiese, d'accordo con il Gran Maestro Armando Corona, che tutte le Logge sudafricane,
peraltro già avviate in tale direzione dal 1977 (quando un gruppo di Liberi
Muratori della Massoneria Prince Hall era stato ammesso nella Loggia "De
Goede Hoop" di Cape Town), abrogassero l'apartheid, scelta che esse
fecero, qualificandosi tra le prime associazioni bianche a superare la
segregazione razziale. Nel 1992 uscì dal Grande Oriente d'Italia,
rigettandone il laicismo, per ravvivare i nuclei massonici di impronta
cristiana e spiritualista, che assunsero la denominazione Real Ordine degli Antichi
Liberi e Accettati Muratori (A.D. 926). Su tale concezione della Massoneria ha
scritto La via massonica. Dal manoscritto Graham al risveglio noachide e
cristiano (), un testo dal quale emerge, fra l'altro, l'importanza della
devozione alla Vergine Maria, come madre del Cristo ed espressione umana della
divina Sophia, nella genesi della spiritualità massonica. Ha ricostruito
le vicende della Gran Loggia d'Italia, l'altra associazione maggioritaria di
Liberi Muratori in Italia, nel volume Piazza del Gesù (1944-1968). Documenti
rari e inediti della tradizione massonica italiana (1992), contribuendo in
seguito alla realizzazione di programmi tematici per varie emittenti
televisive, tra le quali Rossija 24 (), Reteconomy () e È TV Rete7. Ha
conseguito il 33º grado del Rito scozzese antico ed accettato e il VII del Rito
filosofico italiano, che nel secondo decennio del Novecento vide tra le sue
fila i neopitagorici Arturo Reghini e Amedeo Rocco Armentano. Nel 1986 ha
fondato in Italia l'Antico Rito Noachita su patente ricevuta presso il British
Museum dall'ex Maestro Venerabile della Loggia "Heliopolis" di
Londra. Ha realizzato una colonna sonora per i rituali massonici, dal
titolo Masonic Ritual Rhapsody. Il 28 giugno 2003, presso la Loggia
"Gottfried Keller" di Zurigo, è stato ricevuto come membro
nell'Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Già attivo con Joseph L. Gentili
(1946-2008), editore del newsletter Brooklyn Universalist Christian, in un
progetto di restaurazione della Chiesa Universalista d'America, contro la
deriva liberal di quel movimento, ha ricevuto il navjote zoroastriano nel 2003.
Nel volume Il Mazdeismo Universale propone una visione eclettica di tale
religione, collegando ad essa elementi del misticismo ebraico, del dualismo
platonico e cristiano, del buddhismo Mahāyāna, e riconoscendo in Gesù il
saoshyant (divino soccorritore, messia) profetizzato dall'antica religione
iranica, in una prospettiva teologica di tipo mazdeo-cristiano, intorno alla
quale si è formata una Fraternità Mazdea Cristiana. Si è avvicinato alle
correnti latitudinaria e mistica dell'Anglicanesimo e al percorso religioso di
Charles Loyson, confluendo in una comunità religiosa di orientamento eclettico
, ove ha potuto conservare la doppia appartenenza, cristiana e zoroastriana.
Entro tale gruppo, che nel gennaio ha
assunto la denominazione Reformed Cloister of the Holy SpiritUnione Riformata
Universalista, è un oblato di San Pellegrino delle Alpi, secondo la Regola che,
ispirandosi alle tradizioni fiorite intorno alla vita di quell'eremita del
Cristianesimo celtico, contempla almeno un atto quotidiano "di giustizia,
o di soccorso fraterno" anche nei riguardi di animali e piante.
Laureatosi cum laude in Filosofia presso l'Bologna nel 1977, con una tesi sul
pensatore indiano Sri Aurobindo (relatore il noto indologo e sanscritista
Giorgio Renato Franci), nella seconda metà degli anni Ottanta si è formato in
Training autogeno e Psicoterapia con la procedura immaginativa sotto la guida
di Luigi Peresson. Ha trattato dei nessi tra Zoroastrismo e Cristianesimo
nei libri La celeste dottrina noachita (1994) e I Magi eterni (), di
fenomenologia del sacro ne L'ultima tappa di Henry Corbin e di tanatologia in
Psicologia del morire (1991). Ha scritto negli anni 1973-1975 sulle esperienze di
autogestione dei lavoratori nel mondo e sui rapporti tra socialismo e religione
per Azione nonviolenta, la rivista fondata da Aldo Capitini. Con il saggio Per
una rifondazione del Socialismo partecipò al simposio "Marxismo e
nonviolenza" (Firenze, 1975) nel quale intervennero, tra gli altri,
Norberto Bobbio e Roger Garaudy. Dal 1971 è un sostenitore della lingua
ausiliaria internazionale Esperanto. Ha aderito al gruppo esperantista
bolognese "Achille Tellini 1912". In ambito narrativo, ha
scritto Diario californiano (1981) e Torbida dea (2007). Si è occupato di
storia dello spettacolo, scrivendo I mitici Gufi (2001), sul celebre quartetto
di cabaret degli anni sessanta, e partecipando all'allestimento del programma
Gufologia per Rai Sat (2002); con l'ex "Gufo" Roberto Brivio ha
collaborato sia nella riproposta del repertorio del gruppo in teatri e circoli
culturali, sia nella realizzazione di un laboratorio teatrale e musicale che
vide attivamente coinvolti numerosi alunni portatori di disabilità, presso l'Istituto
medio superiore in cui insegnò psicologia dal 1994 al 2009. Ha
inciso quattro CD, Allucinazioni amorose (meno due), Gesbitando, Come al
crepuscolo l'acacia e Existenz, che contengono sue canzoni e brevi suites
strumentali, ricevendo il plauso, tra gli altri, di critici come Maurizio
Becker, Mario Bonanno (Musica & Parole) e Salvatore Esposito (Blogfoolk),
di autori come Bruno Lauzi, Ernesto Bassignano, Giorgio Conte e dei jazzisti
Giulio Stracciati e Shinobu Ito. Nel dicembre è stato chiamato da Luisa Melis, figlia e
continuatrice dell'opera di Ennio Melis, il patron della RCA Italiana, a far
parte della giuria del Premio De André (XVI, XVII e XVIII edizione).
Opere Saggistica, narrativa e studi di filosofia La Massoneria ieri e oggi (De
Vecchi, Milano 1977) La Massoneria oggi. Cronaca, realtà, idee (De Vecchi,
Milano 1981) Per una rifondazione del socialismo, in : Marxismo e nonviolenza
(Lanterna, Genova 1977) La Libera Muratoria,
(SugarCo, Milano 1978). Masonstvo v proshlom i nashtoiashchem (Progress,
Moskva 1990) La Massoneria. Il vincolo fraterno che gioca con la storia,
(seconda ed., Giunti, Firenze 2009) Diario californiano (Bastogi, Foggia 1981)
Grande Dizionario Enciclopedico UTET (quarta ed., Torino 1985) (voci:
Antroposofia, Besant, Cagliostro, Radiestesia, ecc.) L'ultima tappa di Henry
Corbin, in Contributi alla storia dell'Orientalismo, G.R. Franci (Clueb,
Bologna 1985) 250 anni di Massoneria in Italia, (Bastogi, Foggia 1985) Nuova
Enciclopedia Massonica (Ce.S.A.S., Reggio E. 1989-1995; seconda ed.: Bastogi,
Foggia 1997) Psicologia del morire, in I
nuovi ultimi (Francisci, Abano Terme 1991) Piazza del Gesù (1944-1968).
Documenti rari e inediti della tradizione massonica italiana (Ce.SA.S. Reggio
Emllia, 1992) Sette Lodi Massoniche alla Beata Vergine Maria (Real Ordine
A.L.A.M., Reggio Emilia 1992) La celeste dottrina noachita (Ce.S.A.S, Reggio E.
1994) I mitici Gufi (Edishow, Reggio Emilia 2001) Torbida dea. Psicostoria
d'amore, fantomi & zelosia (Bastogi, Foggia 2007) Il Mazdeismo Universale.
Una chiave esoterica alla dottrina di Zarathushtra (Bastogi, Foggia ) I Magi
eterni. Tra Zarathushtra e Gesù (con Graziano Moramarco) (Om Edizioni, Bologna
) La via massonica. Dal manoscritto Graham al risveglio noachide e cristiano
(Om Edizioni, Bologna ) Massoneria. Simboli, cultura, storia (consulenza
scientifica di M.M.) (Atlanti del Mistero/Giunti-De Vecchi, Firenze )
Introduzione alla Libera Muratoria (Il Settenario, Bologna ) Musica
Allucinazioni amorose (meno due) (cd) (Bastogi Music Italia 2008) Masonic
Ritual Rhapsody (cd) (Bastogi Music Italia 2008) Gesbitando (cd, con Andrea
Ascolini) (Bastogi Music Italia ) Come al crepuscolo l'acacia (cd) (Heristal
Entertainment, Roma ) Existenz (cd) (Heristal Entertainment, Roma ) Note Aplogruppo I-Z63, subclade L 1242 A. A. Mola, Un valido impulso per una
Massoneria "à parts entières", in 250 anni di Massoneria in
Italia, 11-13; F. Ferrari, La Massoneria
verso il futuro (una conversazione con Michele Moramarco) (2008) (v. ) Una breve rassegna di testi fondamentali
sulla Massoneria si trova sul sito del Cesnur diretto da Massimo Introvigne.
Vedi anche le recensioni di E. Albertoni ne Il Sole 24 Ore, p.1 inserto
domenicale, 29 aprile 1990 e di G. Caprile ne La Civiltà Cattolica, 6 ottobre
1990, 97-98. Il volume fu pubblicato nel 1990, anno della
dissoluzione dell'URSS, dalla casa editrice Progress (v. e ) V.
Brunelli, Massoneria: è finito con la condanna della P2 il tempo delle logge e
dei "fratelli" coperti, in Corriere della sera, 26 giugno 1983,
p.5 Grand Lodge of South Africa Il Corriere della Sera dedicò un lungo
articolo allo "scisma" (v. ). Del Real Ordine A.L.A.M. si è occupato
anche il centro di ricerca Cesnur, diretto dal noto storico e sociologo delle
religioni Massimo Introvigne, v.//cesnur.org/religioni_italia/a/appendice_02.htm.
Il termine Real non aveva alcun riferimento alla storia italiana, ma si
richiamava alla leggenda, contenuta negli Antichi doveri, secondo cui l'Ordine
Massonico ricevé le sue proto-costituzioni dal re Atelstano d'Inghilterra
(Æðelstan) nel 926 d.C.; recentemente il Real Ordine ha assunto la
denominazione di Unione Cristiana dei Liberi Muratori Rito filosofico italiano Antico Rito Noachita Masonic Ritual Rhapsody, Bastogi Music
Italia, 2008. youtube.com/watch?v=rSs04kpA36U. A questa esperienza è collegata
la sua iscrizione alla SIAE come autore musicale Del percorso che lo ha condotto verso la
visione di Zoroastro (Zarathushtra) si è occupata la rivista parsi di Bombay,
Parsiana, così come il quotidiano torinese La Stampa (v. ). v. mazdeanchristian.wordpress.com/ latitudinarismo, in Dizionario di filosofia,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009. v. riformatiuniversalisti.wordpress.com//
In questa comunità si ritrovano, su vari temi, idee tratte dal Manicheismo,
dall'Arianesimo, dal Quaccherismo, dall'Unitarianismo, dal Giurisdavidismo e
dall'universalismo hindu-cristiano del movimento Navavidhan fondato da Keshab
Chandra Sen (1838-1884). Frequenti e significativi sono altresì i riferimenti
al pensiero di Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803) e alla "religione
aperta"o della "compresenza dei morti e dei viventi"elaborata da
Aldo Capitini (1899-1968) Giulio
Stracciati Shinobu Ito E. Albertoni, Tante fedi, nessun dogma
(recensione della Nuova Enciclopedia Massonica, Il Sole 24 Ore, 29 aprile 1990
I, inserto culturale domenicale) M. Chierici, Nasce la Lega dei Venerabili
(Corriere della Sera, 19 gennaio 199316) S. Esposito , Dalle radici del
Mazdeismo all'Alleanza Mazdea CristianaIntervista con Michele Moramarco (in
Secreta Magazine n°3/4 marzo-Aprile ,
21–29) S. Esposito , Gesbitando: intervista con Michele Moramarco
(Blogfoolk, 4, ) F. Ferrari, La Massoneria verso il futuro (una conversazione
con Michele Moramarco) (Bastogi, Foggia 2008) S. Semeraro, Tra la via Emilia e
l'Est. Così parlò Zoroastro (La Stampa, Torino, 21 novembre 200633) S. Sari,
Unico e plurimo al contempo, Dio secondo gli Zoroastriani [intervista a
M.M.](Libero, 25 novembre 200613) G. Giovacchini, Cultura e spiritualità della
Massoneria italiana nella seconda metà del '900 [prefazione di Michele
Moramarco] (Tiphereth, Acireale-Roma )
Zoroastrismo Universalismo Massoneria Rosacroce Altri progetti Collabora
a Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Michele Moramarco
Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio su Michele Moramarco Collabora a Wikimedia
Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file su Michele
Moramarco Sito ufficiale, su
michelemoramarco.it. blog del Real
Ordine A.L.A.M., su realordine.wordpress.com. Pagina sul sito di Heristal
Entertainment, su heristal.eu. blog degli anglicani latitudinari, su riformatiepiscopali.wordpress.com.
moravia Sergio Moravia «Il Nietzsche che prediligo è il Nietzsche
terreno, umano, presente nel tempo. È il Nietzsche intrepido esploratore del
sottosuolo dell'uomo e dei disagi della civiltà. È il Nietzsche che fertilmente
e sofferentemente (non narcisisticamente) vive e pensa il nichilismo: ma per
andare oltre il nichilismo. È soprattutto il Nietzsche cheneo-illuminista forse
malgrado luivuole conoscere, capire, dare un (nuovo) senso alle cose.» (Sergio Moravia) Sergio Moravia (Bologna),
filosofo. È Professore di Storia della Filosofia all'Università degli studi di
Firenze. Allievo di Eugenio Garin, si è
formato in ambiente fiorentino conseguendovi la laurea in filosofia nel 1962
con tesi su Gian Domenico Romagnosi. Professore incaricato dal 1969, è poi
diventato, nel 1975, ordinario di Storia della Filosofia all'Firenze. Nel corso della sua carriera, si è
interessato particolarmente dell'illuminismo francese e del pensiero del
Novecento, della storia e dell'epistemologia delle scienze umane, con
particolare attenzione all'antropologia, la filosofia della mente e
l'esistenzialismo. I suoi studi e le sue ricerche hanno aperto nuove
prospettive interdisciplinari fra pensiero filosofico e scienze umane. Attualmente, le sue attenzioni sono rivolte
verso l'opera e il pensiero del filosofo tedesco Friedrich Nietzsche del quale,
nel 1976, pubblicò già una celebre antologia dal titolo La distruzione delle
certezze e, nel 1985, una raccolta di saggi intitolata Itinerario nietzscheano.
Proprio un nuovo modo di avvicinarsi e concepire il pensiero del filosofo
tedesco lo hanno reso uno dei suoi interpreti più originali e più discussi. Grazie ai suoi studi e contributi filosofici,
è stato visiting professor presso l'Università della California a Berkeley,
l'Università del Connecticut a Storrs e il Center for the Humanities della
Wesleyan University. Conferenziere
presso altre sedi universitarie americane (fra le quali, Harvard, UCLA, Boston)
ed europee (Francia, Belgio, Germania), è cofondatore della “Società italiana
degli studi sul XVIII secolo”, nonché membro del Comitato direttivo delle
Riviste filosofiche “Iride” e “Paradigmi”. Collabora ai giornali Corriere della
Sera, Quotidiano nazionale, La Repubblica.
Opere principali Il tramonto dell'Illuminismo. Filosofia e politica
nella società francese (1770-1810), Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1968. La ragione nascosta.
Scienza e filosofia nel pensiero di Claude Lévi-Strauss, G.C. Sansoni, Firenze,
1969. La scienza dell'uomo nel Settecento, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1970.
Lévi-Strauss e l'antropologia strutturale, G.C. Sansoni, Firenze, 1973.
Introduzione a Sartre, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1973. Adorno e la teoria critica
della società, G.C. Sansoni, Firenze, 1974. Il pensiero degli idéologues.
Scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780-1815), La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1974. La
distruzione delle certezze. Raccolta antologica di scritti nietzschiani, La
Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1976. Linguaggio, storia e società (con T. De Mauro e
R.A. Santoni), Guaraldi, Firenze, 1978. Filosofia e scienze umane nell'età dei
Lumi, G.C. Sansoni, Firenze, 1982. Pensiero e civiltà, 3 voll., Le Monnier,
Firenze, 1984. Il ragazzo selvaggio dell'Aveyron. Pedagogia e psichiatria nei
testi di J. Itard, Ph. Pinel e dell'anonimo della "Décade", Laterza,
Roma-Bari, 1984 (prima edizione, 1972). Itinerario nietzscheano, Guida, Napoli,
1985. Educazione e pensiero, 3 voll., Le Monnier, Firenze, 1986. Filosofia:
storia e testi, 3 voll., Le Monnier, Firenze, 1986. L'enigma della mente. Il
mind-body problem nel pensiero contemporaneo, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1986.
Compendio di filosofia, 3 voll., Le Monnier, Firenze, 1994-96. L'enigma
dell'esistenza. Soggetto, morale, passioni nell'età del disincanto,
Feltrinelli, Milano, 1996. L'esistenza ferita. Modi d'essere, sofferenze,
terapie dell'uomo nell'inquietudine del mondo, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1999.
Adorno. Filosofia dialettico-negativa e teoria critica della società, Mimesis
Edizioni, Milano, 2004. Ragione strutturale e universi di senso. Saggio sul
pensiero di Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Lettere, Firenze, 2004. La Massoneria. La
storia, gli uomini, le idee (con Z. Ciuffoletti), Mondadori, Milano, 2004.
Firenze e il Neo-Umanesimo. Arte, cultura, comunicazione multimediale all'alba
del Terzo Millennio, Le Lettere, Firenze, 2005. Lo strutturalismo francese, Le
Lettere, Firenze, 2006 (prima edizione, 1975). Sigmund Freud. Filosofia e
psicoanalisi, raccolta antologica di scritti freudiani, UTET, Torino, 2008.
Alcuni articoli, saggi e contributi a volumi collettivi "Il
pensiero", in: L'universo del corpo, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana,
Roma, 2000, V, 40–46; "Filosofia della mente e realtà
psichica", in: C. Genovese , La realtà psichica, Edizioni Borla, Roma,
2000, 135–147; "L'esistenza e il
male", in: "Mysterium
iniquitatis", Gregoriana Editrice, Padova, 2000, 17–31; "Il "Mind-Body Problem"
e l'interpretazione personologico-esistenziale dell'uomo", in: La questione del soggetto tra filosofia e
scienze umane, Le Monnier, Firenze, 2000,
9–34; "Lettura Magistrale" al VI Convegno Nazionale Dalla
riabilitazione psicosociale alla promozione della salute mentale (Montecatini,
novembre 2001), "S.I.R.F. News", 2001, 1–6; "Mente, soggetto, esperienza nel
mondo", in: P.F. Firrao , La filosofia italiana in discussione (Atti del
Convegno Verso il 2000. La filosofia italiana in discussione, Società
Filosofica Italiana, Firenze 11-13 novembre 1999), Bruno Mondadori, Milano,
2001, 115– 131; "Sujet, existence,
contexte", in: Le médecin
philosophe aux prises avec la maladie mentale, Etudes de Lettres, Lausanne
(CH), 2002, 149–162; "Crisi della cultura
e relazioni generazionali nel mondo contemporaneo", in: Giovani e adulti: prove di ascolto (Atti del
Convegno omonimo), Sansepolcro (AR), 2003,
5-6; "La filosofia degli idéologues. Scienza dell'uomo e
riflessione epistemologica tra Sette e Ottocento", in: G. Santato ,
Letteratura italiana e cultura europea tra illuminismo e romanticismo, Atti
dell'omonimo Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Dipartimento di Italianistica,
Padova, 2000, Droz, Genève CH), 2003,
65–79; "Libertà, finitudine, impegno. Genesi e significato della
responsabilità nel mondo moderno", in: V. Malagola Anziani , Giustizia e
responsabilità (Atti del Convegno omonimo, Firenze, 24 novembre 2001), Dott. A.
Giuffré Editore, Milano, 2003, 33–44;
"Dal soggetto alla relazione", Maieutica, Volume II, Anno 2000, 34–49; "Demitizzazione e
devalorizzazione. La crisi della 'forma famiglia' nella società
contemporanea", in: Interazioni, Volume I, Anno 2001, 78–82; "Illuminismo e modernità",
Hiram, Volume 1, Anno 2001, 5–9;
"Prove d'ascolto. Crisi della cultura e relazioni generazionali nel mondo
contemporaneo", Studi sulla formazione, Volume V, Fascicolo 2, Anno
2002, 104–111; "Considerazioni
sulla guerra giusta", Hiram, Volume 4, Anno 2002, 13–18; "La filosofia, la conoscenza
dell'umano, il dialogo col pensiero religioso", Hiram, Volume 1, Anno
2003, 13–18; "A filosofia, o
conhecimento do humano, o dialogo como pensamento religioso", Acácia
[Brasil], 75, 2003, 31–34; "Esistenza e felicità",
Hiram, Volume 2, Anno 2003, 63–71;
"L'Occidente e la pace. Luci e ombre all'alba del terzo millennio",
Hiram, Volume 4, Anno 2003, 12–16;
"La filosofia e il suo 'altro'. La riflessione metafilosofica di Adorno in
'Dialettica negativa'", Iride, Volume XVII, Anno 2004, 65–75; "L'uomo: una storia
infinita", in: Per una scienza
dell'umano, Arezzo, 2004; "Il mind-body problem e l'interpretazione
personologico-esistenziale dell'uomo", in: L. Lenzi , Neurofisiologia e
teorie della mente, Vita & Pensiero, Milano, 2005, 257-270. "La scoperta settecentesca
dell'inconscio, l'ambiguità del freudismo e il lavoro della psicoanalisi
sull'«animale malato»", Atti del Convegno "Metapsicologia oggi",
tenutosi a Napoli il 24 ottobre 2003, e pubblicati in: O. Pozzi, S. Thanopulos
, Metapsicologia oggi, La Biblioteca Edizioni, Bari, 2005. "Un mondo
negato. L'assolutizzazione del corpo nella psico-umanologia contemporanea",
Hermeneutica, fascicolo speciale intitolato Corpo e persona, Anno 2007, 109–130. "Complessità, pluralità,
confini", in: Dal coordinatore al coordinamento, Atti del III Seminario
sui Coordinatori pedagogici in Emilia-Romagna, Assessorato Servizi Sociali
Provincia Bologna, Bologna, Bruno Maiorca, Filosofi italiani contemporanei.
Parlano i protagonisti, Bari, Nuova biblioteca Dedalo, 1984, 9788822060327. Sergio Moravia, su sapere.it, De Agostini. Pubblicazioni di Sergio Moravia, su Persée,
Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Innovation. Registrazioni di Sergio Moravia, su
RadioRadicale.it, Radio Radicale.
Registrazione video intervista effettuata durante la Gran Loggia 2008
del GOI dal titolo "Tu sei mio fratello" del 4 aprile 2008., su
youtube.com. Registrazione video della Lectio Magistralis "Al di qua del
bene e del maleNietzsche esploratore dell'umano" all'Università degli
studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia del 30 novembre 2007, su tv.unimore.it.
Registrazione audio della tavola rotonda del GOI "Pedagogia delle
libertàLibertà civili" del 13 aprile 2007, su radioradicale.it.
Registrazione video del convegno del GOI "La scienza non sia ostacolata
dall'ideologia, dalla politica e dalla religione" del 20 settembre 2001, su
radioradicale.it. Registrazione audio della tavola rotonda della Comunità Oasi
"Significato e funzione della pena, della punizione e della penitenza
nella promozione umana e sociale" del 14 giugno 1998, su radioradicale.it.
Registrazione video dell'intervento "Catturati dall'effimero?"
all'interno del "42º Convegno Giovanile alla Cittadella di Assisi"
del 29 dicembre 1987, su arcoiris.
Mordacci: Roberto
Mordacci (Milano), filosofo. È preside della Facoltà di Filosofia
dell'Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele dove è Professore di Filosofia
Morale. È Direttore del Centro Internazionale di Ricerca per la Cultura e
la Politica Europea. Laurea in filosofia presso l'Università Cattolica
del Sacro Cuore di Milano; Dottorato in bioetica presso l'Università degli
Studi di Genova. Ha svolto attività di ricerca e insegnamento presso la Scuola
di Medicina e Scienze Umane dell'Istituto Scientifico Ospedale San Raffaele
(1990-2000) Dal 2000 ha insegnato presso l'Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele,
prima presso la Facoltà di Psicologia e dal 2002 presso la Facoltà di Filosofia
che ha contribuito a fondare insieme con Massimo Cacciari, Edoardo Boncinelli,
Michele Di Francesco, Andrea Moro. Ha contribuito a progetti di ricerca ed è
stato membro del Consiglio d'Europa per l'insegnamento della bioetica. Dal è preside della Facoltà di Filosofia
dell'Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, essendo stato rieletto nel
giugno per il secondo mandato. Dal
2007 al è stato membro del Comitato
Nazionale per la Biosicurezza, le Biotecnologie e le Scienze per la Vita della
Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri. Dal al è
stato membro del Comitato Scientifico per EXPO
come delegato del Rettore dell'Università Vita-Salute San Raffele.
Dal è membro della Commissione per
l'Etica della Ricerca e la Bioetica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
(CNR) e del Consiglio Direttiva della Società Italiana di Filosofia Morale
(SIFM). Nel ha fondato
l'International Research Centre for European Culture and Politics (IRCECP) del
quale è Direttore. Temi di ricerca Si è dedicato in particolar modo dei
temi: "Etica e ragioni morali", "Etica pubblica e
rispetto", "Neuroetica". Attraverso l'indagine delle
"ragioni morali" e dell'"identità personale" e ispirandosi
alla filosofia kantiana, propone una forma di "personalismo critico"
in base alla quale il fondamento dell'esperienza morale viene individuato nella
ricerca, che ognuno compie, delle "buone ragioni" che danno forma
alla propria individualità personale attraverso l'agire. Riconoscere ogni persona
come autrice della propria identità fonda un'etica del rispetto delle persone
in quanto a ogni individuo viene riconosciuto il diritto e il dovere di
esprimere le proprie abilità e costruire la propria personalità. Si è
inoltre occupato di bioetica essendo anche stato coordinatore del progetto
Bioetica della genetica: questioni morali e giuridiche negli impieghi clinici,
biomedici e sociali della genetica umana del Miur (FIRB,2009-). Tra i
suoi interessi più recenti, la disciplina della Film and Philosophy: la
riflessione su come i film possono fare filosofia e se possono argomentare vere
e proprie tesi filosofiche. In questo contesto ha dato vita al Laboratorio di
Filosofia e Cinema presso la Facoltà di Filosofia dell'Università Vita-Salute
San Raffaele, conduce il sabato pomeriggio la rubrica "Al cinema col
Filosofo" su TgCom24 (stagioni - e -) e la rubrica "Imparare ad amare
i film" all'interno di Cinematografo Estate () su Rai 1. Riviste È
membro del comitato scientifico dell'Annuario di Etica (ed. Vita e Pensiero),
dell'Annuario di Filosofia (ed. Mimesis) e della rivista online Etica &
Politica. Dalla sua fondazione (febbraio ) è membro del Comitato
Scientifico della rivista scientifica The Future of Science and Ethics, a cura
del Comitato Etico della Fondazione Umberto Veronesi. Attività teatrale
Romeo e Giulietta: nascita e tragedia dell'io moderno, Eloisa e Abelardo:
passione e negazione, Occidente, o identità fragile: Paul Auster e le Follie di
Brooklyn, analisi filosofiche con letture sceniche, ciclo "Aperitivi con
Sophia", Teatro Franco Parenti, marzo-aprile 2009 La violenza e
l'ingiustiziaGorgia, ciclo "Filosofi a teatro" Roberto Mordacci,
Teatro Franco Parenti, dicembre 2009 L'individuo, la libertà e il perdono.
Hegel legge Dostoevskij, lettura scenica di Roberto Mordacci e Jean Sorel,
ciclo l'Intelligenza e la Fantasia, Teatro Strehler, maggio 2006 L'isola della
verità. Divagazioni fotografiche e filosofiche, lettura scenica di Roberto
Mordacci, Anna Traini e Maria Grazia Stepparava, Cluster Isole, Mare e Cibo,
Padiglione P03-Expo Milano (Rho-Fiera),
14 liglio Kant e il mare, lettura
scenica di Roberto Mordacci e Francesca Ria, agosto Pubblicazioni Bioetica della sperimentazione,
FrancoAngeli, Milano 1997. Salute e bioetica (con Giorgio Cosmacini), Einaudi,
Milano 2002. Ethics and Genetics. A workbook for practitioners and students,
Bergham Books, New York 2003, con G. de Wert, R. ter Meulen e M. Tallacchini.
Una introduzione alle teorie morali, Feltrinelli, Milano 2003. La vita etica e
le buone ragioni, Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2007. Ragioni personali. Saggio sulla
normatività morale, Carocci, Milano 2008. Elogio dell'Immoralista, Bruno
Mondadori, Milano 2009. Rispetto, Raffaello Cortina, Milano . Bioetica, Bruno
Mondadori, Milano . L'etica è per le persone, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo . Al
cinema con il filosofo. Imparare ad amare i film, Mondadori, Milano . La
condizione neomoderna, Einaudi[collegamento interrotto], Torino, . Ritorno a
utopia, Laterza, Bari, . Note Università
Vita-Salute San Raffaele, su unisr.it. 1º agosto 19 ottobre ).
Governo.it/bioetica , su governo.it.
Roberto Mordacci, su Le Università per Expo, 17 ottobre . 14 giugno 17 giugno ).
Commissione per l’Etica della Ricerca e la Bioetica | Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche, su cnr.it. 14 giugno . Organi della società | SIFM, su sifm.it. 14
giugno . Intervista a L'accento di
Socrate, su laccentodisocrate.it. Rai 1,
Cinematografo estate, su rai.tv. Scienza
e etica: in uscita la nuova rivista della Fondazione Veronesi, su Fondazione
Umberto Veronesi. 14 giugno . Chi siamo
| FUTURE OF SCIENCE AND ETHICS, su scienceandethics.fondazioneveronesi.it. 14
giugno . Feeding the Mind: Expo-Bicocca
Conversation Hour, su unimib.it. 14 giugno
9 agosto ). Lettura scenica de
"I Sensi del Mare", su//elbareport.it. 14 giugno .
PearsonImparare sempre [collegamento interrotto], su pearson.it. 1º agosto
. BioeticaMordacci RobertoeBookMondadori
BrunoSai cos'è?FilosofiaePubIBS, su ibs.it. 1º agosto . UNIVERSO FILOSOFIAL'etica è per le
personeEdizioni San Paolo, su edizionisanpaolo.it. 1º agosto . AL CINEMA CON IL FILOSOFO. 1º agosto 21 luglio ).
Riflessioni sul senso della vita intervista di Ivo Nardi, sito
"Riflessioni.it", settembre . Ci vuole più rispetto intervista a
Roberto Mordacci, Famiglia Cristiana, 9 ottobre . Ma l'etica non è un'intrusa,
intervista a Roberto Mordacci, Avvenire, 6 giugno Ora smettiamola di parlare inglese,
intervista a Roberto Mordacci, Il Giornale.
mordecai Isacco ben Mordecai Isacco ben Mordecai, conosciuto come Maestro
Gaio (......), filosofo. Fu il primo ebreo ad essere nominato archiatra papale:
fu al servizio di Papa Niccolò IV e/o Papa Bonifacio VIII, alla fine del XIII
secolo. Gaio fu tenuto in grande
considerazione da altri medici suoi contemporanei, come ad esempio Hillel ben
Samuel da Verona. Da Forlì, costui scrisse a Gajo due lunghe lettere (si veda
"Ḥemdah Genuzah," 18–22) sulla
disputa relativa all'accettazione delle dottrine di Mosè Maimonide, per indurlo
ad accettarle. Isacco ben Mordecai in effetti seguì con interesse le nuove
idee. Grätz, Geschichte. 3d ed., vii.
160, 165; Vogelstein and Rieger, Geschichte der Juden in Rom, i. 252-254 «Gajo, Maestro (Isaac ben Mordecai)» la
scheda nella Jewish Encyclopedia. Biografie
Biografie Medicina Medicina
Categorie: Medici italianiFilosofi italiani del XIV secoloMedici
medievaliFilosofi medievaliStoria dell'ebraismoEbrei italiani
Communicatum: meaning, the conventional,
common, or standard sense of an expression, construction, or sentence in a
given language, or of a non-linguistic signal or symbol. Literal meaning is the
non-figurative, strict meaning an expression or sentence has in a language by
virtue of the dictionary meaning of its words and the import of its syntactic
constructions. Synonymy is sameness of literal meaning: ‘prestidigitator’ means
‘expert at sleight of hand’. It is said that meaning is what a good translation
preserves, and this may or may not be literal: in French ‘Où sont les neiges
d’antan?’ literally means ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ and figuratively
means ‘nothing lasts’. Signal-types and symbols have non-linguistic
conventional meaning: the white flag means truce; the lion means St. Mark. In
another sense, meaning is what a person intends to communicate by a particular
utteranceutterer’s meaning, as Grice called it, or speaker’s meaning, in
Stephen Schiffer’s term. A speaker’s meaning may or may not coincide with the
literal meaning of what is uttered, and it may be non-linguistic. Non-literal:
in saying “we will soon be in our tropical paradise,” Jane meant that they
would soon be in Antarctica. Literal: in saying “that’s deciduous,” she meant
that the tree loses its leaves every year. Non-linguistic: by shrugging, she
meant that she agreed. The literal meaning of a sentence typically does not
determine exactly what a speaker says in making a literal utterance: the
meaning of ‘she is praising me’ leaves open what John says in uttering it, e.g.
that Jane praises John at 12:00 p.m., Dec. 21, 1991. A not uncommonbut
theoretically loadedway of accommodating this is to count the context-specific
things that speakers say as propositions, entities that can be expressed in
different languages and that are (on certain theories) the content of what is
said, believed, desired, and so on. On that assumption, a sentence’s literal
meaning is a context-independent rule, or function, that determines a certain
proposition (the content of what the speaker says) given the context of
utterance. David Kaplan has called such a rule or function a sentence’s
“character.” A sentence’s literal meaning also includes its potential for
performing certain illocutionary acts, in J. L. Austin’s term. The meaning of
an imperative sentence determines what orders, requests, and the like can literally
be expressed: ‘sit down there’ can be uttered literally by Jane to request (or
order or urge) John to sit down at 11:59 a.m. on a certain bench in Santa
Monica. Thus a sentence’s literal meaning involves both its character and a
constraint on illocutionary acts: it maps contexts onto illocutionary acts that
have (something like) determinate propositional contents. A context includes
the identity of speaker, hearer, time of utterance, and also aspects of the
speaker’s intentions. In ethics the distinction has flourished between the
expressive or emotive meaning of a word or sentence and its cognitive meaning.
The emotive meaning of an utterance or a term is the attitude it expresses, the
pejorative meaning of ‘chiseler’, say. An emotivist in ethics, e.g. C. L.
Stevenson, cited by Grice in “Meaning” for the Oxford Philosophical Society,
holds that the literal meaning of ‘it is good’ is identical with its emotive
meaning, the positive attitude it expresses. On Hare’s theory, the literal
meaning of ‘ought’ is its prescriptive meaning, the imperative force it gives
to certain sentences that contain it. Such “noncognitivist” theories can allow
that a term like ‘good’ also has non-literal descriptive meaning, implying
nonevaluative properties of an object. By contrast, cognitivists take the
literal meaning of an ethical term to be its cognitive meaning: ‘good’ stands
for an objective property, and in asserting “it is good” one literally
expresses, not an attitude, but a true or false judgment. ’Cognitive meaning’
serves as well as any other term to capture what has been central in the theory
of meaning beyond ethics, the “factual” element in meaning that remains when we
abstract from its illocutionary and emotive aspects. It is what is shared by
‘there will be an eclipse tomorrow’ and ‘will there be an eclipse tomorrow?’.
This common element is often identified with a proposition (or a “character”),
but, once again, that is theoretically loaded. Although cognitive meaning has
been the preoccupation of the theory of meaning in the twentieth century, it is
difficult to define precisely in non-theoretical terms. Suppose we say that the
cognitive meaning of a sentence is ‘that aspect of its meaning which is capable
of being true or false’: there are non-truth-conditional theories of meaning
(see below) on which this would not capture the essentials. Suppose we say it
is ‘what is capable of being asserted’: an emotivist might allow that one can
assert that a thing is good. Still many philosophers have taken for granted
that they know cognitive meaning (under that name or not) well enough to
theorize about what it consists in, and it is the focus of what follows. The
oldest theories of meaning in modern philosophy are the
seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century idea theory (also called the ideational
theory) and image theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of words in
public language derives from the ideas or mental images that words are used to
express. As for what constitutes the representational properties of ideas,
Descartes held it to be a basic property of the mind, inexplicable, and Locke a
matter of resemblance (in some sense) between ideas and things. Contemporary
analytic philosophy speaks more of propositional attitudesthoughts, beliefs,
intentionsthan of ideas and images; and it speaks of the contents of such
attitudes: if Jane believes that there are lions in Africa, that belief has as
its content that there are lions in Africa. Virtually all philosophers agree
that propositional attitudes have some crucial connection with meaning. A
fundamental element of a theory of meaning is where it locates the basis of
meaning, in thought, in individual speech, or in social practices. (i) Meaning
may be held to derive entirely from the content of thoughts or propositional
attitudes, that mental content itself being constituted independently of public
linguistic meaning. (‘Constituted independently of’ does not imply ‘unshaped
by’.) (ii) It may be held that the contents of beliefs and communicative
intentions themselves derive in part from the meaning of overt speech, or even
from social practices. Then meaning would be jointly constituted by both
individual psychological and social linguistic facts. Theories of the first
sort include those in the style of Grice, according to which sentences’
meanings are determined by practices or implicit conventions that govern what
speakers mean when they use the relevant words and constructions. The emissor’s
meaning is explained in terms of certain propositional attitudes, namely the
emissor’s intentions to produce certain effects in his emissee. To mean that it
is raining and that the emissee is to close the door is to utter or to do
something (not necessarily linguistic) with the intention (very roughly) of
getting one’s emissee to believe that it is raining and go and close the door.
Theories of the emissor’s meaning have been elaborated at Oxford by H. P. Grice
(originally in a lecture to the Oxford Philosophical Society, inspired in part
by Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning‘meaning’ was not considered a
curricular topic in the Lit. Hum. programme he belonge in) and by Schiffer.
David Lewis has proposed that linguistic meaning is constituted by implicit
conventions that systematically associate sentences with speakers’ beliefs
rather than with communicative intentions. The contents of thought might be
held to be constitutive of linguistic meaning independently of communication.
Russell, and Wittgenstein in his early writings, wrote about meaning as if the
key thing is the propositional content of the belief or thought that a sentence
(somehow) expresses; they apparently regarded this as holding on an individual
basis and not essentially as deriving from communication intentions or social
practices. And Chomsky speaks of the point of language as being “the free
expression of thought.” Such views suggest that ‘linguistic meaning’ may stand
for two properties, one involving communication intentions and practices, the
other more intimately related to thinking and conceiving. By contrast, the
content of propositional attitudes and the meaning of overt speech might be
regarded as coordinate facts neither of which can obtain independently: to
interpret other people one must assign both content to their beliefs/intentions
and meaning to their utterances. This is explicit in Davidson’s
truth-conditional theory (see below); perhaps it is present also in the
post-Wittgensteinian notion of meaning as assertability conditionse.g., in the
writings of Dummett. On still other accounts, linguistic meaning is essentially
social. Wittgenstein is interpreted by Kripke as holding in his later writings
that social rules are essential to meaning, on the grounds that they alone
explain the normative aspect of meaning, explain the fact that an expression’s
meaning determines that some uses are correct or others incorrect. Another way
in which meaning may be essentially social is Putnam’s “division of linguistic
labor”: the meanings of some terms, say in botany or cabinetmaking, are set for
the rest of us by specialists. The point might extend to quite non-technical
words, like ‘red’: a person’s use of it may be socially deferential, in that
the rule which determines what ‘red’ means in his mouth is determined, not by
his individual usage, but by the usage of some social group to which he
semantically defers. This has been argued by Tyler Burge to imply that the
contents of thoughts themselves are in part a matter of social facts. Let us
suppose there is a language L that contains no indexical terms, such as ‘now’,
‘I’, or demonstrative pronouns, but contains only proper names, common nouns,
adjectives, verbs, adverbs, logical words. (No natural language is like this;
but the supposition simplifies what follows.) Theories of meaning differ
considerably in how they would specify the meaning of a sentence S of L. Here
are the main contenders. (i) Specify S’s truth conditions: S is true if and
only if some swans are black. (ii) Specify the proposition that S expresses: S
means (the proposition) that some swans are black. (iii) Specify S’s
assertability conditions: S is assertable if and only if blackswan-sightings
occur or black-swan-reports come in, etc. (iv) Translate S into that sentence
of our language which has the same use as S or the same conceptual role.
Certain theories, especially those that specify meanings in ways (i) and (ii),
take the compositionality of meaning as basic. Here is an elementary fact: a
sentence’s meaning is a function of the meanings of its component words and
constructions, and as a result we can utter and understand new sentencesold
words and constructions, new sentences. Frege’s theory of Bedeutung or
reference, especially his use of the notions of function and object, is about
compositionality. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein explains compositionality in
his picture theory of meaning and theory of truth-functions. According to
Wittgenstein, a sentence or proposition is a picture of a (possible) state of
affairs; terms correspond to non-linguistic elements, and those terms’ arrangements
in sentences have the same form as arrangements of elements in the states of
affairs the sentences stand for. The leading truth-conditional theory of
meaning is the one advocated by Davidson, drawing on the work of Tarski. Tarski
showed that, for certain formalized languages, we can construct a finite set of
rules that entails, for each sentence S of the infinitely many sentences of
such a language, something of the form ‘S is true if and only if . . .’. Those
finitely statable rules, which taken together are sometimes called a truth
theory of the language, might entail ‘ “(x) (Rx P Bx)” is true if and only if
every raven is black’. They would do this by having separately assigned
interpretations to ‘R’, ‘B’, ‘P’, and ‘(x)’. Truth conditions are compositionally
determined in analogous ways for sentences, however complex. Davidson proposes
that Tarski’s device is applicable to natural languages and that it explains,
moreover, what meaning is, given the following setting. Interpretation involves
a principle of charity: interpreting a person N means making the best possible
sense of N, and this means assigning meanings so as to maximize the overall
truth of N’s utterances. A systematic interpretation of N’s language can be
taken to be a Tarski-style truth theory that (roughly) maximizes the truth of
N’s utterances. If such a truth theory implies that a sentence S is true in N’s
language if and only if some swans are black, then that tells us the meaning of
S in N’s language. A propositional theory of meaning would accommodate
compositionality thus: a finite set of rules, which govern the terms and
constructions of L, assigns (derivatively) a proposition (putting aside
ambiguity) to each sentence S of L by virtue of S’s terms and constructions. If
L contains indexicals, then such rules assign to each sentence not a fully
specific proposition but a ‘character’ in the above sense. Propositions may be
conceived in two ways: (a) as sets of possible circumstances or “worlds”then
‘Hesperus is hot’ in English is assigned the set of possible worlds in which
Hesperus is hot; and (b) as structured combinations of elementsthen ‘Hesperus
is hot’ is assigned a certain ordered pair of elements ‹M1,M2(. There are two
theories about M1 and M2. They may be the senses of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’,
and then the ordered pair is a “Fregean” proposition. They may be the
references of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’, and then the ordered pair is a
“Russellian” proposition. This difference reflects a fundamental dispute in
twentieth-century philosophy of language. The connotation or sense of a term is
its “mode of presentation,” the way it presents its denotation or reference.
Terms with the same reference or denotation may present their references
differently and so differ in sense or connotation. This is unproblematic for
complex terms like ‘the capital of Italy’ and ‘the city on the Tiber’, which
refer to Rome via different connotations. Controversy arises over simple terms,
such as proper names and common nouns. Frege distinguished sense and reference
for all expressions; the proper names ‘Phosphorus’ and ‘Hesperus’ express
descriptive senses according to how we understand them[that bright starlike
object visible before dawn in the eastern sky . . .], [that bright starlike
object visible after sunset in the western sky . . .]; and they refer to Venus
by virtue of those senses. Russell held that ordinary proper names, such as
‘Romulus’, abbreviate definite descriptions, and in this respect his view
resembles Frege’s. But Russell also held that, for those simple terms (not
‘Romulus’) into which statements are analyzable, sense and reference are not
distinct, and meanings are “Russellian” propositions. (But Russell’s view of
their constituents differs from present-day views.) Kripke rejected the “Frege-Russell”
view of ordinary proper names, arguing that the reference of a proper name is
determined, not by a descriptive condition, but typically by a causal chain
that links name and referencein the case of ‘Hesperus’ a partially perceptual
relation perhaps, in the case of ‘Aristotle’ a causal-historical relation. A
proper name is rather a rigid designator: any sentence of the form ‘Aristotle
is . . . ‘ expresses a proposition that is true in a given possible world (or
set of circumstances) if and only if our (actual) Aristotle satisfies, in that
world, the condition ‘ . . . ‘. The “Frege-Russell” view by contrast
incorporates in the proposition, not the actual referent, but a descriptive
condition connotated by ‘Aristotle’ (the author of the Metaphysics, or the
like), so that the name’s reference differs in different worlds even when the
descriptive connotation is constant. (Someone else could have written the
Metaphysics.) Some recent philosophers have taken the rigid designator view to
motivate the stark thesis that meanings are Russellian propositions (or
characters that map contexts onto such propositions): in the above
proposition/meaning ‹M1,M2(, M1 is simply the referentthe planet Venusitself.
This would be a referential theory of meaning, one that equates meaning with
reference. But we must emphasize that the rigid designator view does not
directly entail a referential theory of meaning. What about the meanings of
predicates? What sort of entity is M2 above? Putnam and Kripke also argue an
anti-descriptive point about natural kind terms, predicates like ‘(is) gold’,
‘(is a) tiger’, ‘(is) hot’. These are not equivalent to descriptions’gold’ does
not mean ‘metal that is yellow, malleable, etc.’but are rigid designators of
underlying natural kinds whose identities are discovered by science. On a
referential theory of meanings as Russellian propositions, the meaning of
‘gold’ is then a natural kind. (A complication arises: the property or kind
that ‘widow’ stands for seems a good candidate for being the sense or
connotation of ‘widow’, for what one understands by it. The distinction between
Russellian and Fregean propositions is not then firm at every point.) On the
standard sense-theory of meanings as Fregean propositions, M1 and M2 are pure
descriptive senses. But a certain “neo-Fregean” view, suggested but not held by
Gareth Evans, would count M1 and M2 as object-dependent senses. For example,
‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ would rigidly designate the same object but have
distinct senses that cannot be specified without mention of that object. Note
that, if proper names or natural kind terms have meanings of either sort, their
meanings vary from speaker to speaker. A propositional account of meaning (or
the corresponding account of “character”) may be part of a broader theory of
meaning; for example: a Grice-type theory involving implicit conventions; (b) a
theory that meaning derives from an intimate connection of language and
thought; (c) a theory that invokes a principle of charity or the like in interpreting
an individual’s speech; (d) a social theory on which meaning cannot derive
entirely from the independently constituted contents of individuals’ thoughts
or uses. A central tradition in twentieth-century theory of meaning identifies
meaning with factors other than propositions (in the foregoing senses) and
truth-conditions. The meaning of a sentence is what one understands by it; and
understanding a sentence is knowing how to use itknowing how to verify it and
when to assert it, or being able to think with it and to use it in inferences
and practical reasoning. There are competing theories here. In the 1930s,
proponents of logical positivism held a verification theory of meaning, whereby
a sentence’s or statement’s meaning consists in the conditions under which it
can be verified, certified as acceptable. This was motivated by the
positivists’ empiricism together with their view of truth as a metaphysical or
non-empirical notion. A descendant of verificationism is the thesis, influenced
by the later Wittgenstein, that the meaning of a sentence consists in its
assertability conditions, the circumstances under which one is justified in
asserting the sentence. If justification and truth can diverge, as they appear
to, then a meaning meaning sentence’s assertability conditions can be distinct
from (what non-verificationists see as) its truth conditions. Dummett has
argued that assertability conditions are the basis of meaning and that
truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake (and hence also propositional
semantics in sense [a] above). A problem with assertability theories is that,
as is generally acknowledged, compositional theories of the assertability
conditions of sentences are not easily constructed. A conceptual role theory of
meaning (also called conceptual role semantics) typically presupposes that we
think in a language of thought (an idea championed by Fodor), a system of
internal states structured like a language that may or may not be closely
related to one’s natural language. The conceptual role of a term is a matter of
how thoughts that contain the term are dispositionally related to other
thoughts, to sensory states, and to behavior. Hartry Field has pointed out that
our Fregean intuitions about ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are explained by those
terms’ having distinct conceptual roles, without appeal to Fregean descriptive
senses or the like, and that this is compatible with those terms’ rigidly
designating the same object. This combination can be articulated in two ways.
Gilbert Harman proposes that meaning is “wide” conceptual role, so that
conceptual role incorporates not just inferential factors, etc., but also
Kripke-Putnam external reference relations. But there are also two-factor
theories of meaning, as proposed by Field among others, which recognize two
strata of meaning, one corresponding to how a person understands a termits
narrow conceptual role, the other involving references, Russellian
propositions, or truth-conditions. As the language-of-thought view indicates,
some concerns about meaning have been taken over by theories of the content of
thoughts or propositional attitudes. A distinction is often made between the
narrow content of a thought and its wide content. If psychological explanation
invokes only “what is in the head,” and if thought contents are essential to
psychological explanation, there must be narrow content. Theories have appealed
to the “syntax” or conceptual roles or “characters” of internal sentences, as
well as to images and stereotypes. A thought’s wide content may then be
regarded (as motivated by the Kripke-Putnam arguments) as a Russellian
proposition. The naturalistic reference-relations that determine the elements
of such propositions are the focus of causal, “informational” and
“teleological” theories by Fodor, Dretske, and Ruth Millikan. Assertability
theories and conceptual role theories have been called use theories of meaning
in a broad sense that marks a contrast with truthconditional theories. On a use
theory in this broad sense, understanding meaning consists in knowing how to
use a term or sentence, or being disposed to use a term or sentence in response
to certain external or conceptual factors. But ‘use theory’ also refers to the
doctrine of the later writings of Wittgenstein, by whom theories of meaning
that abstract from the very large variety of interpersonal uses of language are
declared a philosopher’s mistake. The meanings of terms and sentences are a
matter of the language games in which they play roles; these are too various to
have a common structure that can be captured in a philosopher’s theory of
meaning. Conceptual role theories tend toward meaning holism, the thesis that a
term’s meaning cannot be abstracted from the entirety of its conceptual
connections. On a holistic view any belief or inferential connection involving
a term is as much a candidate for determining its meaning as any other. This
could be avoided by affirming the analytic–synthetic distinction, according to
which some of a term’s conceptual connections are constitutive of its meaning
and others only incidental. (‘Bachelors are unmarried’ versus ‘Bachelors have a
tax advantage’.) But many philosophers follow Quine in his skepticism about
that distinction. The implications of holism are drastic, for it strictly
implies that different people’s words cannot mean the same. In the philosophy
of science, meaning holism has been held to imply the incommensurability of
theories, according to which a scientific theory that replaces an earlier
theory cannot be held to contradict it and hence not to correct or to improve
on itfor the two theories’ apparently common terms would be equivocal. Remedies
might include, again, maintaining some sort of analytic–synthetic distinction
for scientific terms, or holding that conceptual role theories and hence holism
itself, as Field proposes, hold only intrapersonally, while taking
interpersonal and intertheoretic meaning comparisons to be referential and
truth-conditional. Even this, however, leads to difficult questions about the
interpretation of scientific theories. A radical position, associated with
Quine, identifies the meaning of a theory as a whole with its empirical
meaning, that is, the set of actual and possible sensory or perceptual
situations that would count as verifying the theory as a whole. This can be
seen as a successor to the verificationist theory, with theory replacing
statement or sentence. Articulations of meaning internal to a theory would then
be spurious, as would virtually all ordinary intuitions about meaning. This
fits well Quine’s skepticism about meaning, his thesis of the indeterminacy of
translation, according to which no objective facts distinguish a favored
translation of another language into ours from every apparently incorrect
translation. Many constructive theories of meaning may be seen as replies to
this and other skepticisms about the objective status of semantic facts. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” H. P. Grice, “Utterer’s meaning and intentions,” H. P.
Grice, “Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning,” H. P. Grice,
“Meaning revisited.”
H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational
helpfulness.
H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational
co-operation. Grice loved to botanise linguistically on ‘desideratum,’
‘objective,’ ‘postulate,’ ‘principle.’ “My favourite seems to be ‘postulate.’”
-- postŭlo , āvi, ātum, 1, v. a. posco, Which Lewis
and Short render as I.to ask, demand, require, request, desire (syn.: posco,
flagito, peto); constr. with aliquid, aliquid ab aliquo, aliquem aliquid, with
ut (ne), de, with inf., or absol. I. In gen.: “incipiunt postulare, poscere,
minari,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 34, § 78: “nemo inventus est tam audax, qui posceret,
nemo tam impudens qui postularet ut venderet,” id. ib. 2, 4, 20, § 44; cf. Liv.
2, 45; 3, 19: “tametsi causa postulat, tamen quia postulat, non flagitat,
praeteribo,” Cic. Quint. 3, 13: “postulabat autem magis quam petebat, ut,
etc.,” Curt. 4, 1, 8: “dehinc postulo, sive aequom est, te oro, ut, etc.,” Ter.
And. 1, 2, 19: “ita volo itaque postulo ut fiat,” id. ib. 3, 3, 18; Plaut. Aul.
4, 10, 27: “suom jus postulat,” Ter. Ad. 2, 1, 47; cf.: “aequom postulat, da
veniam,” id. And. 5, 3, 30; and: “quid est? num iniquom postulo?” id. Phorm. 2,
3, 64: “nunc hic dies alios mores postulat,” id. And. 1, 2, 18: “fidem
publicam,” Cic. Att. 2, 24, 2: “istud, quod postulas,” id. Rep. 1, 20, 33; id.
Lael. 2, 9: “ad senatum venire auxilium postulatum,” Caes. B. G. 1, 31:
“deliberandi sibi unum diem postulavit,” Cic. N. D. 1, 22, 60; cf.: “noctem
sibi ad deliberandum postulavit,” id. Sest. 34, 74: “postulo abs te, ut, etc.,”
Plaut. Capt. 5, 1, 18: “postulatur a te jam diu vel flagitatur potius
historia,” Cic. Leg. 1, 5: “quom maxime abs te postulo atque oro, ut, etc.,”
Ter. And. 5, 1, 4; and: “quidvis ab amico postulare,” Cic. Lael. 10, 35; cf. in
pass.: “cum aliquid ab amicis postularetur,” id. ib.: “orationes a me duas
postulas,” id. Att. 2, 7, 1: “quod principes civitatum a me postulassent,” id.
Fam. 3, 8, 5; cf. infra the passages with an object-clause.—With ut (ne):
“quodam modo postulat, ut, etc.,” Cic. Att. 10, 4, 2: “postulatum est, ut
Bibuli sententia divideretur,” id. Fam. 1, 2, 1 (for other examples with ut, v.
supra): “legatos ad Bocchum mittit postulatum, ne sine causā hostis populo
Romano fieret,” Sall. J. 83, 1.—With subj. alone: “qui postularent, eos qui sibi
Galliaeque bellum intulissent, sibi dederent,” Caes. B. G. 4, 16, 3.—With de:
“sapientes homines a senatu de foedere postulaverunt,” Cic. Balb. 15, 34:
“Ariovistus legatos ad eum mittit, quod antea de colloquio postulasset, id per
se fieri licere,” Caes. B. G. 1, 42.—With inf., freq. to be rendered, to wish,
like, want: qui lepide postulat alterum frustrari, Enn. ap. Gell. 18, 2, 7
(Sat. 32 Vahl.): “hic postulat se Romae absolvi, qui, etc.,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3,
60, § 138: “o facinus impudicum! quam liberam esse oporteat, servire
postulare,” Plaut. Rud. 2, 3, 62; id. Men. 2, 3, 88: “me ducere istis dictis
postulas?” Ter. And. 4, 1, 20; id. Eun. 1, 1, 16: “(lupinum) ne spargi quidem
postulat decidens sponte,” Plin. 18, 14, 36, § 135: “si me tibi praemandere postulas,”
Gell. 4, 1, 11.—With a double object: quas (sollicitudines) levare tua te
prudentia postulat, demands of you, Luccei. ap. Cic. Fam. 5, 14, 2. —With nom.
and inf.: “qui postulat deus credi,” Curt. 6, 11, 24.— II. In partic., in
jurid. lang. A. To summon, arraign before a court, to prosecute, accuse,
impeach (syn.: accuso, insimulo); constr. class. usu. with de and abl.,
post-Aug. also with gen.): “Gabinium tres adhuc factiones postulant: L.
Lentulus, qui jam de majestate postulavit,” Cic. Q. Fr. 3, 1, 5, § 15: “aliquem
apud praetorem de pecuniis repetundis,” id. Cornel. Fragm. 1: “aliquem
repetundis,” Tac. A. 3, 38: “aliquem majestatis,” id. ib. 1, 74: “aliquem
repetundarum,” Suet. Caes. 4: aliquem aliquā lege, Cael. ap. Cic. Fam. 8, 12,
3: “aliquem ex aliquā causā reum,” Plin. 33, 2, 8, § 33: “aliquem impietatis
reum,” Plin. Ep. 7, 33, 7: “aliquem injuriarum,” Suet. Aug. 56 fin.: “aliquem
capitis,” Dig. 46, 1, 53: “qui (infames) postulare prohibentur,” Paul. Sent. 1,
2, 1.— B. To demand a writ or leave to prosecute, from the prætor or other
magistrate: “postulare est desiderium suum vel amici sui in jure apud eum qui
jurisdictioni praeest exponere vel alterius desiderio contradicere, etc.,” Dig.
3, 1, 1; cf. “this whole section: De postulando: in aliquem delationem nominis
postulare,” Cic. Div. in Caecil. 20, 64: “postulare servos in quaestionem,” id.
Rosc. Am. 28, 77: “quaestionem,” Liv. 2, 29, 5.— C. For the usual expostulare,
to complain of one: “quom patrem adeas postulatum,” Plaut. Bacch. 3, 3, 38 (but
in id. Mil. 2, 6, 35, the correct read. is expostulare; v. Ritschl ad h. l.).—*
D. Postulare votum (lit. to ask a desire, i. e.), to vow, A Flor. init.— E. Of
the seller, to demand a price, ask (post-class. for posco): “pro eis (libris)
trecentos Philippeos postulasse,” Lact. 1, 6, 10; cf.: “accipe victori populus
quod postulat aurum,” Juv. 7, 243. — III. Transf., of things. A. To contain,
measure: “jugerum sex modios seminis postulat,” Col. 2, 9, 17.— B. To need,
require: “cepina magis frequenter subactam postulat terram,” Col. 11, 3,
56.—Hence, po-stŭlātum , i, n.; usually in plur.: po-stŭlāta , ōrum, a demand,
request (class.): “intolerabilia postulata,” Cic. Fam. 12, 4, 1; id. Phil. 12,
12, 28: deferre postulata alicujus ad aliquem, Caes. B. C. 1, 9: “cognoscere de
postulatis alicujus,” id. B. G. 4, 11 fin.: “postulata facere,” Nep. Alcib. 8,
4.
Mechanism.
A monster. But on p. 286 of WoW he speaks of mechanism, and psychological
mechanism. Or rather of this or that psychological mechanism to be BENEFICIAL
for a mouse that wants to eat a piece of cheese. He uses it twice, and it’s the
OPERATION of the mechanism which is beneficial. So a psychophysical
correspondence is desirable for the psychological mechanism to operate in a way
that is beneficial for the sentient creature. Later in that essay he now
applies ‘mechanism’ to communication, and he speak of a ‘communication
mechanism’ being beneficial. In particular he is having in mind Davidson’s
transcendental argument for the truth of the transmitted beliefs. “If all our
transfers involved mistaken beliefs, it is not clear that the communication
mechanism would be beneficial for the institution of ‘shared experience.’”
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “My twelve labours.” mechanistic
explanation, a kind of explanation countenanced by views that range from the
extreme position that all natural phenomena can be explained entirely in terms
of masses in motion of the sort postulated in Newtonian mechanics, to little
more than a commitment to naturalistic explanations. Mechanism in its extreme
form is clearly false because numerous physical phenomena of the most ordinary
sort cannot be explained entirely in terms of masses in motion. Mechanics is
only one small part of physics. Historically, explanations were designated as
mechanistic to indicate that they included no reference to final causes or
vital forces. In this weak sense, all present-day scientific explanations are
mechanistic. The adequacy of mechanistic explanation is usually raised in
connection with living creatures, especially those capable of deliberate
action. For example, chromosomes lining up opposite their partners in
preparation for meiosis looks like anything but a purely mechanical process,
and yet the more we discover about the process, the more mechanistic it turns
out to be. The mechanisms responsible for meiosis arose through variation and
selection and cannot be totally understood without reference to the
evolutionary process, but meiosis as it takes place at any one time appears to
be a purely mechanistic physicochemical meaning, conceptual role theory of
mechanistic explanation process. Intentional behavior is the phenomenon that is
most resistant to explanation entirely in physicochemical terms. The problem is
not that we do not know enough about the functioning of the central nervous
system but that no matter how it turns out to work, we will be disinclined to
explain human action entirely in terms of physicochemical processes. The
justification for this disinclination tends to turn on what we mean when we
describe people as behaving intentionally. Even so, we may simply be mistaken
to ascribe more to human action than can be explained in terms of purely
physicochemical processes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Mechanism.”
meliorism: the view that the
world is neither completely good nor completely bad, and that incremental
progress or regress depend on human actions. By creative intelligence and
education we can improve the environment and social conditions. The position is
first attributed to George Eliot and William James. Whitehead suggested that
meliorism applies to God, who can both improve the world and draw sustenance
from human efforts to improve the world.
Melissus: Grecian philosopher,
traditionally classified as a member of the Eleatic School. He was also famous
as the victorious commander in a preemptive attack by the Samians on an
Athenian naval force. Like Parmenideswho must have influenced Melissus, even
though there is no evidence the two ever metMelissus argues that “what-is” or
“the real” cannot come into being out of nothing, cannot perish into nothing,
is homogeneous, and is unchanging. Indeed, he argues explicitly (whereas
Parmenides only implies) that there is only one such entity, that there is no
void, and that even spatial rearrangement (metakosmesis) must be ruled out. But
unlike Parmenides, Melissus deduces that what-is is temporally infinite (in
significant contrast to Parmenides, regardless as to whether the latter held
that what-is exists strictly in the “now” or that it exists non-temporally).
Moreover, Melissus argues that what-is is spatially infinite (whereas
Parmenides spoke of “bounds” and compared what-is to a well-made ball).
Significantly, Melissus repeatedly speaks of “the One.” It is, then, in
Melissus, more than in Parmenides or in Zeno, that we find the emphasis on
monism. In a corollary to his main argument, Melissus argues that “if there
were many things,” each would have to beper impossibileexactly like “the One.”
This remark has been interpreted as issuing the challenge that was taken up by
the atomists. But it is more reasonable to read it as a philosophical
strategist’s preemptive strike: Melissus anticipates the move made in the
pluralist systems of the second half of the fifth century, viz., positing a
plurality of eternal and unchanging elements that undergo only spatial
rearrangement.
Grice’s
memoryGrice
on temporary mnemonic state. Grice remembers. Grice reminisces. "someone hears a noise" iff "a
(past) hearing of a nose is an elemnent in a total temporary state which is a
member of a series of total temporary statess such that every member of the
series would, given certain conditions, contain as al element a MEMORY of some
EXPERIENCE which is an element in some previous member OR contains as an
element some experience a memory of which would, given certain conditions,
occur as an element in some subsequent member; there being no subject of
members which is independent from all the rest." The retention of,
or the capacity to retain, past experience or previously acquired information.
There are two main philosophical questions about memory: (1) In what does
memory consist? and (2) What constitutes knowing a fact on the basis of memory?
Not all memory is remembering facts: there is remembering one’s perceiving or
feeling or acting in a certain waywhich, while it entails remembering the fact
that one did experience in that way, must be more than that. And not all
remembering of facts is knowledge of facts: an extremely hesitant attempt to
remember an address, if one gets it right, counts as remembering the address
even if one is too uncertain for this to count as knowing it. (1) Answers to
the first question agree on some obvious points: that memory requires (a) a
present and (b) a past state of, or event in, the subject, and (c) the right
sort of internal and causal relations between the two. Also, we must
distinguish between memory states (remembering for many years the name of one’s
first-grade teacher) and memory occurrences (recalling the name when asked). A
memory state is usually taken to be a disposition to display an appropriate
memory occurrence given a suitable stimulus. But philosophers disagree about
further specifics. On one theory (held by many empiricists from Hume to
Russell, among others, but now largely discredited), occurrent memory consists
in images of past experience (which have a special quality marking them as
memory images) and that memory of facts is read off such image memory. This
overlooks the point that people commonly remember facts without remembering
when or how they learned them. A more sophisticated theory of factual memory
(popular nowadays) holds that an occurrent memory of a fact requires, besides a
past learning of it, (i) some sort of present mental representation of it (perhaps
a linguistic one) and (ii) continuous storage between then and now of a
representation of it. But condition (i) may not be conceptually necessary: a
disposition to dial the right number when one wants to call home constitutes
remembering the number (provided it is appropriately linked causally to past
learning of the number) and manifesting that disposition is occurrently
remembering the fact as to what the number is even if one does not in the
process mentally represent that fact. Condition (ii) may also be too strong: it
seems at least conceptually possible that a causal link sufficient for memory
should be secured by a relation that does not involve anything continuous
between the relevant past and present occurrences (in The Analysis of Mind,
Russell countenanced this possibility and called it “mnemic causation”). (2)
What must be added to remembering that p to get a case of knowing it because
one remembers it? We saw that one must not be uncertain that p. Must one also
have grounds for trusting one’s memory impression (its seeming to one that one
remembers) that p? How could one have such grounds except by knowing them on
the basis of memory? The facts one can know not on the basis of memory are
limited at most to what one presently perceives and what one presently finds
self-evident. If no memory belief qualifies as knowledge unless it is supported
by memory knowledge of the reliability of one’s memory, then the process of
qualifying as memory knowledge cannot succeed: there would be an endless chain,
or loop, of factsthis belief is memory knowledge if and only if this other
belief is, which is if and only if this other one is, and so onwhich never
becomes a set that entails that any belief is memory knowledge. On the basis of
such reasoning a skeptic might deny the possibility of memory knowledge. We may
avoid this consequence without going to the lax extreme of allowing that any
correct memory impression is knowledge; we can impose the (frequently
satisfied) requirement that one not have reasons specific to the particular
case for believing that one’s memory impression might be unreliable. Finally,
remembering that p becomes memory knowledge that p only if one believes that p
because it seems to one that one remembers it. One might remember that p and confidently
believe that p, but if one has no memory impression of having previously
learned it, or one has such an impression but does not trust it and believes
that p only for other reasons (or no reason), then one should not be counted as
knowing that p on the basis of memory. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Memory and personal
identity.” H. P. Grice, “Benjamin on Broad on ‘remembering’”
Mentatum -- mens rea versus mens
castaactus reus versus actus castus -- One of the two main prerequisites, along
with “actus reus” for prima facie liability to criminal punishment in the
English legal systems. To be punishable in such systems, one must not only have
performed a legally prohibited action, such as killing another human being; one
must have done so with a culpable state of mind, or mens rea. Such culpable
mental states are of three kinds: they are either motivational states of
purpose, cognitive states of belief, or the non-mental state of negligence. To
illustrate each of these with respect to the act of killing: a killer may kill
either having another’s death as ultimate purpose, or as mediate purpose on the
way to achieving some further, ultimate end. Alternatively, the killer may act
believing to a practical certainty that his act will result in another’s death,
even though such death is an unwanted side effect, or he may believe that there
is a substantial and unjustified risk that his act will cause another’s death.
The actor may also be only negligent, which is to take an unreasonable risk of
another’s death even if the actor is not aware either of such risk or of the
lack of justification for taking it. Mens rea usually does not have to do with
any awareness by the actor that the act done is either morally wrong or legally
prohibited. Neither does mens rea have to do with any emotional state of guilt
or remorse, either while one is acting or afterward. Sometimes in its older
usages the term is taken to include the absence of excuses as well as the
mental states necessary for prima facie liability; in such a usage, the
requirement is helpfully labeled “general mens rea,” and the requirement above
discussed is labeled “special mens rea.” “Mentalese”Grice
on ‘modest mentalism’ -- the language of thought (the title of an essay by
Fodor) or of “brain writing” (a term of Dennett’s); specifically, a
languagelike medium of representation in which the contents of mental events
are supposedly expressed or recorded. (The term was probably coined by Wilfrid
Sellars, with whose views it was first associated.) If what one believes are
propositions, then it is tempting to propose that believing something is having
the Mentalese expression of that proposition somehow written in the relevant
place in one’s mind or brain. Thinking a thought, at least on those occasions
when we think “wordlessly” (without formulating our thoughts in sentences or
phrases composed of words of a public language), thus appears to be a matter of
creating a short-lived Mentalese expression in a special arena or work space in
the mind. In a further application of the concept, the process of coming to
understand a sentence of natural language can be viewed as one of translating
the sentence into Mentalese. It has often been argued that this view of
understanding only postpones the difficult questions of meaning, for it leaves
unanswered the question of how Mentalese expressions come to have the meanings
they do. There have been frequent attempts to develop versions of the
hypothesis that mental activity is conducted in Mentalese, and just as frequent
criticisms of these attempts. Some critics deny there is anything properly
called representation in the mind or brain at all; others claim that the system
of representation used by the brain is not enough like a natural language to be
called a language. Even among defenders of Mentalese, it has seldom been
claimed that all brains “speak” the same Mentalese. mentalism: Cfr.
‘psychism,’ animism.’ ‘spiritualism,’ cfr. Grice’s modest mentalism; any theory
that posits explicitly mental events and processes, where ‘mental’ means
exhibiting intentionality, not necessarily being immaterial or non-physical. A
mentalistic theory is couched in terms of belief, desire, thinking, feeling,
hoping, etc. A scrupulously non-mentalistic theory would be couched entirely in
extensional terms: it would refer only to behavior or to neurophysiological
states and events. The attack on mentalism by behaviorists was led by B. F.
Skinner, whose criticisms did not all depend on the assumption that mentalists
were dualists, and the subsequent rise of cognitive science has restored a sort
of mentalism (a “thoroughly modern mentalism,” as Fodor has called it) that is
explicitly materialistic. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Myro’s modest mentalism. mentatum: Grice
prefers psi-transmission. He knows that ‘mentatum’ sounds too much like ‘mind,’
and the mind is part of the ‘rational soul,’ not even encompassing the rational
pratical soul. If perhaps Grice was unhappy about the artificial flavour to
saying that a word is a sign, Grice surely should have checked with all the
Grecian-Roman cognates of mean, as in his favourite memorative-memorable
distinction, and the many Grecian realisations, or with Old Roman mentire
and mentare. Lewis and Short have “mentĭor,” f. mentire, L and S note, is
prob. from root men-, whence mens and memini, q. v. The original meaning, they
say, is to invent, hence, but alla Umberto Eco with sign, mentire comes
to mean in later use what Grice (if not the Grecians) holds is the opposite of
mean. Short and Lewis render mentire as to lie, cheat, deceive, etc., to
pretend, to declare falsely: mentior nisi or si mentior, a form of
asseveration, I am a liar, if, etc.: But also, animistically (modest
mentalism?) of things, as endowed with a mind. L and S go on: to deceive,
impose upon, to deceive ones self, mistake, to lie or speak falsely about, to
assert falsely, make a false promise about; to feign, counterfeit, imitate a
shape, nature, etc.: to devise a falsehood, to assume falsely, to
promise falsely, to invent, feign, of a poetical fiction: “ita mentitur (sc.
Homerus), Trop., of inanim. grammatical Subjects, as in Semel fac illud,
mentitur tua quod subinde tussis, Do what your cough keeps falsely promising,
i. e. die, Mart. 5, 39, 6. Do what your cough means! =imp. die!; hence, mentĭens,
a fallacy, sophism: quomodo mentientem, quem ψευδόμενον vocant, dissolvas;”
mentītus, imitated, counterfeit, feigned (poet.): “mentita tela;” For
“mentior,” indeed, there is a Griceian implicaturum involving rational control.
The rendition of mentire as to lie stems from a figurative shift from to
be mindful, or inventive, to have second thoughts" to "to lie,
conjure up". But Grice would also have a look at cognate “memini,” since
this is also cognate with “mind,” “mens,” and covers subtler instances of mean,
as in Latinate, “mention,” as in Grices “use-mention” distinction. mĕmĭni,
cognate with "mean" and German "meinen," to think = Grecian
ὑπομένειν, await (cf. Schiffer, "remnants of meaning," if I think, I
hesitate, and therefore re-main, cf. Grecian μεν- in μένω, Μέντωρ; μαν- in
μαίνομαι, μάντις; μνᾶ- in μιμνήσκω, etc.; cf.: maneo, or manere, as in
remain. The idea, as Schiffer well knows or means, being that if you
think, you hesitate, and therefore, wait and remain], moneo, reminiscor [cf.
reminiscence], mens, Minerva, etc. which L and S render as “to remember,
recollect, to think of, be mindful of a thing; not to have
forgotten a person or thing, to bear in mind (syn.: reminiscor,
recordor).” Surely with a relative clause, and to make mention of, to
mention a thing, either in speaking or writing (rare but
class.). Hence. mĕmĭnens, mindful And then Grice would have a look at
moneo, as in adMONish, also cognate is “mŏnĕo,” monere, causative from the root
"men;" whence memini, q. v., mens (mind), mentio (mention); lit. to
cause to think, to re-mind, put in mind of, bring to ones recollection; to
admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach (syn.: hortor, suadeo, doceo). L
and S are Griceian if not Grecian when they note that ‘monere’ can be used
"without the accessory notion [implicaturum or entanglement, that is] of
reminding or admonishing, in gen., to teach, instruct, tell, inform, point
out; also, to announce, predict, foretell, even if also to
punish, chastise (only in
Tacitus): “puerili verbere moneri.” And surely, since he loved to re-minisced,
Grice would have allowed to just earlier on just minisced. Short and Lewis
indeed have rĕmĭniscor, which, as they point out, features the root men; whence
mens, memini; and which they compare to comminiscere, v. comminiscor, to recall
to mind, recollect, remember (syn. recordor), often used by the Old
Romans with with Grices beloved that-clause, for sure. For what is
the good of reminiscing or comminiscing, if you cannot reminisce that Austin
always reminded Grice that skipping the dictionary was his big mistake! If
Grice uses mention, cognate with mean, he loved commenting Aristotle. And
commentare is, again, cognate with mean. As opposed to the development of the
root in Grecian, or English, in Roman the root for mens is quite represented in
many Latinate cognates. But a Roman, if not a Grecian, would perhaps be puzzled
by a Grice claiming, by intuition, to retrieve the necessary and sufficient
conditions for the use of this or that expression. When the Roman is told that
the Griceian did it for fun, he understands, and joins in the fun! Indeed,
hardly a natural kind in the architecture of the world, but one that fascinated
Grice and the Grecian philosophers before him! Communication.
mereologicum:: The mereological implicaturum.
Grice. "In a burst
of inspiration, Leśniewski coins "mereology" on a Tuesday evening in
March 1927, from the Grecian "μέρος," Polish for "part." From Leśniewski's Journal -- translation
from the Polish by Grice:
"Dear Anne, I have just coined a word. MEREOLOGY. I want to refer to a FORMA, not
informal as in Husserl, which is in German, anyway (his section, "On the
whole and the parts") theory of part-whole. I hope you love it! Love, L. --- "Leśniewski's tutee, another Pole, Alfred Tarski, in his Appendix
E to Woodger oversimplified, out of envey's Leśniewski's formalism."
"But then more loyal tutees (and tutees of tutees) of Lesniewski
elaborated this "Polish mereology." "For a good selection of the literature on Polish mereology,
see Srzednicki and Rickey (1984). For a survey of Polish mereology, see Simons
(1987). Since 1980 or so, however, research on Polish mereology has been almost
entirely historical in nature." Which is just as well. The theory of the totum and the pars. --
parts. Typically, a mereological theory employs notions such as the following: “proper
part,” “mproper part,” “overlapping” (having a part in common), disjoint (not
overlapping), mereological product (the “intersection” of overlapping objects),
mereological sum (a collection of parts), mereological difference, the
universal sum, mereological complement, and atom (that which has no proper
parts). A formal mereology is an axiomatic system. Goodman’s “Calculus of
Individuals” is compatible with Nominalism, i.e., no reference is made to sets,
properties, or any other abstract entity. Goodman hopes that his mereology,
with its many parallels to set theory, may provide an alternative to set theory
as a foundation for mathematics. Fundamental and controversial implications of
Goodman’s theories include their extensionality and collectivism. An
extensional theory implies that for any individuals, x and y, x % y provided x
and y have the same proper parts. One reason extensionality is controversial is
that it rules out an object’s acquiring or losing a part, and therefore is
inconsistent with commonsense beliefs such as that a car has a new tire or that
a table has lost a sliver of wood. A second reason for controversy is that
extensionality is incompatible with the belief that a statue and the piece of
bronze of which it is made have the same parts and yet are diverse objects.
Collectivism implies that any individuals, no matter how scattered, have a
mereological sum or constitute an object. Moreover, according to collectivism,
assembling or disassembling parts does not affect the existence of things,
i.e., nothing is created or destroyed by assembly or disassembly, respectively.
Thus, collectivism is incompatible with commonsense beliefs such as that when a
watch is disassembled, it is destroyed, or that when certain parts are
assembled, a watch is created. Because the aforementioned formal theories shun
modality, they lack the resources to express the thesis that a whole has each
of its parts necessarily. This thesis of mereological essentialism has recently
been defended by Roderick Chisholm.
meritum, a meritarian is one who asserts
the relevance of individual merit, as an independent justificatory condition,
in attempts to design social structures or distribute goods. ‘Meritarianism’ is
a recently coined term in social and political philosophy, closely related to
‘meritocracy’, and used to identify a range of related concerns that supplement
or oppose egalitarian, utilitarian, and contractarian principles and principles
based on entitlement, right, interest, and need, among others. For example, one
can have a pressing need for an Olympic medal but not merit it; one can have
the money to buy a masterpiece but not be worthy of it; one can have the right
to a certain benefit but not deserve it. Meritarians assert that considerations
of desert are always relevant and sometimes decisive in such cases. What counts
as merit, and how important should it be in moral, social, and political
decisions? Answers to these questions serve to distinguish one meritarian from
another, and sometimes to blur the distinctions between the meritarian position
and others. Merit may refer to any of these: comparative rank, capacities,
abilities, effort, intention, or achievement. Moreover, there is a relevance condition
to be met: to say that highest honors in a race should go to the most deserving
is presumably to say that the honors should go to those with the relevant sort
of meritspeed, e.g., rather than grace. Further, meritarians may differ about
the strength of the merit principle, and how various political or social
structures should be influenced by it.
meritocracy, in ordinary usage, a system
in which advancement is based on ability and achievement, or one in which
leadership roles are held by talented achievers. The term may also refer to an
elite group of talented achievers. In philosophical usage, the term’s meaning
is similar: a meritocracy is a scheme of social organization in which essential
offices, and perhaps careers and jobs of all sorts are (a) open only to those
who have the relevant qualifications for successful performance in them, or (b)
awarded only to the candidates who are likely to perform the best, or (c)
managed so that people advance in and retain their offices and jobs solely on the
basis of the quality of their performance in them, or (d) all of the above.
merton: merton holds a portrait of H. P. Grice. And the
association is closer. Grice was sometime Harmsworth Scholar at Merton. It was
at Merton he got the acquaintance with S. Watson, later historian at St.
John’s. Merton is the see of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. What does that
mean? It means that the Lit. Hum. covers more than philosophy. Grice was Lit.
Hum. (Phil.), which means that his focus was on this ‘sub-faculty.’ The faculty
itself is for Lit. Hum. in general, and it is not held anywhere specifically.
Grice loved Ryle’s games with this:: “Oxford is a universale, with St. John’s
being a particulare which can become your sense-datum.’
Mos -- meta-ethics. “philosophia moralis” was te traditional labeluntil
Nowell-Smith. Hare is professor of moral philosophy, not meta-ethics. Strictly,
‘philosophia practica’ as opposed to ‘philosophia speculativa’. Philosophia speculativa is distinguished
from philosophia
practica; the former is further differentiated into physica,
mathematica, and theologia; the latter into moralis, oeconomica and
politica. Surely the philosophical mode does not change
when he goes into ethics or other disciplines. Philosophy is ENTIRE. Ethics
relates to metaphysics, but this does not mean that the philosopher is a
moralist. In this respect, unlike, say Philippa Foot, Grice remains a
meta-ethicist. Grice is ‘meta-ethically’ an futilitarian, since he provides a
utilitarian backing of Kantian rationalism, within his empiricist, naturalist,
temperament. For Grice it is complicated, since there is an ethical or
practical side even to an eschatological argument. Grice’s views on ethics are
Oxonian. At Oxford, meta-ethics is a generational thing: there’s Grice, and the
palaeo-Gricieans, and the post-Gricieans. There’s Hampshire, and Hare, and
Nowell-Smith, and Warnock. P. H. Nowell Smith felt overwhelmed by Grice’s
cleverness and they would hardly engage in meta-ethical questions. But Nowell
Smith felt that Grice was ‘too clever.’ Grice objected Hare’s use of
descriptivism and Strawsons use of definite descriptor. Grice preferred to say
“the the.”. “Surely Hare is wrong when sticking with his anti-descriptivist
diatribe. Even his dictum is descriptive!” Grice was amused that it all started
with Abbott BEFORE 1879, since Abbott’s first attempt was entitled, “Kant’s
theory of ethics, or practical philosophy” (1873). ”! Grices explorations on
morals are language based. With a substantial knowledge of the classical languages
(that are so good at verb systems and modes like the optative, that English
lacks), Grice explores modals like should, (Hampshire) ought to (Hare)
and, must (Grice ‒ necessity). Grice is well aware of Hares reflections on
the neustic qualifications on the phrastic. The imperative has usually been one
source for the philosophers concern with the language of morals. Grice
attempts to balance this with a similar exploration on good, now regarded as
the value-paradeigmatic notion par excellence. We cannot understand, to
echo Strawson, the concept of a person unless we understand the concept of a
good person, i.e. the philosopher’s conception of a good person.
Morals is very Oxonian. There were in Grices time only three chairs of
philosophy at Oxford: the three W: the Waynflete chair of metaphysical
philosophy, the Wykeham chair of logic (not philosophy, really), and the White
chair of moral philosophy. Later, the Wilde chair of philosophical
psychology was created. Grice was familiar with Austin’s cavalier attitude
to morals as Whites professor of moral philosophy, succeeding Kneale. When
Hare succeeds Austin, Grice knows that it is time to play with the neustic implicaturum! Grices
approach to morals is very meta-ethical and starts with a fastidious (to use
Blackburns characterisation, not mine!) exploration of modes related to
propositional phrases involving should, ought to, and must. For Hampshire,
should is the moral word par excellence. For Hare, it is ought. For
Grice, it is only must that preserves that sort of necessity that, as a Kantian
rationalist, he is looking for. However, Grice hastens to add that whatever
hell say about the buletic, practical or boulomaic must must also apply to the
doxastic must, as in What goes up must come down. That he did not hesitate to
use necessity operators is clear from his axiomatic treatment, undertaken with
Code, on Aristotelian categories of izzing and hazzing. To understand
Grices view on ethics, we should return to the idea of creature construction in
more detail. Suppose we are genitors-demigods-designing living creatures,
creatures Grice calls Ps. To design a type of P is to specify a diagram and
table for that type plus evaluative procedures, if any. The design is
implemented in animal stuff-flesh and bones typically. Let us focus on one type
of P-a very sophisticated type that Grice, borrowing from Locke, calls very
intelligent rational Ps. Let me be a little more explicit, and a great deal
more speculative, about the possible relation to ethics of my programme for
philosophical psychology. I shall suppose that the genitorial programme has
been realized to the point at which we have designed a class of Ps which,
nearly following Locke, I might call very intelligent rational Ps. These Ps
will be capable of putting themselves in the genitorial position, of asking
how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival,
they would execute this task; and, if we have done our work aright, their
answer will be the same as ours . We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a
highly general practical manual, which these Ps would be in a position to
compile. The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of
generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability.
The Ps have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to
the genitorial justified psychological theory; so the manual will have to be
formulated in terms of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the
very general description of livingconditions which have been used to set up
that theory; the manual will therefore have conceptual generality. There will
be no way of singling out a special subclass of addressees, so the injunctions
of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very intelligent
rational P, and will thus have generality of form. And since the manual can be
thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable Ps, no P
would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct
in circumstances to which he was not likely to be Subjects; nor indeed could he
do so even if he would. So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed
could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any
addressee; the manual, then, will have generality of application. Such a manual
might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an immanuel; and the very
intelligent rational Ps, each of whom both composes it and from time to time
heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course). Refs.:
Most of Grice’s theorizing on ethics counts as ‘meta-ethic,’ especially in
connection with R. M. Hare, but also with less prescriptivist Oxonian
philosophers such as Nowell-Smith, with his bestseller for Penguin, Austin,
Warnock, and Hampshire. Keywords then are ‘ethic,’ and ‘moral.’ There are many
essays on both Kantotle, i.e. on Aristotle and Kant. The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
object-language/meta-language distinction,
the: Grice: “The use of ‘object’ in ‘object-language’ is utterly inappropriate
and coined by someone who had no idea of philosophy!”And ‘meta-language’ is a
horrible hybrid.” “Meta-logic,” or “meta-semantic,” may do better, as opposed
to ‘logic’ or ‘seemantic’ simpliciter. meta-language:
versus object-languagewhere Russell actually means thing-language (German:
meta-sprache und ding-sprache). In formal semantics, a language used to
describe another language (the object language). The object language may be
either a natural language or a formal language. The goal of a formal semantic
theory is to provide an axiomatic or otherwise systematic theory of meaning for
the object language. The metalanguage is used to specify the object language’s
symbols and formation rules, which determine its grammatical sentences or
well-formed formulas, and to assign meanings or interpretations to these
sentences or formulas. For example, in an extensional semantics, the
metalanguage is used to assign denotations to the singular terms, extensions to
the general terms, and truth conditions to sentences. The standard format for
assigning truth conditions, as in Tarski’s formulation of his “semantical
conception of truth,” is a T-sentence, which takes the form ‘S is true if and
only if p.’ Davidson adapted this format to the purposes of his truth-theoretic
account of meaning. Examples of T-sentences, with English as the metalanguage,
are ‘ “La neige est blanche” is true if and only if snow is white’, where the
object langauge is French and the homophonic (Davidson) ‘“Snow is white” is
true if and only if snow is white’, where the object language is English as
well. Although for formal purposes the distinction between metalanguage and
object language must be maintained, in practice one can use a langauge to talk
about expressions in the very same language. One can, in Carnap’s terms, shift
4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 560 from the material mode to the formal
mode, e.g. from ‘Every veterinarian is an animal doctor’ to ‘ “Veterinarian”
means “animal doctor”.’ This shift is important in discussions of synonymy and
of the analytic–synthetic distinction. Carnap’s distinction corresponds to the
use–mention distinction. We are speaking in the formal modewe are mentioning a
linguistic expressionwhen we ascribe a property to a word or other expression
type, such as its spelling, pronunciation, meaning, or grammatical category, or
when we speak of an expression token as misspelled, mispronounced, or misused.
We are speaking in the material mode when we say “Reims is hard to find” but in
the formal mode when we say “ ‘Reims’ is hard to pronounce.”
trviumversus quadrivium -- riviality:
Grice: “Austin once confessed that he felt it was unworthy of a philosopher to
spend his time on trivialities, but what was he to do?”
metaosiosiscited by Grice, one of his metaphysical routines.
transubstantiation, change of one substance into another. Aristotelian
metaphysics distinguishes between substances and the accidents that inhere in
them; thus, Socrates is a substance and being snub-nosed is one of his
accidents. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches appeal to
transubstantiation to explain how Jesus Christ becomes really present in the
Eucharist when the consecration takes place: the whole substances of the bread
and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but the accidents
of the bread and wine such as their shape, color, and taste persist after the
transformation. This seems to commit its adherents to holding that these
persisting accidents subsequently either inhere in Christ or do not inhere in
any substance. Luther proposed an alternative explanation in terms of
consubstantiation that avoids this hard choice: the substances of the bread and
wine coexist in the Eucharist with the body and blood of Christ after the consecration;
they are united but each remains unchanged. P.L.Q. transvaluation of values.
Metaphilosophy: Grice, “I shall
distinguish: philosophy, metaphilosophy, and Austin’s favourite,
para-philosophy” -- the theory of the nature of philosophy, especially its
goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions. First-order philosophical inquiry
includes such disciplines as epistemology, ontology, ethics, and value theory.
It thus constitutes the main activity of philosophers, past and present. The
philosophical study of firstorder philosophical inquiry raises philosophical
inquiry to a higher order. Such higher-order inquiry is metaphilosophy. The
first-order philosophical discipline of (e.g.) epistemology has the nature of
knowledge as its main focus, but that discipline can itself be the focus of
higher-order philosophical inquiry. The latter focus yields a species of
metaphilosophy called metaepistemology. Two other prominent species are
metaethics and metaontology. Each such branch of metaphilosophy studies the
goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions of a first-order philosophical
discipline. Typical metaphilosophical topics include (a) the conditions under
which a claim is philosophical rather than non-philosophical, and (b) the
conditions under which a first-order philosophical claim is either meaningful,
true, or warranted. Metaepistemology, e.g., pursues not the nature of knowledge
directly, but rather the conditions under which claims are genuinely
epistemological and the conditions under which epistemological claims are
either meaningful, or true, or warranted. The distinction between philosophy
and metaphilosophy has an analogue in the familiar distinction between
mathematics and metamathematics. Questions about the autonomy, objectivity,
relativity, and modal status of philosophical claims arise in metaphilosophy.
Questions about autonomy concern the relationship of philosophy to such
disciplines as those constituting the natural and social sciences. For
instance, is philosophy methodologically independent of the natural sciences?
Questions about objectivity and relativity concern the kind of truth and
warrant available to philosophical claims. For instance, are philosophical
truths characteristically, or ever, made true by mind-independent phenomena in
the way that typical claims of the natural sciences supposedly are? Or, are
philosophical truths unavoidably conventional, being fully determined by (and
thus altogether relative to) linguistic conventions? Are they analytic rather
than synthetic truths, and is knowledge of them a priori rather than a
posteriori? Questions about modal status consider whether philosophical claims
are necessary rather than contingent. Are philosophical claims necessarily true
or false, in contrast to the contingent claims of the natural sciences? The
foregoing questions identify major areas of controversy in contemporary
metaphilosophy.
metaphoricum implicaturum: Grice made a
dictionary of figures of rhetoricfrom A to Z.
accumulation: Grice, “As its
name implies, this is the utterer accumulating arguments in a concise forceful
manner.”
adnomination: Grice: As the
name implies, this is the repetition of words with the same root word.
alliteration: Grice: “As the
name implies, this is a device, where a series of words in a row have the same
first consonant sound. It was quite used by my ancestorsthey called it
‘head-rhyme.’” Example: "She sells sea shells by the sea shore".
Adynaton: Grice: “This is
almost like Hyperbole, as in the ditty, “Every nice girl loves a sailor.” It is
an extreme exaggeration used to make a point. It is like the opposite of
"understatement". Example: "I've told you a million times."
anacoluthon: Grice, as the
name implies, this is a Transposition of clauses to achieve an unnatural (or
non-natural) order in a sentence. “Join them, if you can’t beat’em.”
anadiplosis: Repetition of a
word at the end of a clause and then at the beginning of its succeeding clause.
anaphora: Repetition of the same word or set of words in a paragraph.
anastrophe: Grice: As the name
implies this Changing the object, subject and verb order in a clause, as in “Me
loves she,” as uttered by Tarzan.
anti-climax: It is when a
specific point, expectations are raised, everything is built-up and then
suddenly something boring or disappointing happens. Example: "People,
pets, batteries, ... all are dead."
anthimeria: Transformation of
a word of a certain word class to another word class.
antimetabole: A sentence
consisting of the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in reverse
order.
antirrhesis: Disproving an
opponent's argument. antistrophe: Repetition of the same word or group of words
in a paragraph in the end of sentences. antithesis: Juxtaposition of opposing
or contrasting ideas.
aphorismus: Statement that
calls into question the definition of a word. aposiopesis: Breaking off or
pausing speech for dramatic or emotional effect. apposition: Placing of two
statements side by side, in which the second defines the first. assonance:
Repetition of vowel sounds: "Smooth move!" or "Please
leave!" or "That's the fact Jack!"
asteismus: Mocking answer or
humorous answer that plays on a word.
asterismos: Beginning a
segment of speech with an exclamation of a word. asyndeton: Omission of
conjunctions between related clauses. cacophony: Words producing a harsh sound.
cataphora: Co-reference of one expression with another expression which follows
it, in which the latter defines the first. (example: If you need one, there's a
towel in the top drawer.) classification: Linking a proper noun and a common
noun with an article chiasmus: Two or more clauses are related to each other
through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point climax:
Arrangement of words in order of descending to ascending order. commoratio:
Repetition of an idea, re-worded conduplicatio: Repetition of a key word
conversion (word formation): An unaltered transformation of a word of one word
class into another word class consonance: Repetition of consonant sounds, most
commonly within a short passage of verse correlative verse: Matching items in
two sequences diacope: Repetition of a word or phrase with one or two
intervening words dubitatio: Expressing doubt and uncertainty about oneself
dystmesis: A synonym for tmesis ellipsis: Omission of words elision: Omission
of one or more letters in speech, making it colloquial enallage: Wording
ignoring grammatical rules or conventions enjambment: Incomplete sentences at
the end of lines in poetry enthymeme: An informal syllogism epanalepsis: Ending
sentences with their beginning. epanodos: Word repetition. epistrophe: (also
known as antistrophe) Repetition of the same word or group of words at the end
of successive clauses. The counterpart of anaphora epizeuxis: Repetition of a
single word, with no other words in between euphony: Opposite of cacophonyi.e.
pleasant-sounding half rhyme: Partially rhyming words hendiadys: Use of two
nouns to express an idea when it normally would consist of an adjective and a
noun hendiatris: Use of three nouns to express one idea homeoptoton: ending the
last parts of words with the same syllable or letter. homographs: Words we
write identically but which have a differing meaning homoioteleuton: Multiple
words with the same ending homonyms: Words that are identical with each other
in pronunciation and spelling, but different in meaning homophones: Words that
are identical with each other in pronunciation, but different in meaning
homeoteleuton: Words with the same ending hypallage: A transferred epithet from
a conventional choice of wording.hyperbaton: Two ordinary associated words are
detached. The term may also be used more generally for all different figures of
speech which transpose natural word order in sentences. hyperbole: Exaggeration
of a statement hypozeuxis: Every clause having its own independent subject and
predicate hysteron proteron: The inversion of the usual temporal or causal
order between two elements isocolon: Use of parallel structures of the same
length in successive clauses internal rhyme: Using two or more rhyming words in
the same sentence kenning: Using a compound word neologism to form a metonym
litotes derived from a Greek word meaning "simple", is a figure of
speech which employs an understatement by using double negatives or, in other
words, positive statement is expressed by negating its opposite expressions.
Examples: "not too bad" for "very good" is an
understatement as well as a double negative statement that confirms a positive
idea by negating the opposite. Similarly, saying "She is not a beauty
queen," means "She is ugly" or saying "I am not as young as
I used to be" in order to avoid saying "I am old". Litotes,
therefore, is an intentional use of understatement that renders an ironical
effect. merism: Referring to a whole by enumerating some of its parts mimesis:
Imitation of a person's speech or writing onomatopoeia: Word that imitates a
real sound (e.g. tick-tock or boom) paradiastole: Repetition of the disjunctive
pair "neither" and "nor" parallelism: The use of similar
structures in two or more clauses paraprosdokian: Unexpected ending or
truncation of a clause paremvolia: Interference of speak by speakingparenthesis:
A parenthetical entry paroemion: Alliteration in which every word in a sentence
or phrase begins with the same letter parrhesia: Speaking openly or boldly, in
a situation where it is unexpected (e.g. politics) pleonasm: The use of more
words than are needed to express meaning polyptoton: Repetition of words
derived from the same root polysyndeton: Close repetition of conjunctions pun:
When a word or phrase is used in two (or more) different senses rhythm: A
synonym for parallelism sibilance: Repetition of letter 's', it is a form of
consonance sine dicendo: An inherently superfluous statement, the truth value
of which can easily be taken for granted. When held under scrutiny, it becomes
readily apparent that the statement has not in fact added any new or useful
information to the conversation (e.g. 'It's always in the last place you
look.') solecism: Trespassing grammatical and syntactical rules spoonerism:
Switching place of syllables within two words in a sentence yielding amusement
superlative: Declaring something the best within its class i.e. the ugliest,
the most precious synathroesmus: Agglomeration of adjectives to describe
something or someone syncope: Omission of parts of a word or phrase symploce:
Simultaneous use of anaphora and epistrophe: the repetition of the same word or
group of words at the beginning and the end of successive clauses synchysis:
Words that are intentionally scattered to create perplexment synesis: Agreement
of words according to the sense, and not the grammatical form synecdoche:
Referring to a part by its whole or vice versa synonymia: Use of two or more
synonyms in the same clause or sentence tautology: Redundancy due to
superfluous qualification; saying the same thing twice tmesis: Insertions of
content within a compound word zeugma: The using of one verb for two or more
actions Tropes accismus: expressing the want of something by denying it allegory:
A metaphoric narrative in which the literal elements indirectly reveal a
parallel story of symbolic or abstract significance.allusion: Covert reference
to another work of literature or art ambiguity: Phrasing which can have two
meanings anacoenosis: Posing a question to an audience, often with the
implication that it shares a common interest with the speaker analogy: A
comparison anapodoton: Leaving a common known saying unfinished antanaclasis: A
form of pun in which a word is repeated in two different senses. anthimeria: A
substitution of one part of speech for another, such as noun for a verb and
vice versa. anthropomorphism: Ascribing human characteristics to something that
is not human, such as an animal or a god (see zoomorphism) antimetabole:
Repetition of words in successive clauses, but in switched order antiphrasis: A
name or a phrase used ironically. antistasis: Repetition of a word in a
different sense. antonomasia: Substitution of a proper name for a phrase or
vice versa a: Briefly phrased, easily memorable statement of a truth or
opinion, an adage apologia: Justifying one's actions aporia: Faked or sincere
puzzled questioning apophasis: (Invoking) an idea by denying its (invocation)
appositive: Insertion of a parenthetical entry apostrophe: Directing the
attention away from the audience to an absent third party, often in the form of
a personified abstraction or inanimate object. archaism: Use of an obsolete,
archaic word (a word used in olden language, e.g. Shakespeare's language) auxesis:
Form of hyperbole, in which a more important-sounding word is used in place of
a more descriptive term bathos: Pompous speech with a ludicrously mundane
worded anti-climax burlesque metaphor: An amusing, overstated or grotesque
comparison or example. catachresis: Blatant misuse of words or phrases.
cataphora: Repetition of a cohesive device at the end categoria: Candidly
revealing an opponent's weakness cliché: Overused phrase or theme
circumlocution: Talking around a topic by substituting or adding words, as in
euphemism or periphrasis congeries: Accumulation of synonymous or different
words or phrases together forming a single message correctio: Linguistic device
used for correcting one's mistakes, a form of which is epanorthosis dehortatio:
discouraging advice given with seeming sagacity denominatio: Another word for
metonymy diatyposis: The act of giving counsel double negative: Grammar
construction that can be used as an expression and it is the repetition of
negative words dirimens copulatio: Balances one statement with a contrary,
qualifying statement distinctio: Defining or specifying the meaning of a word
or phrase you use dysphemism: Substitution of a harsher, more offensive, or
more disagreeable term for another. Opposite of euphemism dubitatio: Expressing
doubt over one's ability to hold speeches, or doubt over other ability
ekphrasis: Lively describing something you see, often a painting epanorthosis:
Immediate and emphatic self-correction, often following a slip of the tongue
encomium: A speech consisting of praise; a eulogy enumeratio: A sort of
amplification and accumulation in which specific aspects are added up to make a
point epicrisis: Mentioning a saying and then commenting on it epiplexis:
Rhetorical question displaying disapproval or debunks epitrope: Initially
pretending to agree with an opposing debater or invite one to do something
erotema: Synonym for rhetorical question erotesis: Rhetorical question asked in
confident expectation of a negative answer euphemism: Substitution of a less
offensive or more agreeable term for another grandiloquence: Pompous speech
exclamation: A loud calling or crying out humour: Provoking laughter and
providing amusement hyperbaton: Words that naturally belong together separated
from each other for emphasis or effect hyperbole: Use of exaggerated terms for
emphasis hypocatastasis: An implication or declaration of resemblance that does
not directly name both terms hypophora: Answering one's own rhetorical question
at length hysteron proteron: Reversal of anticipated order of events; a form of
hyperbaton innuendo: Having a hidden meaning in a sentence that makes sense
whether it is detected or not inversion: A reversal of normal word order,
especially the placement of a verb ahead of the subject (subject-verb
inversion). irony: Use of word in a way that conveys a meaning opposite to its
usual meaning. litotes: Emphasizing the magnitude of a statement by denying its
opposite malapropism: Using a word through confusion with a word that sounds
similar meiosis: Use of understatement, usually to diminish the importance of
something memento verbum: Word at the top of the tongue, recordabantur merism:
Referring to a whole by enumerating some of its parts metalepsis: Figurative
speech is used in a new context metaphor: An implied comparison between two
things, attributing the properties of one thing to another that it does not
literally possess. metonymy: A thing or concept is called not by its own name
but rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or
concept neologism: The use of a word or term that has recently been created, or
has been in use for a short time. Opposite of archaism non sequitur: Statement
that bears no relationship to the context preceding occupatio see apophasis:
Mentioning something by reportedly not mentioning it onomatopoeia: Words that
sound like their meaning oxymoron: Using two terms together, that normally
contradict each other par'hyponoian: Replacing in a phrase or text a second
part, that would have been logically expected. parable: Extended metaphor told
as an anecdote to illustrate or teach a moral lesson paradiastole: Extenuating
a vice in order to flatter or soothe paradox: Use of apparently contradictory
ideas to point out some underlying truth paraprosdokian: Phrase in which the
latter part causes a rethinking or reframing of the beginning paralipsis:
Drawing attention to something while pretending to pass it over parody:
Humouristic imitation paronomasia: Pun, in which similar-sounding words but
words having a different meaning are used pathetic fallacy: Ascribing human
conduct and feelings to nature periphrasis: A synonym for circumlocution
personification/prosopopoeia/anthropomorphism: Attributing or applying human
qualities to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena pleonasm: The use
of more words than is necessary for clear expression praeteritio: Another word
for paralipsis procatalepsis: Refuting anticipated objections as part of the
main argument proslepsis: Extreme form of paralipsis in which the speaker
provides great detail while feigning to pass over a topic prothesis: Adding a
syllable to the beginning of a word proverb: Succinct or pithy, often
metaphorical, expression of wisdom commonly believed to be true pun: Play on
words that will have two meanings rhetorical question: Asking a question as a
way of asserting something. Asking a question which already has the answer
hidden in it. Or asking a question not for the sake of getting an answer but
for asserting something (or as in a poem for creating a poetic effect) satire:
Humoristic criticism of society sensory detail imagery: sight, sound, taste,
touch, smell sesquipedalianism: use of long and obscure words simile:
Comparison between two things using like or as snowclone: Alteration of cliché
or phrasal template style: how information is presented superlative: Saying
that something is the best of something or has the most of some quality, e.g.
the ugliest, the most precious etc. syllepsis: The use of a word in its
figurative and literal sense at the same time or a single word used in relation
to two other parts of a sentence although the word grammatically or logically
applies to only one syncatabasis (condescension, accommodation): adaptation of
style to the level of the audience synchoresis: A concession made for the
purpose of retorting with greater force. synecdoche: Form of metonymy,
referring to a part by its whole, or a whole by its part synesthesia:
Description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally
describe another. tautology: Superfluous repetition of the same sense in
different words Example: The children gathered in a round circle transferred
epithet: A synonym for hypallage. truism: a self-evident statement tricolon
diminuens: Combination of three elements, each decreasing in size tricolon
crescens: Combination of three elements, each increasing in size verbal
paradox: Paradox specified to language verba ex ore: Taking the words out of
someone’s mouth, speaking of what the interlocutor wanted to say. verbum volitans:
A word that floats in the air, on which everyone is thinking and is just about
to be imposed. zeugma: Use of a single verb to describe two or more actions
zoomorphism: Applying animal characteristics to humans or gods. Refs.
Holdcroft: “Grice on indirect communication,” Journal of Rhetoric.”
FallaciaGrice compilied a
“Fallaciae: A to Z.” Formal fallacies Main article: Formal fallacy A formal
fallacy is an error in logic that can be seen in the argument's form. All
formal fallacies are specific types of non sequitur. Appeal to
probabilitya statement that takes something for granted because it would
probably be the case (or might be the case). Argument from fallacy (also known
as the fallacy fallacy)the assumption that if an argument for some conclusion
is fallacious, then the conclusion is false. Base rate fallacymaking a
probability judgment based on conditional probabilities, without taking into
account the effect of prior probabilities. Conjunction fallacythe assumption
that an outcome simultaneously satisfying multiple conditions is more probable
than an outcome satisfying a single one of them. Masked-man fallacy (illicit
substitution of identicals)the substitution of identical designators in a true
statement can lead to a false one. Propositional fallacies A propositional
fallacy is an error in logic that concerns compound propositions. For a
compound proposition to be true, the truth values of its constituent parts must
satisfy the relevant logical connectives that occur in it (most commonly: [and],
[or], [not], [only if], [if and only if]). The following fallacies involve
inferences whose correctness is not guaranteed by the behavior of those logical
connectives and are not logically guaranteed to yield true conclusions. Types
of propositional fallacies: Affirming a disjunctconcluding that one
disjunct of a logical disjunction must be false because the other disjunct is
true; A or B; A, therefore not B. Affirming the consequentthe antecedent in an
indicative conditional is claimed to be true because the consequent is true; if
A, then B; B, therefore A. Denying the antecedentthe consequent in an
indicative conditional is claimed to be false because the antecedent is false;
if A, then B; not A, therefore not B. Quantification fallacies A quantification
fallacy is an error in logic where the quantifiers of the premises are in
contradiction to the quantifier of the conclusion. Types of quantification
fallacies: Existential fallacyan argument that has a universal premise
and a particular conclusion. Formal syllogistic fallacies Syllogistic
fallacieslogical fallacies that occur in syllogisms. Affirmative
conclusion from a negative premise (illicit negative)a categorical syllogism
has a positive conclusion, but at least one negative premise. Fallacy of exclusive
premisesa categorical syllogism that is invalid because both of its premises
are negative. Fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum)a categorical
syllogism that has four terms. Illicit majora categorical syllogism that is
invalid because its major term is not distributed in the major premise but
distributed in the conclusion. Illicit minora categorical syllogism that is
invalid because its minor term is not distributed in the minor premise but
distributed in the conclusion. Negative conclusion from affirmative premises
(illicit affirmative)a categorical syllogism has a negative conclusion but
affirmative premises. Fallacy of the undistributed middlethe middle term in a
categorical syllogism is not distributed. Modal fallacyconfusing possibility with
necessity. Modal scope fallacya degree of unwarranted necessity is placed in
the conclusion. Informal fallacies Main article: Informal fallacy Informal
fallaciesarguments that are logically unsound for lack of well-grounded
premises. Argument to moderation (false compromise, middle ground,
fallacy of the mean, argumentum ad temperantiam)assuming that the compromise
between two positions is always correct. Continuum fallacy (fallacy of the
beard, line-drawing fallacy, sorites fallacy, fallacy of the heap, bald man
fallacy)improperly rejecting a claim for being imprecise. Correlative-based
fallacies Suppressed correlativea correlative is redefined so that one
alternative is made impossible (e.g., "I'm not fat because I'm thinner
than him"). Definist fallacydefining a term used in an argument in a
biased manner. The person making the argument expects the listener will accept
the provided definition, making the argument difficult to refute. Divine
fallacy (argument from incredulity)arguing that, because something is so
incredible or amazing, it must be the result of superior, divine, alien or
paranormal agency. Double countingcounting events or occurrences more than once
in probabilistic reasoning, which leads to the sum of the probabilities of all
cases exceeding unity. Equivocationusing a term with more than one meaning in a
statement without specifying which meaning is intended. Ambiguous middle
termusing a middle term with multiple meanings. Definitional retreatchanging
the meaning of a word when an objection is raised. Motte-and-bailey
fallacyconflating two positions with similar properties, one modest and easy to
defend (the "motte") and one more controversial (the
"bailey"). The arguer first states the controversial position, but
when challenged, states that they are advancing the modest position.[25]
Fallacy of accentchanging the meaning of a statement by not specifying on which
word emphasis falls. Persuasive definitionpurporting to use the
"true" or "commonly accepted" meaning of a term while, in
reality, using an uncommon or altered definition. (cf. the if-by-whiskey
fallacy) Ecological fallacyinferences about the nature of specific individuals
are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which
those individuals belong.[26] Etymological fallacyreasoning that the original
or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual
present-day usage.[27] Fallacy of compositionassuming that something true of
part of a whole must also be true of the whole.[28] Fallacy of divisionassuming
that something true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its
parts.[29] False attributionan advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified,
unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument. Fallacy of
quoting out of context (contextotomy, contextomy; quotation mining)refers to
the selective excerpting of words from their original context in a way that
distorts the source's intended meaning.[30] False authority (single
authority)using an expert of dubious credentials or using only one opinion to
sell a product or idea. Related to the appeal to authority. False dilemma
(false dichotomy, fallacy of bifurcation, black-or-white fallacy)two
alternative statements are held to be the only possible options when in reality
there are more.[31] False equivalencedescribing two or more statements as
virtually equal when they are not. Feedback fallacybelieving in the objectivity
of an evaluation to be used as the basis for improvement without verifying that
the source of the evaluation is a disinterested party.[32] Historian's
fallacyassuming that decision makers of the past had identical information as
those subsequently analyzing the decision.[33] This should not to be confused
with presentism, in which present-day ideas and perspectives are
anachronistically projected into the past. Historical fallacya set of
considerations is thought to hold good only because a completed process is read
into the content of the process which conditions this completed result.[34]
Baconian fallacyusing pieces of historical evidence without the aid of specific
methods, hypotheses, or theories in an attempt to make a general truth about
the past. Commits historians "to the pursuit of an impossible object by an
impracticable method".[35] Homunculus fallacyusing a
"middle-man" for explanation; this sometimes leads to regressive
middle-men. It explains a concept in terms of the concept itself without
explaining its real nature (e.g.: explaining thought as something produced by a
little thinkera homunculusinside the head simply identifies an intermediary
actor and does not explain the product or process of thinking).[36] Inflation
of conflictarguing that, if experts in a field of knowledge disagree on a
certain point within that field, no conclusion can be reached or that the
legitimacy of that field of knowledge is questionable.[37] If-by-whiskeyan
argument that supports both sides of an issue by using terms that are
selectively emotionally sensitive. Incomplete comparisoninsufficient
information is provided to make a complete comparison. Inconsistent
comparisondifferent methods of comparison are used, leaving a false impression
of the whole comparison. Intentionality fallacythe insistence that the ultimate
meaning of an expression must be consistent with the intention of the person
from whom the communication originated (e.g. a work of fiction that is widely
received as a blatant allegory must necessarily not be regarded as such if the
author intended it not to be so.)[38] Lump of labour fallacythe misconception
that there is a fixed amount of work to be done within an economy, which can be
distributed to create more or fewer jobs.[39] Kettle logicusing multiple,
jointly inconsistent arguments to defend a position.[dubiousdiscuss] Ludic
fallacythe belief that the outcomes of non-regulated random occurrences can be
encapsulated by a statistic; a failure to take into account that unknown
unknowns have a role in determining the probability of events taking place.[40]
McNamara fallacy (quantitative fallacy)making a decision based only on
quantitative observations, discounting all other considerations. Mind
projection fallacysubjective judgments are "projected" to be inherent
properties of an object, rather than being related to personal perceptions of
that object. Moralistic fallacyinferring factual conclusions from purely
evaluative premises in violation of fact–value distinction. For instance,
inferring is from ought is an instance of moralistic fallacy. Moralistic
fallacy is the inverse of naturalistic fallacy defined below. Moving the
goalposts (raising the bar)argument in which evidence presented in response to
a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is
demanded. Nirvana fallacy (perfect-solution fallacy)solutions to problems are
rejected because they are not perfect. Proof by assertiona proposition is
repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction; sometimes confused with
argument from repetition (argumentum ad infinitum, argumentum ad nauseam)
Prosecutor's fallacya low probability of false matches does not mean a low
probability of some false match being found. Proving too muchan argument that
results in an overly-generalized conclusion (e.g.: arguing that drinking
alcohol is bad because in some instances it has led to spousal or child abuse).
Psychologist's fallacyan observer presupposes the objectivity of their own
perspective when analyzing a behavioral event. Referential fallacy[41]assuming
all words refer to existing things and that the meaning of words reside within the
things they refer to, as opposed to words possibly referring to no real object
or that the meaning of words often comes from how they are used. Reification
(concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness)treating
an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it were a concrete, real
event or physical entity (e.g.: saying that evolution selects which traits are
passed on to future generations; evolution is not a conscious entity with
agency). Retrospective determinismthe argument that because an event has
occurred under some circumstance, the circumstance must have made its
occurrence inevitable. Slippery slope (thin edge of the wedge, camel's
nose)asserting that a proposed. relatively small, first action will inevitably
lead to a chain of related events resulting in a significant and negative event
and, therefore, should not be permitted.[42] Special pleadingthe arguer
attempts to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule or
principle without justifying the exemption (e.g.: a defendant who murdered his
parents asks for leniency because he is now an orphan). Improper premise
Begging the question (petitio principii)using the conclusion of the argument in
support of itself in a premise (e.g.: saying that smoking cigarettes is deadly
because cigarettes can kill you; something that kills is deadly).[43][44][45]
Loaded labelwhile not inherently fallacious, use of evocative terms to support
a conclusion is a type of begging the question fallacy. When fallaciously used,
the term's connotations are relied on to sway the argument towards a particular
conclusion. For example, an organic foods advertisement that says "Organic
foods are safe and healthy foods grown without any pesticides, herbicides, or
other unhealthy additives." Use of the term "unhealthy
additives" is used as support for the idea that the product is safe.[46]
Circular reasoning (circulus in demonstrando)the reasoner begins with what he
or she is trying to end up with (e.g.: all bachelors are unmarried males).
Fallacy of many questions (complex question, fallacy of presuppositions, loaded
question, plurium interrogationum)someone asks a question that presupposes
something that has not been proven or accepted by all the people involved. This
fallacy is often used rhetorically so that the question limits direct replies
to those that serve the questioner's agenda. Faulty generalizations Faulty
generalizationreach a conclusion from weak premises. Unlike fallacies of
relevance, in fallacies of defective induction, the premises are related to the
conclusions yet only weakly support the conclusions. A faulty generalization is
thus produced. Accidentan exception to a generalization is ignored.[47]
No true Scotsmanmakes a generalization true by changing the generalization to
exclude a counterexample.[48] Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete
evidence)act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a
particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or
data that may contradict that position.[49] Survivorship biasa small number of
successes of a given process are actively promoted while completely ignoring a
large number of failures False analogyan argument by analogy in which the
analogy is poorly suited.[50] Hasty generalization (fallacy of insufficient
statistics, fallacy of insufficient sample, fallacy of the lonely fact, hasty
induction, secundum quid, converse accident, jumping to conclusions)basing a
broad conclusion on a small sample or the making of a determination without all
of the information required to do so.[51] Inductive fallacyA more general name
to some fallacies, such as hasty generalization. It happens when a conclusion
is made of premises that lightly support it. Misleading vividnessinvolves
describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional
occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem; this also relies on the
appeal to emotion fallacy. Overwhelming exceptionan accurate generalization
that comes with qualifications that eliminate so many cases that what remains
is much less impressive than the initial statement might have led one to
assume.[52] Thought-terminating clichéa commonly used phrase, sometimes passing
as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance, conceal lack of forethought,
move on to other topics, etc.but in any case, to end the debate with a cliché
rather than a point. Questionable cause Questionable cause is a general type of
error with many variants. Its primary basis is the confusion of association
with causation, either by inappropriately deducing (or rejecting) causation or
a broader failure to properly investigate the cause of an observed
effect. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "with this, therefore
because of this"; correlation implies causation; faulty cause/effect,
coincidental correlation, correlation without causation)a faulty assumption
that, because there is a correlation between two variables, one caused the
other.[53] Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "after this, therefore
because of this"; temporal sequence implies causation)X happened, then Y
happened; therefore X caused Y.[54] Wrong direction (reverse causation)cause
and effect are reversed. The cause is said to be the effect and vice versa.[55]
The consequence of the phenomenon is claimed to be its root cause. Ignoring a
common cause Fallacy of the single cause (causal oversimplification[56])it is
assumed that there is one, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may
have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes. Furtive
fallacyoutcomes are asserted to have been caused by the malfeasance of decision
makers. Gambler's fallacythe incorrect belief that separate, independent events
can affect the likelihood of another random event. If a fair coin lands on
heads 10 times in a row, the belief that it is "due to the number of times
it had previously landed on tails" is incorrect.[57] Inverse gambler's
fallacy Magical thinkingfallacious attribution of causal relationships between
actions and events. In anthropology, it refers primarily to cultural beliefs
that ritual, prayer, sacrifice, and taboos will produce specific supernatural
consequences. In psychology, it refers to an irrational belief that thoughts by
themselves can affect the world or that thinking something corresponds with
doing it. Regression fallacyascribes cause where none exists. The flaw is
failing to account for natural fluctuations. It is frequently a special kind of
post hoc fallacy. Relevance fallacies Appeal to the stone (argumentum ad
lapidem)dismissing a claim as absurd without demonstrating proof for its
absurdity.[58] Argument from ignorance (appeal to ignorance, argumentum ad
ignorantiam)assuming that a claim is true because it has not been or cannot be
proven false, or vice versa.[59] Argument from incredulity (appeal to common
sense)"I cannot imagine how this could be true; therefore, it must be
false."[60] Argument from repetition (argumentum ad nauseam, argumentum ad
infinitum)repeating an argument until nobody cares to discuss it any more;[61][62]
sometimes confused with proof by assertion Argument from silence (argumentum ex
silentio)assuming that a claim is true based on the absence of textual or
spoken evidence from an authoritative source, or vice versa.[63] Ignoratio
elenchi (irrelevant conclusion, missing the point)an argument that may in
itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.[64] Red herring
fallacies A red herring fallacy, one of the main subtypes of fallacies of
relevance, is an error in logic where a proposition is, or is intended to be,
misleading in order to make irrelevant or false inferences. In the general case
any logical inference based on fake arguments, intended to replace the lack of
real arguments or to replace implicitly the subject of the discussion.[65][66]
Red herringintroducing a second argument in response to the first argument that
is irrelevant and draws attention away from the original topic (e.g.: saying
“If you want to complain about the dishes I leave in the sink, what about the
dirty clothes you leave in the bathroom?”).[67] See also irrelevant
conclusion. Ad hominemattacking the arguer instead of the argument.
(N.b., "ad hominem" can also refer to the dialectical strategy of
arguing on the basis of the opponent's own commitments. This type of ad hominem
is not a fallacy.) Circumstantial ad hominemstating that the arguer's personal
situation or perceived benefit from advancing a conclusion means that their
conclusion is wrong.[68] Poisoning the wella subtype of ad hominem presenting
adverse information about a target person with the intention of discrediting
everything that the target person says.[69] Appeal to motivedismissing an idea
by questioning the motives of its proposer. Kafka-trappinga sophistical and
unfalsifiable form of argument that attempts to overcome an opponent by
inducing a sense of guilt and using the opponent's denial of guilt as further
evidence of guilt.[70] Tone policingfocusing on emotion behind (or resulting
from) a message rather than the message itself as a discrediting tactic.
Traitorous critic fallacy (ergo decedo, 'thus leave')a critic's perceived
affiliation is portrayed as the underlying reason for the criticism and the
critic is asked to stay away from the issue altogether. Easily confused with
the association fallacy ("guilt by association") below. Appeal to
authority (argument from authority, argumentum ad verecundiam)an assertion is
deemed true because of the position or authority of the person asserting
it.[71][72] Appeal to accomplishmentan assertion is deemed true or false based
on the accomplishments of the proposer. This may often also have elements of
appeal to emotion (see below). Courtier's replya criticism is dismissed by
claiming that the critic lacks sufficient knowledge, credentials, or training
to credibly comment on the subject matter. Appeal to consequences (argumentum
ad consequentiam)the conclusion is supported by a premise that asserts positive
or negative consequences from some course of action in an attempt to distract
from the initial discussion.[73] Appeal to emotionan argument is made due to
the manipulation of emotions, rather than the use of valid reasoning.[74]
Appeal to fearan argument is made by increasing fear and prejudice towards the
opposing side[75] Appeal to flatteryan argument is made due to the use of
flattery to gather support.[76] Appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam)an
argument attempts to induce pity to sway opponents.[77] Appeal to ridiculean
argument is made by presenting the opponent's argument in a way that makes it appear
ridiculous (or, arguing or implying that because it is ridiculous it must be
untrue).[78] Appeal to spitean argument is made through exploiting people's
bitterness or spite towards an opposing party.[79] Judgmental languageinsulting
or pejorative language to influence the audience's judgment.
Pooh-poohdismissing an argument perceived unworthy of serious
consideration.[80] Wishful thinkinga decision is made according to what might
be pleasing to imagine, rather than according to evidence or reason.[81] Appeal
to naturejudgment is based solely on whether the subject of judgment is
'natural' or 'unnatural'.[82] (Sometimes also called the "naturalistic
fallacy", but is not to be confused with the other fallacies by that
name.) Appeal to novelty (argumentum novitatis, argumentum ad antiquitatis)a
proposal is claimed to be superior or better solely because it is new or
modern.[83] Appeal to poverty (argumentum ad Lazarum)supporting a conclusion
because the arguer is poor (or refuting because the arguer is wealthy).
(Opposite of appeal to wealth.)[84] Appeal to tradition (argumentum ad
antiquitatem)a conclusion supported solely because it has long been held to be
true.[85] Appeal to wealth (argumentum ad crumenam)supporting a conclusion
because the arguer is wealthy (or refuting because the arguer is poor).[86]
(Sometimes taken together with the appeal to poverty as a general appeal to the
arguer's financial situation.) Argumentum ad baculum (appeal to the stick,
appeal to force, appeal to threat)an argument made through coercion or threats
of force to support position.[87] Argumentum ad populum (appeal to widespread
belief, bandwagon argument, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people)a
proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because a majority or many
people believe it to be so.[88] Association fallacy (guilt by association and
honor by association)arguing that because two things share (or are implied to
share) some property, they are the same.[89] Ipse dixit (bare assertion
fallacy)a claim that is presented as true without support, as self-evidently
true, or as dogmatically true. This fallacy relies on the implied expertise of
the speaker or on an unstated truism.[90][91] Bulverism (psychogenetic
fallacy)inferring why an argument is being used, associating it to some
psychological reason, then assuming it is invalid as a result. The assumption
that if the origin of an idea comes from a biased mind, then the idea itself
must also be a falsehood.[37] Chronological snobberya thesis is deemed
incorrect because it was commonly held when something else, known to be false,
was also commonly held.[92][93] Fallacy of relative privation (also known as
"appeal to worse problems" or "not as bad as")dismissing an
argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems.
First World problems are a subset of this fallacy.[94][95] Genetic fallacya
conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather
than its current meaning or context.[96] I'm entitled to my opiniona person discredits
any opposition by claiming that they are entitled to their opinion. Moralistic
fallacyinferring factual conclusions from evaluative premises, in violation of
fact-value distinction; e.g. making statements about what is, on the basis of
claims about what ought to be. This is the inverse of the naturalistic fallacy.
Naturalistic fallacyinferring evaluative conclusions from purely factual
premises[97][98] in violation of fact-value distinction. Naturalistic fallacy
(sometimes confused with appeal to nature) is the inverse of moralistic
fallacy. Is–ought fallacy[99]statements about what is, on the basis of claims
about what ought to be. Naturalistic fallacy fallacy[100] (anti-naturalistic
fallacy)[101]inferring an impossibility to infer any instance of ought from is
from the general invalidity of is-ought fallacy, mentioned above. For instance,
is {\displaystyle P\lor \neg P}P \lor \neg P does imply ought {\displaystyle
P\lor \neg P}P \lor \neg P for any proposition {\displaystyle P}P, although the
naturalistic fallacy fallacy would falsely declare such an inference invalid.
Naturalistic fallacy fallacy is a type of argument from fallacy. Straw man
fallacymisrepresenting an opponent's argument by broadening or narrowing the
scope of a premise and refuting a weaker version (e.g.: saying “You tell us
that A is the right thing to do, but the real reason you want us to do A is
that you would personally profit from it).[102] Texas sharpshooter
fallacyimproperly asserting a cause to explain a cluster of data.[103] Tu
quoque ('you too'appeal to hypocrisy, whataboutism)the argument states that a
certain position is false or wrong or should be disregarded because its
proponent fails to act consistently in accordance with that position.[104] Two
wrongs make a rightoccurs when it is assumed that if one wrong is committed,
another wrong will rectify it.[105] Vacuous trutha claim that is technically
true but meaningless, in the form of claiming that no A in B has C, when there
is no A in B. For example, claiming that no mobile phones in the room are on
when there are no mobile phones in the room at all.
metaphorical implicaturum -- Grice,
“You’re the cream in my coffee”“You’re the salt in my stew”“You’re the starch
in my collar”“You’re the lace in my shoe.” metaphor, a figure of speech (or a
trope) in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one thing is used to
denote another, thereby implicitly comparing the two things. In the normal use
of the sentence ‘The Mississippi is a river’, ‘river’ is used literallyor as some
would prefer to say, used in its literal sense. By contrast, if one assertively
uttered “Time is a river,” one would be using ‘river’ metaphoricallyor be using
it in a metaphorical sense. Metaphor has been a topic of philosophical
discussion since Aristotle; in fact, it has almost certainly been more
discussed by philosophers than all the other tropes together. Two themes are
prominent in the discussions up to the nineteenth century. One is that
metaphors, along with all the other tropes, are decorations of speech; hence
the phrase ‘figures of speech’. Metaphors are adornments or figurations. They
do not contribute to the cognitive meaning of the discourse; instead they lend
it color, vividness, emotional impact, etc. Thus it was characteristic of the Enlightenment
and proto-Enlightenment philosophersHobbes and Locke are good examplesto insist
that though philosophers may sometimes have good reason to communicate their
thought with metaphors, they themselves should do their thinking entirely
without metaphors. The other theme prominent in discussions of metaphor up to
the nineteenth century is that metaphors are, so far as their cognitive force
is concerned, elliptical similes. The cognitive force of ‘Time is a river’,
when ‘river’ in that sentence is used metaphorically, is the same as ‘Time is
like a river’. What characterizes almost all theories of metaphor from the time
of the Romantics up through our own century is the rejection of both these
traditional themes. Metaphorsso it has been arguedare not cognitively
dispensable decorations. They contribute to the cognitive meaning of our
discourse; and they are indispensable, not only to religious discourse, but to
ordinary, and even scientific, discourse, not to mention poetic. Nietzsche,
indeed, went so far as to argue that all speech is metaphorical. And though no
consensus has yet emerged on how and what metaphors contribute to meaning, nor
how we recognize what they contribute, nearconsensus has emerged on the thesis
that they do not work as elliptical similes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why it is not
the case that you’re the cream in my coffee.” H. P. Grice, “One figure of
rhetoric too many.” “Metanonymy.”
Ariskant
-- Aristkantian metaphysical deduction: cf. the transcendental club. or
argument. transcendental argument Metaphysics,
epistemology An argument that starts from some accepted experience or fact to
prove that there must be something which is beyond experience but which is a
necessary condition for making the accepted experience or fact possible. The
goal of a transcendental argument is to establish the transcendental dialectic truth of this precondition.
If there is something X of which Y is a necessary condition, then Y must be
true. This form of argument became prominent in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
where he argued that the existence of some fundamental a priori concepts,
namely the categories, and of space and time as pure forms of sensibility, are
necessary to make experience possible. In contemporary philosophy,
transcendental arguments are widely proposed as a way of refuting skepticism.
Wittgenstein used this form of argument to reject the possibility of a private
language that only the speaker could understand. Peter Strawson employs a
transcendental argument to prove the perception-independent existence of
material particulars and to reject a skeptical attitude toward the existence of
other minds. There is disagreement about the kind of necessity involved in
transcendental arguments, and Barry Stroud has raised important questions about
the possibility of transcendental arguments succeeding. “A transcendental
argument attempts to prove q by proving it is part of any correct explanation
of p, by proving it a precondition of p’s possibility.” Nozick Philosophical
Explanations transcendental deduction Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics,
aesthetics For Kant, the argument to prove that certain a priori concepts are
legitimately, universally, necessarily, and exclusively applicable to objects
of experience. Kant employed this form of argument to establish the legitimacy
of space and time as the forms of intuition, of the claims of the moral law in
the Critique of Practical Reason, and of the claims of the aesthetic judgment
of taste in the Critique of Judgement. However, the most influential example of
this form of argument appeared in the Critique of Pure Reason as the
transcendental deduction of the categories. The metaphysical deduction set out
the origin and character of the categories, and the task of the transcendental
deduction was to demonstrate that these a priori concepts do apply to objects
of experience and hence to prove the objective validity of the categories. The
strategy of the proof is to show that objects can be thought of only by means
of the categories. In sensibility, objects are subject to the forms of space
and time. In understanding, experienced
objects must stand under the conditions of the transcendental unity of
apperception. Because these conditions require the determination of objects by
the pure concepts of the understanding, there can be no experience that is not
subject to the categories. The categories, therefore, are justified in their
application to appearances as conditions of the possibility of experience. In
the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant extensively
rewrote the transcendental deduction, although he held that the result remained
the same. The first version emphasized the subjective unity of consciousness,
while the second version stressed the objective character of the unity, and it is
therefore possible to distinguish between a subjective and objective deduction.
The second version was meant to clarify the argument, but remained extremely
difficult to interpret and assess. The presence of the two versions of this
fundamental argument makes interpretation even more demanding. Generally
speaking, European philosophers prefer the subjective version, while
Anglo-American philosophers prefer the objective version. The transcendental
deduction of the categories was a revolutionary development in modern
philosophy. It was the main device by which Kant sought to overcome the errors
and limitations of both rationalism and empiricism and propelled philosophy
into a new phase. “The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus
relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction.” Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason. metaphysical realism, in the widest sense, the view
that (a) there are real objects (usually the view is concerned with
spatiotemporal objects), (b) they exist independently of our experience or our
knowledge of them, and (c) they have properties and enter into relations
independently of the concepts with which we understand them or of the language
with which we describe them. Anti-realism is any view that rejects one or more
of these three theses, though if (a) is rejected the rejection of (b) and (c)
follows trivially. (If it merely denies the existence of material things, then
its traditional name is ‘idealism.’) Metaphysical realism, in all of its three
parts, is shared by common sense, the sciences, and most philosophers. The
chief objection to it is that we can form no conception of real objects, as
understood by it, since any such conception must rest on the concepts we
already have and on our language and experience. To accept the objection seems
to imply that we can have no knowledge of real objects as they are in
themselves, and that truth must not be understood as correspondence to such
objects. But this itself has an even farther reaching consequence: either (i)
we should accept the seemingly absurd view that there are no real objects
(since the objection equally well applies to minds and their states, to
concepts and words, to properties and relations, to experiences, etc.), for we
should hardly believe in the reality of something of which we can form no
conception at all; or (ii) we must face the seemingly hopeless task of a
drastic change in what we mean by ‘reality’, ‘concept’, ‘experience’,
‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, and much else. On the other hand, the objection may be
held to reduce to a mere tautology, amounting to ‘We (can) know reality only as
we (can) know it’, and then it may be argued that no substantive thesis, which
anti-realism claims to be, is derivable from a mere tautology. Yet even if the
objection is a tautology, it serves to force us to avoid a simplistic view of
our cognitive relationship to the world. In discussions of universals,
metaphysical realism is the view that there are universals, and usually is
contrasted with nominalism. But this either precludes a standard third
alternative, namely conceptualism, or simply presupposes that concepts are
general words (adjectives, common nouns, verbs) or uses of such words. If this
presupposition is accepted, then indeed conceptualism would be the same as
nominalism, but this should be argued, not legislated verbally. Traditional
conceptualism holds that concepts are particular mental entities, or at least
mental dispositions, that serve the classificatory function that universals
have been supposed to serve and also explain the classificatory function that
general words undoubtedly also serve. -- metaphysics, most generally, the
philosophical investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of
reality. It is broader in scope than science, e.g., physics and even cosmology
(the science of the nature, structure, and origin of the universe as a whole),
since one of its traditional concerns is the existence of non-physical
entities, e.g., God. It is also more fundamental, since it investigates questions
science does not address but the answers to which it presupposes. Are there,
for instance, physical objects at all, and does every event have a cause? So
understood, metaphysics was rejected by positivism on the ground that its
statements are “cognitively meaningless” since they are not empirically
verifiable. More recent philosophers, such as Quine, reject metaphysics on the
ground that science alone provides genuine knowledge. In The Metaphysics of
Logical Positivism (1954), Bergmann argued that logical positivism, and any
view such as Quine’s, presupposes a metaphysical theory. And the positivists’
criterion of cognitive meaning was never formulated in a way satisfactory even
to them. A successor of the positivist attitude toward metaphysics is Grice’s tutee
at St. John’sfor his Logic Paper for the PPE -- P. F. Strawson’s preference (especially
in Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics) for what he calls
descriptive metaphysics, which is “content to describe the actual structure of
our thought about the world,” as contrasted with revisionary metaphysics, which
is “concerned to produce a better structure.” The view, sometimes considered
scientific (but an assumption rather than an argued theory), that all that
there is, is spatiotemporal (a part of “nature”) and is knowable only through
the methods of the sciences, is itself a metaphysics, namely metaphysical
naturalism (not to be confused with natural philosophy). It is not part of
science itself. In its most general sense, metaphysics may seem to coincide
with philosophy as a whole, since anything philosophy investigates is
presumably a part of reality, e.g., knowledge, values, and valid reasoning. But
it is useful to reserve the investigation of such more specific topics for
distinct branches of philosophy, e.g., epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and
logic, since they raise problems peculiar to themselves. Perhaps the most
familiar question in metaphysics is whether there are only material
entitiesmaterialismor only mental entities, i.e., minds and their
statesidealismor bothdualism. Here ‘entity’ has its broadest sense: anything
real. More specific questions of metaphysics concern the existence and nature
of certain individualsalso called particulars(e.g., God), or certain properties
(e.g., are there properties that nothing exemplifies?) or relations (e.g., is
there a relation of causation that is a necessary connection rather than a mere
regular conjunction between events?). The nature of space and time is another
important example of such a more specific topic. Are space and time peculiar
individuals that “contain” ordinary individuals, or are they just systems of
relations between individual things, such as being (spatially) higher or
(temporally) prior. Whatever the answer, space and time are what render a world
out of the totality of entities that are parts of it. Since on any account of
knowledge, our knowledge of the world is extremely limited, concerning both its
spatial and temporal dimensions and its inner constitution, we must allow for an
indefinite number of possible ways the world may be, might have been, or will
be. And this thought gives rise to the idea of an indefinite number of possible
worlds. This idea is useful in making vivid our understanding of the nature of
necessary truth (a necessarily true proposition is one that is true in all
possible worlds) and thus is commonly employed in modal logic. But the idea can
also make possible worlds seem real, a highly controversial doctrine. The
notion of a spatiotemporal world is commonly that employed in discussions of
the socalled issue of realism versus anti-realism, although this issue has also
been raised with respect to universals, values, and numbers, which are not
usually considered spatiotemporal. While there is no clear sense in asserting
that nothing is real, there seems to be a clear sense in asserting that there
is no spatiotemporal world, especially if it is added that there are minds and
their ideas. This was Berkeley’s view. But contemporary philosophers who raise
questions about the reality of the spatiotemporal world are not comfortable
with Berkeleyan minds and ideas and usually just somewhat vaguely speak of
“ourselves” and our “representations.” The latter are themselves often
understood as material (states of our brains), a clearly inconsistent position
for anyone denying the reality of the spatiotemporal world. Usually, the
contemporary anti-realist does not actually deny it but rather adopts a view
resembling Kant’s transcendental idealism. Our only conception of the world,
the anti-realist would argue, rests on our perceptual and conceptual faculties,
including our language. But then what reason do we have to think that this
conception is true, that it corresponds to the world as the world is in itself?
Had our faculties and language been different, surely we would have had very
different conceptions of the world. And very different conceptions of it are
possible even in terms of our present faculties, as seems to be shown by the
fact that very different scientific theories can be supported by exactly the
same data. So far, we do not have anti-realism proper. But it is only a short
step to it: if our conception of an independent spatiotemporal world is
necessarily subjective, then we have no good reason for supposing that there is
such a world, especially since it seems selfcontradictory to speak of a
conception that is independent of our conceptual faculties. It is clear that
this question, like almost all the questions of general metaphysics, is at
least in part epistemological. Metaphysics can also be understood in a more
definite sense, suggested by Aristotle’s notion (in his Metaphysics, the title
of which was given by an early editor of his works, not by Aristotle himself)
of “first philosophy,” namely, the study of being qua being, i.e., of the most
general and necessary characteristics that anything must have in order to count
as a being, an entity (ens). Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in this sense, but
this is by no means common practice, ‘ontology’ being often used as a synonym
of ‘metaphysics’. Examples of criteria (each of which is a major topic in
metaphysics) that anything must meet in order to count as a being, an entity,
are the following. (A) Every entity must be either an individual thing (e.g.,
Socrates and this book), or a property (e.g., Socrates’ color and the shape of
this book), or a relation (e.g., marriage and the distance between two cities),
or an event (e.g., Socrates’ death), or a state of affairs (e.g., Socrates’
having died), or a set (e.g., the set of Greek philosophers). These kinds of
entities are usually called categories, and metaphysics is very much concerned
with the question whether these are the only categories, or whether there are
others, or whether some of them are not ultimate because they are reducible to
others (e.g., events to states of affairs, or individual things to temporal
series of events). (B) The existence, or being, of a thing is what makes it an
entity. (C) Whatever has identity and is distinct from everything else is an entity.
(D) The nature of the “connection” between an entity and its properties and
relations is what makes it an entity. Every entity must have properties and
perhaps must enter into relations with at least some other entities. (E) Every
entity must be logically self-consistent. It is noteworthy that after
announcing his project of first philosophy, Aristotle immediately embarked on a
defense of the law of non-contradiction. Concerning (A) we may ask (i) whether
at least some individual things (particulars) are substances, in the
Aristotelian sense, i.e., enduring through time and changes in their properties
and relations, or whether all individual things are momentary. In that case,
the individuals of common sense (e.g., this book) are really temporal series of
momentary individuals, perhaps events such as the book’s being on a table at a
specific instant. We may also ask (ii) whether any entity has essential
properties, i.e., properties without which it would not exist, or whether all
properties are accidental, in the sense that the entity could exist even if it
lost the property in question. We may ask (iii) whether properties and
relations are particulars or universals, e.g., whether the color of this page
and the color of the next page, which (let us assume) are exactly alike, are
two distinct entities, each with its separate spatial location, or whether they
are identical and thus one entity that is exemplified by, perhaps even located
in, the two pages. Concerning (B), we may ask whether existence is itself a
property. If it is, how is it to be understood, and if it is not, how are we to
understand ‘x exists’ and ‘x does not exist’, which seem crucial to everyday
and scientific discourse, just as the thoughts they express seem crucial to
everyday and scientific thinking? Should we countenance, as Meinong did,
objects having no existence, e.g. golden mountains, even though we can talk and
think about them? We can talk and think about a golden mountain and even claim
that it is true that the mountain is golden, while knowing all along that what
we are thinking and talking about does not exist. If we do not construe
non-existent objects as something, then we are committed to the somewhat
startling view that everything exists. Concerning (C) we may ask how to construe
informative identity statements, such as, to use Frege’s example, ‘The Evening
Star is identical with the Morning Star’. This contrasts with trivial and
perhaps degenerate statements, such as ‘The Evening Star is identical with the
Evening Star’, which are almost never made in ordinary or scientific discourse.
The former are essential to any coherent, systematic cognition (even to
everyday recognition of persons and places). Yet they are puzzling. We cannot
say that they assert of two things that they are one, even though ordinary
language suggests precisely this. Neither can we just say that they assert that
a certain thing is identical with itself, for this view would be obviously
false if the statements are informative. The fact that Frege’s example includes
definite descriptions (‘the Evening Star’, ‘the Morning Star’) is irrelevant,
contrary to Russell’s view. Informative identity statements can also have as
their subject terms proper names and even demonstrative pronouns (e.g.,
‘Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus’ and ‘This [the shape of this page] is
identical with that [the shape of the next page]’), the reference of which is
established not by description but ostensively, perhaps by actual pointing.
Concerning (D) we can ask about the nature of the relationship, usually called
instantiation or exemplification, between an entity and its properties and
relations. Surely, there is such a relationship. But it can hardly be like an
ordinary relation such as marriage that connects things of the same kind. And
we can ask what is the connection between that relation and the entities it
relates, e.g., the individual thing on one hand and its properties and
relations on the other. Raising this question seems to lead to an infinite
regress, as Bradley held; for the supposed connection is yet another relation
to be connected with something else. But how do we avoid the regress? Surely,
an individual thing and its properties and relations are not unrelated items.
They have a certain unity. But what is its character? Moreover, we can hardly
identify the individual thing except by reference to its properties and
relations. Yet if we say, as some have, that it is nothing but a bundle of its
properties and relations, could there not be another bundle of exactly the same
properties and relations, yet distinct from the first one? (This question
concerns the so-called problem of individuation, as well as the principle of
the identity of indiscernibles.) If an individual is something other than its
properties and relations (e.g., what has been called a bare particular), it
would seem to be unobservable and thus perhaps unknowable. Concerning (E),
virtually no philosopher has questioned the law of non-contradiction. But there
are important questions about its status. Is it merely a linguistic convention?
Some have held this, but it seems quite implausible. Is the law of
non-contradiction a deep truth about being qua being? If it is, (E) connects
closely with (B) and (C), for we can think of the concepts of self-consistency,
identity, and existence as the most fundamental metaphysical concepts. They are
also fundamental to logic, but logic, even if ultimately grounded in
metaphysics, has a rich additional subject matter (sometimes merging with that
of mathematics) and therefore is properly regarded as a separate branch of
philosophy. The word ‘metaphysics’ has also been used in at least two other
senses: first, the investigation of entities and states of affairs
“transcending” human experience, in particular, the existence of God, the
immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will (this was Kant’s
conception of the sort of metaphysics that, according to him, required
“critique”); and second, the investigation of any alleged supernatural or
occult phenomena, such as ghosts and telekinesis. The first sense is properly
philosophical, though seldom occurring today. The second is strictly popular,
since the relevant supernatural phenomena are most questionable on both
philosophical and scientific grounds. They should not be confused with the
subject matter of philosophical theology, which may be thought of as part of
metaphysics in the general philosophical sense, though it was included by
Aristotle in the subject matter of metaphysics in his sense of the study of
being qua being. Refs.: H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “Seminars on
Aristotle’s Categoriae,” Oxford.
metaphysical wisdom: J. London-born philosopher, cited by H. P. Grice in his
third programme lecture on Metaphysics. “Wisdom used to say that metaphysics is
nonsense, but INTERESTING nonsense.” Some more “contemporary” accounts of
“metaphysics” sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of
these. Consider, for example, from the
OTHER place, John Wisdom's description of a metaphysical, shall we say,
‘statement’I prefer ‘utterance’ or pronouncement! Wisdom says that a metaphysical, shall we
say, ‘proposition’ is, characteristically, a sort of illuminating falsehood, a
pointed paradox, which uses what Wisdom calls ‘ordinary language’ in a disturbing,
baffling, and even shocking way, but not otiosely, but in order to make your
tutee aware of a hidden difference or a hidden resemblance between this thing
and that thinga difference and a resemblance hidden by our ordinary ways of
“talking.” The metaphysician renders
what is clear, obscure. And the
metaphysician MUST retort to some EXTRA-ordinary language, as Wisdom calls
it! Of course, to be fair to Wisdom
and the OTHER place, Wisdom does not claim this to be a complete
characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one. Since Wisdom loves a figure of speech and a
figure of thought! Perhaps what Wisdom
claims should *itself* be seen as an illuminating paradox, a meta-meta-physical
one! In any case, its relation to
Aristotle's, or, closer to us, F. H. Bradley's, account of the matter is not
obvious, is it? But perhaps a relation
CAN be established. Certainly not every
metaphysical statement is a paradox serving to call attention to an usually
unnoticed difference or resemblance.
For many a metaphysical statement is so obscure (or unperspicuous, as I
prefer) that it takes long training, usually at Oxford, before the
metaphysician’s meaning can be grasped.
A paradox, such as Socrates’s, must operate with this or that familiar
concept. For the essence of a paradox is
that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock your tutee when he is
standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations. Nevertheless there IS a connection between
“metaphysics” and Wisdom's kind of paradox.
He is not speaking otiosely!
Suppose we consider the paradox:
i. Everyone is really always alone.
Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram -- rather a flat one
about the human condition. The implicaturum,
via hyperbole, is “I am being witty.”
The pronouncement (i) might be
said, at least, to minimise the difference between “being BY oneself” and
“being WITH other people,” Heidegger’s “Mit-Sein.” But now consider the pronouncement (i), not
simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of
“metaphysical” argument: by a “metaphysical” argument to the effect that what
passes for “knowledge” of the other's mental or psychological process is, at
best, an unverifiable conjecture, since the mind (or soul) and the body are
totally distinct things, and the working of the mind (or soul, as Aristotle
would prefer, ‘psyche’) is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily
manifestations, as Witters would have it. (Not in vain Wisdom calls himself or
hisself a disciple of Witters!) When
this solitude-affirming paradox, (i) is seen in the context of a general theory
about the soul and the body and the possibilities and limits of so-called
“knowledge” (as in “Knowledge of other minds,” to use Wisdom’s fashionable
sobriquet), when it is seen as embodying such a “metaphysical” theory, indeed
the paradox BECOMES clearly a “metaphysical” statement. But the fact that the statement or
proposition is most clearly seen as “metaphysical” in such a setting does not
mean that there is no “metaphysics” at all in it when it is deprived of the
setting. (Cf. my “The general theory of context.”). An utterance like (ii) Everyone is alone. invites us to change, for a moment at least
and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at and talking about things,
and hints (or the metaphysician implicates rather) that the changed view the
tutee gets is the truer, the profounder, view.
Cf. Cook Wilson, “What we know we know,” as delighting this air marshal.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, “The nature of metaphysics:
the Third-Programme Lectures for 1953.”
Totum -- Holosholism -- Methodus -- methodological
holism, also called metaphysical holism, the thesis that with respect to some
system there is explanatory emergence, i.e., the laws of the more complex
situations in the system are not deducible by way of any composition laws or
laws of coexistence from the laws of the simpler or simplest situation(s).
Explanatory emergence may exist in a system for any of the following reasons:
that at some more complex level a variable interacts that does not do so at
simpler levels, that a property of the “whole” interacts with properties of the
“parts,” that the relevant variables interact by different laws at more complex
levels owing to the complexity of the levels, or (the limiting case) that
strict lawfulness breaks down at some more complex level. Thus, explanatory
emergence does not presuppose descriptive emergence, the thesis that there are
properties of “wholes” (or more complex situations) that cannot be defined
through the properties of the “parts” (or simpler situations). The opposite of
methodological holism is methodological individualism, also called explanatory
reductionism, according to which all laws of the “whole” (or more complex
situations) can be deduced from a combination of the laws of the simpler or
simplest situation(s) and either some composition laws or laws of coexistence
(depending on whether or not there is descriptive emergence). Methodological
individualists need not deny that there may be significant lawful connections
among properties of the “whole,” but must insist that all such properties are
either definable through, or connected by laws of coexistence with, properties
of the “parts.”
michelstaedter: essential Italian
philosopher. Carlo Michelstaedter Carlo
Michelstaedter in un suo autoritratto. Carlo Raimondo Michelstaedter (anche
Michelstädter) (Gorizia), filosofo. Michelstaedter nasce a Gorizia, ultimo di
quattro figli, da un'agiata famiglia di origini ebraiche. Il padre, Alberto,
dirige l'ufficio goriziano delle Assicurazioni Generali ed è presidente del
Gabinetto di Lettura goriziano. È un uomo colto, autore di scritti letterari e
di conferenze, rispettoso delle usanze tradizionali ebraiche, ma solo
formalmente, per rispetto borghese: egli è, anzi, un laico, un «tipico
rappresentante della mentalità materialistica dell'Ottocento». L'ebraismo non
sembra quindi incidere molto sulla formazione culturale di Carlo, che scoprirà
solo più tardi e con non poca meraviglia di avere un antenato cabalista. Tra
gli altri membri della famiglia è da ricordare Carolina Luzzatto, prima donna
italiana ad aver diretto un quotidiano. Iscritto al severo
Staatsgymnasium cittadino, fa propria la rigida Bildung asburgica. Con le
traduzioni dal greco e dal latino il giovane Michelstaedter ha i primi approcci
con la speculazione filosofica. A iniziarlo sono il suo professore di
filosofia, Richard von Schubert-Soldern, fautore del solipsismo gnoseologico,
secondo il quale tutto il sapere va ricondotto alla sfera del soggetto; e
l'amico Enrico Mreule, ex compagno di classe, che gli fa conoscere Il mondo
come volontà e rappresentazione, di cui resterà traccia soprattutto ne La
Persuasione e la Rettorica. Nella soffitta di Nino Paternolli, oltre a
Schopenhauer, leggerà e discuterà, con gli amici Nino e Rico, i tragici e i
presocratici, Platone, il Vangelo e le Upanishad; e poi ancora Petrarca,
Leopardi, Tolstoj, e l'amatissimo Ibsen. Conclusi nel 1905 gli studi
ginnasiali, Carlo progetta di iscriversi a giurisprudenza; in seguito abbandona
l'idea e si iscrive alla facoltà di matematica dell'Vienna. Ma l'anima è giàper
dirla con Leopardi«nel primo giovanil tumulto» verso un altrove ch'egli non
riesce a riconoscere nella ferrea logica matematica. Si iscrive al corso di
Lettere dell'Istituto di Studi Superiori Fiorentino, città in cui vivrà per
quasi quattro anni e dove conoscerà, fra gli altri, Gaetano Chiavacci, futuro
curatore delle sue Opere, e Vladimiro Arangio-Ruiz, in seguito noto filosofo
accademico. Continua a ritrarre, fra tratto espressionistico e schizzo
caricaturale, la varia umanità in cui s'imbatte, sia nei mesi di studio che nei
periodi di vacanza al mare e in montagna. Scrive moltissimo, in modo quasi
ossessivo, dalle lettere ai familiari (in particolare alla sorella Paula) alle
recensioni di drammi teatrali. Nel 1909 un evento luttuoso segna la sua vita:
la morte, per suicidio, del fratello Gino (di dieci anni più vecchio), emigrato
a New York. Due anni prima si era suicidata anche una donna da lui amata, Nadia
Baraden. Nell'ottobre dello stesso anno l'amico Enrico Mreule parte per
l'Argentina. Questa partenza è segnata da un evento significativo, una sorta di
passaggio del testimone: Carlo si fa consegnare da Rico la pistola che portava
sempre con sé. Tra il 1909 e il 1910, completati gli esami, ritorna a
Gorizia e inizia la stesura della tesi di laurea, assegnatagli dal docente di
letteratura greca, Girolamo Vitelli, concernente i concetti di persuasione e di
retorica in Platone e Aristotele. La sua attività è febbrile: oltre alla
Persuasione scrive anche la maggior parte delle Poesie e alcuni dialoghi, tra
cui spicca il Dialogo della salute. Il suo isolamento diventa pressoché totale,
mangia pochissimo e dorme per terra, come un asceta; vede solo la sorella e il
cugino Emilio. Comunica al padre che dopo la tesi «non avrebbe fatto il
professore, ma che appena laureato sarebbe andato al mare», forse a Pirano o a
Grado. Il 17 ottobre 1910, dopo un diverbio con la madre, impugna la
pistola lasciatagli da Enrico Mreule e si toglie la vita. Sul frontespizio
della tesi aveva disegnato una "fiorentina", una lampada ad olio, e
aggiunto in greco: apesbésthen, «io mi spensi». Amici e parenti
pubblicarono le sue opere e raccolsero i suoi scritti, ora alla Biblioteca
Civica di Gorizia. Michelstaedter è sepolto nel cimitero ebraico di
Valdirose (Rožna Dolina), oggi nel comune sloveno di Nova Gorica, a poche
centinaia di metri dal confine con l'Italia. Pensiero Una foto di
Carlo Michelstaedter Magnifying glass icon mgx2.svgLa Persuasione e la
Rettorica. La breve vita di Michelstaedter scorrecome risulta
dall'Epistolarioall'insegna di una volontà di vivere continuamente illuminata
dal desiderio di un altrimenti e di un altrove metafisico che fa di lui, già in
giovane età, un impulsivo, un irrequieto esploratore di linguaggi e di mezzi
espressivi, capace di spaziare dalla pittura alla poesia passando per le ripide
vette della filosofia. Nell'apologo dell'aerostato incluso ne La Persuasione e
la Rettorica, l'essenza del pensiero occidentale, la rettorica, viene fatta
risalire da Michelstaedter a un "parricidio": quello di Aristotele
nei confronti di Platone. Questi, nella metafora costruita da Michelstaedter,
escogita un mechánema, una macchina volante per abbandonare il "peso"
del mondo e giungere all'Assoluto. Maestro e discepoli riescono a librarsi
negli alti spazi del cielo, ma restano a metà strada, fra una mera
contemplazione dell'essere e del tempo e la nostalgia della terra e delle cure
mondane. A riportarli sulla terra ci pensa allora un discepolo più scaltro e
intraprendente degli altri, Aristotele, il quale, tradendo il maestro, fa
scendere il mechánema restituendo così a tutti «la gioia d'aver la terra sicura
sotto i piedi» (La persuasione e la rettorica115). Questa nostalgia del mondo
intelligibile platonico fa quindi di Michelstaedter un discepolo di
Schopenhauer, più che di Nietzsche. La costituzione della metafisica è
per lui una storia di "rettorici" tradimenti, la vicenda di una
verità dai grandi "persuasi" tanto proclamata agli uomini quanto da
questi disattesa e inascoltata. «Quanto io dico», scrive Michelstaedter ne La
persuasione e la rettorica, «è stato detto tante volte e con tale forza che
pare impossibile che il mondo abbia ancor continuato ogni volta dopo che erano
suonate quelle parole. Lo dissero ai Greci Parmenide, Eraclito, Empedocle, ma
Aristotele li trattò da naturalisti inesperti; lo disse Socrate, ma ci
fabbricarono su 4 sistemi... lo disse Cristo, e ci fabbricarono su la Chiesa».
La persuasione è la visione propria di chi ha compreso la tragicità della
finitezza e ad essa vuol tener fermo, senza ricorrere a quegli «empiastri»i
kallopísmata órphnes, gli «ornamenti dell'oscurità»che possano lenire il dolore
scatenato da tale consapevolezza. L'essere è finitezza che si rivela solo nella
dimensione tragica di una presenza abbacinante, ma gli uomini rigettano questa
tragica consapevolezza ottundendosi, pascalianamente, nel divertissement.
Persuaso è chi ha la vita in sé, chi non la cerca alienandosi nelle cose o nei
luoghi comuni della società perdendo l'irrinunciabile hic et nunc del proprio
esserci, ma riesce «a consistere nell'ultimo presente», abbandonando quelle
illusioni di sicurezza e di conforto che avviluppano chi vive abbagliato dalle
illusioni create dal potere, dalla cultura, dalle dottrine filosofiche,
politiche, sociali, religiose. È questa «la via preparata» dalla quale a tutti
fa comodo non discostarsi troppo; è questo restare perennemente attaccati alla
vitala philopsychìaa far sì che la "rettorica" trionfi sempre. La
vita, soffocata dalla ricerca dei piaceri, della potenza, finanche dalla
presunzione filosofica di possedere la via e quindi la vita stessa, non vive,
perché in ogni istante ciascuno rimane avvolto dalle cure per ciò che non è
ancora o dal rimpianto per ciò che non è più, mancando sempre l'attimo
decisivo, quello che i greci chiamavano kairós, il tempo propizio. Perciò nella
vita facciamo esperienza della morte, di quella «morte nella vita» cantataquasi
una danse macabrenel Canto delle crisalidi: «Noi col filo / col filo della vita
/ nostra sorte / filammo a questa morte». Il pensiero di Michelstaedter
procede di conseguenza, per liberare il potenziale di tragicità dell'esistenza,
attraverso violente contrapposizioni concettuali (persuasione-rettorica,
vita-morte, piacere-dolore), senza alcun tentativo di mediazione dialettica.
Michelstaedter respinge, con un gesto iniziatico, l'idea di costruire una
dottrina sistematica della persuasione e della salute, in quanto «la via della
persuasione non è corsa da 'omnibus', non ha segni, indicazioni che si possano
comunicare, studiare, ripetere. Ma ognuno ha in sé il bisogno di trovarla e nel
proprio dolore l'indice, ognuno deve nuovamente aprirsi da sé la via, poiché
ognuno è solo e non può sperar aiuto che da sé: la via della persuasione non ha
che questa indicazione: non adattarti alla sufficienza di ciò che t'è dato». La
salvezza individuale è possibile solo in una singolarità irripetibile, irriducibile,
concentrata in sé. Il solipsismo di Michelstaedter è perciò radicale: non
ci sono vie, non ci sono cammini, c'è solo il viandante che nel deserto
dell'esistenza è «il primo e l'ultimo», crocefisso al legno della propria
sufficienza e schiacciato dalla croce di falsi bisogni. Poiché il mondo è
negatività assoluta, al pensiero non resta che negare questa stessa negatività
rifiutando i dati dell'immanenza: «Solo quando non chiederai più la conoscenza
conoscerai, poiché il tuo chiedere ottenebra la tua vita». Si tratta di una
sentenza di sapore quasi buddistico: non a caso Mreule enfatizzerà la figura
dell'amico descrivendolo come «il Buddha dell'occidente». Produzione
artistica La produzione poetica e quella pittorica di Michelstaedter possono
essere considerate un prolungamento e un completamento di questo sentimento
tragico e mistico. Come nel verso poetico egli tenta di esprimere
l'inesprimibile, di dire con parole ciò che sfugge al sistema di segni
codificato e perciò già da sempre istituito retoricamente, così nel segno
pittorico, nello schizzo rapido e scherzoso come nel ritratto composto e
meditato, traluce l'impossibilità di giungere a quella che Parmenide chiamava
«la ben rotonda verità»: non siamo giocati solo dalle parole, ma anche dalle immagini
di una realtà fatta di colori e di forme che ci sfuggono nella loro
immediatezza e alterità, «come chi vuol veder sul muro l'ombra del proprio
profilo, in ciò appunto la distrugge». Anche l'arte e la poesia, come la
retorica filosofica, si rivelano infine per quello che sono: fragili orpelli di
cui si orna l'oscurità dell'essere e che ogni linguaggio escogitato dall'uomo
sarà sempre impotente a esprimere. Opere Opere, G. Chiavacci, Sansoni,
Firenze 1958 Scritti scolastici, Sergio Campailla, Gorizia 1976 Opera grafica e
pittorica, Sergio Campailla, Gorizia 1976 Il dialogo della salute e altri
dialoghi, Sergio Campailla, Adelphi, Milano 1988 Poesie (1905-1910), Sergio
Campailla, Adelphi, Milano 1987 La Persuasione e la Rettorica (1910), Vladimiro
Arangio-Ruiz, Formiggini, Genova 1913; edizione critica Sergio Campailla,
Adelphi, Milano 1982 (poi, con le Appendici critiche, ivi, 1995). Epistolario,
Sergio Campailla, Adelphi, Milano 1983; nuova edizione riveduta e ampliata,
ivi, Parmenide ed Eraclito. Empedocle,
SE, Milano 2003 L'anima ignuda nell'isola dei beati. Scritti su Platone, David
Micheletti, Diabasis, Reggio Emilia 2005 Dialogo della salute. E altri scritti
sul senso dell'esistenza, a cura e con un saggio introduttivo di G.
Brianese, Mimesis, Milano 2009 La melodia del giovane divino, Sergio Campailla,
Adelphi, Milano La persuasione e la
rettorica, edizione critica, A. Comincini, Joker, . Note P. Michelstaedter-Winteler, Appunti per una
biografia di Carlo Michelstaedter
Michelstaedter si riferisce, nell'Epistolario, al bonno Isacco Samuele
Reggio, 1784-1855, confondendolo con il padre di questo, Abram Vita Reggio S.Campailla, Il segreto di Nadia B.,
Marsilio, . Da articoli di cronaca americani dell'epoca, si apprende che il
suicidio avvenne con un colpo di pistola alla tempia destra. La persuasione e la rettorica35 La persuasione e la rettorica89 Poesie54
La persuasione e la rettorica104
Opere781 C. Magris, Un altro
mare95 Il dialogo della salute, 63-64
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Italiani, Volume 74, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, . Arbo
Alessandro, Il suono instabile. Saggi sulla filosofia della musica nel
Novecento, NeoClassica, Roma, . Giuseppe Auteri, Metafisica dell'inganno,
Università degli Studi, Catania 2002. Aurelio Benevento, Scrittori giuliani.
Michelstaedter, Slataper, Stuparich, Otto/Novecento, Azzate 1992. Giorgio
Brianese, L'arco e il destino. Interpretazione di Michelstaedter, Abano Terme
(PD), Francisci 1985; nuova edizione riveduta e ampliata, Milano, Mimesis, .
Giuseppe A. Camerino, La persuasione e i simboli. Michelstaedter e Slataper,
Liguori, Napoli 2005. Sergio Campailla, Pensiero e poesia di Carlo
Michelstaedter, Patron, Bologna 1973. Sergio Campailla, A ferri corti con la
vita, Comune di Gorizia 1981. Sergio Campailla, Controcodice, Edizioni
Scientifiche Italiane, 77–85, Napoli
2001. Valerio Cappozzo, La passione di Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910), Les
Cahiers d'Histoire de l'Art nº2, Parigi 2004. Valerio Cappozzo, Il percorso
universitario di Carlo Michelstaedter dall'archivio dell'Istituto di Studi
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Carlo Michelstaedter. L'Essere come Azione, Erasmo Silvio Storace,
AlboVersorio, 2007. Marco Cerruti, Carlo Michelstaedter, Mursia, 2. ed. Milano
1987 (Civiltà letteraria del '900. Sez. italiana). Marco Cerruti, Ricordi per
Michelsaedter,[ "Carlo Michelstaedter. L'Essere come Azione", Erasmo
Silvio Storace, AlboVersorio, Milano 2007. Nicola Cinquetti, Michelstaedter. Il
nulla e la folle speranza, Edizioni Messaggero, Padova 2002 (Tracce del sacro
nella cultura contemporanea, 25). Paola Colotti, La persuasione
dell'impersuadibilità. Saggio su Carlo Michelstaedter, Ferv, Roma 2004.
Giuseppe D'Acunto, La parola nuova. Momenti della riflessione filosofica sulla
parola nel Novecento, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2004. Martino Dalla Valle,
Dal niente all'impensato. Saggio su Carlo Michelstaedter, Imprimitur, Padova
2008. Daniela De Leo, Michelstaedter filosofo del "frammento" con
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Mistero e persuasione in Carlo Michelstaedter. Passando da Parmenide ed
Eraclito, Milella, Lecce 2001. Roberta De Monticelli, Il richiamo della
persuasione. Lettere a Carlo Michelstaedter, Marietti, Genova 1988. Roberta De
Monticelli, Ricordo di una giovinezza,[ "Carlo Michelstaedter. L'Essere
come Azione", Erasmo Silvio Storace, AlboVersorio, Milano 2007.
"Carlo Michelstaedter: martire della persuasione", tesi di laurea di
Massimo Mirizzi, Biblioteca Statale Isontina, Gorizia 2007. Dialoghi intorno a
Michelstaedter, Sergio Campailla, Biblioteca Statale Isontina, Gorizia 1988.
Eredità di Michelstaedter, Silvio Cumpeta e Angela Michelis, Forum Edizioni,
Udine 2002. Laura Furlan, Carlo Michelstaedter: l'essere straniero di un
intellettuale moderno, Lint, Trieste 1999 (Vie di fuga 6). L'immagine
irraggiungibile. Dipinti e disegni di Carlo Michelstaedter, Antonella
Gallarotti, Edizioni della Laguna, Mariano del Friuli 1992. Galgano Andrea,
Carlo Michelstaedter. Il vortice del nulla, in Mosaico, Roma, Aracne, , 163–166. Mario Gabriele Giordano, Il pensiero
e l'arte di Carlo Michelstaedter, in "Riscontri", I(1979),1. Ora,
revisionato, in Id., Il fantastico e il reale. Pagine di critica letteraria da
Dante al Novecento, Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche italiane, 1997. Innella
Francesco, Michelstaedter: frammenti da una filosofia oscura, Ripostes,
Salerno-Roma 1995 (I tascabili). Vincenzo Intermite, Carlo Michelstaedter.
Società rettorica e coscienza persuasa, Firenze Atheneum (collana Collezione
Oxenford, 2008. Claudio La Rocca, Nichilismo e retorica. Il pensiero di Carlo
Michelstaedter, ETS, Pisa 1984 (Biblioteca di "Teoria" 2). Claudio La
Rocca, Carlo Michelstaedter e l'esperienza del senso, in «Il Cannocchiale»,
1992, 1, 71–92. Claudio La Rocca, Carlo
Michelstaedter y la experiencia del sentido, in «Daímon», 4, 1992, 109–123. Claudio La Rocca, Il motivo della
persuasione e il rapporto con Michelstaedter, in «Il Ponte», LIV, n. 10,
ottobre 1998, numero monografico su “Aldo Capitini, persuasione e non
violenza”, T. Raffaelli, 199–223.
Claudio La Rocca, Esistenzialismo e nichilismo. Luporini e Michelstaedter,
«Belfagor», Claudio La Rocca, Prima e dopo la Persuasione. Interpretare
Michelstaedter, in Carlo Michelstaedter: l'essere come azione, E. Storace,
AlboVersorio, Milano, 2007, 19–31.
Claudio La Rocca, La persuasione (e l'oratoria), «Humanitas», 2, , numero su
Carlo Michelstaedter, un classico del Novecento, A. Michelis, 811–835. Claudio Magris, Un altro mare,
Garzanti, Milano 1991. Biagio Marin, Ricordo di Carlo Michelstaedter, in Studi
Goriziani, XXXII [1962], 4 sgg. Aldo Marroni, Filosofie
dell'intensità. Quattro maestri occulti del pensiero italiano contemporaneo,
Mimesis, Milano 1997 (IF. Itinerari filosofici). Aldo Marroni, Carlo
Michelstaedter e l'estetica del 'farsi fiamma', in Estetiche dell'eccesso.
Quando il sentire estremo diventa grande stile, Quodlibet, Macerata, ; Fabrizio
Meroi, «Michelstaedter, Carlo» in Il contributo italiano alla storia del
PensieroFilosofia, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, Roma, . Angela
Michelis, Carlo Michelstaedter. Il coraggio dell'impossibile, Città Nuova, Roma
1997. (Idee 113). Francesco Muzzioli, Michelstaedter, Milella, Lecce 1987.
Antimo Negri, Il lavoro e la città. Un saggio su Carlo Michelstaedter, Lavoro,
Roma 1996. (I grandi piccoli 11). Rosalia Peluso, L'identico e i molteplici.
Meditazioni michelstaedteriane, Loffredo, Napoli . Mario Perniola, La
"persuasione" tra marginalità e centralità, in "Eredità di Carlo
Michelstaedter", C. Cumpeta e A. Michelis, Udine, Forum, 2002, 201-8.
Piero Pieri, Il pensiero della poesia. Carlo Michelstaedter e il Romanticismo
della tragedia, Nautilus, Bologna 2001. Piero Pieri, "Esorcismo e ironia
nella critica del primo Michelstaedter", in «Il lettore di provincia», anno
IV, fasc. 14, 1973. Piero Pieri, "Modelli di cultura alle origini della
Persuasione di Michelstaedter", in «Il lettore di provincia», anno VIII,
fasc. 29-30, 1977. Piero Pieri, "Il rischio dell'autoinganno (Una errata
attribuzione di incisione a Carlo Michelstaedter)", in «Metodi e
ricerche», anno VII, n. 1, gennaio-giugno 1988. Piero Pieri,"La scienza
del tragico. Saggio su Carlo Michelstaedter", Bologna, Cappelli, 1989.
Piero Pieri, "Nello sguardo della trascendenza. Intorno alla figura
dell'ermafrodita e del satiro nella Persuasione di Michelstaedter", in
«Intersezioni», a. X, n. 1, aprile 1990. Piero Pieri, "Due diverse ma non
opposte interpretazioni de «La persuasione e la retorica» di Carlo
Michelstaedter", in Studi sulla modernità, F. Curi, Bologna, Clueb, 1989.
Piero Pieri, "Per una dialettica storica del silenzio. La “vergogna” del
filosofo e l'autoinganno dello scrittore", in Eredità di Carlo Michelstaedter, Forum,
Udine, 2002, 225–235. Piero Pieri,
"La differenza ebraica: grecità, tradizione e ripetizione in
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Bologna, 2002. Piero Pieri, "Michelstaedter nel '900. Forme del tragico
contemporaneo", Transeuropa, collana «Pronto intervento», Massa, . Antonio
Piromalli, Michelstaedter, La Nuova Italia, 2. ed. Firenze 1974. (Il castoro
19-20). Paolo Pulcina, Carlo Michelstaedter: estetica. L'illusione della
retorica, le ragioni del suicidio, Atheneum, Firenze 2004. Giuseppe Pulina,
L'imperfetto pessimista. Saggio sul pensiero di Carlo Michelstaedter, Lalli,
Poggibonsi 1996. (Materiali di filosofia e pedagogia). Giuseppe Pulina,
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Cassino, Giuseppe Pulina, "Capitini e Michelstaedter: un dialogo sulla
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154–168 (1924) Antonio Russo, Gaetano Chiavacci interprete di
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un secolo dopo, Marsilio, , 111–131.
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tra Ottocento e Novecento, Città aperta, Troina2005. Laura Sanò, Leggere La
persuasione e la rettorica di Carlo Michelstaedter, Ibis, Como . Licia
Semeraro, Lo svuotamento del futuro. Note su Michelstaedter, Milella, Lecce
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9788861480391 Stella Vittori, Carlo Michelstaedter, FERV, Milano 2002.
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AlboVersorio, Milano 2007. Erasmo Silvio Storace, Thanatografie. Per
un'estetica del morire in Platone, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Michelstaedter e
Rilke, Mimesis, Milano . Giovanna Taviani, Michelstaedter, Palumbo, Palermo
2002 (La scrittura e l'interpretazione 17). Marcello Veneziani, Carlo
Michelstaedter e la metafisica della gioventù, AlboVersorio, Milano . Antonio
Verri, Michelstaedter e il suo tempo, Longo Angelo, Ravenna 1969 (Il portico
21). Roberta Visone, L'incidenza di Schopenhauer sul pensiero di Carlo
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Michelstaedter. L'Essere come Azione, Erasmo Silvio Storace, AlboVersorio, 2007
Altri progetti Collabora a Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a
Carlo Michelstaedter Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio su Carlo Michelstaedter
Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file
su Carlo Michelstaedter Carlo
Michelstaedter, su Treccani.itEnciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana. Carlo Michelstaedter, in
Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Carlo Michelstaedter, in Dizionario
biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. (DE) Carlo Michelstaedter (XML), in
Dizionario biografico austriaco 1815-1950.
Opere di Carlo Michelstaedter, su Liber Liber. Opere di Carlo Michelstaedter, su openMLOL,
Horizons Unlimited srl. Opere di Carlo Michelstaedter, . italiana di Carlo Michelstaedter, su
Catalogo Vegetti della letteratura fantastica, Fantascienza.com. Sito dedicato a Michelstaedter, su
michelstaedter.beniculturali.it. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, "Grice e Michelstaedter: retorica e persuasione," per il
Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
migliio: essential
Italian philosopher. Gianfranco Miglio
Gianfranco Miglio Gianfranco Miglio 1960s.jpg Senatore della Repubblica
Italiana Durata mandato23 aprile 199229 maggio 2001 LegislatureXI, XII, XIII
Gruppo parlamentare. Lega Nord (1992-1994), Misto (1994-2001) Coalizione. PdL
(1994), PpL (1996) CircoscrizioneLombardia Collegio. Como Sito istituzionale
Dati generali Partito politicoDC (1943-1959) LN (1992-1994) PF (1994-2001)
Titolo di studio laurea in giurisprudenza UniversitàUniversità Cattolica del
Sacro Cuore Professionedocente universitario Gianfranco Miglio (Como),
filosofo. Sostenitore della trasformazione dello Stato italiano in senso
federale o, addirittura, confederale, fra gli anni ottanta e i novanta è
considerato l'ideologo della Lega Lombarda, in rappresentanza della quale fu
anche senatore, prima di "rompere" con Umberto Bossi dando vita alla
breve stagione del Partito Federalista. Polo scolastico
"Gianfranco Miglio" ad Adro. Costituzionalista e scienziato della
politica, fu senatore della Repubblica Italiana nella XI, XII e XIII
legislatura. Ha insegnato presso l'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
di Milano, ove fu preside della Facoltà di Scienze politiche dal 1959 al 1989.
È stato allievo di Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves e Giorgio Balladore Pallieri,
sotto la cui docenza si è formato sui classici del pensiero giuridico e
politologico. Colpito da ictus nel 2000, non si riprese e morì
ottantatreenne nella sua stessa città natale, Como, circa un anno dopo. Il
funerale si tenne a Domaso, sul Lago di Como, comune d'origine del padre e sede
di una villa nella quale il professore si rifugiava spesso; in seguito Miglio è
stato tumulato nel locale cimitero, a fianco dei membri della sua famiglia.
Laureatosi in Giurisprudenza all'Università Cattolica nel 1940 con una
tesi sulle Origini e i primi sviluppi delle dottrine giuridiche internazionali
pubbliche nell'età moderna, evitò l'arruolamento per la Seconda guerra
mondiale a causa di un difetto uditivo congenito, e poté divenire assistente
volontario alla cattedra di Storia delle dottrine politiche, che d'Entreves
tenne sino alla fine degli anni quaranta nella medesima università.
Libero docente nel 1948, Miglio si dedicò negli anni cinquanta allo studio
delle opere di storici e giuristi, soprattutto tedeschi: dai quattro volumi del
Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht che Otto Von Gierke scrisse tra il 1869 e il
1913, ai saggi di storia amministrativa di Otto Hintze, alcuni dei quali, negli
anni seguenti, vennero tradotti in italiano dal suo allievo e ferrato
germanista Pierangelo Schiera (O. Hintze, Stato e società, Zanichelli
1980). Fu di quegli anni l'incontro del giovane Miglio con l'immensa
produzione scientifica di Max Weber: il professore comasco fu uno dei primi ad
aver studiato a fondo Economia e Società, l'opera più importante del sociologo
tedesco che era stata completamente trascurata in Italia. Sviluppo del
lavoro scientifico Miglio storico dell'amministrazione Alla fine degli anni cinquanta,
Miglio fondò con il giurista Feliciano Benvenuti l'ISAP Milano (Istituto per la
Scienza dell'Amministrazione Pubblica), ente pubblico partecipato da Comune e
Provincia di Milano, di cui ricopri per alcuni anni la carica di vicedirettore.
In un saggio memorabile intitolato Le origini della scienza
dell'amministrazione (1957), il professore comasco descriveva con elegante
chiarezza le radici storiche della disciplina. L'interesse per il campo
dell'amministrazione era dovuto in quegli anni alle politiche pianificatrici
che gli stati andavano conducendo per l'incremento della crescita
economica. La Fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa Ben presto
Miglio sentì tuttavia l'esigenza di studiare in modo più sistematico la storia
dei poteri pubblici europei e, negli anni sessanta, costituì la Fondazione
italiana per la storia amministrativa: un istituto le cui ricerche vennero
condotte con rigoroso metodo scientifico. A tal proposito, il professore aveva
appositamente preparato per i collaboratori della fondazione uno schema di
istruzioni divenuto famoso per chiarezza e organicità. In realtà, fondando la
F.I.S.A. Miglio si era posto l'ambizioso obiettivo di scrivere una storia
costituzionale che prendesse in esame le amministrazioni pubbliche esistite
in luoghi e tempi diversi: in tal modo egli sarebbe riuscito a tracciare una
vera e propria tipologia delle istituzioni dal medioevo all'età contemporanea,
al cui interno sarebbero stati indicati i tratti distintivi o, viceversa, gli
elementi comuni di ogni potere pubblico. Ma v'era un'altra ragione che aveva
indotto Miglio a studiare i poteri pubblici in un'ottica, come scriveva lui
stesso, analogico-comparativa. Servendosi di un metodo scientifico che
Hintze aveva parzialmente seguito nella prima metà del Novecento, il professore
comasco intendeva definire l'evoluzione storica dello stato moderno,
storicizzando in tal modo le stesse istituzioni contemporanee. Gli Acta
italica La fondazione pubblicava tre collezioni: gli Acta italica, l'Archivio
(diviso in due collane: la prima riguardante ricerche e opere strumentali, la
seconda dedicata alle opere dei maggiori storici dell'amministrazione) e gli
Annali. Tra i più autorevoli lavori storici pubblicati nell'Archivio, si
ricordano il volume sui comuni italiani di Walter Goetz e il famoso saggio di
Pietro Vaccari sulla territorialità del contado medievale. Nella prima serie
alcuni giovani studiosi poterono invece pubblicare le loro ricerche di storia
delle istituzioni: Gabriella Rossetti, allieva dello storico Cinzio Violante,
vi diede alle stampe un approfondito studio sulla società e sulle istituzioni
nella Cologno Monzese dell'Alto Medioevo; Adriana Petracchi pubblicò la prima
parte di un'interessante ricerca sullo sviluppo storico dell'istituto
dell'intendente nella Francia dell'ancien régime; occorre inoltre ricordare il
poderoso volume di Pierangelo Schiera sul cameralismo tedesco e
sull'assolutismo nei maggiori stati germanici. Su tutt'altro piano si poneva
invece la collezione della F.I.S.A. denominata Acta italica: al suo interno
dovevano essere pubblicati i documenti relativi all'amministrazione pubblica
degli stati italiani preunitari: è probabile che l'ispirazione per
quest'ultima serie fosse venuta a Miglio dallo studio delle opere di
Hintze: verso la fine del XIX secolo, lo storico tedesco aveva infatti scritto
alcuni saggi sull'amministrazione prussiana pubblicandoli negli Acta borussica,
un'autorevole collana che raccoglieva le fonti storiche dello stato degli
Hohenzollern. L'edizione dei lavori della commissione Giulini Tra i
volumi degli Acta italica, occorre ricordare l'edizione dei lavori della
Commissione Giulini curata da Nicola Raponi nel 1962, uno studio cui Miglio
tenne molto e di cui si servì, molti anni dopo, per la stesura del celebre saggio
su Vocazione e destino dei lombardi (in
La Lombardia moderna, Electa 1989, ripubblicato in G. Miglio, Io, Bossi
e la Lega, Mondadori 1994). La commissionei cui lavori avevano avuto luogo a
Torino dal 10 al 26 maggio 1859 sotto la presidenza del nobile milanese Cesare
Giulini della Portaaveva il compito di elaborare progetti di legge che
sarebbero entrati in vigore in Lombardia nel periodo immediatamente successivo
alla guerra. Cavour, che in quegli anni ricopriva la carica di primo ministro,
voleva che il governo, nel sancire l'annessione dei nuovi territori al Piemonte
di Vittorio Emanuele, mantenesse separati gli ordinamenti amministrativi delle
due regioni, lasciando che in Lombardia continuassero a sussistere una parte
delle istituzioni austriache esistenti. Il saggio Le contraddizioni dello
stato unitario Nel saggio magistrale Le contraddizioni dello stato unitario
(1969) scritto in occasione del convegno per il centenario delle leggi di
unificazione, Miglio prese in esame gli effetti devastanti che l'accentramento
amministrativo aveva provocato nel sistema politico italiano. La classe
politica italiana non fu capace di elaborare un ordinamento amministrativo che
consentisse allo stato di governare adeguatamente un territorio esteso dalle
Alpi alla Sicilia. Ricorrendo a una felice similitudine, il professore scrisse
che la scelta di estendere le norme piemontesi a tutta Italia fu come "far
indossare a un gigante il vestito di un nano". Secondo Miglio, i nostri
"padri della patria", spaventati dalle annessioni a cascata e dalle
circostanze fortunose in cui era avvenuta l'unificazione, preferirono
conservare ottusamente gli istituti piemontesi, costringendo la stragrande
maggioranza degli italiani ad essere governati da istituzioni che, oltre ad
essere percepite come "straniere", si rivelarono palesemente
inefficienti. Nel saggio, Miglio aveva però messo in luce un altro dato
fondamentale; il professore scrisse che il paese, quantunque fosse stato
formalmente unito dalle norme piemontesi, continuò nei fatti a restare diviso
ancora per molti anni: le leggi, che il Parlamento emanava dalle Alpi alla
Sicilia, venivano infatti interpretate in cento modi diversi nelle regioni
storiche in cui il Paese continuava, nonostante tutto, ad essere naturalmente
articolato. Era il federalismo che, negato alla radice dalla classe politica
liberal-nazionale in nome dell'unità, si prendeva ora la rivincita traducendosi
in forme evidenti di "criptofederalismo".[senza fonte] Miglio e
Otto Brunner Furono inoltre fondamentali, nella formazione del professor
Miglio, i lavori dello storico austriaco Otto Brunner: di questo eminente
studioso di storia medievale Miglio non solo fece tradurre svariati saggi
(O.Brunner, Per una nuova storia costituzionale e sociale, Vita e Pensiero 1970),
ma promosse anche la pubblicazione dell'opera monumentale Land und Herrschaft:
in questo lavorouscito per la prima volta nel 1939Brunner aveva preso in esame
la costituzione materiale degli ordinamenti medievali, ponendo in evidenza i
numerosi elementi di diversità tra la civiltà dell'età di mezzo e quella
moderna, soprattutto nel modo di concepire il diritto. La traduzione di
Land und Herrschaft, affidata inizialmente alle cure di Emilio Bussi, sarebbe
dovuta comparire nell'elegante collana della F.I.S.A. già negli anni sessanta.
Interrotto negli anni seguenti, il lavoro venne invece portato a compimento
solo nei primi anni ottanta dagli allievi Pierangelo Schiera e Giuliana Nobili.
Pubblicato da Giuffré con il titolo di "Terra e potere", il capolavoro
di Brunner apparve nel 1983 negli Arcana imperii, la collana di scienza della
politica di cui Miglio era divenuto direttore nei primi anni Ottanta. Il
professore comasco si occupò inoltre dei contributi recati alla scienza
dell'amministrazione da parte di altri due storici e giuristi tedeschi: Lorenz
Von Stein e Rudolf Gneist. La chiusura della FISA Negli anni Settanta la
F.I.S.A. dovette chiudere i battenti per mancanza di fondi. Il professor
Miglio, ricordando a distanza di tempo la fine di quell'autorevole collana di
storia delle istituzioni, ne espose le ragioni con un breve commento:
"Malgrado la sua efficienza, la F.I.S.A. ebbe vita breve: gli enti che
provvedevano al suo finanziamento, non scorgendo l'utilità "politica"
immediata della sua attività, strinsero i cordoni della borsa".
Miglio scienziato della politica e costituzionalista Negli anni ottanta, il
degenerarsi del clima politico in Italia indusse il professor Miglio ad
occuparsi di riforme istituzionali; egli intendeva contribuire in tal modo alla
modernizzazione del paese. Fu così che, nel 1983, raggruppando un gruppo di
esperti di diritto costituzionale e amministrativo stese un organico progetto
di riforma limitato alla seconda parte della costituzione. Ne uscirono due
volumi che, pubblicati nella collana Arcana imperii, vennero completamente
trascurati dalla classe politica democristiana e socialista. Tra le proposte
più interessanti avanzate dal "Gruppo di Milano"così venne definito
il pool di professori coordinati da Migliov'era il rafforzamento del governo
guidato da un primo ministro dotato di maggiori poteri, la fine del
bicameralismo perfetto con l'istituzione di un senato delle regioni sul modello
del Bundesrat tedesco, ed infine l'elezione diretta del primo ministro da
tenersi contemporaneamente a quella per la camera dei deputati. Secondo
il gruppo di Milano, queste e numerose altre riforme avrebbero garantito
all'Italia una maggiore stabilità politica, cancellando lo strapotere dei
partiti e salvaguardando la separazione dei poteri propria di uno stato di
diritto. Diversamente dalla F.I.S.A., la collana Arcana imperii era incentrata
esclusivamente sullo studio scientifico dei comportamenti politici. Il citato
volume di Brunner costituì pertanto un'eccezione perché, come si è avuto
modo di accennare, esso doveva essere pubblicato negli eleganti volumi della
F.I.S.A. già negli anni sessanta. All'interno della collana Arcana imperii
vennero invece inseriti saggi e contributi di psicologia politica, di etologia,
di teoria politica, di economia, di sociologia e di storia. Miglio
intendeva costituire un vero e proprio laboratorio dove lo scienziato della
politica, servendosi dei risultati portati alla disciplina dalle diverse
scienze sperimentali, fosse in grado di conseguire una formazione scientifica
che si ponesse all'avanguardia; dal 1983 al 1995 vi vennero pubblicati più di
trenta volumi. Si ricordano, tra gli altri: lo studio di Lorenzo Ornaghi sulla
dottrina della corporazione nel ventennio fascista, l'edizione degli scritti
schmittiani su Thomas Hobbes, la pubblicazioneinterrottadi alcune opere di
Lorenz Von Stein, il trattato di diritto costituzionale del tedesco Rudolph
Smend. Degni di nota anche gli scritti degli economisti Ludwig Von Mises e
Friedrich Von Hayek. I volumi, di squisita fattura, non poterono tuttavia
eguagliare l'elegante veste tipografica di quelli pubblicati dalla F.I.S.A., ed
un identico destino parve accomunare le due collane: anche in questo caso,
Miglio fu infatti costretto a sospendere le pubblicazioni. Miglio e
Lorenz Von Stein Alla formazione del pensiero politico di Gianfranco Miglio
contribuirono le opere sociologiche di Lorenz Von Stein e i saggi di Carl
Schmitt sulle categorie del politico. Secondo Stein, in ogni comunità sono
presenti due realtà irriducibili: lo stato e la società. La società è il
terreno della libera iniziativa, ove gli uomini forti vincono sui deboli e
tentano di stabilizzare le loro posizioni attraverso l'ordinamento giuridico;
lo stato è invece il luogo ove regna il principio di uguaglianza. Per Stein
esso non può che identificarsi con la monarchia: il re è infatti l'unica
autorità in grado di intervenire a sostegno dei più deboli. Già a partire dalla
seconda metà del Settecento i monarchi, attraverso il potere di ordinanza, erano
stati in grado di modificare le costituzioni giuridiche cetuali all'interno dei
loro territori, una politica ch'essi avevano potuto condurre in porto non senza
grosse difficoltà, a vantaggio del bene comune: questo era accaduto soprattutto
in Austria, in Prussia e in Sassonia, ma anche nella Lombardia austriaca e nel
Granducato di Toscana. È probabile che Stein, quando sosteneva che il
ruolo dello stato dovesse controbilanciare quello della società, avesse in
mente il riformismo illuminato delle grandi monarchie assolute di fine
Settecento (la Prussia di Federico II, l'Austria di Giuseppe II). In realtà, le
sue dottrine sociologiche si ponevano all'interno dello stato liberale e
partivano dal presupposto che la monarchia, lungi dall'essere un potere assoluto,
dovesse comunque fare i conti con il potere della società attestato nei
parlamenti. Secondo Stein ogni comunità prospera solo quando stato e società
sono in equilibrio, ugualmente vitali ed operanti. Anche il professor Miglio
credeva che ogni comunità fosse dominata da due realtà irriducibili ma, a
differenza di Lorenz Von Stein, egli non le identificava nello stato e nella
società: Non lo stato, perché è una realtà storica inserita nel tempo e, come
tutte le creature e specie viventi, destinata a decadere,a scomparire ed essere
sostituita da altre forme di aggregazione politica; non la società perché Stein
la considerava in un'ottica esclusivamente economico-giuridica e l'aveva tenuta
artificiosamente separata dall'altra realtà, lo stato. Miglio e Carl Schmitt
Tornando alla formazione di Miglio, fu senza dubbio decisivo l'incontro con
l'eminente giurista tedesco Carl Schmitt, le cui opere erano state in gran
parte trascurate dagli intellettuali italiani. L'aiuto che Schmitt aveva finito
per prestare al regime hitleriano, in particolare nel sostenere la legalità
delle leggi razziali in un sistema di diritto internazionale, furono più che
sufficienti per oscurare in Italia la sua imponente produzione scientifica. In
realtà, i rapporti di Schmitt con il nazismo furono di breve durata: nella
seconda metà degli anni trenta, il giurista di Plettenberg aveva preso
definitivamente le distanze da Hitler.[senza fonte] Di Schmitt il professor
Miglio apprezzò gli studi di scienza politica e di diritto internazionale: nel
1972 curò assieme a Schiera l'edizione italiana di alcuni saggi pubblicati dal
Mulino con il titolo Le categorie del politico. Nella prefazione al volume, il
professore si soffermò sui decisivi contributi portati da Schmitt alla scienza
politologica. L'antologia destò scalpore nel mondo accademico. Norberto
Bobbio sostenne che, con quegli scritti, Miglio aveva "destabilizzato la
sinistra italiana". È dall'incontro con la grande produzione scientifica
di Carl Schmitt che Miglio riuscì quindi a "fabbricarsi" gli
strumenti per costruire una parte importante del suo modello sociologico. Nel
Begriff des Politischen, Schmitt aveva infatti scoperto che l'essenza del
politico è fondata sul conflitto tra amico e nemico: è uno scontro all'ultimo
sangue perché la guerra politica porta normalmente all'eliminazione fisica
dell'avversario. Non a caso il giurista tedesco sostenne che l'esempio più
emblematico di scontro politico fosse la guerra civile (Bürgerkrieg) tra
fazioni partigiane: qui il tasso di conflittualità tra amico e nemico è sempre
stato altissimo. Chi ha gli stessi amici non può che avere gli stessi nemici
del proprio compagno di lotta. Si crea in altre parole un clima di solidarietà
tra i membri del gruppo che è decisivo nella guerra contro i nemici. Il
rapporto politico è sempre esclusivo, volto a marcare l'identità del gruppo in
opposizione a quella degli altri. Schmitt aveva inoltre scoperto che
l'avvento dello stato moderno aveva portato a due risultati di eccezionale
portata storica. Primo: la fine delle guerre civili all'interno del territorio
(le faide e le guerre confessionali del XVI-XVII secolo) con l'annientamento
del ruolo politico detenuto sino a quel momento dalle fazioni in lotta (dai
partiti confessionali ai ceti). Da quel momento i sovrani furono i supremi
garanti dell'ordine all'interno degli stati, territori sempre più estesi
ch'essi governarono servendosi di un apparato amministrativo regolato dal
diritto. Il secondo grande risultato fu per certi versi una conseguenza del
primo: l'avvento dello stato moderno portò nello stesso periodo all'erezione di
un sistema di diritto internazionale (ius publicum europeum) assolutamente
vincolante per i paesi che vi aderirono. Anche in questo caso, il tasso di
politicità (cioè l'aggressività delle parti in lotta, gli stati) venne
fortemente limitato: le guerre legittime, intraprese solo dagli stati, vennero
condotte da quel momento in base alle regole dello ius publicum europaeum. Si
trattava quindi di conflitti a basso tasso di politicità, non foss'altro perché
la vittoria di una delle parti in lotta non poteva portare in alcun modo
all'annientamento dell'avversario, il cui diritto di esistenza era tutelato dal
diritto e accettato da tutti gli stati. La crisi dello ius publicum
europaeum, divenuta palese alla fine della Prima guerra mondiale e acuitasi
ulteriormente con lo scoppio delle guerre partigiane nei decenni successivi,
resero palese a Schmitt la fine della regle de droit su cui si era fondato
l'universo giuridico occidentale nei rapporti internazionali tra stati sovrani.
La guerra civile e, in modo particolare, l'estrema politicizzazione avvenuta
durante le guerre mondiali con la criminalizzazione degli avversari persuasero
Schmitt che la fine dello ius publicum europaeum era ormai compiuta. In questo,
il giurista tedesco vide soprattutto il fallimento della civiltà giuridica
occidentale nel suo supremo tentativo di fondare i rapporti umani unicamente
sulle basi del diritto. Anche Miglio prese atto della fine dello ius
publicum europaeum ma, a differenza di Schmitt, non credette che tale processo
segnasse la fine del diritto e la vittoria definitiva delle leggi aggressive
della politica. Fondando il suo originale modello sociologico,
egli sostenne che tutte le comunità umane si sono sempre rette su due tipi
di rapporti: l'obbligazione politica e il contratto-scambio. Ai suoi occhi, lo
stato (moderno) era stato un autentico capolavoro perché, apportando un
contributo decisivo alla sua costituzione, i giuristi dell'età moderna erano
riusciti a regolare la politica inserendola in un compiuto sistema di norme
fondato sulla razionalità del diritto, sull'impersonalità del comando e sui
concetti di contratto e rappresentanza: tutti elementi appartenenti alla sfera
del contratto/scambio. Secondo il professore, il crollo dello ius
publicum europeum aveva però messo in crisi la stessa impalcatura su cui si
reggeva lo stato, che ora dimostrava tutta la sua storicità. Diversamente da
Schmitt, che era rimasto legato all'idea dell'organizzazione statale, Miglio
sosteneva che la civiltà occidentale, soprattutto dopo il 1989, stesse
attraversando una fase di transizione al termine della quale lo stato verrà
probabilmente sostituito da altre forme di comunità ove obbligazione politica e
contratto/scambio si reggeranno in un nuovo equilibrio. La fine dello
stato e il ritorno al medioevo Con il crollo del muro di Berlino (1989), il
professore ritenne che lo stato moderno fosse giunto al capolinea. Il progresso
tecnologico e, in modo particolare, il più alto livello di ricchezza cui erano
giunti i paesi occidentali lo convinsero che negli anni successivi sarebbero
avvenuti cambiamenti di portata radicale, tali da coinvolgere anche la
costituzione (Verfassung) degli ordinamenti politici. Secondo Miglio, lo stato
avrà in futuro crescenti difficoltà nel garantire servizi efficienti alla
popolazione. Ciascun cittadino, vedendo accresciuto il proprio tenore di
vita in forza dell'economia di mercato, sarà infatti portato ad avere sempre
meno fiducia nei lenti meccanismi della burocrazia pubblica, ch'egli riterrà
inadeguata a soddisfare i suoi standard di vita. L'elevata produttività
dei paesi avanzati e la vittoria definitiva dell'economia di mercato su quella
pubblica porterà in altri termini a nuove forme di aggregazione politica al cui
interno i cittadini saranno desti contare in misura molto maggiore rispetto a
quanto non lo siano oggi nei vasti stati in cui si trovano inseriti. Secondo il
professore gli stati democratici, ancora fondati su istituti rappresentativi
risalenti all'Ottocento, non riusciranno più a provvedere agli interessi della
civiltà tecnologica del secolo XXI. Con il crollo del muro di Berlino e la fine
della guerra fredda, si creano in altri termini le premesse perché la politica
cessi di ricoprire un ruolo primario nelle comunità umane e venga invece
subordinata agli interessi concreti dei cittadini, legati alla logica di
mercato. La fine degli stati moderni porterà secondo Miglio alla
costituzione di comunità neofederali dominate non più dal rapporto politico di
comando-obbedienza, bensì da quello mercantile del contratto e della mediazione
continua tra centri di potere diversi: sono i nuovi gruppi in cui sarà
articolato il mondo di domani, corporazioni dotate di potere politico ed
economico al cui interno saranno inseriti gruppi di cittadini accomunati dagli
stessi interessi. Secondo il professore, il mondo sarà costituito da una
società pluricentrica, ove le associazioni territoriali e categoriali vedranno
riconosciuto giuridicamente il loro peso politico non diversamente da quanto
avveniva nel medioevo. Di qui l'appello a riscoprire i sistemi politici
anteriori allo stato, a riscoprire quel variegato mosaico medievale costituito
dai diritti dei ceti, delle corporazioni e, in particolar modo, delle libere
città germaniche. Il professore studiò a fondo gli antichi sistemi
federali esistiti tra il medioevo e l'età moderna: le repubbliche urbane
dell'Europa germanica tra il XII e il XIII secolo, gli ordinamenti elvetici
d'antico regime, la Repubblica delle Province Unite e, da ultimo, gli Stati
Uniti tra il 1776 e il 1787. Ai suoi occhi, il punto di forza risiedeva
precisamente nel ruolo che quei poteri pubblici avevano saputo riconoscere alla
società nelle sue articolazioni corporative e territoriali. Miglio dedicò i
suoi ultimi anni allo studio approfondito di questi temi, progettando di
scrivere un volume intitolato l'Europa degli Stati contro l'Europa delle città.
Il libro è rimasto incompiuto per la morte del professore. L'impegno
politico diretto e il federalismo Nel 1943, a 25 anni, Miglio si iscrisse alla
neonata Democrazia Cristiana, che lasciò nel 1959, quando divenne preside della
Facoltà di Scienze politiche dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di
Milano; Miglio rimase comunque legato culturalmente alla DC fino al 1968. Il 27
aprile 1945, nell'immediato domani della Liberazione, fu tra i fondatori, a
Como, del movimento federalista “Il Cisalpino”, con altri docenti
dell'Università Cattolica di Milano. Ispirato alle idee di Carlo Cattaneo, il
programma del “Cisalpino” prevedeva la suddivisione del territorio italiano su
base cantonale, secondo il modello svizzero, con la costituzione di tre grandi
macroregioni (Nord, Centro e Sud). Nel 1971 il suo nome venne proposto
per il conferimento del titolo di Commendatore dell'Ordine al Merito della
Repubblica Italiana, ma una volta informato del fatto rifiutò di accettare
l'onorificenza, che venne annullata con un successivo Decreto presidenziale
l'anno seguente. Nel 1990 Miglio si avvicinò alla Lega Nord. Eletto nel 1992 al
Senato della Repubblica come indipendente nelle liste della Lega Nord-Lega
Lombarda (da allora a Miglio fu attribuito l'appellativo lombardo di Profesùr),
per quattro anni (dal 1990 al 1994) lavorò per il partito con l'intento di farne
un'autentica forza di cambiamento. In questo periodo elaborò un progetto
di riforma federale fondato sul ruolo costituzionale assegnato all'autorità
federale e a quella delle macroregioni o cantoni (del Nord o Padania, del
Centro o Etruria, del Sud o Mediterranea, oltre alle cinque regioni a statuto
speciale). Questa architettura costituzionale prevedeva l'elezione di un
governo direttoriale composto dai governatori delle tre macroregioni, da un
rappresentante delle cinque regioni a statuto speciale e dal presidente
federale. Quest'ultimo, eletto da tutti i cittadini in due tornate elettorali,
avrebbe rappresentato l'unità del paese. I puntisalienti del progetto,
esposti nel Decalogo di Assago del 1993, vennero fatti propri dalla Lega Nord
solo marginalmente: il segretario federale, Umberto Bossi, preferì infatti
seguire una politica di contrattazione con lo stato centrale che mirasse
al rafforzamento delle autonomie regionali. Il dissenso di Miglio, iniziato al
congresso leghista di Assago, si acuì dopo le elezioni politiche del 1994, dove
fu rieletto al Senato, quando il professore si disse non d'accordo sia ad
allearsi con Forza Italia, sia a entrare nel primo governo Berlusconi.
Soprattutto Miglio non gradì che per il ruolo di ministro delle Riforme
istituzionali fosse stato scelto Francesco Speroni al suo posto. Bossi
reagì spiegando: «Capisco che Miglio sia rimasto un po' irritato perché non è
diventato ministro, ma non si può dire che non abbiamo difeso la sua
candidatura. Il punto è che era molto difficile sostenerla, perché c'era la
pregiudiziale di Berlusconi e di Fini contro di lui. Di fatto, il ministero per
le Riforme istituzionali a lui non lo davano. ( [...] ) Se Miglio vorrà
lasciare la strada della Lega, libero di farlo. Ma vorrei ricordargli che è
arrivato alla Lega nel '90 e che, a quell'epoca, il movimento aveva già
raggranellato un sacco di consiglieri regionali». In conclusione per Bossi,
Miglio «pare che ponga solo un problema di poltrone e la difesa del federalismo
non è questione di poltrone». Il giorno dopo, 16 maggio 1994, in aperto
dissidio con Umberto Bossi, Miglio lascia la Lega Nord dicendo di Bossi: «Spero
proprio di non rivederlo più. ( [...] ) . Per Bossi il federalismo è stato
strumentale alla conquista e al mantenimento del potere. L'ultimo suo exploit è
stato di essere riuscito a strappare a Berlusconi cinque ministri. Tornerò solo
nel giorno in cui Bossi non sarà più segretario». Nonostante ciò,
moltissimi militanti e sostenitori leghisti continuarono a provare grande simpatia
e ammirazione per il professore e per le sue teorie. Alcuni dirigenti della
Lega tennero comunque vivo il dialogo con Miglio, in particolar modo Giancarlo
Pagliarini, Francesco Speroni e il presidente della Libera compagnia padana
Gilberto Oneto, al quale il professore era particolarmente legato. In
particolare Miglio fu in stretti rapporti con l'ex deputato leghista Luigi
Negri, col quale fondò il Partito Federalista. Nel 1996 fu eletto ancora una
volta al Senato, nel collegio di Como per il Polo per le Libertà, iscrivendosi
al gruppo misto. Negli anni in cui la Lega si spostò su posizioni
indipendentiste (1996-1999), il professore si riavvicinò alla linea del
partito, sostenendo a più riprese la piena legittimità del diritto di
secessione della Padania dall'Italia come sottospecie del più antico diritto di
resistenza medievale. Miglio e la mafia Nella sua originale riflessione
sul contrasto tra i regimi giuridici "freddi" e "caldi"
Miglio sostenne la necessità di sviluppare, all'interno delle diverse società e
culture, ordini giuridici in grado di rispondere alle specifiche esigenze. In
maniera provocatoria, egli giunse a dichiararsi favorevole al «mantenimento
anche della mafia e della 'ndrangheta. Il Sud deve darsi uno statuto poggiante
sulla personalità del comando. Che cos'è la mafia? Potere personale, spinto
fino al delitto. Io non voglio ridurre il Meridione al modello europeo, sarebbe
un'assurdità. C'è anche un clientelismo buono che determina crescita economica.
Insomma, bisogna partire dal concetto che alcune manifestazioni tipiche del Sud
hanno bisogno di essere costituzionalizzate». La sua riflessione puntava a
cogliere quali fossero le ragioni profonde alla base di mafia, camorra e
'ndrangheta (insieme a ciò che genera il consenso attorno a queste
organizzazioni criminali), perché solo istituzioni che sono in sintonia con la
comunitànel caso specifico, che non dimentichino la centralità del rapporto
personale piuttosto che impersonale nella società meridionalepossono creare una
vera alternativa al presente. Opere La controversia sui limiti del
commercio neutrale fra Giovanni Maria Lampredi e Ferdinando Galiani. Ricerche
sulla genesi dell'indirizzo positivo nella scienza del diritto delle genti,
Milano, Ispi, 1942. La crisi dell'universalismo politico medioevale e la
formazione ideologica del particolarismo statuale moderno, in: "Pubbl.
Fac. giurispr. Univ. Padova", n. 13, 1942. La struttura ideologica
della monarchia greca arcaica ed il concetto "patrimoniale" dello
Stato nell'eta antica, in: "Jus. Rivista di scienze giuridiche",
nuova serie, anno V, fasc. IV, ottobre 1954. Le origini della scienza
dell'amministrazione, Milano, Giuffrè, 1957. L'unità fondamentale di
svolgimento dell'esperienza politica occidentale, in: "Rivista
internazionale di scienze sociali", anno LXV, fasc. V, settembre-ottobre
1957. I cattolici di fronte all'unità d'Italia, in: "Vita e
pensiero", fasc. 12, 1959. L'amministrazione nella dinamica storica, in:
Istituto per la Scienza dell'Amministrazione Pubblica, Storia Amministrazione
Costituzione, n. 12, Bologna, Il Mulino, Le trasformazioni dell'attuale regime
politico, in: "Jus. Rivista di scienze giuridiche", anno XVI, fasc.
I, 1965. Il ruolo del partito nella trasformazione del tipo di ordinamento
politico vigente. Il punto di vista della scienza della politica, Milano, La
nuova Europa editrice, 1967. L'unificazione amministrativa e i suoi
protagonisti, e con Feliciano Benvenuti, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 1969. La
trasformazione delle università e l'iniziativa privata, in: Atti del I Convegno
su: Università: problemi e proposte, promosso dal Rotary Club di Milano-Centro
(8-9 novembre 1969), s.l., s.n., 1969. Una Costituzione in "corto
circuito", in: "Prospettive nel mondo", n. 19-20, 1978.
Ricominciare dalla montagna. Tre rapporti sul governo dell'area alpina
nell'avanzata eta industriale, Milano, Giuffrè, 1978. La Valtellina. Un modello
possibile di integrazione economica e sociale, Sondrio, Banca Piccolo Credito
Valtellinese, 1978. Utopia e realtà della Costituzione, in "Prospettive
del mondo", Posizione del problema. Ciclo storico e innovazione
scientifico-tecnologica. Il caso della tarda antichità, in Tecnologia, economia
e società nel mondo romano. Atti del Convegno di Como, 27-29 settembre 1979,
Como, s.n., 1980. Genesi e trasformazioni del termine-concetto Stato, in Stato
e senso dello Stato oggi in Italia. Atti del Corso di aggiornamento culturale
dell'Università cattolica, Pescara, 20-25 settembre 1981, Milano, Vita e
pensiero, 1981. Guerra, pace, diritto. Una ipotesi generale sulle regolarità
del ciclo politico, in: Umberto Curi , Della guerra, Venezia, Arsenale, 1982.
Una repubblica migliore per gli italiani. Verso una nuova costituzione, Milano,
Giuffrè, 1983. Le contraddizioni interne del sistema parlamentare-integrale,
in: "Rivista italiana di Scienza Politica", a. XIV, n. 2, agosto
1984. Considerazioni sulle responsabilità, in: "Synesis, periodico
dell'Associazione italiana centri culturali", a. II, n. 1, 1985. Le
regolarità della politica. Scritti scelti raccolti e pubblicati dagli allievi,
2 voll., Milano, Giuffrè, 1988.
88-14-01702-6 Il nerbo e le briglie del potere. Scritti brevi di critica
politica, 1945-1988, Milano, Edizioni del Sole 24 ore, 1988. Una Costituzione
per i prossimi trent'anni. Intervista sulla terza Repubblica, Roma-Bari,
Laterza, Per un'Italia federale, Milano, Il Sole 24 ore, 1990. Come cambiare.
Le mie riforme, Milano, A. Mondadori, 1992.
88-04-36046-1 Italia 1996. Così è andata a finire, con "Il Gruppo
del lunedì", Collezione Frecce, Milano, A. Mondadori, ed. Oscar Saggi, Disobbedienza
civile, con Henry David Thoreau, Milano, A. Mondadori, 1993. 88-04-36755-5 Io, Bossi e la Lega. Diario
segreto dei miei quattro anni sul Carroccio, Milano, A. Mondadori, Come
cambiare. Le mie riforme per la nuova Italia, Milano, A. Mondadori, Modello di
Costituzione Federale per gli italiani, Milano, Fondazione per un'Italia
Federale, 1995. Federalismi falsi e degenerati, Milano, Sperling & Kupfer, Federalismo
e secessione. Un dialogo, con Augusto Antonio Barbera, Milano, A. Mondadori, Padania,
Italia. Lo stato nazionale è soltanto in crisi o non è mai esistito?, con
Marcello Veneziani, Firenze, Le Lettere, Le barche a remi del Lario. Da
trasporto, da guerra, da pesca, e da diporto, con Massimo Gozzi e Gian Alberto
Zanoletti, Milano, Leonardo arte, 1999.
88-7813-468-6 L'Asino di Buridano. Gli italiani alle prese con l'ultima
occasione di cambiare il loro destino, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, L'Asino di
Buridano. Gli italiani alle prese con l'ultima occasione di cambiare il loro
destino. Nuova edizione, pref. di Roberto Formigoni, postf. di Sergio Romano,
Varese, Edizioni Lativa, 2001. , Gianfranco Miglio: un uomo libero, coll.
Quaderni Padani, nn. 37-38, La Libera Compagnia Padana, Novara, 2002. , Un
Miglio alla libertà, audiolibro, coll. Laissez Parler, Treviglio, La Libera
Compagnia PadanaLeonardo Facco Editore, 2005. , Gianfranco Miglio: gli
articoli, coll. Quaderni Padani, nn. 64-65, La Libera Compagnia Padana, Novara,
2006. , Gianfranco Miglio: le interviste, coll. Quaderni Padani, nn. 69-70, La
Libera Compagnia Padana, Novara, 2007. L'Asino di Buridano. Gli italiani alle
prese con l'ultima occasione di cambiare il loro destino, pref. di Roberto
Formigoni, coll. I libri di LiberoMiglio n. 1, Firenze, Editoriale Libero, Padania,
Italia. Lo stato nazionale è soltanto in crisi o non è mai esistito?, con
Marcello Veneziani, intr. di Marco Ferrazzoli, coll. I libri di LiberoMiglio n.
2, Firenze, Editoriale Libero, 2008. Federalismo e secessione. Un dialogo, con
Augusto Antonio Barbera, coll. I libri di LiberoMiglio n. 4, Firenze, Editoriale
Libero, Disobbedienza civile, con Henry David Thoreau, coll. I libri di
LiberoMiglio n. 5, Firenze, Editoriale Libero, La controversia sui limiti del
commercio neutrale fra Giovanni Maria Lampredi e Ferdinando Galiani, pref. di
Lorenzo Ornaghi, Torino, Aragno, Gianfranco Miglio: scritti brevi, interviste,
coll. Quaderni Padani, nn. 84-85, La Libera Compagnia Padana, Novara, 2009.
Lezioni di politica. 1. Storia delle dottrine politiche. 2. Scienza della
politica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2 voll., Davide G. Bianchi e Alessandro Vitale,
Bologna, Il Mulino,Discorsi parlamentari, con un saggio di Claudio Bonvecchio,
Senato della Repubblica, Archivio storico, Bologna, Il Mulino, . 88-15-23479-9 L'Asino di Buridano. Gli
italiani alle prese con l'ultima occasione di cambiare il loro destino, coll.
Opere scelte di Gianfranco Miglio, Stefano Bruno Galli, Milano, Guerini e
Associati, . 978-88-6250-501-7 Considerazioni
retrospettive e altri scritti, coll. Opere scelte di Gianfranco Miglio, Stefano
Bruno Galli, Milano, Guerini e Associati,
Lo scienziato della politica, coll. Opere scelte di Gianfranco Miglio, a
cura e con intr. di Stefano Bruno Galli, Milano, Guerini e Associati, .Guerra,
pace, diritto, con un saggio di Massimo Cacciari, La Nuova Guerra,
[S.l.Milano], Editrice La Scuola, 1 Scritti politici, Luigi Marco Bassani,
pref. di Giuseppe Valditara, coll. I libri del Federalismo, Roma, Pagine, Modello
di Costituzione Federale per gli italiani, pref. di Lorenzo Ornaghi, Andrea
Spallino, Torino, G. Giappichelli Editore, La Padania e le grandi regioni, in:
Innocenzo Gasparini, L'unità economico-sociale della Padania. In appendice:
Guido Fanti, Gianfranco Miglio, con intr. e Stefano Bruno Galli, Fano, Associazione
Gilberto OnetoIl Cerchio, .Carl Schmitt. Saggi, Damiano Palano, Brescia,
ScholéEditrice Morcelliana, .Le origini e i primi sviluppi delle dottrine
giuridiche internazionali pubbliche nell'età moderna, pref. di Lorenzo Ornaghi,
intr. di Damiano Palano, Torino, Aragno, Vocazione e destino dei Lombardi, a
cura e con pref. di Stefano Bruno Galli, [S.l.Milano], Regione Lombardia,
[s.d.]. Prefazioni Gilberto Oneto, Bandiere di libertà: Simboli e vessilli dei
Popoli dell'Italia settentrionale. In appendice le bandiere dei popoli europei
in lotta per l'autonomia, intr. di Gianfranco Miglio, Effedieffe, Milano, Gianfranco
Morra, Breve storia del pensiero federalista, pref. di Gianfranco Miglio,
Milano, Oscar Mondadori, 1993.
978-88-0437-640-8 Governo Provvisorio della Padania, Manuale di
resistenza fiscale, pref. di Gianfranco Miglio, 2ª ed., Gallarate, 1996
Gilberto Oneto, Croci draghi aquile e leoni. Simboli e bandiere dei popoli
padano-alpini, pref. alla prima edizione di Gianfranco Miglio, Roberto Chiaramonte
EditoreLa Libera Compagnia Padana, Collegno (TO), 2005 Opere su Gianfranco
Miglio Alberto Sensini, Prima o seconda Repubblica? A colloquio con Aldo Bozzi
e Gianfranco Miglio, Napoli, Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1986. Lorenzo
Ornaghi e Alessandro Vitale , Multiformità e unità della politica. Atti del
Convegno tenuto in occasione del 70º compleanno di Gianfranco Miglio, 24-26
ottobre 1988, Milano, Giuffrè, Giorgio Ferrari, Gianfranco Miglio. Storia di un
giacobino nordista, Milano, Liber internazionale, 1993. 88-8004-006-5 Mario Bevilacqua, Insidia mito
e follia nel razzismo di Gianfranco Miglio, in "Il rinnovamento", 24,
n. 217, 1994. Alessandro Campi, Schmitt, Freund, Miglio. Figure e temi del realismo
politico europeo, Firenze, Akropolis/La Roccia di Erec, Giovanni Di Capua,
Gianfranco Miglio, scienziato impolitico, pref. di Giancarlo Galli, Soveria
Mannelli (Catanzaro), Rubbettino, Alessandro Vitale, La costituzione e il
cambiamento internazionale. Il mito della costituente, l'obsolescenza della
costituzione e la lezione dimenticata di Gianfranco Miglio, Torino, CIDAS,
2007. Luca Romano , Il pensiero federalista di Gianfranco Miglio: una lezione
da ricordare. Atti del Convegno di studi, Venezia 17 aprile 2009, Sala del
Piovego di Palazzo Ducale, Venezia, Consiglio regionale del Veneto-Caselle di
Sommacampagna, Cierre, Fulco Lanchester, Miglio costituzionalista, Rivista di
politica: trimestrale di studi, analisi e commenti, 3, , Soveria Mannelli
(Catanzaro), Rubbettino, . In lingua inglese The Cultural Roots of the
Federalist Revolution. Telos 97 (Autunno 1997). New York, Telos Press, C.
Lottieri, Gianfranco Miglio, Telos 122 (Inverno 2002). New York, Telos Press,
pagg. 101–110. Damiano Palano, Il
cristallo dell'obbligazione politica in ID., Geometrie del potere. Materiali
per la storia della scienza politica italiana, Milano, Vita e Pensiero. Maroni:
voglio riprendere l'eredità di Gianfranco MiglioMiglioVerde, su miglioverde.eu.
14 giugno . Bossi a sorpresa al convegno
su Miglio a Domaso:"Un grande"Ciao Como, su CiaoComo, la
Repubblica/politica: È morto Gianfranco Miglio, su repubblica.it. 14 giugno
. TicinonlineCOMO: Lunedì a Domaso i
funerali di Gianfranco Miglio. Riletture: Gianfranco Miglio su
ariannaeditrice.it. 14 giugno .
GIANFRANCO MIGLIO | il ricordo a 15 anni dalla scomparsa | Terre di
Lombardia, su terredilombardia.info. Francesco D'Alessandro, Cristianesimo e
cultura politica: l'eredità di otto illustri testimoni, Paoline, Gianfranco
Morra, [Miglio]La vita e le opere, La Voce di Romagna, 8 agosto 5. Il silenzio di Miglio fa paura alla Lega Bossi: Miglio pensa solo alla poltrona Miglio: "con Bossi è un amore finito" Miglio torna nell'arena: è l'occasione
buona Gianfranco Miglio, Una repubblica
mediterranea?, in Un'altra Repubblica?
Perché, come, quando, Laterza, Roma-Bari, Umberto Rosso, Miglio l'antropologo.
'Diverso l'uomo del Sud', in la Repubblica, 11 settembre 1993. «Non mi fecero ministro perché avrei
distrutto la Repubblica» Altri progetti Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio su
Gianfranco Miglio Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene
immagini o altri file su Gianfranco Miglio
Gianfranco Miglio, su Treccani.itEnciclopedie on line, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Gianfranco
Miglio, in Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Gianfranco Miglio, in Dizionario di storia,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, .
Gianfranco Miglio, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Gianfranco
Miglio / Gianfranco Miglio (altra versione) / Gianfranco Miglio (altra
versione), su senato.it, Senato della Repubblica. Gianfranco Miglio, su Openpolis, Associazione
Openpolis. Registrazioni di Gianfranco
Miglio, su RadioRadicale.it, Radio Radicale.
Istituto per la scienza dell'amministrazione pubblica, su
isapistituto.it. 14 aprile 17 novembre
). Interviste Intervista sulla Secessione della Padania, 1996,
su prov-varese.leganord.org. 3 novembre 2006 9 luglio 2006). Commemorazione
di Miglio nel 1º anniversario della scomparsa di Alessandro Campi, su
giovanipadani.leganord.org 14 maggio 2006). «Non mi fecero ministro perché
avrei distrutto la Repubblica», Il Giornale, 1999, su newrassegna.camera.it.
Interviste a Miglio sui "Quaderni della Libera Compagnia Padana" dal
1991 al 2001 , su laliberacompagnia.org. Documenti politici Sezione di
approfondimento sul pensiero di Gianfranco Miglio Archiviato il 20 novembre
2009 in ., dal sito ufficiale della Lega Nord. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, "Grice e Miglio," per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia. Speranza “Saturdays and
Mondays”
middle platonism, the period of Platonism
between Antiochus of Ascalon and Plotinus, characterized by a rejection of the
skeptical stance of the New Academy and by a gradual advance, with many
individual variations, toward a comprehensive dogmatic position on metaphysical
principles, while exhibiting a certain latitude, as between Stoicizing and
Peripateticizing positions, in the sphere of ethics. Antiochus himself was much
influenced by Stoic materialism (though disagreeing with the Stoics in ethics),
but in the next generation a neo-Pythagorean influence made itself felt,
generating the mix of doctrines that one may most properly term Middle
Platonic. From Eudorus of Alexandria (fl. c.25 B.C.) on, a transcendental,
two-world metaphysic prevailed, featuring a supreme god, or Monad, a secondary
creator god, and a world soul, with which came a significant change in ethics,
substituting, as an ‘end of goods’ (telos), “likeness to God” (from Plato,
Theaetetus 176b), for the Stoicizing “assimilation to nature” of Antiochus. Our
view of the period is hampered by a lack of surviving texts, but it is plain
that, in the absence of a central validating authority (the Academy as an
institution seems to have perished in the wake of the capture of Athens by
Mithridates in 88 B.C.), a considerable variety of doctrine prevailed among
individual Platonists and schools of Platonists, particularly in relation to a
preference for Aristotelian or Stoic principles of ethics. Most known activity
occurred in the late first and second centuries A.D. Chief figures in this
period are Plutarch of Chaeronea (c.45–125), Calvenus Taurus (fl. c.145), and
Atticus (fl. c.175), whose activity centered on Athens (though Plutarch
remained loyal to Chaeronea in Boeotia); Gaius (fl. c.100) and Albinus (fl.
c.130)not to be identified with “Alcinous,” author of the Didaskalikos; the
rhetorician Apuleius of Madaura (fl. c.150), who also composed a useful treatise
on the life and doctrines of Plato; and the neo-Pythagoreans Moderatus of Gades
(fl. c.90), Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl. c.140), and Numenius (fl. c.150), who do
not, however, constitute a “school.” Good evidence for an earlier stage of
Middle Platonism is provided by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria
(c.25 B.C.–A.D. 50). Perhaps the single most important figure for the later
Platonism of Plotinus and his successors is Numenius, of whose works we have
only fragments. His speculations on the nature of the first principle, however,
do seem to have been a stimulus to Plotinus in his postulation of a
supraessential One. Plutarch is important as a literary figure, though most of
his serious philosophical works are lost; and the handbooks of Alcinous and
Apuleius are significant for our understanding of second-century Platonism.Luigi
Speranza, “Middle Griceianism and Middle Platonism, Compared.”
Miletusians, or Ionian Miletusians, or Milesians,
the pre-Socratic philosophers of Miletus, a Grecian city-state on the Ionian
coast of Asia Minor. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes produced the earliest philosophies,
stressing an “arche” or material source from which the cosmos and all things in
it were generated: water for Thales, and then there’s air, fire, and earththe
fifth Grice called the ‘quintessentia.’
more
grice to the mill:
Mill: Scots-born philosopher (“One should take grice to one mill but not to the
mill –“ Grice --) and social theorist. He applied the utilitarianism of his
contemporary Bentham to such social matters as systems of education and
government, law and penal systems, and colonial policy. He also advocated the
associationism of Hume. Mill was an influential thinker in early
nineteenth-century London, but his most important role in the history of
philosophy was the influence he had on his son, J. S. Mill. He raised his more
famous son as a living experiment in his associationist theory of education.
His utilitarian views were developed and extended by J. S. Mill, while his
associationism was also adopted by his son and became a precursor of the
latter’s phenomenalism. More grice to the mill -- Mill, Scots
London-born empiricist philosopher and utilitarian social reformer. He was the
son of Mill, a leading defender of Bentham’s utilitarianism, and an advocate of
reforms based on that philosophy. Mill was educated by his father (and thus “at
Oxford we always considered him an outsider!”Grice) in accordance with the
principles of the associationist psychology adopted by the Benthamites and deriving
from David Hartley, and was raised with the expectation that he would become a
defender of the principles of the Benthamite school. Mill begins the study of
Grecian at three and Roman at eight, and later assisted Mill in educating his
brothers. He went to France to learn the language (“sc. French --” Grice ), and
studied chemistry and mathematics at Montpellier. He wrote regularly for the
Westminster Review, the Benthamite journal. He underwent a mental crisis that
lasted some months. This he later attributed to his rigid education; in any
case he emerged from a period of deep depression still advocating
utilitarianism but in a very much revised version. Mill visits Paris during the
revolution, meeting Lafayette and other popular leaders, and was introduced to
the writings of Saint-Simon and Comte. He also met Harriet Taylor, to whom he
immediately became devoted. They married only in 1851, when Taylor died. He
joined the India House headquarters of the East India Company, serving as an
examiner until the company was dissolved in 1858 in the aftermath of the Indian
Mutiny. Mill sat in Parliament. Harriet dies and is buried at Avignon, where
Mill thereafter regularly resided for half of each year. Mill’s major works are
his “System of Logic, Deductive and Inductive,” “Political Economy,” “On
Liberty,” “Utilitarianism,” in Fraser’s Magazine, “The Subjection of
Women”Grice: “I wrote a paper for Hardie on this. His only comment was: ‘what
do you mean by ‘of’?” --; “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,”
and “Religion.” His writing style is excellent, and his history of his own
mental development, the “Autobiography” is a major Victorian literary text. His
main opponents philosophically are Whewell and Hamilton, and it is safe to say
that after Mill their intuitionism in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and
ethics could no longer be defended. Mill’s own views were later to be eclipsed
by those of such Oxonian lumaries as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and the other
Oxonian Hegelian idealists (Bosanquet, Pater). His views in metaphysics and
philosophy of science have been revived and defended by Russell and the logical
positivists, while his utilitarian ethics has regained its status as one of the
major ethical theories. His social philosophy deeply infuenced the Fabians and
other groups on the English left; its impact continues. Mill was brought up on
the basis of, and to believe in, the strict utilitarianism of his father. His
own development largely consisted in his attempts to broaden it, to include a
larger and more sympathetic view of human nature, and to humanize its program
to fit this broader view of human beings. In his own view, no doubt largely
correct, he did not so much reject his father’s principles as fill in the gaps
and eliminate rigidities and crudities. He continued throughout his life his
father’s concern to propagate principles conceived as essential to promoting
human happiness. These extended from moral principles to principles of
political economy to principles of logic and metaphysics. Mill’s vision of the
human being was rooted in the psychological theories he defended. Arguing
against the intuitionism of Reid and Whewell, he extended the associationism of
his father. On this theory, ideas have their genetic antecedents in sensation,
a complex idea being generated out of a unique set of simple, elementary ideas,
through associations based on regular patterns in the presented sensations.
Psychological analysis reveals the elementary parts of ideas and is thus the
means for investigating the causal origins of our ideas. The elder Mill
followed Locke in conceiving analysis on the model of definition, so that the
psychological elements are present in the idea they compose and the idea is
nothing but its associated elements. Mill emerged from his mental crisis with
the recognition that mental states are often more than the sum of the ideas
that are their genetic antecedents. On the revised model of analysis, the
analytical elements are not actually present in the idea, but are present only
dispositionally, ready to be recovered by association under the analytical set.
Moreover, it is words that are defined, not ideas, though words become general
only by becoming associated with ideas. Analysis thus became an empirical task,
rather than something settled a priori according to one’s metaphysical
predispositions, as it had been for Mill’s predecessors. The revised psychology
allowed the younger Mill to account empirically in a much more subtle way than
could the earlier associationists for the variations in our states of feeling.
Thus, for example, the original motive to action is simple sensations of
pleasure, but through association things originally desired as means become
associated with pleasure and thereby become desirable as ends, as parts of
one’s pleasure. But these acquired motives are not merely the sum of the simple
pleasures that make them up; they are more than the sum of those genetic
antecedents. Thus, while Mill holds with his father that persons seek to
maximize their pleasures, unlike his father he also holds that not all ends are
selfish, and that pleasures are not only quantitatively but also qualitatively
distinct. In ethics, then, Mill can hold with the intuitionists that our moral
sentiments are qualitatively distinct from the lower pleasures, while denying
the intuitionist conclusion that they are innate. Mill urges, with his father
and Bentham, that the basic moral norm is the principle of utility, that an
action is right provided it maximizes human welfare. Persons always act to
maximize their own pleasure, but the general human welfare can be among the
pleasures they seek. Mill’s position thus does not have the problems that the
apparently egoistic psychology of his father created. The only issue is whether
a person ought to maximize human welfare, whether he ought to be the sort of
person who is so motivated. Mill’s own ethics is that this is indeed what one
ought to be, and he tries to bring this state of human being about in others by
example, and by urging them to expand the range of their human sympathy through
poetry like that of Wordsworth, through reading the great moral teachers such
as Jesus and Socrates, and by other means of moral improvement. Mill also
offers an argument in defense of the principle of utility. Against those who,
like Whewell, argue that there is no basic right to pleasure, he argues that as
a matter of psychological fact, people seek only pleasure, and concludes that
it is therefore pointless to suggest that they ought to do anything other than
this. The test of experience thus excludes ends other than pleasure. This is a
plausible argument. Less plausible is his further argument that since each
seeks her own pleasure, the general good is the (ultimate) aim of all. This
latter argument unfortunately presupposes the invalid premise that the law for
a whole follows from laws about the individual parts of the whole. Other moral
rules can be justified by their utility and the test of experience. For
example, such principles of justice as the rules of property and of promise
keeping are justified by their role in serving certain fundamental human needs.
Exceptions to such secondary rules can be justified by appeal to the principle
of utility. But there is also utility in not requiring in every application a
lengthy utilitarian calculation, which provides an objective justification for
overlooking what might be, objectively considered in terms of the principle of
utility, an exception to a secondary rule. Logic and philosophy of science. The
test of experience is also brought to bear on norms other than those of
morality, e.g., those of logic and philosophy of science. Mill argues, against
the rationalists, that science is not demonstrative from intuited premises.
Reason in the sense of deductive logic is not a logic of proof but a logic of
consistency. The basic axioms of any science are derived through generalization
from experience. The axioms are generic and delimit a range of possible
hypotheses about the specific subject matter to which they are applied. It is
then the task of experiment and, more generally, observation to eliminate the
false and determine which hypothesis is true. The axioms, the most generic of
which is the law of the uniformity of nature, are arrived at not by this sort
of process of elimination but by induction by simple enumeration: Mill argues
plausibly that on the basis of experience this method becomes more reliable the
more generic is the hypothesis that it is used to justify. But like Hume, Mill
holds that for any generalization from experience the evidence can never be
sufficient to eliminate all possibility of doubt. Explanation for Mill, as for
the logical positivists, is by subsumption under matter-of-fact
generalizations. Causal generalizations that state sufficient or necessary and
sufficient conditions are more desirable as explanations than mere
regularities. Still more desirable is a law or body of laws that gives
necessary and sufficient conditions for any state of a system, i.e., a body of
laws for which there are no explanatory gaps. As for explanation of laws, this
can proceed either by filling in gaps or by subsuming the law under a generic
theory that unifies the laws of several areas. Mill argues that in the social
sciences the subject matter is too complex to apply the normal methods of
experiment. But he also rejects the purely deductive method of the Benthamite
political economists such as his father and David Ricardo. Rather, one must
deduce the laws for wholes, i.e., the laws of economics and sociology, from the
laws for the parts, i.e., the laws of psychology, and then test these derived
laws against the accumulated data of history. Mill got the idea for this
methodology of the social sciences from Comte, but unfortunately it is vitiated
by the false idea, already noted, that one can deduce without any further
premise the laws for wholes from the laws for the parts. Subsequent
methodologists of the social sciences have come to substitute the more
reasonable methods of statistics for this invalid method Mill proposes. Mill’s
account of scientific method does work well for empirical sciences, such as the
chemistry of his day. He was able to show, too, that it made good sense of a
great deal of physics, though it is arguable that it cannot do justice to theories
that explain the atomic and subatomic structure of mattersomething Mill himself
was prepared to acknowledge. He also attempted to apply his views to geometry,
and even more implausibly, to arithmetic. In these areas, he was certainly
bested by Whewell, and the world had to wait for the logical work of Russell
and Whitehead before a reasonable empiricist account of these areas became
available. Metaphysics. The starting point of all inference is the sort of
observation we make through our senses, and since we know by experience that we
have no ideas that do not derive from sense experience, it follows that we
cannot conceive a world beyond what we know by sense. To be sure, we can form
generic concepts, such as that of an event, which enable us to form concepts of
entities that we cannot experience, e.g., the concept of the tiny speck of sand
that stopped my watch or the concept of the event that is the cause of my
present sensation. Mill held that what we know of the laws of sensation is
sufficient to make it reasonable to suppose that the immediate cause of one’s
present sensation is the state of one’s nervous system. Our concept of an
objective physical object is also of this sort; it is the set of events that
jointly constitute a permanent possible cause of sensation. It is our inductive
knowledge of laws that justifies our beliefs that there are entities that fall
under these concepts. The point is that these entities, while unsensed, are (we
reasonably believe) part of the world we know by means of our senses. The
contrast is to such things as the substances and transcendent Ideas of
rationalists, or the God of religious believers, entities that can be known
only by means that go beyond sense and inductive inferences therefrom. Mill
remained essentially pre-Darwinian, and was willing to allow the plausibility
of the hypothesis that there is an intelligent designer for the perceived order
in the universe. But this has the status of a scientific hypothesis rather than
a belief in a substance or a personal God transcending the world of experience
and time. Whewell, at once the defender of rationalist ideas for science and
for ethics and the defender of established religion, is a special object for
Mill’s scorn. Social and political thought. While Mill is respectful of the
teachings of religious leaders such as Jesus, the institutions of religion,
like those of government and of the economy, are all to be subjected to
criticism based on the principle of utility: Do they contribute to human
welfare? Are there any alternatives that could do better? Thus, Mill argues
that a free-market economy has many benefits but that the defects, in terms of
poverty for many, that result from private ownership of the means of production
may imply that we should institute the alternative of socialism or public
ownership of the means of production. He similarly argues for the utility of
liberty as a social institution: under such a social order individuality will
be encouraged, and this individuality in turn tends to produce innovations in
knowledge, technology, and morality that contribute significantly to improving
the general welfare. Conversely, institutions and traditions that stifle
individuality, as religious institutions often do, should gradually be
reformed. Similar considerations argue on the one hand for democratic
representative government and on the other for a legal system of rights that
can defend individuals from the tyranny of public opinion and of the majority.
Status of women. Among the things for which Mill campaigned were women’s
rights, women’s suffrage, and equal access for women to education and to
occupations. He could not escape his age and continued to hold that it was
undesirable for a woman to work to help support her family. While he disagreed
with his father and Bentham that all motives are egoistic and self-interested,
he nonetheless held that in most affairs of economics and government such
motives are dominant. He was therefore led to disagree with his father that
votes for women are unnecessary since the male can speak for the family.
Women’s votes are needed precisely to check the pursuit of male self-interest.
More generally, equality is essential if the interests of the family as such
are to be served, rather than making the family serve male self-interest as had
hitherto been the case. Changing the relation between men and women to one of
equality will force both parties to curb their self-interest and broaden their
social sympathies to include others. Women’s suffrage is an essential step
toward the moral improvement of humankind. Grice: “I am fascinated by how
Griceian Mill can be.” “In treating of the
‘proposition,’ some considerations of a comparatively elementary nature
respecting its form must be premised,and the ‘import’ which the emisor conveyed
by a token of an expression of a ‘proposition’for one cannot communicate but that the cat is on the mat -- . A
proposition is a move in the conversational game in which a feature (P) is
predicated of the subject (S)The S is PThe subject and the predicateas in
“Strawson’s dog is shaggy” -- are all that is necessarily required to make up a
proposition. But as we can not conclude from merely seeing two “Strawson’s dog”
and “shaggy” put together, that “Strawson’s dog” is the subject and “shaggy”
the predicate, that is, that the predicate is intended to be ‘predicated’ of
the subject, it is necessary that there should be some mode or form of indicating
that such is, in Griceian parlance, the ‘intention,’ sc. some sign to signal
this predicationmy father says that as I was growing up, I would say “dog
shaggy”The explicit communication of a predication is sometimes done by a slight
alteration of the expression that is the predicate or the expression that is
the subjectsc., a ‘casus’even if it is ‘rectum’or ‘obliquum’ -- inflectum.” Grice: “The example Mill gives is
“Fire burns.”” “The change from ‘burn’ to ‘burns’ shows that the emisor intends
to predicate the predicate “burn” of the subject “fire.” But this function is
more commonly fulfilled by the copula, which serves the purporse of the sign of
predication, “est,” (or by nothing at all as in my beloved Grecian! “Anthropos
logikos,” -- when the predication is, again to use Griceian parlance,
‘intended.’” Grice: “Mill gives the example, ‘The king of France is smooth.”
“It may seem to be implied, or implicatedimplicatum, implicaturum -- not only
that the quality ‘smooth’ can be predicated of the king of France, but moreover
that there is a King of France. Grice: “Mill notes: ‘It’s different with ‘It is
not the case that the king of France is smooth’”. “This, however should not
rush us to think that ‘is’ is aequi-vocal, and that it can be ‘copula’ AND
‘praedicatum’, e. g. ‘… is a spatio-temporal continuant.’ Grice: “Mill then
gives my example: ‘Pegasus is [in Grecian mythologyi. e. Pegasus is *believed*
to exist by this or that Grecian mythographer], but does not exist.’” “A flying
horse is a fiction of some Grecian poets.” Grice: “Mill hastens to add that the
annulation of the implicaturum is implicit or contextual.” “By uttering ‘A
flying horse is a Griceian allegory’ the emisor cannot possibly implicate that a
flying horse is a spatio-temporal continuant, since by uttering the proposition
itself the emisor is expressly asserting that the thing has no real existence.”
“Many volumes might be filled”Grice: “And will be filled by Strawson!” -- with
the frivolous speculations concerning the nature of being (ƒø D½, øPÃw±, ens,
entitas, essentia, and the like), which have arisen from overlooking the
implicaturum of ‘est’; from supposing that when by uttering “S est P” the
emisor communicates that S is a spatio-temporal continuant. when by uttering
it, the emisor communicates that the S is some *specified* thing, a horse and a
flier, to be a phantom, a mythological construct, or the invention of the
journalists (like Marmaduke Bloggs, who climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees)
even to be a nonentity (as a squared circle) it must still, at bottom, answer
to the same idea; and that a proposition must be found for it which shall suit
all these cases. The fog which rises from this very narrow spot diffuses itself
over the whole surface of ontology. Yet it becomes us not to triumph over the
great intellect of Ariskant because we are now able to preserve ourselves from
many errors into which he, perhaps inevitably, fell. The fire-teazer of a steam-engine
produces by his exertions far greater effects than Milo of Crotona could, but
he is not therefore a stronger man. The Grecianslike some uneducated Englishman
-- seldom knew any language but their own! This render it far more difficult
for *them* than it is for us, to acquire a readiness in detecting the
implicaturum. One of the advantages of having accurately studied Grecian and
Roman at Clifton, especially of those languages which Ariskant used as the
vehicle of his thought, is the practical lesson we learn respecting the implicaturm,
by finding that the same expression in Grecian, say (e. g. ‘is’) corresponds,
on different occasions, to a different expression in Gricese, say (i. e.
‘hazz’). When not thus exercised, even the strongest understandings find it
difficult to believe that things which fall under a class, have not in some
respect or other a common nature; and often expend much labour very unprofitably
(as is frequently done by Ariskant) in a vain attempt to discover in what this
common nature consists. But, the habit once formed, intellects much inferior
are capable of detecting even an impicaturum which is common or generalised to
Grecian and Griceses: and it is surprising that this sous-entendu or
impicaturum now under consideration, though it is ordinary at Oxford as well as
in the ancient, should have been overlooked by almost every philosopher until
Grice. Grice: “Mill was proud of Mill.” “The quantity of futilitarian speculation
which had been caused by a misapprehension of the nature of the copula, is hinted
at by Hobbes; but my father is the first who distinctly characterized the implicaturm,
and point out to me how many errors in the received systems of philosophy it
has had to answer for. It has, indeed, misled the moderns scarcely less than
the ancients, though their mistakes, because our understandings are not yet so
completely emancipated from their influence, do not appear equally
irrational. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” L. G. Wilton,
“Mill’s mentalism,” for the Grice Club. Grice treasured Hardie’s invocation of
Mill’s method during a traffic incident on the HIhg. Mill’s methods, procedures
for discovering necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, and necessary and
sufficient conditions, where these terms are used as follows: if whenever A
then B (e.g., whenever there is a fire then oxygen is present), then B is a
necessary (causal) condition for A; and if whenever C then D (e.g., whenever
sugar is in water, then it dissolves), then C is a sufficient (causal)
condition for D. Method of agreement. Given a pair of hypotheses about
necessary conditions, e.g., (1) whenever A then B1 whenever A then B2, then an
observation of an individual that is A but not B2 will eliminate the second
alternative as false, enabling one to conclude that the uneliminated hypothesis
is true. This method for discovering necessary conditions is called the method
of agreement. To illustrate the method of agreement, suppose several people
have all become ill upon eating potato salad at a restaurant, but have in other
respects had quite different meals, some having meat, some vegetables, some
desserts. Being ill and not eating meat eliminates the latter as the cause;
being ill and not eating dessert eliminates the latter as cause; and so on. It
is the condition in which the individuals who are ill agree that is not
eliminated. We therefore conclude that this is the cause or necessary condition
for the illness. Method of difference. Similarly, with respect to the pair of
hypotheses concerning sufficient conditions, e.g., (2) whenever C1 then D
whenever C2 then D, an individual that is C1 but not D will eliminate the first
hypothesis and enable one to conclude that the second is true. This is the
method of difference. A simple change will often yield an example of an
inference to a sufficient condition by the method of difference. If something
changes from C1 to C2, and also thereupon changes from notD to D, one can
conclude that C2, in respect of which the instances differ, is the cause of D.
Thus, Becquerel discovered that burns can be caused by radium, i.e., proximity
to radium is a sufficient but not necessary condition for being burned, when he
inferred that the radium he carried in a bottle in his pocket was the cause of
a burn on his leg by noting that the presence of the radium was the only
relevant causal difference between the time when the burn was present and the
earlier time when it was not. Clearly, both methods can be generalized to cover
any finite number of hypotheses in the set of alternatives. The two methods can
be combined in the joint method of agreement and difference to yield the
discovery of conditions that are both necessary and sufficient. Sometimes it is
possible to eliminate an alternative, not on the basis of observation, but on
the basis of previously inferred laws. If we know by previous inductions that
no C2 is D, then observation is not needed to eliminate the second hypothesis
of (2), and we can infer that what remains, or the residue, gives us the
sufficient condition for D. Where an alternative is eliminated by previous
inductions, we are said to use the method of residues. The methods may be
generalized to cover quantitative laws. A cause of Q may be taken not to be a
necessary and sufficient condition, but a factor P on whose magnitude the
magnitude of Q functionally depends. If P varies when Q varies, then one can
use methods of elimination to infer that P causes Q. This has been called the
method of concomitant variation. More complicated methods are needed to infer
what precisely is the function that correlates the two magnitudes. Clearly, if
we are to conclude that one of (1) is true on the basis of the given data, we
need an additional premise to the effect that there is at least one necessary
condition for B and it is among the set consisting of A1 and A2. 4065m-r.qxd
08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 571 Mimamsa mimesis 572 The existence claim here is
known as a principle of determinism and the delimited range of alternatives is
known as a principle of limited variety. Similar principles are needed for the
other methods. Such principles are clearly empirical, and must be given prior
inductive support if the methods of elimination are to be conclusive. In practice,
generic scientific theories provide these principles to guide the experimenter.
Thus, on the basis of the observations that justified Kepler’s laws, Newton was
able to eliminate all hypotheses concerning the force that moved the planets
about the sun save the inverse square law, provided that he also assumed as
applying to this specific sort of system the generic theoretical framework
established by his three laws of motion, which asserted that there exists a
force accounting for the motion of the planets (determinism) and that this
force satisfies certain conditions, e.g., the action-reaction law (limited
variety). The eliminative methods constitute the basic logic of the
experimental method in science. They were first elaborated by Francis Bacon (see
J. Weinberg, Abstraction, Relation, and Induction, 1965). They were restated by
Hume, elaborated by J. F. W. Herschel, and located centrally in scientific
methodology by J. S. Mill. Their structure was studied from the perspective of
modern developments in logic by Keynes, W. E. Johnson, and especially Broad. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” G. L. Brook, “Mill’s Mentalism”, Sutherland,
“Mill in Dodgson’s Semiotics.”
Icon: Iconicity and mimesis. Grice: “If it
hurts, you involuntarily go ‘Ouch.’ ‘Ouch’ can voluntarily become a vehicle for
communication, under voluntary control. But we must allow for any expression to
become a vehicle for communication, even if there is no iconic or mimetic
association -- (from Greek mimesis, ‘imitation’), the modeling of one thing on
another, or the presenting of one thing by another; imitation. The concept
played a central role in the account formulated by Plato and Aristotle of what
we would now call the fine arts. The poet, the dramatist, the painter, the
musician, the sculptor, all compose a mimesis of reality. Though Plato, in his
account of painting, definitely had in mind that the painter imitates physical
reality, the general concept of mimesis used by Plato and Aristotle is usually
better translated by ‘representation’ than by ‘imitation’: it belongs to the
nature of the work of art to represent, to re-present, reality. This
representational or mimetic theory of art remained far and away the dominant
theory in the West until the rise of Romanticismthough by no means everyone
agreed with Plato that it is concrete items of physical reality that the artist
represents. The hold of the mimetic theory was broken by the insistence of the
Romantics that, rather than the work of art being an imitation, it is the artist
who, in his or her creative activity, imitates Nature or God by composing an
autonomous object. Few contemporary theorists of art would say that the essence
of art is to represent; the mimetic theory is all but dead. In part this is a
reflection of the power of the Romantic alternative to the mimetic theory; in
part it is a reflection of the rise to prominence over the last century of
nonobjective, abstract painting and sculpture and of “absolute” instrumental
music. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of representation has not ceased to draw the
attention of theorists. In recent years three quite different general theories
of representation have appeared: Nelson Goodman’s (The Languages of Art),
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s (Works and Worlds of Art), and Kendall Walton’s
(Mimesis as Make-Believe). Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle’s mimesis and Paget’s
ta-ta theory of communication.”
Ta-ta: Paget: author beloved by Grice,
inventor of what Grice calls the “ta-ta” theory of communication.
Grice’s bellow -- “Ouch”Grice’s theory of
communication in “Meaning revisited.” Grice’s paradox of the ta-ta. Why would a
simulation of pain be taken as a sign of pain if the sendee recognises that the
emisor is simulating a ‘causally provoked,’ rather than under voluntary
control, expression of pain. Grice’s wording is subtle and good. “Stage one in
the operation involves the supposition that the creature actually voluntarily
produces a certain sort of behaviour which is such that its nonvoluntary
production would be evidence that the creature is, let us say, in pain.” Cf.
Ockham, ‘risus naturaliter significat interiorem laetitiam.’ But the laughter
does NOT resemble the inner joy. There is natural causality, but not iconicity.
So what Grice and Ockham are after is ‘artificial laughter’ which does imitate
(mimic) natural laughter. “Risus significat naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.”
“Risus voluntaries significat NON-naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.” Ockham
wants to say that it is via the iconicity of the artificial laughter that the
communication is effected. So if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, non-natural
communication recapitulates natural communication. “Risus voluntarius
non-significat naturaliter (via risus involutarius significans naturaliter)
interiorem laetitiam. “The kinds of cases
of this which come most obviously to mind will be cases of faking or deception.”
“A creature normally voluntarily produces behaviour not only when, but
*because*, its nonvoluntary production would be evidence that the creature is
in a certain state, with the effect that the rest of the world, other creatures
around, treat the production, which is in fact voluntary, as if it were a
nonvoluntary production.” “That is, they come to just the same conclusion about
the creature’s being in the state in question, the signalled state.” Note
Grice’s technical use of Shannon’s ‘signal.’ “The purpose of the creature’s producing the
behaviour voluntarily would be so that the rest of the world should think that
it is in the state which the nonvoluntary production would signify.” Note that at this point, while it is behaviour
that signifiesthe metabolia has to apply ultimately to the emisor. So that it
is the creature who signifiesor it signifies. The fact that Grice uses ‘it’ for
the creature is tellingFor, if Grice claims that only rational Homo sapiens can
communicate, Homo sapiens is an ‘it.’ “In
stage two not only does creature X produce this behaviour voluntarily, instead
of nonvoluntarily, as in the primitive state.” By primitive he means Stage 0. “…
but we also assume that it is *recognised* by another creature Y, involved with
X in some transaction, as being the voluntary production of certain form of
behaviour the nonvoluntary production of which evidences, say, pain.” So again,
there is no iconicity. Does the “Ouch” in Stage 0 ‘imitate’ the pain. How can
‘pain,’ which is a state of the soul, be ‘imitated’ via a physical, material,
medium? There are ways. Pain may involve some discomfort in the soul. The cry,
“Ouch,” involuntary, ‘imitates this disturbance or discomfort. But what about
inner joy and the laughter. Ape studies have demonstrated that the show of
teeth is a sign of agreession. It’s not Mona Lisa’s smile. So Mona Lisa’s inner
joy is signified by her smile. Is this iconic? Is there a resemblance or imitation
here? Yes. Because the inner joy is the opposite of discomfort, and the
distended muscles around the mouth resemble the distended state of the
immaterial soul of Mona Lisa. As a functionalist, Grice was also interested in
the input. What makes Mona Lisa smile? What makes you to utter “Ouch” when you
step on a thorn? Is the disturbance (of pain, since this is the example Grice
uses) or the distension of joy resemble the external stimulus? Yes. Because a
thorn on the ground is NOT to be thereit is a disturbance of the environment.
Looking at Leonardo da Vinci who actually is commanding, “Smile!” is enough of
a stimulus for “The Gioconda” to become what Italians call ‘the gioconda.’ “That is, creature X is now supposed not just
to simulate pain-behaviour, but also to be recognised as simulating
pain-behaviour.” “The import of the recognition by Y that the production is
voluntary UNDERMINES, of course, any tendency on the part of Y to come to the
conclusion that creature X is in pain.” “So, one might ask, what would be
required to restore the situation: what COULD be ADDED which would be an
‘antidote,’ so to speak, to the dissolution on the part of Y of the idea that X
is in pain?” “A first step in this direction would be to go to what we might
think of as stage three.” “Here, we suppose that creature Y not only recognises
that the behaviour is voluntary on the part of X, but also recognises that X
*intends* Y to recognise HIS [no longer its] behaviour as voluntary.” “That is,
we have now undermined the idea that this is a straightforward piece of
deception.” “Deceiving consists in trying to get a creature to accept certain
things AS SIGNS [but cf. Grice on words not being signs in ‘Meaning’] as
something or other without knowing that this is a faked case.” “Here, however, we would have a sort of perverse
faked case, in which something is faked but at the same time a clear indication
is put in that the faking has been done.” Cf. Warhol on Campbell soup and why Aristotle
found ‘mimesis’ so key “Creature Y can be thought of as initially BAFFLED by
this conflicting performance.” “There is this creature, as it were, simulating
pain, but announcing, in a certain sense, that this is what IT [again it, not
he] is doing.” “What on earth can IT be up to?” “It seems to me that if Y does
raise the question of why X should be doing this, it might first come up with
the idea that X is engaging in some form of play or make-believe, a game to
which, since X’s behaviour is seemingly directed TOWARDS Y [alla Kurt Lewin], Y
is EXPECTED OR INTENDED to make some appropriate contribution. “Cases
susceptible of such an interpretation I regard as belonging to stage four.” “But,
we may suppose, there might be cases which could NOT be handled in this way.” “If
Y is to be expected to be a fellow-participant with X in some form of play, it
ought to be possible for Y to recognise what kind of contribution Y [the
sendeethe signalee] is supposed to make; and we can envisage the possibility that
Y has no clue on which to base such recognition, or again that though SOME form
of contribution seems to be SUGGESTED, when Y obliges by coming up with it, X,
instead of producing further pain-behaviour, gets cross and perhaps repeats its
original, and now problematic, performance.” [“Ouch!”]. “We now reach stage five, at which Y supposes
not that X is engaged in play, but that what X is doing is trying to get Y to
believe OR ACCEPT THAT X *is* in pain.” That is, not just faking that he is in
pain, but faking that he is in pain because he IS in pain. Surely the pain
cannot be that GROSS if he has time to consider all this! So “communicating
pain” applies to “MINOR pain,” which the Epicureans called “communicable pains”
(like a tooth-acheVitters after reading Diels, came up with the idea that
Marius was wrong and that a tooth-pain is NOT communicable! “: that is, trying to get Y to believe in or
accept the presence of that state in X which the produced behaviour, when
produced NONVOLUNTARILY, in in fact a natural sign of, naturally means.” Here
the under-metabolis is avoidable: “when produced nonvolutarily, in in fact THE
EFFECT OF, or the consequence of.” And if you want to avoid ending a sentence
with a preposition: “that STATE in X of which the produced behaviour is the
CONSEQUENCE or EFFECT. CAUSATUM. The causans-causatum distinction. “More specifically, one might say that at
stage five, creature Y recognises that creature X in the first place INTENDS
that Y recognise the production of the sign of pain (of what is USUALLY the
sign of pain) to be voluntary, and further intends that Y should regard this
first intention I1 as being a sufficient reason for Y to BELIEVE that X is in
pain.” But would that expectation occur in a one-off predicament? “And that X
has these intentions because he has the additional further INTENTION I3 that Y
should not MERELY have sufficient REASON for believing that X is in pain, but
should actually [and AND] believe it.” This substep shows that for Grice it’s
the INFLUENCING and being influenced by others (or the institution of
decision), rather than the exchange of information (giving and receiving
information), which is basic. The protreptic, not the exhibitive. “Whether or
not in these circumstances X will not merely recognise that X intends, in a
certain rather QUEER way, to get Y to believe that X is in pain, whether Y not
only recognises this but actually goes on to believe that X is in pain, would
presumably DEPEND on a FURTHER SET OF CONDITIONS which can be summed up under
the general heading that Y should regard X as TRUSTWORTHY [as a good
meta-faker!] in one or another of perhaps a variety of ways.” This is Grice’s
nod to G. J. Warnock’s complex analysis of the variety of ways in which one can
be said to be ‘trustworthy’last chapter of ‘trustworthiness in conversation,’
in Warnock’s brilliant, “The object of morality.” “For example, suppose Y
thinks that, either in general or at least in THIS type of CASE [this token, a
one-off predicament? Not likely!] X would NOT want Y to believe that X is in
pain UNLESS [to use R. Hall and H. L. A. Hart’s favourite excluder defeater] X
really WERE in pain.” [Cf. Hardie, “Why do you use the subjunctive?” “Were
Hardie to be here, I would respond!”Grice]. “Suppose also (this would perhaps
not apply to a case of pain but might apply to THE COMMUNICATION of other
states [what is communicated is ONLY a state of the soul] that Y also believes
that X is trustworthy, not just in the sense of not being malignant
[malevolent, ill-willed, maleficent], but also in the sense of being, as it
were, in general [semiotically] responsible, for example, being the sort of
creature, who takes adequate trouble to make sure that what HE [not it] is
trying to get the other creature to believe is in fact the case.” Sill, “’I
have a toothache” never entails that the emisor has a toothache!a sign is
anything we can lie with!” (Eco). “… and who is not careless, negligent, or
rash.” “Then, given the general fulfilment of the idea that Y regards X either
in general or in this particular case of being trustworthy in this kind of
competent, careful, way, one would regard it as RATIONAL [reasonable] not only
for Y to recognise these intentions on the part of X that Y should have certain
beliefs about X’s being in pain, but also for Y actually to pass to adopting
these beliefs.” Stage six annuls mimesis, or lifts the requirement of mimesis“we relax this
requirement.” “As Judith Baker suggests, it would be unmanly to utter (or ‘let
out’) a (natural) bellow!” Here Grice speaks of the decibels of the emission of
the bellowas indicating this or that degree of pain. But what about “It’s
raining.” We have a state of affairs (not necessarily a state in the soul of the
emissor). So by relaxing the requirement, the emissor chooses a behaviour which
is “suggestive, in some recognizable way” with the state of affairs of rain
“without the performance having to be the causal effect of (or ‘response to,’
as Grice also has it) that state of affairs, sc. that it is raining. The connection becomes “non-natural,” or
‘artificial’: any link will doas long as the correlation is OBVIOUS,
pre-arranged, or foreknown.‘one-off predicament’. There are problems with
‘stage zero’ and ‘stage six.’ When it comes to stage zero, Grice is supposing,
obviously that a state of affairs is the CAUSE of some behaviour in a
creaturesince there is no interpretantthe phenomenon may very obliquely called
‘semiotic.’ “If a tree falls in the wood and nobody is listening…”So stage zero
need not involve a mimetic aspect. Since stage one involves ‘pain,’ i.e. the
proposition that ‘X is in pain,’ as Grice has it. Or as we would have it, ‘A is
in pain’ or ‘The emisor is in pain.’ Althought he uses the metaphor of the play
where B is expected or intended to make an appropriate contribution or move in
the game, it is one of action, he will have to accept that ‘The emisor is in
pain’ and act appropriately. But Grice is not at all interested in the cycle of
what B might doas Gardiner is, when he talks of a ‘conversational dyad.’ Grice
explores the conversational ‘dyad’ in his Oxford lectures on the conversational
imlicaturum. A poetic line might not do but: “A: I’m out of gas.” B: “There’s a
garage round the corner.”is the conversational dyad. In B’s behaviour, we come
to see that he has accepted that A is out of gas. And his ‘appropriate
contribution’ in the game goes beyond that acceptancehe makes a ‘sentence’ move
(“There is a garage round the corner.”). So strictly a conversational
implicaturum is the communicatum by the second item in a conversational dyad. Now
there are connections to be made between stage zero and stage six. Why? Well,
because stage six is intended to broaden the range of propositions that are
communicated to be OTHER than a ‘state’ in the emisorX is in pain --. But Grice
does not elaborate on the ‘essential psychological attitude’ requirement. Even
if we require this requirementGrice considers two requirements. The requirement
he is interested in relaxing is that of the CAUSAL connectionhe keeps using
‘natural’ misleadingly --. But can he get rid of it so easily? Because in stage
six, if the emisor wants to communicate that the cat is on the mat, or that it
is raining, it will be via his BELIEF that the cat is on the mat or that it is
raining. The cat being on the mat or it being raining would CAUSE the emisor to
have that belief. Believing is the CAUSAL consequence. Grice makes a comparison
between the mimesis or resemblance of a bellow produced voluntarily or notand
expands on the decibels. The ‘information’ one may derive at stage 0 of hearing
an emisor (who is unaware that he is being observed) is one that is such and
suchand it is decoded by de-correlating the decibels of the bellow. More
decibels, higher pain. There is a co-relation here. Grice ventures that perhaps
that’s too much information (he is following someone’s else objection). Why
would not X just ‘let out a natural bellow.’ Grice states there
areOBVIOUSLYvarioius reasons why he would notthe ‘obviously’ implicates the
objection is silly (typical tutee behaviour). The first is charming. Grice, seeing the
gender of the tutee, says that it woud be UNMANLY for A to let out a natural
bellow. He realizes that ‘unmanly’ may be considered ‘artless sexism’ (this is
the late mid-70s, and in the provinces!)So he turns the ‘unmanly’ into the
charmingly Oxonian, “ or otherwise uncreaturely.”which is a genial piece of
ironic coinage! Surely ‘manly’ and ‘unmanly,’ if it relates to ‘Homo sapiens,’
need not carry a sexist implicaturum. Another answer to the obvious objection
that Grice gives relates to the level of informativenessthe ‘artificial’ (as he
calls it)His argument is that if one takes Aristotle’s seriously, and the
‘artificial bellow’ is to ‘imitate’ the ‘natural bellow,’ it may not replicate
ALL THE ‘FEATURES’which is the expression Grice uses -- he means semiotic distinctive feature --. So
he does not have to calculate the ‘artificial bellow’ to correlate exactly to
the quantity of decibels that the ‘natural bellow’ does. This is important from
a CAUSAL point of view, or in terms of Grice’s causal theory of behaviour. A
specific pain (prooked by Stimulus S1) gives the RESPONSE R2with decibels D1. A
different stimulus S2 woud give a different RESPONSE R2, with different
decibels D2. So Grice is exploring the possibility of variance here. In a
causal involuntary scenario, there is nothing the creature can do. The stimulus
Sn will produce the creature Cn to be such that its response is Rn (where Rn is
a response with decibelsthis being the semiotic distinctive feature FnDn. When
it comes to the ‘artificial bellow,’ the emisor’s only point is to express the
proposition, ‘I am in pain,’ and not ‘I am in pain such that it causes a
natural bellow of decibels Dn,” which would flout the conversational postulate
of conversational fortitude. The overinformativeness would baffle the sendee,
if not the sender). At this point there is a break in the narrative, and Grice,
in a typical Oxonian way, goes on to say, “But then, we might just as well
relax the requirement that the proposition concerns a state of the sender.” He
gives no specific example, but refers to a ‘state of affairs’ which does NOT
involve a state of the senderAND ONE TO WHICH, HOWEVER, THE SENDER RESPONDS
with a behaviour. I. e. the state of the affairs, whatever it is, is the
stimulus, and the creature’s behaviour is the response. While ‘The cat is on
the mat’ or ‘It is raining’ does NOT obviously ‘communicate’ that the sender
BELIEVES that to be, the ‘behaviour’ which is the response to the external
state of affairs is mediated by this statethis is pure functionalism. So, in
getting at stage sixdue to the objection by his tuteehe must go back to stage
zero. Now, he adds MANY CRUCIAL features with these relaxations of the
requirements. Basically he is getting at GRICESE. And what he says is very
jocular. He knows he is lecturing to ‘service professionals,’ not philosophers,
so he keep adding irritating notes for them (but which we philosophers find
charming), “and we get to something like what people are getting at (correctly,
I would hope) when they speak of a semiotic system!” These characteristics are
elaborated under ‘gricese’But in teleological terms they can even be ordered. What
is the order that Grice uses? At this stage, he has already considered in
detail the progression, with his ‘the dog is shaggy,’ so we know where he is
getting atbut he does not want to get philosophically technical at the lecture.
He is aiming then at compositionality. There is utterance-whole and
utterance-part, or as he prefers ‘complete utterance’ and ‘non-complete utterance’.
‘dog’ and ‘shaggy’ would be non-complete. So the external ‘state of affairs’ is
Grice’s seeing that Strawson’s dog is shaggy and wanting to communicate this to
Pears (Grice co-wrote an essay only with two Englishmen, these being Strawson
and Pears‘The three Englishmen’s essay,’ as he called it’ --. So there is a
state of affairs, pretty harmless, Strawson’s dog is being shaggyperhaps he
needs a haircut, or some brooming. “Shaggy” derives from ‘shag’ plus –y, as in
‘’twas brillig.’so this tells that it is an adjectival or attribute
predicationof the feature of being ‘shaggy’ to ‘dog.’ When the Anglo-Saxons
first used ‘dog’the Anglo-Saxon ‘Adam,’ he should have used ‘hound’. Grice is
not concerned at the point with ‘dog,’ since he KNOWS that Strawson’s dog is
“Fido”dogs being characteristically faithful and the Strawsons not being very
original“I kid” --. In this case, we need a ‘communication function.’ The
sender perceives that Fido is shaggy and forms the proposition ‘Fido is
shaggy.’ This is via his belief, caused by his seeing that Fido is shaggy. He
COMPOSES a complete utterance. He could just utter, elliptically, ‘shaggy’but
under quieter circumstances, he manages to PREDICATE ‘shagginess’ to Strawson’s
dogand comes out with “Fido is shaggy.” That is all the ‘syntactics’ that
Gricese needs (Palmer, “Remember when all we had to care about was nouns and
verbs?”) (Strictly, “I miss the good old days when all we had to care was nouns
and verbs”). Well here we have a ‘verb,’ “is,” and a noun“nomen adjectivum”or
‘adjective noun’, shaggy. Grice is suggesting that the lexicon (or corpus) is
hardly relevant. What is important is the syntax. Having had to read Chomsky
under Austin’s tutelage (they spent four Saturday mornings with the Mouton
paperback, and Grice would later send a letter of recommendation on one of his
tutees for study with Chomsky overseas). But Grice has also read Peano. So he
needs a set of FINITE set of formation rulesthat will produce an INFINITE SET
of ‘sentences’ where Grice highers the decibels when he says ‘infinite,’ hoping
it will upset the rare Whiteheadian philosopher in the audience! Having come up
with “Fido is shaggy,’ the sender sends it to the sendee. “Any link will do”The
link is ‘arranged’ somehowarranged simpliciter in a one-off predicament, or
pre-arranged in two-off predicament, etc. Stages 2, 3, 4, and 5have all to do
with ‘trustworthy’which would one think otiose seeing that Sir John Lyons has
said that prevarication in the golden plover and the Homo sapiens is an
essential feature of language! (But we are at the Oxford of Warnock!). So, the
sender sends “Fido is shaggy,’ and Pears gets it. He takes Grice to be
expressing his belief that Strawson’s dog is shaggy, and comes not only to
accept that Grice believes this, but to accept that Strawson’s dog is shaggy.
As it happens, Pears recommends a bar of soap to make his hairs at least look
‘cuter.’ Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A teleological model of communication.”
minimal transformationalism. Grice: “I wonder where Chomsky got the idea of a
‘transformation’?” -- Grice was proud that his system PIROTESE ‘allowed for the
most minimal transformations.” transformational
grammar Philosophy of language The most powerful of the three kinds of grammar
distinguished by Chomsky. The other two are finite-state grammar and
phrasestructure grammar. Transformational grammar is a replacement for
phrase-structure grammar that (1) analyzes only the constituents in the
structure of a sentence; (2) provides a set of phrase-structure rules that
generate abstract phrase-structure representations; (and 3) holds that the
simplest sentences are produced according to these rules. Transformational
grammar provides a further set of transformational rules to show that all
complex sentences are formed from simple elements. These rules manipulate
elements and otherwise rearrange structures to give the surface structures of
sentences. Whereas phrase-structure rules only change one symbol to another in
a sentence, transformational rules show that items of a given grammatical form
can be transformed into items of a different grammatical form. For example,
they can show the transformation of negative sentences into positive ones,
question sentences into affirmative ones and passive sentences into active
ones. Transformational grammar is presented as an improvement over other forms
of grammar and provides a model to account for the ability of a speaker to
generate new sentences on the basis of limited data. “The central idea of
transformational grammar is determined by repeated application of certain
formal operations called ‘grammatical transformations’ to objects of a more
elementary sort.” Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, “Grice: “Some like Quine, but Chomsky’s MY man,” per il Club
Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
miracle, an extraordinary
event brought about by God. In the medieval understanding of nature, objects
have certain natural powers and tendencies to exercise those powers under
certain circumstances. Stones have the power to fall to the ground, and the
tendency to exercise that power when liberated from a height. A miracle is then
an extraordinary event in that it is not brought about by any object exercising
its natural powerse.g., a liberated stone rising in the airbut brought about
directly by God. In the modern understanding of nature, there are just events
(states of objects) and laws of nature that determine which events follow which
other events. There is a law of nature that heavy bodies when liberated fall to
the ground. A miracle is then a “violation” of a law of nature by God. We must
understand by a law a principle that determines what happens unless there is
intervention from outside the natural order, and by a “violation” such an intervention.
There are then three problems in identifying a miracle. The first is to
determine whether an event of some kind, if it occurred, would be a violation
of a law of nature (beyond the natural power of objects to bring about). To
know this we must know what are the laws of nature. The second problem is to
find out whether such an event did occur on a particular occasion. Our own
memories, the testimony of witnesses, and physical traces will be the
historical evidence of this, but they can mislead. And the evidence from what
happened on other occasions that some law L is a law of nature is evidence
supporting the view that on the occasion in question L was operative, and so
there was no violation. Hume claimed that in practice there has never been enough
historical evidence for a miracle to outweigh the latter kind of
counterevidence. Finally, it must be shown that God was the cause of the
violation. For that we need grounds from natural theology for believing that
there is a God and that this is the sort of occasion on which he is likely to
intervene in nature.
misfire: used by Grice in Meaning Revisited. Cf.
Austin. “When the utterance is a misfire, the procedure which we purport to
invoke is disallowed or is botched: and our act (marrying, etc.) is void or
without effect, etc. We speak of our act as a purported act, or perhaps an
attempt, or we use such an expression as ‘went through a form of marriaage’ by
contrast with ‘married.’ If somebody issues a performative utterance, and the
utterance is classed as a misfire because the procedure invoked is not
accepted , it is presumably persons other than the speaker who do not
accept it (at least if the speaker is speaking seriously ). What would be
an ex- ample ? Consider ‘I divorce you*, said to a wife by her
husband in a Christian country, and both being Chris- tians rather than
Mohammedans. In this case it might be said, ‘nevertheless he has not
(successfully) divorced her: we admit only some other verbal or
non-verbal pro- cedure’; or even possibly ‘we (we) do not admit any
procedure at all for effecting divorce — marriage is indis- soluble’.
This may be carried so far that we reject what may be called a whole code
of procedure, e.g. the code of honour involving duelling: for example, a
challenge may be issued by ‘my seconds will call on you’, which is
equivalent to ‘ I challenge you’, and we merely shrug it off The general
position is exploited in the unhappy story of Don Quixote. Of
course, it will be evident that it is comparatively simple if we never
admit any ‘such’ procedure at all — that is, any procedure at all for
doing that sort of thing, or that procedure anyway for doing that
particular thing. But equally possible are the cases where we do sometimes
— in certain circumstances or at certain hands — accept n
nA/'Q/1n U UlUVlfU u plUVWUiV/, ULIL UW 111
T\llt 1 n nrttT at* amaiitvwifnnaati at* af ULIL 111
ttllj UL1U/1 L/llCUllli3Lail\/ KJL CIL other hands. And here
we may often be in doubt (as in 28 Horn
to do things with Words the naming example above) whether an
infelicity should be brought into our present class A. i or rather
into A. 2 (or even B. i or B. 2). For example, at a party, you say,
when picking sides, ‘I pick George’: George grunts ‘I’m not playing.’ Has
George been picked? Un- doubtedly, the situation is an unhappy one. Well,
we may say, you have not picked George, whether because there is no
convention that you can pick people who aren’t playing or because George
in the circumstances is an inappropriate object for the procedure of
picking. Or on a desert island you may say to me ‘Go and pick up
wood’; and I may say 4 1 don’t take orders from you’ or ‘you’re not
entitled to give me orders’ — I do not take orders from you when you try
to ‘assert your authority’ (which I might fall in with but may not) on a
desert island, as opposed to the case when you are the captain on a
ship and therefore genuinely have authority.
missum: If Grice uses psi-transmission (and emission,
when he speaks of ‘pain,’ and the decibels of the emission of a bellow) he also
uses transmission, and mission, transmissum, and missum. Grice was out on a
mission. Grice uses ‘emissor,’ but then there’s the ‘missor.’ This is in key
with modern communication theory as instituted by Shannon. The ‘missor’ ‘sends’
a ‘message’ to a recipientor missee. But be careful, he may miss it. In any
case, it shows that e-missor is a compound of ‘ex-‘ plus ‘missor,’ so that
makes sense. It transliterates Grice’s ut-terer (which literally means
‘out-erer’). And then there’s the prolatum, from proferre, which has the
professor, as professing that p, that is. As someone said, if H. P. Girce were
to present a talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society he would possibly call it
“Messaging.” c. 1300, "a communication
transmitted via a messenger, a notice sent through some agency," from Old
French message "message,
news, tidings, embassy" (11c.), from Medieval Latin missaticum, from Latin missus "a sending away,
sending, dispatching; a throwing, hurling," noun use of past participle
of mittere "to
release, let go; send, throw" (see mission). The Latin word is glossed in Old English by ærende. Specific religious sense of
"divinely inspired communication via a prophet" (1540s) led to
transferred sense of "the broad meaning (of something)," which is
attested by 1828. To get the message "understand" is by 1960.
m’naghten: a rule in England’s
law defining legal insanity for purposes of creating a defense to criminal
liability: legal insanity is any defect of reason, due to disease of the mind,
that causes an accused criminal either not to know the nature and quality of
his act, or not to know that his act was morally or legally wrong. Adopted in
the Edward Drummond-M’Naghten case in England in 1843, the rule harks back to
the responsibility test for children, which was whether they were mature enough
to know the difference between right and wrong. The rule is alternatively
viewed today as being either a test of a human being’s general status as a
moral agent or a test of when an admitted moral agent is nonetheless excused
because of either factual or moral/legal mistakes. On the first (or status)
interpretation of the rule, the insane are exempted from criminal liability
because they, like young children, lack the rational agency essential to moral
personhood. On the second (or mistake) interpretation of the rule, the insane
are exempted from criminal liability because they instantiate the accepted
moral excuses of mistake or ignorance. Refs.: H. P. Grice and H. L. A. Hart,
‘Legal rules;’ D. F. Pears, “Motivated irrationality.”
mnemic
causation,
a type of causation in which, in order to explain the proximate cause of an
organism’s behaviour, it is necessary to specify not only the present state of
the organism and the present stimuli operating upon it, but also this or that
past experience of the organism. The term was introduced by Russell in The
Analysis of Mind, and borrowed, but never returned, by Grice for his Lockeian
logical construction of personal identity or “I” in terms of an chain of
mnemonic temporary states. “Unlike Russell, I distinguish between the mnemic
and the mnemonic.”
Modus -- mode of co-relation: a technical jargon, under ‘mode’although Grice uses ‘c’ to
abbreviate it, and sometimes speaks of ‘way’ of ‘co-relation’but ‘mode’ was his
favourite. Grice is not sure whether
‘mode’ ‘of’ and ‘correlation’ are the appropriate terms. Grice speaks of an
associative mode of correlationvide associatum. He also speaks of a
conventional mode of correlation (or is it mode of conventional
correlation)vide non-conventional, and he speaks of an iconic mode of
correlation, vide non-iconic. Indeed he speaks once of ‘conventional
correlation’ TO THE ASSOCIATED specific response.
So the mode is rather otiose. In the context when he uses ‘conventional
correlation’ TO THE ASSOCIATED specific response, he uses ‘way’ rather than
modeGrice wants ‘conventional correlation’ TO THE ASSOCIATED specific RESPONSE
to be just one way, or mode. There’s ASSOCIATIVE correlation, and iconic
correlation, and ‘etc.’ Strictly, as he puts it, this or that correlation is
this or that provision of a way in which the expressum is correlated to a
specific response. When symbolizing he uses the informal “correlated in way c
with response r’having said that ‘c’ stands for ‘mode of correlation.’ But
‘mode sounds too pretentious, hence his retreat to the more flowing ‘way.’ Modusmodelllo -- model
theory:
Grice, “The etymology of ‘model’ is fascinating.” H. P. Grice, “A conversational model.” Grice: “Since the object of the present exercise, is to
provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a certain family of
cases, why is it that a particular implicaturum is present, I
would suggest that the final test of the adequacy and utility of this
model should be: can it be used to construct an explanation of
the presence of such an implicaturum, and is it more comprehensive
and more economical than any rival? is the no
doubt pre-theoretical explanation which one would be prompted to give
of such an implicaturum consistent with, or better still a favourable pointer
towards the requirements involved in the model? cf. Sidonius: Far otherwise:
whoever disputes with you will find those protagonists of heresy, the Stoics, Cynics,
and Peripatetics, shattered with their own arms and their own engines; for
their heathen followers, if they resist the doctrine and spirit of
Christianity, will, under your teaching, be caught in their own familiar
entanglements, and fall headlong into their own toils; the barbed
syllogism of your arguments will hook the glib tongues of the
casuists, and it is you who will tie up their slippery
questions in categorical clews, after the manner of a clever
physician, who, when compelled by reasoned thought, prepares antidotes for
poison even from a serpent.qvin potivs experietvr qvisqve conflixerit stoicos
cynicos peripateticos hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis qvoqve concvti
machinamentis nam sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi si repvgnaverint
mox te magistro ligati vernaculis implicaturis in retia sua
præcipites implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis volvbilem
tergiversantvm lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lubricas qvæstiones
tv potivs innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena cum ratio
compellit et de serpente conficivnt.” Grice: “Since the object of the present
exercise, is to provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a
certain family of cases, why is it that a particular conversational
implicaturum is present, I would suggest that
the final tess of the adequacy
and utility of this MODEL should be various. First: can the model be used to
construct an explanation (argumentum) of the presence of this or that
conversational implicaturum? Second, is the model it more comprehensive than
any rival in providing this explanation? Third, is the model more economical
than any rival in providing this explanation? Fourth, is the no
doubt pre-theoretical (antecedent) explanation which one would be
prompted to give of such a conversational implicaturum consistent with the
requirements involved in the model. Fifth: is the no doubt pre-threoretical
(antecedent) explanation which one would be prompted to give of such a
conversational implciaturum better
still, a favourable POINTER towards the requirements involved in the model? Cf.
Sidonius: Far otherwise: whoever disputes with you will find those protagonists
of heresy, the Stoics, Cynics, and Peripatetics, shattered with their own arms
and their own engines; for their heathen followers, if they resist the
doctrine and spirit of Christianity, will, under your teaching, be caught
in their own familiar entanglements, and fall headlong into their
own toils; the barbed syllogism of your arguments will hook the
glib tongues of the casuists, and it is you who will tie
up their slippery questions in categorical clews, after the
manner of a clever physician, who, when compelled by reasoned thought, prepares
antidotes for poison even from a serpent -- qvin potivs experietvr qvisqve
conflixerit stoicos cynicos peripateticos hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis
qvoqve concvti machinamentis nam sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi
si repvgnaverint mox te magistro ligati vernacvlis implicatvris in
retia sva præcipites implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis
volvbilem tergiversantvm lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lvbricas
qvæstiones tv potivs innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena
cvm ratio compellit et de serpente conficivnt. qvin
potivs experietvr qvisqve conflixerit stoicos cynicos peripateticos
hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis qvoqve concvti machinamentis nam
sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi si repvgnaverint mox te
magistro ligati vernacvlis IMPILICATVRIS in retia sva præcipites
implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis volvbilem tergiversantvm
lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lubricas qvæstiones tv potivs
innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena cvm ratio compellit et
de serpente conficivnt. So Grice has the phenomenon: the conversational
implcaturumthe qualifying adjective is crucial, since surely he is not
interested in non-conventional NON-conversational implicatura derived from
moral maxims! --. And then he needs a MODELthat of the principle or postulate
of conversational benevolence. It fits the various requirements. First: the
model can be used to construct an explanation (argumentum) of the presence of
this or that conversational implicaturum. Second, REQUIREMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL
GENERALITY -- the model is more
comprehensive than any rival. Third, the OCCAM requirement: the model is more
ECONOMICAL than any rivalin what sense?“in providing this explanation” of this
or that conversational implicaturum. Fourth, the J. L. Austin requirement, this
or that requirement involved in the model is SURELY consistent with the no
doubt pre-theoretical antecedent explanation (argumentum) that one would be
prompted to give. Fifth, the second J. L. Austin requirement: towards this or
that requirement involved in the model the no-doubt pre-theoretical
(antecedent) explanation (argument) that one would be prompted to give is, better
still, a favourable pointer. Grice’s oversuse of ‘model’ is due to Max Black,
who understands model theory as a branch of philosophical semantics that deals with
the connection between a language and its interpretations or structures. Basic
to it is the characterization of the conditions under which a sentence is true
in structure. It is confusing that the term ‘model’ itself is used slightly
differently: a model for a sentence is a structure for the language of the
sentence in which it is true. Model theory was originally developed for
explicitly constructed, formal languages, with the purpose of studying foundational
questions of mathematics, but was later applied to the semantical analysis of
empirical theories, a development initiated by the Dutch philosopher Evert
Beth, and of natural languages, as in Montague grammar. More recently, in
situation theory, we find a theory of semantics in which not the concept of
truth in a structure, but that of information carried by a statement about a
situation, is central. The term ‘model theory’ came into use in the 0s, with
the work on first-order model theory by Tarski, but some of the most central
results of the field date from before that time. The history of the field is
complicated by the fact that in the 0s and 0s, when the first model-theoretic
findings were obtained, the separation between first-order logic and its
extensions was not yet completed. Thus, in 5, there appeared an article by
Leopold Löwenheim, containing the first version of what is now called the
Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. Löwenheim proved that every satisfiable sentence has
a countable model, but he did not yet work in firstorder logic as we now
understand it. One of the first who did so was the Norwegian logician Thoralf
Skolem, who showed in 0 that a set of first-order sentences that has a model,
has a countable model, one form of the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. Skolem argued
that logic was first-order logic and that first-order logic was the proper
basis for metamathematical investigations, fully accepting the relativity of
set-theoretic notions in first-order logic. Within philosophy this thesis is
still dominant, but in the end it has not prevailed in mathematical logic. In 0
Kurt Gödel solved an open problem of Hilbert-Ackermann and proved a
completeness theorem for first-order logic. This immediately led to another
important model-theoretic result, the compactness theorem: if every finite
subset of a set of sentences has a model then the set has a model. A good
source for information about the model theory of first-order logic, or
classical model theory, is still Model Theory by C. C. Chang and H. J. Keisler
3. When the separation between first-order logic and stronger logics had been
completed and the model theory of first-order logic had become a mature field,
logicians undertook in the late 0s the study of extended model theory, the
model theory of extensions of first-order logic: first of cardinality
quantifiers, later of infinitary languages and of fragments of second-order
logic. With so many examples of logics around
where sometimes classical theorems did generalize, sometimes not Per Lindström showed in 9 what sets
first-order logic apart from its extensions: it is the strongest logic that is
both compact and satisfies the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. This work has been the
beginning of a study of the relations between various properties logics may
possess, the so-called abstract model. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The postulate of
conversational co-operation,” Oxford.
senofane: “Or as Strawson would prefer, Xenophanes, but since he emigrated
to Italy, we might just as well use an “S””Grice. Grice: “You have to be
careful when you research for this in Italythey spell it with an ‘s’!”
-- Grecian philosopher, a proponent of an idealized conception of
the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound epistemological
views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Grecian city on the coast of Asia Minor, he
emigrated as a young man to the Grecian West Sicily and southern Italy. The
formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism. He is the
first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports but also
quite a few verbatim quotations fragments from his “Lampoons” Silloi
and from other didactic poetry. Xenophanes attacks the worldview of Homer,
Hesiod, and traditional Grecian piety: it is an outrage that the poets attribute
moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion reflects regional biases blond
gods for the Northerners; black gods for the Africans. Indeed, anthropomorphic
gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the human viewpoint “If cattle, or
horses, or lions . . . could draw pictures of the gods . . . ,” frg. 15. There
is a single “greatest” god, who is not at all like a human being, either in
body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of organs, he effects changes
without “moving,” through the sheer power of his thought. The rainbow is no
sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud formation. Nor are the sun or the
moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from the elusive “Twin Sons of Zeus” St.
Elmo’s fire to sun, moon, and stars, are varieties of cloud formation. There
are no mysterious infernal regions; the familiar strata of earth stretch down
ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is the one visible at our feet: the
horizontal border between earth and air. Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his
theological and cosmological pronouncements with an epistemological caveat:
what he offers is only a “conjecture.” In later antiquity Xenophanes came to be
regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School, and his teachings were
assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This appears to be based on
nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness and utter immobility of
God. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Senofane in Italia.”
sensus -- modified Occam’s razor: Grice was obsessed with ‘sense,’ and thought Oxonian
philosohpers were multiplying it otioselynotably L. J. Cohen (“The diversity of
meaning”). The original razor is what Grice would have as ‘ontological,’ to
which he opposes with in his ‘ontological marxism’. Entities should not be
multiplied beyond the necessity of needing them as honest working entities. He
keeps open house provided they come in help with the work. This restriction
explains what Grice means by ‘necessity’ in the third lecturea second sense
does not do any work. The implicaturum does. Grice loved a razor, and being into analogy
and focal meaning, if he HAD to have semantic multiplicity, for the case of
‘is,’ (being) or ‘good,’ it had to be a UNIFIED semantic multiplicity, as
displayed by paronymy. The essay had circulated since the Harvard days, and it
was also repr. in Pragmatics, ed. Cole for Academic
Press. Personally, I prefer dialectica. ‒ Grice. This is
the third James lecture at Harvard. It is particularly useful for Grices
introduction of his razor, M. O. R., or Modified Occams Razor, jocularly expressed
by Grice as: Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. An
Englishing of the Ockhams Latinate, Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter
necessitatem. But what do we mean sense. Surely Occam was right with his
Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem. We need to translate that
alla linguistic turn. Grice jokes: Senses are not be multiplied beyond
necessity. He also considers irony, stress (supra-segmental fourth-articulatory
phonology), and truth, which the Grice Papers have under a special f. in the s.
V . Three topics where the implicaturum helps. He is a scoundrel may
well be the implicaturum of He is a fine friend. But cf. the pretense
theory of irony. Grice, being a classicist, loved the etymological
connection. With Stress, he was concerned with anti-Gettier uses of
emphatic know: I KNOW. (Implicaturum: I do have conclusive
evidence). Truth (or is true)
sprang from the attention by Grice to that infamous Bristol symposium between
Austin and Strawson. Cf. Moores paradox. Grice wants to defend correspondence
theory of Austin against the performative approach of Strawson. If is true implicates someone previously
affirmed this, that does not mean a ditto implicaturum is part of the
entailment of a is true utterance, further
notes on logic and conversation, in Cole, repr. in a revised form, Modified
Occams Razor, irony, stress, truth. The preferred citation should be the
Harvard. This is originally the third James lecture, in a revised
form.In that lecture, Grice introduced the M. O. R., or Modified Occams
Razor. Senses are not be multiplied beyond necessity. The point is
that entailment-cum-implicaturum does the job that multiplied
senses should not do! The Grice Papers contains in a different f. the
concluding section for that lecture, on irony, stress, and truth. Grice
went back to the Modified Occams razor, but was never able to formalise it! It
is, as he concedes, almost a vacuous methodological thingy! It is interesting
that the way he defines the alethic value of true alrady cites satisfactory. I
shall use, to Names such a property, not true but factually
satisfactory. Grices sympathies dont lie with Strawsons Ramsey-based
redundance theory of truth, but rather with Tarskis theory of correspondence.
He goes on to claim his trust in the feasibility of such a theory. It is,
indeed, possible to construct a theory which treats truth as (primarily) a
property, not true but factually satisfactory. One may see that point above as
merely verbal and not involving any serious threat. Lets also assume that
it will be a consequence, or theorem, of such a theory that there will be a
class C of utterances (utterances of affirmative Subjects-predicate sentences
[such as snow is white or the cat is on the mat of the dog is hairy-coated such
that each member of C designates or refers to some item and indicates or
predicates some class (these verbs to be explained within the theory), and is
factually satisfactory if the item belongs to the class. Let us also
assume that there can be a method of introducing a form of expression, it is
true that /it is buletic that and
linking it with the notion of factually or alethic or doxastic satisfactory, a
consequence of which will be that to say it is true that Smith is happy will be
equivalent to saying that any utterance of class C which designates Smith and
indicates the class of happy people is factually satisfactory (that is, any
utterance which assigns Smith to the class of happy people is factually
satisfactory. Mutatis mutandis for Let Smith be happy, and buletic
satisfactoriness. The move is Tarskian. TBy stress, Grice means
suprasegmental phonology, but he was too much of a philosopher to let that
jargon affect him! Refs.: The locus classicus, if that does not sound too
pretentious, is Essay 3 in WoW, but there are references elsewhere, such as in
“Meaning Revisited,” and under ‘semantics.’ The only one who took up Grice’s
challenge at Oxford was L. J. Cohen, “Grice on the particles of natural
language,” which got a great response by Oxonian R. C. S. Walker (citing D.
Bostock, a tutee of Grice), to which Cohen again responded “Can the
conversationalist hypothesis be defended.” Cohen clearly centres his criticism
on the razor. He had an early essay, citing Grice, on the DIVERSITY of meaning.
Cohen opposes Grice’s conversationalist hypothesis to his own ‘semantic
hypothesis’ (“Multiply senses all you want.”). T. D. Bontly explores the topic of
Grice’s MOR. “Ancestors of this essay were presented at meetings of the Society
for Philosophy and Psychology (Edmonton, Alberta), of the the Pacific Division
of the American Philosophical Association (San Francisco, CA) and at the
University of Connecticut. I am indebted to all three groups and particularly
to the commentators D. Sanford (at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology)
and M. Reimer (at the APA). Thanks also to the following for helpful comments
or discussion (inclusive): F. Adams, A. AriewBloom, M. Devitt, B. Enc, C.
Gaulker, M. Lynch, R. Millikan, J. Pust, E. Sober, R. C. Stalnaker, D. W.
Stampe, and S. Wheeler.” Bontly writes, more or less (I have
paraphrased him a little, with good intentions, always!) “Some philosophers
have appealed to a principle which H. P. Grice, in his third William James
lecture, dubs Modified Occam’s Razor (henceforth, “M. O. R.”): “Sensesrather
than ‘entities,’ as the inceptor from Ockham more boringly has it -- are not to
be multiplied beyond necessity’.”
What
is ‘necessity’? Bontly: “Superficially, Grice’s “M. O. R.”
seems a routine application of Ockham’s principle of parsimony: ‘entities are
not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Now, parsimony arguments, though common
in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Grice faces one
objection or two. Grice’s “M. O. R.” makes considerably more sense in light of
certain assumptions about the psychological processes involved in language
development, learning, and acquisition, and it describes recent *empirical*, if
not philosophical or conceptual, of the type Grice seems mainly interested in
-- findings that bear these assumptions out. [My] resulting account solves
several difficulties that otherwise confront Grice’s “M. O. R.”, and it draws
attention to problematic assumptions involved in using parsimony to argue for
pragmatic accounts of the type of phenomena ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers
were interested in. In more general terms, when an expression E has two or more
usesU1 and U2, say -- enabling its users to express two or more different
meaningsM1 and M2, say -- one is tempted to assume that E is semantically (i.e.
lexically) ambiguous, or polysemous, i.e., that some convention, constituting
the language L, assign E these two meanings M1 and M2 corresponding to its two
uses U1 and U2. One hears, for instance, that ‘or’ is ambiguous (polysemous)
between a weak (inclusive) (‘p v q’) and a strong (exclusive) sense, ‘p w q.’ Grice
actually feels that speaking of the meaning or sense of ‘or’ sounds harsh
(“Like if I were asked what the meaning of ‘to’ is!”). But in one note from a
seminar from Strawson he writes: “Jones is between Smith and Williams.” “I
wouldn’t say that ‘between’ is ambiguous, even if we interpret the sentence in
a physical sense, or in an ordering of merit, say.” Bontly:
“Used exclusively, an utterance of ‘p or q’ (p v q) entails that ‘p’ and ‘q’
are NOT both true. Used inclusively, it does not. Still, ambiguity is not the
only possible explanation.” (This reminds me of Atlas, “Philosophy WITHOUT
ambiguity!”ambitious title!). The phenomenon can also be approached
pragmatically, from within the framework of a general theory conversation alla
Grice. One could, e. g., first, maintain that ‘p or q’ is unambiguously
monosemous inclusive and, second, apply Grice’s idea of an ‘implicaturum’ to
explain the exclusive.” I actually traced this, and found that O.
P. Wood in an odd review of a logic textbook (by Faris) in “Mind,” in the
1950s, makes the point about the inclusive-exclusive distinction,
pre-Griceianly! Grice seems more interested, as you later consider, the implicaturum:
“Utterer U has non-truth-functional grounds for uttering ‘p or q. Not really
the ‘inclusive-exclusive’ distinction. Jennings deals with this in “The
genealogy of disjunction,” and elsewhere, and indeed notes that ‘or’ may be a
dead metaphor from ‘another.’ Bontly goes on: “On any such account, ‘p
or q’ would have two uses U1 and U2 and two standard interpretations, I1 and
I2, but NEVER two ‘conventional’ meanings,” M1 and M2 Or take ‘and’ (p.q) which
(when used as a sentential connective) ordinarily stands for truth-functional
conjunction (as in 1a, below). Often enough, though, ‘p and q’ seems to imply
temporal priority (1b), while in other cases it suggests causal priority (1c).
(1) a. Bill bought a shirt and Christy [bought] a sweater. b. Adam took off his
shoes and [he] got into bed. c. “Jack fell down and [he] broke his crown, and
Jill came tumbling o:ter.” (to rhyme with ‘water’ in an earlier
line.”Apparently Grice loved this nursery rhyme too, “Jack is an Englishman; he
must, therefore, be brave,” Jill says.” (Grice, “Aspects of reason.”)Bontly:
“Again, one suspects an ambiguity, M1 and M2, but Grice argues that a
‘conversational’ explanation is available and preferable. According to the
‘pragmatist’ or ‘conversationalist’ hypothesis’ (as I shall call it), a
temporal or a causal reading of “and” (p.q) may be part of what the UTTERER
means, but such a reading I2, are not part of what the sentence means, or the
word _and_ means, and thus belong in a general theory of conversation, not the
grammar of a specific language.” Oddly, I once noticed that Chomsky, of all
people, and since you speak of ‘grammar,’ competence, etc. refers to “A.”
Albert? P. Grice in his 1966! Aspects of the theory of syntax. “A. P. Grice
wants to say that the temporal succession is not part of the meaning of ‘and.’”
I suspect one of Grice’s tutees at Oxford was spreading the unauthorized word! Bontly:
“Many an alleged ambiguity seems amenable to Grice’s conversationalist
hypothesis. Besides the sentential connectives or truth-functors, a pragmatic
explanation has been applied fruitfully to quantifiers (Grice lists ‘all’ and
‘some (at least one’), definite descriptions (Grice lists ‘the,’ ‘the
murderer’), the indefinite description (‘a finger’, much discussed by Grice,
“He’s meeting a woman this evening.”), the genitive construction (‘Peter’s
bat’), and the indirect speech act (‘Can you pass the salt?’) — to mention just
a few. The literature on the Griceian treatment of these phenomena is
extensive. Some classic treatments are found in the oeuvre of philosophers like
Grice, Bach, Harnish, and Davis, and linguists like Horn, Gazdar, and Levinson.
But the availability of a pragmatic explanation poses an interesting
methodological problem. Prima facie, the alleged ‘ambiguity’ M1 and M2, can now
be explained either semantically (by positing two or more senses S1 and S2, or
M1 and M2, of expression E) or pragmatically (by positing just one sense (S)
plus one super-imposed implicaturum, I).Sometimes, of course, one approach or
the other is transparently inadequate. When the ‘use’ of E cannot be derived
from a general conversational principle, the pragmatic explanation seems a
non-starter.” Not for a radically radical pragmatist like Atlas! Ambitious!
Similarly, an ambiguity- or polysemy- based explanation seems out of the
question where the interpretation of E at issue is highly context-dependent.”
(My favourite is Grice on “a,” that you analyse in term of ‘developmental’ or
ontogenetical pragmaticsversus Millikan’s phylogenetical! But, in many cases, a
semantic, or polysemy, and a conversational explanations both appear plausible,
and the usual data — Grice’s intuitions about how the expression can and cannot
be used, should or shouldn’t beused — appear to leave the choice of one of the
two hypotheses under-determined.These were the cases that most interest Grice,
the philosopher, since they impinge on various projects in philosophical
analysis. (Cf. Grice, 1989, 3–21 and
passim).” Notably the ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy
‘project,’ I would think. I love the fact that in the inventory of philosophers
who are loose about this (as in the reference you mention above, 3-21, he includes himself in “Causal theory
of perception”! “To adjudicate these border-line cases, Grice (1978) proposes a
methodological principle which he dubs “Modified Occam’s Razor,” M. O. R.”
‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’ (1978, 118–119) “(I follow Grice in using the
Latinate ‘Occam’ rather than the Anglo-Saxon ‘Ockham’ which is currently
preferred). More fully, the idea is that one should not posit an alleged
special, stronger SENSE S2, for an expression E when a general conversational
principle suffices to explain why E, which bears only Sense 1, S1, receives a
certain interpretation or carries implicaturum I. Thus, if the ‘use’ (or an
‘use’) of E can be explained pragmatically, other things being equal, the use
should be explained pragmatically.” Griceians appeal to M. O. R. quite often,”
pragmatically bearded or not! (I love Quine’s idea that Occam’s razor was
created to shave Plato’s beard. Cfr. Schiffer’s anti-shave! It is affirmed, in
spirit if not letter, by philosopher/linguist Atlas and Levinson,
philosopher/linguist Bach, Bach and philosopher Harnish, Horn, Levinson,
Morgan, linguist/philosopher Neale, philosopher Searle, philosopher Stalnaker,
philosopher Walker (of Oxford), and philosopher Ziff” (I LOVE Ziff’s use,
seeing that he could be otherwise so anti-Griceian, vide Martinich, “On Ziff on
Grice on meaning,” and indeed Stampe (that you mention) on Ziff on Grice on
meaning. One particularly forceful statement is found in “of all people”
Kripke, who derides the ambiguity hypothesis as ‘the lazy man’s approach in
philosophy’ and issues a strong warning.”
When I
read that, I was reminded that Stampe, in some unpublished manuscripts, deals
with the loose use of Griceian ideas by Kripke. Stampe discusses at length,
“Let’s get out of here, the cops are coming.” Stampe thinks Kripke is only
superficially a Griceian! Kripke: “‘Do not posit an ambiguity unless
you are really forced to, unless there are really compelling theoretical (or
intuitive) grounds to suppose that an ambiguity really is present’ (197720). A
similar idea surfaces in Ruhl’s principle of “mono-semic” bias’. One’s initial
effort is directed toward determining a UNITARY meaning S1 for a lexical item
E, trying to attribute apparent variations (S2) in meaning to other factors. If
such an effort fails, one tries to discover a means of relating the distinct
meanings S1 and S2. If this effort fails, there are several words: E1 and E2 (19894).”
Grice’s ‘vice’ and Grice’s ‘vyse,’ different words in English, same in Old
Roman (“violent.”). Ruhl’s position differs from Grice’s approach. Whereas
Grice takes word-meaning to be its WEAKEST exhibited meaning, Ruhl argues that
word-meaning can be so highly abstract or schematic as to provide only a CORE
of meaning, making EVEN the weakest familiar reading a pragmatic
specialisation.” Loved that! Ruhl as more Griceian than
Grice! Indeed, Grice is freely using the very abstract notion of a Fregeian
‘sense,’ with the delicacy you would treat a brick! “The
difference between Grice’s and Ruhl’s positions raises issues beyond the scope
of the present essay (though see Atlas, 1989, for further discussion).” I will! Atlas knows
everything you wanted to know, and more, especially when it comes to linguists!
He has a later book with ‘implicaturum’ in its subtitle. “Considering
the central role that “M. O. R.” plays in Grice’s programme, one is thus
surprised to find barely any attention paid to whether it is a good principle —
to whether it is true that a pragmatic explanation, when available, is in
general more likely to be true than its ‘ambiguity’ or polysemy, or bi-semy, or
aequi-vocal rival.” Trying to play with this, I see that Grice
loves ‘aequi-vocal.’ He thinks that ‘must’ is ‘aequi-vocal’ between an alethic
and a practical ‘use.’ It took me some time to process that! He means that
since it’s the ‘same,’ ‘aequi’, ‘voice’, vox’. So ‘aequi-vocal’ IS ‘uni-vocal.’
The Aristotelian in Grice, I guess!
“Grice
himself offers vanishingly little argument.” How extended is a Harvard
philosophical audience’s attention-span? “Examining just two (out of the blue,
unphilosophical) cases where we seem happy to attribute a secondary or
derivative sense S2 to one word or expression E, but not another, Grice notes
that, in both cases, the supposition that the expression E has an additional
sense S2 is not superfluous, or unparsimonious, accounting for certain facets
of the use of E that cannot, apparently, be explained pragmatically.” I wonder
if a radically radical pragmatist would agree! I never met a polysemous
expression! Grice concludes that, therefore, ‘there is as yet no reason NOT to
accept M. O. R. ’ (1978120) — faint praise for a principle so important to his
philosophical programme! Besides this weak argument for “M. O. R.,” Grice
(1978) also mentions a few independent, rather loose, tests for alleged
ambiguity.” (“And how to fail them,” as Zwicky would have it!) But Grice’s
rationale for “M. O. R.,” presumably, is a thought Grice does not bother to
articulate, thinking perhaps that the principle’s name, its kinship with
Occam’s famous razor, ‘Do not multiply entities beyond necessity,’ made its
epistemic credentials sufficiently obvious already.” Plus,
Harvard is very Occamist!“To lay it out, though, the thought is surely that
parsimony -- and other such qualities as simplicity, generality, and
unification -- are always prized in scientific (and philosophical?)
explanation, the more parsimonious (etc.) of two otherwise equally adequate
theories being ipso facto more likely to be true. If, as would seem to be the
case, a pragmatic explanation were more parsimonious than its semantic, or
‘conventionalist,’ or ambiguity, or polysemic, or polysemy or bi-semic rival, the
conversational explanation would be supported by an established, received,
general principle of scientific inference.”
I love
your exploration of Newton on this below! Hypotheses non fingo! “Certainly,
some such argument is on Grice’s mind when he names his principle as he does,
and much the same thought surely lies behind Kripke’s references to ‘general
methodological considerations’ and ‘considerations of economy’ Other ‘Griceian’
appeals to these theoretical virtues are even more transparent. Linguist J. L.
Morgan tells us, for instance, that ‘Occam’s Razor dictates that we take a
Gricean account of an indirect speech act as the correct analysis, lacking
strong evidence to the contrary’ Philosopher Stalnaker argues that a major
advantage accrues to a pragmatic treatment of Strawson’s presupposition in that
‘there will then be no need to complicate the semantics or the lexicon’” or
introduce metaphysically dubious truth-value gaps! Linguist S. C. Levinson
suggests that a major selling point for a conversational theory in general is
that such a theory promises to ‘effect a radical simplification of the
semantics’ and ‘approximately halve the size of the lexicon’.” So we don’t need
to learn two words, ‘vyse’ and ‘vice.’ There can be little doubt, therefore,
that a Griceian takes parsimony to argue for the pragmatic approach.” I
use the rather pedantic and awful spelling “Griceian,” so that I can keep the
pronunciation /grais/ and also because Fodor used it! And non-philosophers,
too! “But a parsimony argument is notoriously
problematic, and the argument for “M. O. R.” is no exception. The preference
for a parsimonious theory is surprisingly difficult to justify, as is the
assumption that a pragmatic explanation IS more parsimonious. This does not
mean Grice’s “M. O. R.” is entirely without merit. On the contrary, Grice is
right to hold that senses should not be multiplied, if a conversational
principle will do.” But the justification for M. O. R. need have nothing to do
with the idea that parsimony is, always and everywhere, a virtue in scientific
theories.” Also because we are dealing with
philosophy, not science, here? What makes Grice’s “M. O. R.” reasonable,
rather, is a set of assumptions about the psychological processes involved in
language learning, development, and acquisition, and I will report some
empirical (rather than conceptual, as Grice does) evidence that these
assumptions are, at least, roughly correct. One disclaimer. While I shall
defend Grice’s “M. O. R.,” and therefore the research programme initiated by
Grice, it is not my goal here to vindicate any specific pragmatic account, nor
to argue that any given linguistic phenomenon requires a pragmatic
explanation.” This reminds me of Kilgariff, a Longman
linguist. He has a lovely piece, “I don’t believe in word SENSE!” I think he
found that Longman had, under ‘horse’: 1. Quadruped animal. 2. Painting of a
horse, notably by Stubbs! He did not like that! Why would ‘sense,’ a Fregeian
notion, have a place in something like ‘lexicography,’ that deals with corpuses
and statistics? “The task is, rather, to understand the
logic of a particular type of inference, a type of Griceian inference that can
be and has been employed by a philosopher such as Grice who disagree on many
other points of theory. Since it would be impossible within the confines of
this essay to discuss these disagreements, or to do justice to the many ways in
which Grice’s paradigm or programme has been revised and extended
(palaeo-Griceians, neo-Griceians, post-Griceians), my discussion is confined to
a few hackneyed examples hackneyed by Grice himself, and to Grice’s orthodox
theory, if a departure therefrom will be noted where relevant. The
conversational explanation of an alleged ambiguity or polysemy or bi-semy aims
to show how an utterer U can take an expression E with one conventional meaning
and use it as if it had other meanings as well. Typically, this requires
showing how the utterer U’s intended message can be ‘inferred,’ with the aid of
a general principle of communicative behaviour, from the conventional meaning
or sense of the word E that U utters. In Grice’s pioneering account, for
instance, the idea is that speech is subject to a Principle of Conversational
Co-Operation (In earlier Oxford seminars, where he introduced ‘implicaturum’ he
speaks of two principles in conflict: the principle of conversational
self-interest, and the principle of conversational benevolence! I much love
THAT than the rather artificial Kant scheme at Harvard). ‘Make your
conversational contribution, or move, such as is required, at the stage at
which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the conversational
exchange in which you are engaged.’(197544). “Sub-ordinate to the Principle of
Conversational Co-Operation are four conversational maxims (he was jocularly
‘echoing’ Kant!) falling under the four Kantian conversational categories of
Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Modus. Roughly: Make your contribution true.
Kant’s quality has to do with affirmation and negation, rather. Make your contribution
informative. Kant’s quantity has to do with ‘all’ and ‘one,’ rather. Make your
contribution relevant. Kant’s relation God knows what it has to do with. Make
your contribution perspicuous [sic]. Kant’s modus has to do with ‘necessary’
and ‘contingent.’ Grice actually has ‘sic’ in the original
“Logic and Conversation.” It’s like the self-refuting Kantian. Also in ‘be
brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity’” ‘proguard obfuscation,’ sort of thing? “…
further specifying what cooperation entails ( 45–46).” It’s
sad Grice did not remember about the principle of conversational benevolence
clashing with the principle of conversational self-interest, or dismissed the
idea, when he wrote that ‘retro-spective’ epilogue about the maxims, etc. Bontly:
“Unlike the constitutive (to use Anscombe and Searle, not regulative)
principles of a grammar, the Principle of Conversational Co-Operation and the
conversational, universalisable, maxims are to be thought of not as an
arbitrary conventionvide Lewis -- but rather as a rational STRATEGY or
guideline (if ‘strategy’ is too strong) for achieving one’s communicative
ends.” I DO think ‘strategy’ is too strong. A
strategist is a general: it’s a zero-sum game, war. I think Grice’s idea is
that U is a rational agent dealing with his addressee A, another rational
agent. So, it’s not strategic rationality, but communicative rationality. But
then I’m being an etymologist! Surely chess players speak of ‘strategies,’ but
then they also speak of ‘check mate,” kill the king! Bontly quotes from Grice:
“‘[A]nyone who cares about the goals that are central to conversation,’ says
Grice, ought to find the principle of conversational cooperation eminently
reasonable (p. 49).” If not rational! I love Grice’s /:
rational/reasonable. He explores on this later, “The price of that pair of
shoes is not reasonable, but hardly irrational!” Bontly: “Like a grammar,
however, the principle of conversational co-operation is (supposedly) tacitly
known (or assumed) by conversationalists, who can thus call on it to interpret
each other’s conversational moves.”
Exactly.
Parents teach their children well, not to lie, etc. “These interpretive
practices being mutual ‘knowledge,’ or common ground, moreover, an utterer U
can plan on his co-conversationalist B using the principle of conversational
cooperation, to interpret his own utterances, enabling him to convey a good
deal of information (and influencing) implicitly by relying on others to infer
his intended meaning.”INFORMING seems to do, because, although Grice makes a
distinction between ‘informing’ and ‘influencing,’ he takes an ‘exhibitive’
approach. So “Close the door!” means “I WANT YOU To believe that I want you to
close the door.” I.e. I’m informinginfluencing VIA informing. “Detailed
discussions of Grice’s principle of conversational cooperation are found in
many of the essays collected in Grice (1989), as well as in the work by
linguists like Levinson (1983) and linguist/philosopher Neale (1992).
Extensions and refinements of Grice’s approach are developed by linguist Horn
(1972), linguist/philosopher Bach and philosopher Harnish (1979), linguist
Gazdar (1979), linguist/philosopher Atlas and philosopher Levinson (1981),
anthropologist Sperber and linguist Wilson (1986), linguist/philosopher Bach
(1994), linguisdt Levinson (2000), and linguist Carston (2002).). The Principle
of conversational cooperation and its conversational maxims allow Grice to draw
a distinction between two dimensions of an utterer’s meaning within the total
significance.” I never liked that Grice uses
“signification,” here when in “Meaning” he had said: “Words, for all that Locke
said, are NOT signs.” “We apply ‘sign’ to traffic signals, not to ‘dog’.” Bontly:
“That which is ‘closely related to the conventional meaning of the word’ uttered
is what the utterer has SAID (197544),” or the explicatum, or explicitum. That
which must instead be inferred with the aid of the principle of conversational
cooperation is what the utterer U has conversationally implicated, the IMPLICATURUM
( 49–50), or implicitum. This dichotomy is in several ways oversimplified.
First, Grice (1975, 1978) also makes room for ‘conventional’ implicaturums
(“She was poor BUT she was honest”) and non-conversational non-conventional implicaturums
(“Thank you,” abiding with the maxim, ‘be polite’), although these dimensions
are both somewhat controversial (cf. Bach’s attack on conventional implicaturum)
and can be set aside here. Also controversial is the precise delineation of
Grice’s notion of what is said.” He grants he is using ‘say’ ‘artifiicially,’
which means, “natural TO ME!.” Some (anthropologist Sperber and linguist
Wilson, 1986; linguist Carston, 1988, 2002; philosopher Recanati, 1993) hold
that ‘what is said,’ the DICTUM, the explicatum, or explicitum, is significantly
underdetermined by the conventional meaning of the word uttered, with the
result that considerable pragmatic intrusive processing must occur even to
recover what the utterer said.” And Grice allows
that an implicaturum can occur within the scope of an
operator.“Linguist/philosopher Bach disagrees, though he does add an
‘intermediate’ dimension (that of conversational ‘impliciture’) which is, in
part, pragmatically determined, enriched, or intruded. For my purpose, the
important distinction is between that element of meaning which is conventional
or ‘encoded’ and that element which is ‘inferred,’ ab-duced, or pragmatically
determined, whether or not it is properly considered part of what is said,” in
Grice’s admittedly artificial use of this overused verb! (“A horse says
neigh!”) A conversational implicaturum can itself be either particularized
(henceforth, PCIs) or generalized (GCIs) (56).” Most familiar examples of implicaturum
are particularised, where the inference to the utterer U’s intended meaning
relies on a specific assumption regarding the context of utterance.” Grice’s
first example, possibly, “Jones has beautiful handwriting” (Grice 1961).“Alter
that context much at all and the implicaturum will simply disappear, perhaps to
be replaced by another. With a generalised implicaturum, on the other hand, the
inference or abduction to U’s intended interpretation is relatively
context-independent, going through unless special clues to the contrary are
provided to defeat it.”Love the ‘defeat.’ Levinson cites one of Grice’s
unpublications as “Probability, defeasibility, and mood operators,” where Grice
is actually writing, “desirability.”!
“For
instance, an utterance of the sentence” ‘SOME residents survived the
earth-quake,’ would quite generally, absent any special clues to the contrary,
seem to implicate that not all survived. All survived, alas, seems to be, to
some, no news. Cruel world. No special ‘stage-setting’ has to be provided to
make the implicaturum appreciable. No particular context needs to be assumed in
order to calculate the likely intended meaning. All one needs to know is that
an utterer U who thought that everyone, all residents survived the earthquake
(or that none did?) would probably make this stronger assertion (in keeping
with Grice’s first sub-maxim of Quantity: ‘Make your contribution as
informative as required’).” Perhaps it’s best
to deal with buildings. “Somesome 75%, I would say -- of the buildings did not
collapse after the earth-quake on the tiny island, and fortunately, no fatalities
need be reported. It wasn’t such a big earth-quake as pessimist had predicted.” “A
Gricean should maintain that the ‘ambiguity’ of “some” -> “not all”
canvassed at the outset can all be explained in terms of a generalized
conversational implicaturum. For instance, linguist Horn shows, in his PhD on
English, how an exclusive use of ‘or’ can be treated as a consequence of the
maxim of Quantity. Roughly, since ‘p AND q’ is always ‘more informative,’
stronger, than ‘p or q’, an utterer U’s choosing to assert only the disjunction
would ordinarily indicate that he takes one or the other disjunct to be false.
He could assert the conjunction anyway, but then he would be violating Grice’s
first submaxim of Quality: ‘Do not say what you believe to be false’ For
similar reasons, the assertion of a disjunction would ordinarily seem to
implicate that the utterer U does not know which disjunct is true (otherwise he
would assert that disjunct rather than the entire disjunction) and hence, and
this is the way Grice puts it, which is technically, the best way, that the
utterer wants to be ‘interpreted’ as having some ‘non-truth-functional grounds’
for believing the disjunction (philosopher Grice, 1978; linguist Gazdar, 1979).
For recall that this all goes under the scope
of a psychological attitude. In “Method in psychological philosophy: from the
banal to the bizarre,” repr. in “The conception of value,” Grice considers
proper disjunctions: “The eagle is not sure whether to attack the rabbit or the
dove.” I think Loar plays with this too in his book for Cambridge on meaning
and mind and Grice. “Grice (1981) takes a similar line with
regard to asymmetric uses of ‘and’.”
Indeed,
I loved his “Jones got into bed and took off his clothes, but I do not want to
suggest in that order.” “Is that a linguistic offence?” Don’t think so!” “The
fourth submaxim of Manner,” ‘be orderly’ -- I tend to think this is ad-hoc and
that Grice had this maxim JUST to explain away the oddity of “She got a
children and married,” by Strawson in Strawson 1952. “says that utterers should
be ‘orderly,’ and when describing a sequence of events, an orderly presentation
would normally describe the events in the order in which they occurred. So an
utterance of (1b) (‘Jones took off his
trousershe had taken off his shoes already -- and got into bed.’ “would
ordinarily (unless the utterer U ‘indicates’ otherwise) implicate that Jones
did so in that order, hence the temporal reading of ‘and’.” “(Grice’s (1981)
account of asymmetric ‘and’ seems NOT to account for causal interpretations
like (1c).”Ryle says in “Informal logic,” 1953, in Dilemmas, “She felt ill and
took arsenic,” has the conscript ‘and’ of Whitehead and Russell, not the
‘civil’ ‘and’ of the informalist. “Oxonian philosopher R. C. S. Walkerwhat took
him to respond to Cohen? Walker quotes from Bostock, who was Grice’s tutee at
St. John’s -- (1975136) suggests that the causal reading can be derived from
the maxim of Relation.”Nowell-Smith had spoken of ‘be relevant’ in Ethics. But
Grice HAD to be a Kantian!“Since conversationalists are expected to make their
utterances relevant, one expects that conjoined sentences will ‘have some
bearing to one another’, often a causal bearing. More nearly adequate accounts
of the temporal and causal uses of ‘and’ (so-called ‘conjunction buttressing’)
are found in linguist/philosopher Atlas and linguist Levinson (1981) and in
linguist Levinson (1983, 2000). Linguist Carston (1988, 2002) develops a rival
pragmatic account within the framework of anthropologist Sperber’s and linguist
Wilson’s Relevance Theory, on which temporal and causal readings are
explicatures rather than implicaturums. For the purposes of this essay, it is
immaterial which of these accounts best accords with the data. In these and
many other cases, it seems that a general principle regarding communicative
RATIONALITY can provide an alternative to positing a semantic
ambiguity.”Williamson is lecturing at Yale that ‘rationality’ has little to do
with it!“But a Gricean goes a step further and claims that the implicaturum
account (when available) is BETTER than an ambiguity or polysemy account. One
possible argument for the stronger thesis is that the various specialised uses
of ‘or’ (etc.) bear all the usual hallmarks of a conversational implicaturum. An
implicaturum is: calculable (i.e. derivable from what is said or dictum or
explicatum or explicitum via the Principle of conversational cooperation and
the conversational maxims); cancellable (retractable without contradiction),
and; non-detachable (incapable of being paraphrased away) Grice, 1975, 50 and 57–58). They ought also to be, sort
of, universal.” (Cf. Elinor Keenan Ochs, “The universality of conversational implicaturum.”
I hope Williamson considers this. In Madagascar, they have other ‘norms’ of
conversation: since speakers are guarded, implicatura to the effect, “I don’t
know” are never invited! Unlike the true lexical ambiguity that arises from a
language-specific convention, an implicaturum derives rather from general
features of communicative RATIONALITY and should thus be similar across
different languages (philosopher Kripke, 1977; linguist Levinson, 1983).”I’m
not sure. Cfr. Ochs in Madagascar. But she is a linguist/anthropologist, rather
than a philosopher? From a philosophical point of view, perhaps the best who
treated this issues is English philosopher Martin Hollis in his essays on
‘rationality’ and ‘relativism’ (keywords!)“Since the ‘ambiguity’ in question
here has all these features, at least to some degree, the implicaturum approach
may well seem irresistible. It is well known, however, that none of the
features listed on various occasions by Grice are sufficient (individually or
jointly) to establish the presence of a conversational implicaturum (Grice,
1978; linguist Sadock, 1978). Take calculability.” Or how to ‘work it out,’ to
keep it Anglo-Saxon, as pretentious Grice would not! The main difficulty is
that a conversationalimplicaturum can become fossilized, or ‘conventionalised’
over time but remain calculable nonetheless, as happens with some ‘dead’
metaphors — one-time non-literal uses which congealed into a new conventional
meaning.” A linguist at Berkeley worked on this, Traugott, on items in the
history of the English language, or H-E-L, for short, H.O.T.E.L, history of the
English language. I don’t think Grice considers this. He sticks with old Roman
‘animal’ -> ‘non-human’, strictly, having a ‘soul,’ or animus, anima. (I
think Traugott’s focus was on verb forms, like “I have eaten,” meaning,
literally, “I possess eating,” or something. But she does quote Grice and
speaks of fossilization. “For instance, the expression.” ‘S went to the
bathroom’ (Jones?) could, for obvious reasons, be used with its original,
compositional, meaning to implicate that S ‘relieved himself’.” “The intended
meaning would still be calculable today.”Or “went to powder her nose?” (Or
consider the pre-Griceian (?) child’s overinformative, standing from table at
dinner, “I’m going to the bathroom to do number 2 (unless he is flouting the
maxim). “But the use has been absorbed, or encoded into some people’s grammar,
as witnessed by the fact that ‘S went to
the bathroom on the living room carpet.’ is not contradictory (linguist J. L.
Morgan, 1978; linguist Sadock, 1978).”I wonder what some contextualists at Yale
(De Rose) would say about that!? Cf. Jason Stanley, enfant terrible. “Grice’s
cancellability is similarly problematic. While one may cancel the exclusive
interpretation of ‘p or q’ (e.g. by adding ‘or possibly both’), the added
remark could just as well be disambiguating an ambiguous utterance as canceling
the implicaturum (philosopher Walker, 1975; linguist Sadock, 1978).”Excellent
POINT! Walker would be fascinated to see that Grice once coined ‘disimplicaturum’
for some loose uses. “Macbeth saw Banquo.” “That tie is yellow under that
light, but orange under this one.” Actually, Grice creates ‘disimplicaturum’ to
refute Davidson on intending: “Jones intends to climb Mt Everest next weekend.”
Intending DOES entail BELIEF, but people abuse ‘intend’ and use it ‘loosely,’
with one sense dropped. Similarly, Grice says, with “You’re the cream in my
coffee,” where the ‘disimplicaturum’ is TOTAL!“Non-detachability fares no
better. When two sentences are synonymous (if there is, pace Quine, such a
thing), utterances of them ought to generate the same implicaturum. But they
will also have the same semantic implications, so the non-detachability of an
alleged implicaturum shows very little if anything at all (linguist Sadock,
1978).”I never liked non-detachability, because it ENTAILS that there MUST be a
synonym expression: cfr. God? Divinity? “Universality is perhaps the best test
of the four.”I agree. When linguists like Elinor Keenan disregard this, I tend
to think: “the cunning of conversational reason,” alla Hollis. Grice was a
member of Austin’s playgroup, and the conversational MAXIMS were
‘universalisable’ within THAT group. That seems okay for both Kant AND
Hegel!“Since an implicaturum can fossilise into a conventional meanings,
however, it is always possible for a cross-linguistic alleged ‘ambiguity’ to be
pragmatic in some language though lexical in another.”Is that ‘f*rnication’? Or
is it Grice on ‘pushing up the daisies’ as an “established idiom” for ‘… is
dead’ in WJ5? Austin and Grice would I think take for granted THREE languages:
Greek and Roman, that they studied at their public schoolsand this is
important, because Grice says his method of analysis is somehow grounded on his
classical educationand, well, English. Donald Davidson, in the New World, would
object to the ‘substantiation’ that speaking of “Greek” as a language, say, may
entail.“So while Grice’s tests are suggestive, they supply no clear verdict on
the presence of an implicaturum. Besides these inconclusive tests for implicaturum,
Grice could also appeal to various diagnostic tests for alleged ambiguity.”
“And how to fail them,” to echo Zwicky. Grice himself suggests three, although
none of them prove terribly helpful.”Loved your terrible. Cfr. ‘terrific’. And
the king entering St. Paul’s cathedral: “Aweful!” meaning ‘awe-some!’“First,
Grice points out that each alleged sense Sn of an allegedly ambiguous word E
ought to be expressible ‘in a reasonably wide range of linguistic environments’
(1978117). The fact that the strong implicaturum of ‘or’ is UNavailable within
the scope of a negation, for instance, would seem to count AGAINST alleged
ambiguity or polysemy. On the other hand, the strong implicaturum of ‘or’ IS
available within the scope of a propositional-attitude verb. A strong implicaturum
of ‘and’ is arguably available in both environments, within the scope of a
negation, and within the scope of a psychological-attitude verb. So the first
test seems a wash.”Metaphorically, or implicaturally. J“Second, Grice says, if the
expression E is ambiguous with one sense S2 being derived (somehow) from the
initial or original or etymological sense S1, that derivative sense S2 ‘ought
to conform to whatever principle there may be which governs the generation of
derivative senses’ ( 117–118).”GRICE AT HIS BEST! I think he is trying to
irritate Quine, who is seating on second row at Harvard! (After all Quine
thought he was a field linguist!)Bontly, charmingly: “Not knowing the content
of thi principle Grice invokes— and Grice gives us no hint as to what it might
be — we cannot bring it, alas, to bear here!”I THINK he was thinking Ullman. At
Oxford, linguists were working on ‘semantics,’ cfr. Gardiner. And he just
thought that it would be Unphilosophical on his part to bore his philosophical
Harvard audience with ‘facts.’ At one point he does mention that the facts of
the history of the English language (how ‘disc’ can be used, etc.) are not part
of the philosopher’s toolkit?“Third and finally, Grice says, we must ‘give due
(but not undue) weight to MY INTUITIONS about the existence (or indeed
non-existence) of a putative sense S2 of a word E.’ (p. 120).”Emphasis on ‘my’
mine! -- As I say, I never had any intuition about an expression having an
extra-putative sense. Not even ‘bank,’since in Old Germanic, it’s all
etymologically related!Bontly: “But, even granting the point that ‘or’ is
NON-INTUITIVELY ambiguous in quite the same way that ‘bank’ IS, allegedly,
INTUITIVELY ambiguous, the source of our present difficulty is precisely the
fact that ‘p or q’ often *seems* intuitively to imply that one or the other
disjunct is false.”Grice apparently uses ‘intuition’ and ‘introspection’
interchangeably, if that helps? Continental phenomenological philosophers would
make MUCH of this! For Grice’s intuitions are HIS own. In a lecture at
Wellesley, of all places (in Grice 1989) he writes: “My problems with my use of
E arise from MY intuitions about the use of E. I don’t care how YOU use E.
Philosophy is personal.” Much criticised, but authentic, in a way!“Since he discounts
the latter intuition, Grice cannot place much weight on the former!”As I say,
Grice’s intuitions are hard to fathom! So are his introspections! Actually, I
think that Grice’s sticking with introspections and intuitions save him, as
Suppes shows in PGRICE ed Grandy and Warner, from being a behaviourist. He is,
rather, an intentionalist!“While a complete review of ambiguity tests is beyond
the scope of this essay, we have perhaps seen enough to motivate the
methodological problem with which we began: viz., that an, intuitive, alleged,
ambiguity seems fit to be explained either semantically (ambiguity thesis,
polysemy, bi-semy) or pragmatically/conversationally, with little by way of
direct evidence to tell us which is which!”“If philosophy generated no
problems, it would be dead!”Grice. J“Linguists
Zwicky and Sadock review several linguistic tests for ambiguity (e.g.
conjunction reduction) and point out that most are ill-suited to detect
ambiguities where the meanings in question are privative opposites,”Oddly,
Grice’s first publication ever was on “Negation and privation,” 1938!Bontly:
“i.e. where one meaning is a specialization or specification of the other (as
for instance with the female and neutral senses of ‘goose’).”Or cf. Urmson,
“There is an animal in the backyard.” “You mean Aunt Matilda?”Bontly: “Since
the putative ambiguities of ‘or’ and the like are all of this sort, it seems
inevitable that these tests will fail us here as well. For further discussion,
see linguist Horn (1989, 317–18 and 365–66)
and linguist Carston (2002, 274–77).It
is hardly surprising, therefore, to find that a Gricean typically falls back on
a methodological argument like parsimony, as instantiated in “M. O. R.”Let’s
now turn to Parsimony and Its Problems. It may, at first, be less than obvious
why an ambiguity or polysemy or bi-semy account should be deemed less
parsimonious than its Gricean rival.” Where the conventionalist or ambiguist
posits an additional sense S2, Grice adds, to S1, a conversational implicaturum,
I”. Cheap, but no free lunch! (Grice saves)Bontly: “Superficially, little seems
to be gained.” Ah, the surfaces of Oxford superficiality! “Looking closer,
however, the methodological virtues of the Grice’s approach seem fairly
clear.”Good!Bontly: “First, the principles and inference patterns that a
pragmatic or conversational account utilizes are independently motivated. The
principles and inference patterns are needed in any case to account for the
relatively un-controversial class of particularized implicatura, and they
provide an elegant approach to phenomena like figures of rhetoric, or speech --
metaphor, irony, meiosis, litotes, understatement, sarcasmcfr. Holdcroft -- and
tricks like Strawson’s presupposition. So it would seem that Grice can make do
with explanatory material already on hand, whereas the ambiguity or polysemy
theorist must posit a new semantic rule in each and every case. Furthermore,
the explanatory material has an independent grounding in considerations of
rationality.”I love that evening when Grice received a phonecall at Berkeley:
“Professor Grice: You have been appointed the Immanuel Kant Memorial Lecturer
at Stanford.” He gave the lectures on aspects of reason and reasoning!Bontly:
“Since conversation is typically a goal-directed activity, it makes sense for
conversationalists to abide by the Principle of Conversational Cooperation
(something like Kant’s categorical imperative, in conversational format) and
its (universalisable) conversational maxims, and so it makes sense for a co-conversationalist
to interpret the conversationalist accordingly. A pragmatic explanation is
therefore CHEAPhence Occam on ‘aeconomicus’ -- the principle it calls on being
explainable by — and perhaps even reducible to — facts about rational behavior
in general.”I loved your “REDUCE.” B. F. Loar indeed thought, and correctly,
that the maxims are ‘empirical generalisations over functional states.’
Genius!Bontly: A pragmatic account is not only more economic, or cheaper. It
also reveals an orderliness or systematicity that positing a separate lexical
ambiguity or polysemy or bisemy in each and every case would seem to miss
(linguist/philosopher Bach). To a Griceian, it is no accident that a sentential
connective or truth-functor (“not,” “and,” “or,” and “if”), a quantified
expression (Grice’s “all” and “some (at least one)”) and a description (Grice’s
“the”) all lend themselves to a weak and a stronger interpretation”Cf.
Holdcroft, “Weak or strong?” in “Words and deeds.”Bontly: “Note, for instance,
that a sentence with the logical form ‘Some Fs are Gs’, and the pleonethetic, to use Geach’s and
Altham’s coinage, ‘Most Fs are Gs’, and ‘A few Fs are Gs’ are all allegedly
‘ambiguous’ in the SAME way. Each of those expressions has an obvious weak
reading in addition to a stronger reading: ‘Not all Fs are Gs’.Good because
Grice’s first examination was: “That pillar-box seems red to me.” And he
analyses the oddness in terms of ‘strength.’ (Grice 1961). He tries to analyse
this ‘strength’ in terms of ‘entailment,’ but fails (“Neither ‘The pillar-box
IS red’ NOR ‘The pillar-box SEEMS red’ entail each other.”)Bontly: For the
conventionalist or polysemy theorist, there is no apparent reason why this
should be so. There is no reason, that is, why three etymologically unrelated
words (“some,” “most,” and “few”) should display the SAME pattern of alleged
ambiguity. The Gricean, on the other hand, explains each the SAME way, by
appealing to some rational principle of conversation. The implicatura are all
‘scalar’ quantity implicatura, attributable to the utterer U’s having uttered a
weaker, less informative, sentence than he might have.” Linguist Levinson,
1983). Together, these considerations make a persuasive case for the Grice’s
approach. A pragmatic explanation is more economical, and the resulting view of
conversation is more natural and unified. Since economy and unification are
both presumably virtues to be sought in a scientific or philosophical
explanation — virtues which for brevity I lump together under Occamist ‘parsimony’
— it would NOT be unreasonable to conclude that a pragmatic explanation is
(ceteris paribus) a better explanation. So it seems that Grice’s principle, the
“M. O. R.” is correct. Senses ought not to be multiplied when pragmatics will
do. Still, there are several reasons to be suspicious of the parsimony
argument. “I lay out three. It bears emphasis that none of these are objections
to the pragmatic approach per se.” I have no quarrel with the theory of
conversation or particular attempts to apply it to conversational phenomena.
The objections focus rather on the role that parsimony (or simplicity, or
generality, etc.) plays in arguments PRO the implicaturum and CONTRA ambiguity
or polysemy.” Then, there’s Dead Metaphors. First is a worry that parsimony is
too blunt an instrument, generalizing to unwanted conclusions. Versions of this
objection appear in philosopher Walker (1975), linguist Morgan (1978), and
linguist Sadock (1978).” More recently, Reimer (1998) and Devitt (forthcoming)
use it to argue against a Gricean treatment of the referential/attributive
distinction.”But have they read Grice’s VACUOUS NAMES? I know you did! Grice
notes: “My distinction has nothing to do with Donnellan’s!” Grice’s approach is
syntactic: ‘the’ and “THE,” identificatory and non-identificatory uses. R. M.
Sainsbury and D. E. Over have worked on this. Fascinating. Bontly: “For as with
the afore-mentioned so-called ‘dead’ metaphor, it can happen that a word has a
secondary use that is pragmatically predictable, and yet fully conventional. In
many such cases, of course, the original, etymological meaning is long
forgotten: e. g. the contemporary use of ‘fornication’, originally a euphemism
for activities done in fornice (that is, in the vaulted underground dwellings
that once served as brothels in Rome). (I owe this [delightful] example to Sam
Wheeler). Few speakers recall the original meaning, so the metaphor can no
longer be ‘calculated,’ as Grice’s “You’re the cream in my coffee!” (title of
song) can!” The metaphor is both dead _and buried_.”Still un-buriable?“In other
cases, however, speakers do possess the information to construct a Gricean
explanation, and yet the metaphor is dead anyway.”Reimer’s (1998) example of
the verb ‘incense’ is a case in point. One conventional meaning (‘to make or
become angry’) began life as a metaphorical extension of the other (‘to make
fragrant with incense’). The reason for the extension is fairly transparent
(resting on familiar comparisons of burning and emotion), but the use allegedly
represents an additional sense nonetheless.”What dictionaries have as ‘fig.’
But are we sure that when the dictionaries list things like 1., 2., 3., they
are listing SENSES!? Cf. Grice, “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says,”
to Austin, “And that’s where you make your big mistake.” Once Grice actually
opened the dictionary (he was studying ‘feeling + adj.’he got to ‘byzantine,’
finding that MOST adjectives did, and got bored!Bontly: Such examples suggest
that an implicaturum makes up an important source of semantic—and, according to
linguist Levinson (2000), syntactic—innovation. A linguistic phenomenon can
begin life as a pragmatic specialization or an extension and subsequently
become conventionalized by stages, making it difficult to determine at what point
(and for which ‘utterers’) a use has become fully conventional. One consequence
is that an expression E can have, allegedly, a second sense S2, even when a
pragmatic explanation appears to make it explanatorily superfluous, and
parsimony can therefore mislead.”I’m not sure dictionary readers read ‘fig.’ as
a different ‘sense,’ and lexicographers need not be Griceian in style!Bontly:
“A related point is that an ambiguity account needn’t be LESS unified than an implicaturum
account after all. If pragmatic considerations can explain the origin and
development of new linguistic conventions, the ambiguity or polysemy theorist
can provide a unified dia-chronic account of how several un-related expressions
came to exhibit similar patterns of alleged ‘ambiguity.’ Quantifiers like
‘some’, ‘most’, and ‘a few’ may be similarly allegedly ambiguous today because
they generated similar implicaturums in the past (cf. Millikan, 2001).”OKAY, so
that’s the right way to go then? Diachrony and evolution, right?Bontly: “Then,
there’s Tradeoffs. A ‘dead’ metaphor suggests that parsimony is too strong for
the pragmatist’s purposes, but as a pragmatic account could have hidden costs
to offset the semantic savings, parsimony may also be too weak! E. g. an implicaturum
account looks, at least superficially, to multiply (to use Occam’s term)
inferential labour, leaving it to the addressee to infer the utterer’s intended
meaning from the words uttered, the context, and the conversational principle.
Thus there are trade-offs involved, and the account which is semantically more
parsimonious may be less parsimonious all things considered.”Grice once invited
the “P. E. R. E.,” principle of economy of rational effort, though. Things
which seem to be psychologically UNREAL are just DEEMED, tacitly, to
occur.Bontly: “To be clear, this is not to suggest that the ambiguity or
polysemy account can dispense with inference entirely. Were the exclusive and
inclusive senses of ‘or’ BOTH lexically encoded (as they were in Old Roman,
‘vel’ and ‘aut,’ hence Whitehead’s choice of ‘v’ for ‘p v q’) still hearers
would need to infer from contextual clues which meaning were intended. The
worry is not, therefore, so much that the implicaturum account increases the
number of inferences which conversants or conversationalists have to perform.
The issue concerns rather the complexity of these inferences. Alleged
dis-ambiguation is a highly constrained process. In principle, one need only
choose the relevant sense Sn, from a finite list represented in the so-called
‘mental lexicon’. Implicaturum calculation, on the other hand, is a matter of
finding the best explanation (abductively, alla Hanson) for an utterer’s
utterance, the utterer’s meaning being introduced as an explanatory hypothesis,
answering to a ‘why’ question. Unlike dis-ambiguation, where the various
possible readings are known in advance, in the conversational explanation, the
only constraints are provided by the addressee’s understanding of the context
and the conversational principle. So it appears that Grice’s approach saves on
the lexical semantics by placing a greater inferential burden on utterer and
addressee.”But Grice played bridge, and loved those burdens. Stampe actually
gives a lovely bridge alleged counter-example to Grice (in Grice 1989).Bontly:
“Now, a Gricean can try to lessen this load in various ways. Grice can argue,
for instance, that the inference used to recover a generalised implicaturum is
less demanding than that for a particularized one, that familiarity with types
of generalised implicate can “stream-line” the inferential process, and so
on.”Love thatE. R. E., or principle of economy of rational effort,
above?!Bontly: “We examine these moves. There’s Justification. Another
difficulty with Grice’s appeals to parsimony is the most fundamental. On the
one hand, it can hardly be denied that parsimony plays a role in scientific, if
not philosophical, inference.” Across the sciences, if not in philosophy, it is
standard practice to cite parsimony (simplicity, generality, etc.) as a reason
to choose one hypothesis over another; philosophers often do the same.”Bontly’s
‘often’ implicates, ‘often not’! Grice became an opponent of his own minimalism
at a later stage of his life, vide his “Prejudices and predilections; which
become, the life and opinions of Paul Grice,” by Paul Grice!Bontly: “At the
same time, however, it remains quite mysterious, if that’s the word, why
parsimony (etc.) should be given such weight by Occamists like Grice. If it
were safe to assume that Nature is simple and economical, the preference for
theories with these qualities would make perfect sense. Sir Isaac Newton offers
such an ontological rationale for parsimony in the “Principia.” Sir Isaac
writes (in Roman?) “I am to admit no more cause of a natural thing than such as
are true and sufficient to explain its appearance.” “To this purpose, the
philosopher says that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when
less serves.” “For Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp
of a superfluous cause.” “While a blanket assertion about the simplicity of
Nature is hardly uncommon in the history of science, today it is viewed with
suspicion.” Bontly: “Newton’s reasons
were presumably theological.” “If I knew that the Creator values simplicity and
economy, I should expect the creatION to display these qualities as well.”
“Lacking much information about the Creator’s tastes, however, the assumption
becomes quite difficult, if not impossible, to support.”Cfr. literature on
‘biological diversity.’Bontly: “(Sober discusses several objections to an
ontological justification for the principle of parsimony. Philosopher of
science Mary Hesse surveys several other attempts to justify the use of
parsimony and simplicity in scientific inference. Philosophers of science today
are largely persuaded that the role of parsimony is ‘purely methodological’
epistemological, pragmatist, rather than ontological — that it is rational to
reject unnecessary posits (or complex, dis-unified theories) no matter what
Nature is like. One might argue, for instance, that the principle of parsimony
is really just a principle of minimum risk. The more existence claims one
accepts, the greater the chance of accepting a falsehood. Better, then, to do
without any existence claim one does not need. Philosopher J. J. C. Smart
attributes this view to John Stuart Mill.”Cf. Grice: “Not to bring more Grice
to the Mill.”Bontly: “Now, risk minimization may be a reasonable methodological
principle, but it does not suffice to explain the role of parsimony in natural
science. When a theoretical posit is deemed explanatorily superfluous, the
accepted practice is not merely to withhold belief in its existence but to
conclude positively that it does not exist. As Sober notes, ‘Occam’s razor
preaches atheism about unnecessary entities, not just a-gnosticism.’”
Similarly, Grice’s razor tells us that we should believe an expression E to be
unambiguous, aequi-vocal, monosemous, unless we have evidence for a second
meaning. The absence of evidence for this alleged additional, ‘multiplied’
‘sense’ is presumed to count as evidence that this alleged second, additional,
multiplied, sense is absent, does not exist. But an absence of evidence is not
the same thing as evidence of an absence.” The difficult question about
scientific methodology is why we should count one as the other. Why, that is,
should a lack of evidence for an existence claim count as evidence for a
non-existence claim? The minimum risk argument leaves this question unanswered.
Indeed, philosophers of science have had so little success in explaining why
parsimony should be a guide to truth that many are tempted to conclude that it
and the other ‘super-empirical virtues’ have no epistemic value whatsoever.
Their role is rather pragmatic, or aesthetic.”This is in part Strawson’s reply
in his “If and the horseshoe” (1968), repr. in PGRICE, in Grandy/Warner. He
says words to the effect: “Grice’s theory may be more BEAUTIFUL than mine, but
that’s that!” (Strawson thinks that ‘if’ acts as ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ but in
UNASSERTED clauses. So it’s a matter of a ‘conventional’ IMPLICATURUM to the
inferrability of “if p, q” or “p; so, q.” I agree with Strawson that Grice’s
account of ‘conventional’ implicaturum is not precisely too beautiful?Bontly:
“Parsimony can make a theory easier to understand or apply, and it pleases
those of us with a taste for desert landscapes, but (according to these
sceptics) they do not make the theory any more likely to be true.”The reference
to the ‘desert landscape’ is genial. Cfr. Strawson’s “A logician’s landscape.”
Later in life, Grice indeed found it unfair that an explanation of cherry trees
blooming in spring should be explained as a ‘desert landscape.’ “That’s
impoverishing it!”Bontly: “van Fraassen, for instance, tells us that a super-empirical
virtue ‘does not concern the relation between the theory and the world, but
rather the use and usefulness of the theory; it provide reasons to prefer the
theory independently of questions of truth.” “If that were correct, it would be
doubtful that parsimony can shoulder the burden Grice places on it.” “For then
the conventionalist may happily grant that a pragmatic explanation is clever
and elegant, and beautiful.” “The
conventionalist can agree that an implicaturum account comprehends a maximum of
phenomena with a minimum of theoretical apparatus.” “But when it comes to
truth, or alethic satisfactoriness, as Grice would prefer, a conventionalist
may insist that parsimony is simply irrelevant.” “One Gricean sympathizer who
apparently accepts the ‘aesthetic’ view of parsimony is the philosopher of
science R. C. S. Walker (1975), who claims that the ‘[c]hoice between Grice’s
and Cohen’s theories is an aesthetic matter’ and concludes that ‘we should not
regard either the Conversationalist Hypothesis or its [conventionalist] rivals
as definitely right or wrong.’” Cfr. Strawson in Grandy/Warner, but Strawson is
no Griceian sympathiser! “Now asking Grice to justify the principle of
parsimony may seem a bit unfair.” “Grice also assumes the reality of the
external world, the existence of intentional mental states, and the validity of
modus ponens.” “Need Grice justify these assumptions as well?” “Of course not!”
“But even if the epistemic value of parsimony is taken entirely for granted, it
is unclear why it should even count in semantics.” “All sides agree, after all,
that many, perhaps even most, expressions of natural language are allegedly
‘ambiguous.’” “There are both poly-semies, where one word has multiple, though
related, meanings (‘horn’, ‘trunk’), and homo-nymies, where two distinct words
have converged on a single phonological form (‘bat’, ‘pole’).” “The distinction between poly-semy and
homo-nymy is notoriously difficult to draw with any precision, chiefly because
we lack clear criteria for the identity of words (Bach).” “If words are
individuated phono-logically, there would be no homo-nyms.” “If words are
individuated semantically, there would be no poly-semies.” “Individuating words
historically leads to some odd consequences: e.g., that ‘bank’ is poly-semous
rather than homo-nymous, since the ‘sense’ in which it means financial
institution and the ‘sense’ in which it means edge of a river are derived from
a common source.” “I owe this example to David Sanford. For further discussion,
see Jackendoff.”Soon at Hartford. And Sanford is right!Bontly: “Given that
ambiguity is hardly rare, then, one wonders whether a semantic theory ought
really to minimize it (cf. Stampe, 1974).” “One might indeed argue that the
burden of proof here is on the pragmatist, not the ambiguity or polysemy
theorist.” “Perhaps we ought to assume, ceteris paribus, that every regular use
of an expression represents a SPECIAL sense.” “Such a methodological policy may
be less economical than Grice’s, but it does extend the same pattern of
explanation to all alleged ambiguities, and it might even accord better with
the haphazard ways in which natural languages are prone to evolve (Millikan,
2001).”Yes, the evolutionary is the way to go!Bontly: “So Grice owe us some
reason to think that parsimony and the like should count in semantics.” “He
needn’t claim, of course, that parsimony is always and everywhere a reason to
believe a hypothesis true.” “He needn’t produce a global justification for
Occam’s Razor, that is—a local justification, one specific to language, would
suffice.” “I propose to set aside the larger issue about parsimony in general,
therefore, and argue that Modified Occam’s Razor can be justified by
considerations peculiar to the study of language.” “Now for A Developmental
Account of Semantic Parsimony.” “My
approach to parsimony in linguistics is inspired by Sober’s work on parsimony
arguments in evolutionary biology.”And Grice was an evolutionary philosopher of
sorts.Bontly: “In Sober’s view, philosophers have misunderstood the role of
parsimony in scientific inference, taking it to function as a global,
domain-general principle of scientific reasoning (akin perhaps to an axiom of
the probability calculus).” “A more realistic analysis, Sober claims, shows
that parsimony arguments function as tacit references to domain-specific
process assumptions — to assumptions (whether clearly articulated or not) about
the process(es) that generate the phenomena under study.” “Where these
processes tend to be frugal, parsimony is a reasonable principle of
theory-choice.” “Where they are apt to be profligate, it is not.” “What makes
parsimony reasonable in one area of inquiry may, on Sober’s view, be quite
unrelated to the reasons it counts in another.” “Parsimony arguments in the units
of selection controversy, for instance, rest on one set of process assumptions
(i.e. assumptions about the conditions necessary for ‘group’ selection to
occur).” “The application of parsimony to ‘phylogenetic’ inference rests on a
completely different set of assumptions (about rates of evolutionary change).”
“As Sober notes, in either case the assumptions are empirically testable, and
it could turn out that parsimony is a reliable principle of inference in one,
both, or neither of these areas. Sober’s approach amounts to a thorough-going
local reductionism about parsimony.It counts in theory-choice if and only if
there are domain-specific reasons to think the theory which is more economical
(in some specifiable respect) is more likely to be true. The ‘only if’ claim is
the more controversial part of the bi-conditional, and I need not defend it
here. For present purposes I need only the weaker claim that domain-specific
assumptions can be sufficient to justify using parsimony — that parsimony is a
sensible principle of inference if the phenomena in question result from
processes themselves biased, as it were, towards parsimony. Now, in
natural-language semantics, the phenomena in question are ordinarily taken to
be the semantic rules or conventions shared by a community of speakers.”Cf.
Peacocke on Grice as applied to ‘community of utterers,’ in Evans/McDowell,
Truth and meaning, Oxford. Bontly: “The task is to uncover the ‘arbitrary’
mappings between a sound and a meaning (or concepts or referent) of which
utterers have tacit knowledge. This ‘semantic competence’ is shaped by both the
inputs that language learners encounter and the cognitive processes that guide
language acquisition from infancy through adulthood. So the question is whether
that input and these processes are themselves biased toward semantic parsimony
and against the acquisition of multiple meanings for single phonological forms.
As I shall now argue, there are several reasons to suspect that such a bias
should exist. Psychologists often conceptualize learning in general and word
learning in particular as a process of generating and testing hypotheses. A
child (or, in many cases, an adult) encounters an unfamiliar word, forms one or
more hypotheses as to its possible meaning, checks the hypotheses against the
ways in which he hears the word used, and finally adopts one such hypothesis.
This ‘child-as-scientist’ model is plainly short on details, but whatever
mechanism implements the generating and testing, it would seem that the process
cannot be repeated with every subsequent exposure to a word. Once a hypothesis
is accepted — a word learned — the process effectively halts, so that the next
time the child hears that word, he doesn’t have to hypothesize. Instead, the
child can access the known meaning and use it to grasp the intended message.
For that reason, an unfamiliar word ought to be the only one to trigger the
learning process, and that of course makes ambiguity problematic. Take a person
who knows one meaning of an ambiguous word, but not the other. To him, the word
is not unfamiliar, even when used with an unfamiliar meaning. At least, it will
not sound unfamiliar. So, the learning process will not kick in unless some
other source of evidence suggests another, as-yet-unknown meaning. Presumably
the evidence will come from ‘anomalous’ utterances: i.e. uses that are
contextually absurd, given only the familiar meaning. This is not to say, of
course, that hearing one anomalous utterance would be sufficient to re-start
the learning process. Since there are other reasons why an utterance may seem
anomalous (e.g. the utterer simply misspoke), it might take several anomalies
to convince one that the word has another meaning. In the absence of anomalies,
however, it seems highly unlikely that learners would seriously entertain the
possibility of a second sense. A related point is that acquisition involves, or
is at least thought to involve, a variety of ‘boot-strapping’ operations where
the learner uses what he knows of the language in order to learn more.”Oddly
Grice has a bootstrap principle (it relates to having one’s metalanguage as
rich as one’s object-language.Bontly: “It has been argued, for instance, that
children use semantic information to constrain hypotheses about words’
syntactic features (Pinker) and, conversely, syntactic information to constrain
hypotheses about words’ semantic features (Gleitman). Likewise, children must
surely use their knowledge of some words’ meanings to constrain hypotheses as
to the meanings of others, thus inferring the meanings of unfamiliar words from
context. However, that process only works insofar as one can safely assume that
the familiar words in an utterance are typically used with their familiar
meanings. If it were assumed that familiar words are typically used with
unknown meanings, the bootstraps would be too weak. Together, these
considerations point to the hypothesis that language acquisition is
semantically conservative. Children will posit new meanings for familiar words
only when necessary—only when they encounter utterances that make no sense to
them, even though all the words are familiar. Interestingly, experimental work
in language acquisition provides empirical evidence for much the same
conclusion. Psychologists have long observed that children have considerable
difficulties learning and using homo-nyms (Peters and Zaidel), leading many to
suspect that young children operate under the helpful, though mistaken,
assumption that a word can have but one meaning (Slobin). Children have similar
difficulties acquiring synonyms and may likewise assume that a given meaning
can be represented by at most one word. (Markman & Wachtel, see Bloom for a
different explanation). I cannot here survey the many experimental studies
bearing on this hypothesis, but one series of experiments conducted by Michele
Mazzocco is particularly germane. Mazzocco presents children from several
age-groups, as well as adults, with stories designed to mimic one’s first
encounter with the secondary meaning of an ambiguous word. To control the
effects of antecedent familiarity with secondary meanings, the stories used
familiar words (e.g., ‘rope’) as if they had further unknown meanings—as
‘pseudo-homo-nyms’.For comparison, other stories included a non-sense word
(e.g. ‘blus’) used as if it had a conventional meaning — as a ‘pseudo-word’ —
to mimic one’s first encounter with an entirely unfamiliar word.”Cf. Grice’s
seminar at Berkeley: “How pirots karulise elatically: some simpler ways.”“A
pirot can be said to potch or cotch an
obble as fang or feng or fid with another obble.”“A person can be said to
perceive or cognize an object as having the property f or f2 or being in a
relation R with another object.”Bontly: Some stories, finally, used only
genuine words with only their familiar meanings. After hearing a story,
subjects are presented with a series of illustrations and asked to pick out the
item referred to in the story. In a subsequent experiment, subjects had to act
out their interpretations of the stories. In the pseudo-homo-nym condition, one
picture would always illustrate the word’s conventional but contextually
inappropriate meaning, one would depict the unfamiliar but contextually
appropriate meaning, and the rest would be distractors. As one would expect,
adults and older children (10- to 12-year-olds) performed equally well on these
tasks, reliably picking out the intended meanings for familiar words, non-sense
words and pseudo-homonyms alike. Young children (3- to 5-year-olds), on the
other hand, could understand the stories where familiar words were used
conventionally, and they were reasonably good at inferring the intended
meanings of non-sense words from context, but they could not do so for
pseudo-homonyms. Instead, they reliably chose the picture illustrating the familiar
meaning, even though the story made that meaning quite inappropriate. These
results are noteworthy for several reasons. It is significant, first of all,
that spontaneous positing of ambiguities did not occur. As long as the known
meaning of a word comported with its use in a story, subjects show not the
slightest tendency to assign that word a new, secondary meaning—just as one
would expect if the acquisition process were semantically conservative. Second,
note that performance in the non-sense word condition confirms the familiar
finding that young children can acquire the meanings of novel words from
context — just as the bootstrapping procedure suggests. Unlike older children
and adults, however, these young children are unable to determine the meanings
of pseudo-homo-nyms from context, even though they could do so for pseudo-words
— exactly what one would expect if young children assumed that words can have
one meaning only. Why young children would have such a conservative bias
remains controversial. Unfortunately it would take us too far afield to delve
into this debate here. Doherty finds evidence that the understanding of
ambiguity is strongly correlated with a grasp of synonymy, suggesting that
these biases have a common source.” Doherty also finds evidence that the
understanding of ambiguity/synonymy is strongly predicted by the ability to
reason about false beliefs, suggesting the intriguing hypothesis that young
children’s biases are due to their lack of a representational ‘theory of mind’).” Cf. Grice on transmission of true beliefs in
“Meaning, revisited.”a transcendental argument.Bontly: “Nonetheless, Mazzocco’s
results provide empirical evidence for our conjecture that a person will
typically posit a second meaning for a known word only when necessary (and, as
with young children, not always then). And that, of course, is precisely the
sort of process assumption that would make Grice’s “M. O. R.” a reasonable
principle for theory choice in semantics. For we have been operating under the
assumption that the principal task of linguistic semantics is to describe the
competent speaker’s tacit linguistic knowledge. If that knowledge is shaped by
a process biased toward semantic parsimony, our semantic theorizing ought
surely to be biased in the same direction. Is Pragmatism Vindicated?” That
said, the question is still open whether Grice’s “M. O. R.,” understood now
developmentally, ontogenetically, and not phylogenetically, as perhaps Millikan
would prefer, has such consequences as Gricea typically assumes. In particular,
it remains for us to consider whether and, if so, when the above process
assumptions favor implicaturum hypotheses over ambiguity hypotheses, and the
answer would seem to hang on two further issues. First, there is in each case
the question whether a child learning the language will find it necessary to
posit a second sense for a given expression. The fact that linguists, apprised
as they are of the principles of conversation, find it unnecessary to introduce
a second sense for (e.g.) ‘or’ does NOT imply that children would find it
unnecessary. For one thing, children might acquire the various uses of ‘or’
well before they have any pragmatic understanding themselves.”Cfr. You can eat
the cake or the sandwich.”Bontly: Even if they do not, the order in which the
various uses are acquired could make considerable difference.It may be, for
instance, that a child who first learned the inclusive use of ‘or’ would have
no need to posit a second exclusive sense, whereas a child who originally
interpreted ‘or’ exclusively might need eventually to posit an additional,
inclusive sense. So we may well have to determine what meaning children first
attach to an expression in order to determine whether they would find it
necessary to posit a second. The issues raised above are pretty clearly
empirical ones, and significant inter-personal differences could complicate
matters considerably. Just for the sake of argument, however, let us grant that
children do indeed first learn to interpret ‘or’ inclusively, to interpret
‘and’ as mere conjunction, and so on. Let us assume, that is, that the meanings
which Grice typically takes to be conventional are just that. In fact, the
assumption that weak uses are typically learned first has garnered some empirical
support, as one referee brought to my attention. Paris shows that children are
less likely than adults to interpret ‘or’ exclusively (see also Sternberg, and
Braine and Rumain). More recent experimental work indicates that children first
learn to interpret ‘and’ a-temporally (Noveck and Chevaux) and ‘some’ weakly
(as compatible with ‘all’) (Noveck, 2001). Even so, it remains an interesting
question whether children would posit secondary senses for any of these
expressions, and Grice would be on firm ground in arguing that they would not.
First, the ‘ambiguities’ discussed at the outset all involve secondary uses
which can, with the help of pragmatic principles, be understood in terms of the
presumed primary meaning of the expression. If a child, encountering this
secondary use for the first time, already knows the primary meaning, and if he
has moreover an understanding of the norms of conversation—if he is a ‘Griceian
child’ —, he ought to be able to understand the secondary use perfectly well.
He can recover the implicaturum and infer the speaker’s meaning from the
encoded meaning of the utterance. To the ‘Griceian child,’ therefore, the
utterance would not be anomalous. It would make perfect sense in context,
giving him no reason to posit a secondary meaning. But what about children who
are not yet Griceans — children too young to understand pragmatic principles or
to have the conceptual resources to make inferences about other people’s likely
communicative intentions? While there seems to be no consensus as to when
pragmatic abilities emerge, several considerations suggest that they develop
fairly early. Bloom argues that pragmatic understanding is part of the best
account of how children learn the meanings of words. Papafragou discusses
evidence that children can calculate implicaturums as early as age three. Such
children, knowing only the primary meaning of the expression, would be unable
to recover the conversational implicaturum and thus unable to grasp the
secondary use of the expression via the pragmatic route. Nonetheless, I argue
that they would still (at least in most cases) find it unnecessary to posit a
second meaning for the expression. Consider: the ‘ambiguities’ at issue all
involve secondary meanings which are specificatory, being identical to the
primary but for some additional feature making it more restricted or specific.
The primary and second meanings would thus be privative, as opposed to polar,
opposites; Zwicky and Sadock). What a speaker means when he uses the expression
in this secondary way, therefore, would typically imply the proposition he
would mean if he were speaking literally (i.e. if he were using the primary
meaning of the expression). One could thus say something true using the
secondary sense only in contexts where one could say something true using the
primary sense—whenever ‘P exclusive-or Q’ is true, so is ‘P inclusive-or Q’;
whenever ‘P and-then Q’ is true, so is ‘P and Q’; and so on. Thus even when the
intended meaning involves the alleged second sense, the utterance would still
come out true if interpreted with the primary sense in mind. And this means,
crucially, that the utterance would not seem anomalous, there being no obvious
clash between the primary interpretation of the utterance and the
conversational context. The utterance may well be pragmatically inappropriate
when interpreted this way, but our pre-Gricean child is insensitive to such
niceties. Otherwise, he would be already a ‘Gricean’ child. On our account,
therefore, the pre-Gricean child still sees no need to posit a second meaning
for the expression, even though he could not grasp the intended (specificatory)
meaning. We may illustrate the above with the help of an ‘ambiguity’ in the
indefinite description (“a dog”) made famous by Grice. A philosopher would
ordinarily take an expressions of the form ‘an F’ to be a straightforward
existential quantifier, “(Ex)”, as would seem to be the case in ‘I am going to
a meeting’ On the other hand, an utterance of ‘I broke a finger’ seems to imply
that it is my finger which I broke (unless you are a nurseI think Horn’s
cancellation goes), whereas ‘I saw a dog in the backyard’ would seem to carry
the opposite sort of implication — i.e. that it was not my dog which I
saw.”Grice finds this delightful ‘reductio’ of the sense-positer: “a” would
have _three_ senses!Bontly: “We have then the potential for a three-way
ambiguity, but our ruminations on word learning argue against it.”Take a child
who has learned (somehow) the weak (existential quantier) use of ‘an F’ (Ex)Fx,
but has for some reason never been exposed to strong uses: ‘my,’ ‘not mine.’
Now the child hears his mother say ‘Come look! There is a dog in the backyard!’
Running to the window, the child sees not his mother’s pet dog Fido, but some
strange dog, that is not her mother’s. To an adult, this would be entirely
predictable.” Using the indefinite description ‘a dog’ (logical form, “(Ex)Dx”)
instead of the name for the utterer’s dog would lead one to expect that Fido
(the utterer’s dog) is not the dog in question.”Actually, like Ryle, Grice has
a shaggy-dog story in WJ5, “That dog is hairy-coated.” “Shaggy, if you must!”.
Bontly: “And if the child were of an age to have a rudimentary understanding of
the pragmatic aspects of language use, he would make the same prediction and
thus see no need here to posit a second ‘sense’ for ‘an F,’ and take ‘not mine’
as an implicaturum.”It’s different with what Grice would have as an
‘established idiom’ (his example, “He’s pushing up the daisies,” but not “He is
fertilizing the daffodils”) as one might argue that “I broke a finger” is.
Bontly: “The child would not, because the intended, contextually appropriate
interpretation would be clear given the primary meaning plus pragmatics, or implicaturum.
But even if the child fails to grasp the intended meaning of his mother’s
remark, it still seems unlikely that the child would be compelled to posit an
ambiguity. No matter what the child’s mother means, there is, after all, a dog
in the backyard (“Gotcha! That’s _a_ dog, my Fido is, ain’t it?!”). So the
primary interpretation still yields a true proposition. While the ‘pre-Gricean
child’ thus misses (part of) the intended meaning of the utterance, still he
would not experience a clash between his interpretation and the contextually appropriate
interpretation. Perhaps the pre-Gricean child could be forced to see an
anomaly. Consider the following example. A parent offers her pre-Gricean child
dessert, saying, ‘Ice-cream, or cake?’ When the child helps himself to some of
each, the mother removes the cake with a look of annoyance and says:‘I said
ice-cream OR cake’. “While the mother’s
behavioural response makes it abundantly clear that the child’s ‘inclusive’
interpretation is inappropriate, there are several reasons why he might still
refrain from positing an ambiguity. For one, young children, who are more
Griceian (even pre-Griceian) and logical than a few adults, appear to operate
under the assumption that a word can have one meaning only, and it may be that
pre-Gricean children are simply unable to override this assumption. This would
seem particularly likely if Doherty is right that the ability to understand
ambiguity requires a robust ‘theory of mind’.At any rate, the position taken
here is that recognition of anomaly is necessary for one to posit a second
meaning, not that it is sufficient. Contrast this with a similar case where,
coming to the window, the child sees no dog but does see (e.g.) a motorcycle, a
tree, a bird, and a fence.Then he would have reason to consider an ambiguity,
though other explanations might also fit.” “Perhaps Mom was joking or
hallucinating.” The claim is, then, that language acquisition works in such a
way as to make it unlikely that learners would introduce a second senses for
the ‘ambiguities’ in question. Of course, that claim is contingent on a very
large assumption — viz., that the meaning which Grice take to be lexically
‘encoded’ is indeed the primary meaning of the expression — and that assumption
may be mistaken.” In the continuing debate over Donnellan’s
referential/attributive distinction, for instance, Grice takes it as
uncontroversial that Russell on ‘the’ provides at least one of the conventional
interpretations for sentences of the form ‘The king of France is bald’ (i.e.,
the attributive interpretation).” Grice’s example in “Vacuous names,” that
Bontly quotes, is “Jones’s butler mixed
our coats and hats,” when “Jones’s butler” is actually Jones’s haberdasher
dressed as a butler for the occasion.” So Grice distinguishes between THE
butler (identificatory) and ‘the’ butler (non-identificatory, whoever he might
be). Bontly: From there, they argue that we needn’t posit a secondary
(referential) semantics for descriptions since the referential use can be
captured by Russell’s theory supplemented by Grice’s pragmatics. Grice, 1969
(Vacuous Names); Kripke, 1977; Neale, 1990). From a developmental perspective,
however, the ‘uncontroversial’ assumption that Russell on ‘the’ provides the
primary meaning for description phrases is certainly questionable. It being
likely that the vast majority of descriptions children hear early in life are
used referentially, Grice’s position could conceivably have things exactly
backwards— perhaps the referential is primary with the attributive acquired
later, either as an additional meaning or a pragmatic extension. Still, the
fact, if it is a fact, that a referential use is more common in children’s
early environment does not imply that the referential is acquired first.”
Exclusive uses of ‘or’ are at least as frequent as inclusive uses, and yet
there is a good deal of evidence that the inclusive is developmentally primary.
(Paris, Sternberg, Braine and Rumain). Either way, the point remains that
plausible assumptions about language acquisition do indeed justify a role for
parsimony in semantics. These ‘process’ assumptions may, of course, turn out to
be incorrect.” If the evidence points the other way—if it emerges that the
learning process posits ambiguities quite freely—then Grice’s “M. O. R.” could
conceivably be groundless.”Making it a matter of empirical support or lack
thereof, and that was perhaps why Millikan thought that was the wrong way to
go? But then if she thought the evolutionary was the right way to go, wouldn’t
THAT make Grice’s initially ‘sort of’ analytic pragmatist methodological
philosophical decision a matter of fact or lack thereof? Bontly: “Nonetheless,
we can see now that the debate between Grice and the conventionalists is
ultimately an empirical, rather than, as Grice perhaps thougth, a conceptual one.
Choices between pragmatic and semantic accounts may be under-determined by
Grice’s intuitions about meaning and use, but they need not be under-determined
tout court. Then there’s Tradeoffs, Dead Metaphors, and a Dilemma. The
developmental approach to parsimony provides some purchase on the problems
regarding tradeoffs and dead metaphors as well. The former problem is that
parsimony can be a double-edged sword. While an ambiguity account does multiply
senses, the implicaturum account appears to multiply inferential labour.
Hearers have to ‘work out’ or ‘calculate’ the utterer’s meaning from the
conversational principle, without the benefit of a list of possible meanings as
in disambiguation. Pragmatic inference thus seems complex and time-consuming. But
the fact is that we are rarely conscious of engaging in any reasoning of the
sort Grice requires, pace his Principle of Economy of Rational Effort.
Consequently, the claim that communicators actually work through all these
complicated inferences seems psychologically unrealistic. To combat these
charges, Grice’s response is to claim that implicaturum calculation is largely
unconscious and implicit.”Indeed Grice’s principle of economy of rational
effort. Bontly: “Background assumptions can be taken for granted, steps can be
skipped, and only rarely need the entire process breach the surface of
consciousness. This picture seems particularly plausible with a generalised implicaturum
as opposed to a particularized one.” When a particular use of an expression E,
though unconventional, has become standard or regular (“I broke a finger”?
“He’s pushing up the daisies”), the inferential process can be considerably
stream-lined; it gets ‘short-circuited’ or ‘compressed by precedent’ (Bach and
Harnish). “Bach’s and Harnish’s notion of short-circuited inference is similar
to but not quite the same as J. L. Morgan’s notion of short-circuited implicaturum.
The latter involves conventions of use (as Searle would put it), to which Bach
and Harnish see their account as an alternative. Levinson objects to Bach’s and
Harnish’s characterization of default inferences as those compressed by the
weight of precedent. A generalised implicaturum, Levinson says, ‘is generative,
driven by general heuristics and not dependent on routinization’ But Levinson’s
complaint against Bach and Harnish may seem uncharitable. Even on Bach’s and
Harnish’s view, where a default inference is that ‘compressed by the weight of
precedent’, a generalised implicaturum is still generative: it is still generated
by the maxims of conversation. Only the stream-lined character of the inference
is dependent on precedent, not the implicaturum itself. If the addressee has
calculated the EXCLUSIVE meaning of ‘or’ enough times in the past (from his mother, we’ll assume) it becomes the
default, allowing one to proceed directly to the exclusive interpretation
(unless something about the context provides a clue that the standard
interpretation would here be inappropriate. Now, the idea that the generalised implicaturum
can be the default interpretation, reached without all the fancy inference,
provides an obvious reply to the worry about tradeoffs. While it is true that a
pragmatic inference, as Grice calls it, in contrast with the ‘logical
inference, -- “Retrospective Epilogue” -- are in principle abductive, fairly
complex and potentially laborious, familiarity can simplify the process
enormously, to the point where it becomes no more difficult than
dis-ambiguation.” But the appeal to a default interpretation raises an interesting
difficulty that (to my knowledge) Grice never adequately addressed. It is now
quite unclear why this default interpretation should be considered an implicaturum
rather than an additional sense of the expression.”Because it’s
cancellable?Bontly: “To say that it is a default interpretation is, after all,
to say that utterers and addressees learn to associate that interpretation with
the type of expression in question. The default meaning is known in advance,
and all one has to do is be on the lookout for information that could rule it
out. “‘Short-circuited’ implicaturum-calculation is thus hard to differentiate
from disambiguation, making Grice’s hypothesis look more like a notional
variant than a real competitor to the ambiguity hypothesis. Insofar as Grice
has considered this problem, his answer appears to be that linguistic meanings,
being conventional, are inherently arbitrary.”cf. Bach and Harnish, 1979, 192–195).”Indeed, in his evolutionary take on
language, it all starts with Green’s self-expression. You get hit, and you
express pain unvoluntarily. Then you proceed to simulate the response in
absence of the hit, but the meaning is “I’m in pain.” Finally, you adopt the
conventions, arbitrary, and say, ‘pain,’ which is only arbitrarily connected with,
well, the pain. It is the last stage that Grice stresses as ‘artificial,’ and
‘arbitrary,’ “non-iconic,” as he retorts to Peirceian terminology he was
familiar with since his Oxford days. Bontly: “The exclusive use of ‘or’, on the
other hand, is entirely predictable from the conversational principle, so there
is nothing arbitrary about it. Thus the exclusive interpretation cannot be part
of the encoded meaning, even if it is the default interpretation. Familiarity
with that use, in other words, can remove the need to go through the canonical
inference, but it does not change the fact that the use has a ‘natural’ (i.e.,
non-conventional, principled, indeed rational) explanation. It doesn’t change
the fact that it is calculable. At this point, however, Grice’s defense of
default pragmatic interpretations collides with our remaining issue, the
problem of a dead metaphor, such as “He is pushing up the daisies.”” Or as
Grice prefers, an ‘established’ or ‘recognised’ ‘idiom.’Bontly: “A metaphor and
other conversational implicatura can become conventionalized and ‘die’, turning
into new senses. In many such cases the original rationale for the use is long
forgotten, but in other cases the dead metaphor remains calculable. A dead
metaphors thus pose a nasty, macabre?, dilemma for Grice.”Especially if the implicaturum
is “He is dead”!Bontly: “On the one hand, it is tempting to argue that a dead
metaphor involves a new conventional meaning precisely because the
interpretation in question is no longer actually inferred via Gricean
inferences (though one could do so if one had to—if, say, one somehow forgot
that the expression had this secondary meaning). If a conversational implicaturum
had to be not just calculaBLE but actually calculatED, that would suffice to
explain why this one-time, one-off, implicaturum is now semantically
significant. But that reply is apparently closed to pragmatists, for then it
will be said that the same is true of (e.g.) the exclusive use of ‘or.’ The
exclusive interpretation is certainly calculabLE, but since no one actually
calculatES it (except in the most unusual of circumstances, as Grice at
Harvard!), the implication should be considered semantic, not pragmatic. On the
other hand, Grice might maintain that an implicaturum need only be calculabLE
and stick by their view that the exclusive reading of ‘or’ is conversationally
implicated. But then we shall have to face the consequence that many a dead
metaphor (“He is pushing up the daisies”) is likewise calculabLE and thus,
according to the present view, ought not to be considered conventional meanings
of the expressions in question, which in most cases seems quite wrong.”I’m
never sure what Grice means by an ‘established idiom.’ Established by whom?
Perhaps he SHOULD consult the dictionary every now and then! Sad the access to
OED3 is so expensive!Bontly: What one needs, evidently, is some reason to treat
these two types of cases differently.To treat the exclusive use of ‘or’ as an implicaturum
(even though it is only rarely calculatED as such) while at the same time to
view (e.g.) the once metaphorical use of ‘incense’ (or ‘… pushing up the
daisies”) as semantically significant (even though it remains calculabLE).” And
the developmental account of parsimony offers just such a reason. On the
present view, the reason that the ambiguity account has the burden of proof has
to do with the nature of the acquisition, learning, ontogenetical process and
specifically with the presumption that language learners will avoid postulating
unnecessary senses. But the implicaturum must be calculable by the learner,
given his prior understanding of the expression E and his level of pragmatic
sophistication.”Grice was a sophisticated. As I think Dora B.-O knows, Moore
has been claiming that Grice’s idea that animals cannot mean, because they are
not ‘sophisticated’ enough, is an empirical claim, even for Grice!Bontly: “t
may be, therefore, that children at the relevant developmental stage have no
difficulty understanding the exclusive use of ‘or’ (etc.) as an implicaturum
and yet lack the understanding necessary to predict that ‘incense’ could be
used to mean to make or become angry, or that to say of someone that he ‘is
pushing up the daisies,’ means that, having died and getting buried, the corpse
is helping the flowers to grow. The child might not realize, for instance, that
‘incense’ also means an aromatic substance that burns with a pleasant odour,
and even those who do probably lack the general background knowledge necessary
to appreciate the metaphorical connections between burning and emotion.”Cf.
Turner and Fauconnier on ‘blends.’Bontly: Either way, the metaphor would be
dead to the child, forcing him to learn that use the same way they learn any
arbitrary convention.”It may do to explore ‘established idioms’ in, say, parts
of England, which are not so ‘established’ in OTHER parts. Nancy Mitford with
his U and non-U distinction may do. “He went to Haddon Hall” invites, for
Mitford, the ‘unintended’ implicaturum that the utterer is NOT upper-class.
“Surely we drop “hall.’ What else can Haddon be?” But the inference may be
lacking for a non-U addressee or utterer. Similarly, in the north of England,
“our Mary,” invites the implicaturum of ‘affection,’ and this may go over the
head of members of the south-of-England community.Bontly: “The way out of the
dilemma, then, is to look to learning.”Alla Kripkenstein?Bontly: To the problem
of tradeoffs, Grice can reply that it is better to multiply (if we must use the
Occamist verb) inferenceslogical inference and pragmatic inference -- than
multiply senses because language acquisition is biased in that direction. And
Grice may likewise answer the problem of a dead metaphor, or established idiom
like, “He’s been pushing up the daisies for some time, now. The reason that
Grice’s “M. O. R.” does not mandate an implicaturum account for Grice as well
is that such a dead metaphor or established idiom is not calculable by children
at the time they learn such expressions, even if they are calculable by some
adult speakers.”Is that a fact? I would think that a child is a ‘relentless
literalist,’ as Grice called Austin. “Pushing up the daisies?” “I don’t see any
daisies!”I think Brigitte Nerlich has a similar example re: irony: MOTHER: What
a BEAUTIFUL day! (ironically)CHILD: What do you mean? It’s pouring and nasty. MOTHER:
I was being ironic.I don’t think the child is going to posit a second sense to
‘beautiful’ meaning ‘nasty.’Bontly: “For the deciding question in applying
Grice’s “M. O. R.” is NOT whether the implicaturum account is available to a
philosopher like Grice, but whether it is available to the learner! On this way
of carving things up, by the way, some alleged ambiguities which Grice would
treat as implicatura could turn out to be semantically significant after all. Likewise,
some allegedly dead metaphor may turn out to be very much alive.” Look! He did
kick the bucket!” “But he’s PRETENDING to die, dear! Some uses, finally, may
vary from utterer to utterer, there being no guarantee that every utterer will
have learned the use in the same way. As a conclusion, a better understanding
of developmental processes might therefore enlarge our appreciation of the ways
in which semantics and pragmatics interact.”Indeed.REFERENCES Atlas, J. D.
“Philosophy without Ambiguity.” Oxford: Clarendon Press. E: Wolfson, Oxford.
Philosopher. And S. Levinson, “It-clefts, informativeness, and logical form:
Radical pragmatics (revised standard version),” in P. Cole (ed.), Radical
Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Bach, K. “Thought and Reference,”
Oxford.“Conversational impliciture,” Mind & Language, 9And R. Harnish,
“Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloom“How
Children Learn the Meanings of Words,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. “Mind-reading, communication and the learning
of names for things,” Mind & Language, 17Braine, M. and Rumain, B.
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“Pragmatics: A Reader,” Oxford Devitt, M. “The case for referential
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Doherty, M. “Children’s understanding of homonymy: meta-linguistic awareness
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Dordrecht: Reidel. Repr. in part in Ostertag, “Definite descriptions,”
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“Language Learnability and Language Development,” Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Semantics, 4. New York: Academic Press.Refs: The Grice Papers, BANC, Bancroft.
MESURA
-- CUM-MESURATUM -- commensuratum: There’s commensurability and there’s
incommensurability“But Protagoras never explies what makes man commensurableonly
implies it!” In the philosophy of science, the property exhibited by two
scientific theories provided that, even though they may not logically
contradict one another, they have reference to no common body of data.
Positivist and logical empiricist philosophers of science like Carnap had long
sought an adequate account of a theoryneutral language to serve as the basis
for testing competing theories. The predicates of this language were thought to
refer to observables; the observation language described the observable world
or (in the case of theoretical terms) could do so in principle. This view is
alleged to suffer from two major defects. First, observation is infected with
theorywhat else could specify the meanings of observation terms except the relevant
theory? Even to perceive is to interpret, to conceptualize, what is perceived.
And what about observations made by instruments? Are these not completely
constrained by theory? Second, studies by Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others
argued that in periods of revolutionary change in science the adoption of a new
theory includes acceptance of a completely new conceptual scheme that is
incommensurable with the older, now rejected, theory. The two theories are
incommensurable because their constituent terms cannot have reference to a
theory-neutral set of observations; there is no overlap of observational
meaning between the competitor theories; even the data to be explained are
different. Thus, when Galileo overthrew the physics of Aristotle he replaced his
conceptual schemehis “paradigm”with one that is not logically incompatible with
Aristotle’s, but is incommensurable with it because in a sense it is about a
different world (or the world conceived entirely differently). Aristotle’s
account of the motion of bodies relied upon occult qualities like natural
tendencies; Galileo’s relied heavily upon contrived experimental situations in
which variable factors could be mathematically calculated. Feyerabend’s even
more radical view is that unless scientists introduce new theories
incommensurable with older ones, science cannot possibly progress, because
falsehoods will never be uncovered. It is an important implication of these
views about incommensurability that acceptance of theories has to do not only
with observable evidence, but also with subjective factors, social pressures,
and expectations of the scientific community. Such acceptance appears to
threaten the very possibility of developing a coherent methodology for science.
modus: Grice was an expert on mode. There is one mode too many.
If Grice found ‘senses’ obsolete (“Sense are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity”), he was always ready to welcome a new modee. g. the quessertive --.
or mode. ἔγκλισις , enclisis, mood of a verb, D.H.Comp.6, D.T.638.7, A.D. Synt.248.14,
etc.Many times, under ‘mode,’ Grice describes what others call ‘aspect.’ Surely
‘tense’ did not affect him much, except when it concerned “=”. But when it came
to modes, he included ‘aspect,’ so there’s the optative, the imperative, the
indicative, the informational, and then the future intentional and the future
indicative, and the subjunctive, and the way they interact with the praesens,
praeteritum and futurum, and wih the axis of what Aristotle called ‘teleios’
and ‘ateleios,’ indefinite and definite, or ‘perfectum, and ‘imperfectum, ‘but
better ‘definitum’ and ‘indefinitum.’ Grice
uses psi-asrisk, to be read asterisk-sub-psi. He is not concerned with
specficics. All the specifics the philosopher can take or rather ‘assume’ as
‘given.’ The category of mode translates ‘tropos,’ modus. Kant wrongly assumed
it was Modalitat, which irritated Grice so much that he echoed Kant as saying
‘manner’! Grice is a modista. He sometimes uses ‘modus,’ after Abbott. The
earliest record is of course “Meaning.” After elucidating what he calls
‘informative cases,’ he moves to ‘imperative’ ones. Grice agreed with Thomas
Urquhart that English needed a few more moods! Grice’s seven
modes.Thirteenthly, In lieu of six moods which other languages have at most,
this one injoyeth seven in its conjugable words. Ayer had said that non-indicative
utterances are hardly significant. Grice had been freely using the very English
not Latinate ‘mood’ until Moravcsik, of all people, corrects him: What you
mean ain’t a mood. I shall call it mode just to please you, J. M. E. The
sergeant is to muster the men at dawn is a perfect imperative. They shall not
pass is a perfect intentional. A version of this essay was presented in a
conference whose proceedings were published, except for Grices essay, due to
technical complications, viz. his idiosyncratic use of idiosyncratic
symbology! By mode Grice means indicative or imperative. Following
Davidson, Grice attaches probability to the indicative, via the doxastic, and
desirability to the indicative, via the buletic-boulomaic. He also
allows for mixed utterances. Probability is qualified with a suboperator
indicating a degree d; ditto for desirability, degree d. In some of the drafts,
Grice kept using mode until Moravsik suggested to him that mode was a better
choice, seeing that Grices modality had little to do with what other authors
were referring to as mood. Probability, desirability, and modality, modality,
desirability, and probability; modality, probability, desirability. He would
use mode operator. Modality is the more correct term, for things like should,
ought, and must, in that order. One sense. The doxastic modals are
correlated to probability. The buletic or boulomaic modals are correlated to
desirability. There is probability to a degree d. But there is also
desirability to a degree d. They both combine in Grices attempt to
show how Kants categorical imperative reduces to the hypothetical or
suppositional. Kant uses modality in a way that Grice disfavours, preferring
modus. Grice is aware of the use by Kant of modality qua category in the
reduction by Kant to four of the original ten categories in Aristotle). The
Jeffrey-style entitled Probability, desirability, and mode operators finds
Grice at his formal-dress best. It predates the Kant lectures and it got into
so much detail that Grice had to leave it at that. So abstract it hurts. Going
further than Davidson, Grice argues that structures expressing probability and
desirability are not merely analogous. They can both be replaced by more
complex structures containing a common element. Generalising over attitudes
using the symbol ψ, which he had used before, repr. WoW:v, Grice proposes G ψ
that p. Further, Grice uses i as a dummy for sub-divisions of psychological
attitudes. Grice uses Op supra i sub α, read: operation supra i sub alpha, as
Grice was fastidious enough to provide reading versions for these, and where α
is a dummy taking the place of either A or B, i. e. Davidsons prima facie or
desirably, and probably. In all this, Grice keeps using the primitive !, where
a more detailed symbolism would have it correspond exactly to Freges composite
turnstile (horizontal stroke of thought and vertical stroke of assertoric
force, Urteilstrich) that Grice of course also uses, and for which it is
proposed, then: !─p. There are generalising movements here but also merely
specificatory ones. α is not generalised. α is a dummy to serve as a
blanket for this or that specifications. On the other hand, ψ is indeed
generalised. As for i, is it generalising or specificatory? i is a dummy for
specifications, so it is not really generalising. But Grice generalises over
specifications. Grice wants to find buletic, boulomaic or volitive as he
prefers when he does not prefer the Greek root for both his protreptic and
exhibitive versions (operator supra exhibitive, autophoric, and operator supra
protreptic, or hetero-phoric). Note that Grice (WoW:110) uses the asterisk * as
a dummy for either assertoric, i.e., Freges turnstile, and non-assertoric, the
!─ the imperative turnstile, if you wish. The operators A are not mode operators;
they are such that they represent some degree (d) or measure of acceptability
or justification. Grice prefers acceptability because it connects with
accepting that which is a psychological, souly attitude, if a general one.
Thus, Grice wants to have It is desirable that p and It is believable
that p as understood, each, by the concatenation of three elements. The first
element is the A-type operator. The second element is the protreptic-type
operator. The third element is the phrastic, root, content, or proposition
itself. It is desirable that p and It is believable that p share the
utterer-oriented-type operator and the neustic or proposition. They only differ
at the protreptic-type operator (buletic/volitive/boulomaic or
judicative/doxastic). Grice uses + for concatenation, but it is best to use ,
just to echo who knows who. Grice speaks in that mimeo (which he delivers in
Texas, and is known as Grices Performadillo talk ‒ Armadillo + Performative) of
various things. Grice speaks, transparently enough, of acceptance: V-acceptance
and J-acceptance. V not for Victory but for volitional, and J for judicative.
The fact that both end with -acceptance would accept you to believe that both
are forms of acceptance. Grice irritatingly uses 1 to mean the doxastic, and 2
to mean the bulematic. At Princeton in Method, he defines the doxastic in terms
of the buletic and cares to do otherwise, i. e. define the buletic in terms of
the doxastic. So whenever he wrote buletic read doxastic, and vice versa. One
may omits this arithmetic when reporting on Grices use. Grice uses two further
numerals, though: 3 and 4. These, one may decipherone finds oneself as an
archeologist in Tutankamons burial ground, as this or that relexive attitude.
Thus, 3, i. e. ψ3, where we need the general operator ψ, not just
specificatory dummy, but the idea that we accept something simpliciter. ψ3
stands for the attitude of buletically accepting an or utterance: doxastically
accepting that p or doxastically accepting that ~p. Why we should be concerned
with ~p is something to consider. G wants to decide whether to believe p
or not. I find that very Griceian. Suppose I am told that there is a volcano in
Iceland. Why would I not want to believe it? It seems that one may want to
decide whether to believe p or not when p involves a tacit appeal to value.
But, as Grice notes, even when it does not involve value, Grice still needs
trust and volition to reign supreme. On the other hand, theres 4, as attached
to an attitude, ψ4. This stands for an attitude of buletically accepting an or
utterance: buletically accepting that p, or G buletically accepting that ~p, i.
e. G wants to decide whether to will, now that p or not. This indeed is
crucial, since, for Grice, morality, as with Kantotle, does cash in desire, the
buletic. Grice smokes. He wills to smoke. But does he will to will to smoke?
Possibly yes. Does he will to will to will to smoke? Regardless of what Grice
wills, one may claim this holds for a serious imperatives (not Thou shalt not
reek, but Thou shalt not kill, say) or for any p if you must (because if you
know that p causes cancer (p stands for a proposition involving cigarette) you
should know you are killing yourself. But then time also kills, so what gives?
So I would submit that, for Kant, the categoric imperative is one which allows
for an indefinite chain, not of chain-smokers, but of good-willers. If, for
some p, we find that at some stage, the P does not will that he wills that he
wills that he wills that, p can not be universalisable. This is proposed in an
essay referred to in The Philosophers Index but Marlboro Cigarettes took no
notice. One may go on to note Grices obsession on make believe. If I say, I
utter expression e because the utterer wants his addressee to believe that the
utterer believes that p, there is utterer and addresse, i. e. there are two
people here ‒ or any soul-endowed creature ‒ for Grices
squarrel means things to Grice. It even implicates. It miaows to me while I was
in bed. He utters miaow. He means that he is hungry, he means (via
implicaturum) that he wants a nut (as provided by me). On another occasion he
miaowes explicating, The door is closed, and implicating Open it, idiot. On the
other hand, an Andy-Capps cartoon read: When budgies get sarcastic Wild-life
programmes are repeating One may note that one can want some other person
to hold an attitude. Grice uses U or G1 for utterer and A or G2 for addressee.
These are merely roles. The important formalism is indeed G1 and G2. G1 is a
Griceish utterer-person; G2 is the other person, G1s addressee. Grice dislikes
a menage a trois, apparently, for he seldom symbolises a third party, G3. So, G
ψ-3-A that p is 1 just in case G ψ2(G ψ1 that p) or G ψ1 that ~p is 1. And here
the utterers addressee, G2 features: G1 ψ³ protreptically that p is 1 just
in case G buletically accepts ψ² (G buletically accepts ψ² (G doxastically
accepts ψ1 that p, or G doxastically accepts ψ1 that ~p))) is 1. Grice seems to
be happy with having reached four sets of operators, corresponding to four sets
of propositional attitudes, and for which Grice provides the paraphrases. The
first set is the doxastic proper. It is what Grice has as doxastic,and which
is, strictly, either indicative, of the utterers doxastic, exhibitive state, as
it were, or properly informative, if addressed to the addressee A, which is
different from U himself, for surely one rarely informs oneself. The second is
the buletic proper. What Grice dubs volitive, but sometimes he prefers the
Grecian root. This is again either self- or utterer-addressed, or
utterer-oriented, or auto-phoric, and it is intentional, or it is
other-addressed, or addressee-addressed, or addressee- oriented, or
hetero-phoric, and it is imperative, for surely one may not always say to
oneself, Dont smoke, idiot!. The third is the doxastic-interrogative, or
doxastic-erotetic. One may expand on ? here is minimal compared to the
vagaries of what I called the !─ (non-doxastic or buletic turnstile), and which
may be symbolised by ?─p, where ?─ stands for the erotetic turnstile. Geachs
and Althams erotetic somehow Grice ignores, as he more often uses the Latinate
interrogative. Lewis and Short have “interrŏgātĭo,” which they render as “a
questioning, inquiry, examination, interrogation;” “sententia per
interrogationem, Quint. 8, 5, 5; instare interrogation; testium; insidiosa;
litteris inclusæ; verbis obligatio fit ex interrogatione et responsione; as
rhet. fig., Quint. 9, 2, 15; 9, 3, 98. B. A syllogism: recte genus hoc
interrogationis ignavum ac iners nominatum est, Cic. Fat. 13; Sen. Ep. 87
med. Surely more people know what interrogative means what erotetic means,
he would not say ‒ but he would. This attitude comes again in two varieties:
self-addressed or utterer-oriented, reflective (Should I go?) or again,
addresee-addressed, or addressee-oriented, imperative, as in Should you go?,
with a strong hint that the utterer is expecting is addressee to make up his
mind in the proceeding, not just inform the utterer. Last but not least, there
is the fourth kind, the buletic-cum-erotetic. Here again, there is one varietiy
which is reflective, autophoric, as Grice prefers, utterer-addressed, or
utterer-oriented, or inquisitive (for which Ill think of a Greek pantomime), or
addressee-addressed, or addressee-oriented. Grice regrets that Greek (and
Latin, of which he had less ‒ cfr. Shakespeare who had none) fares better in
this respect the Oxonian that would please Austen, if not Austin, or Maucalay,
and certainly not Urquhart -- his language has twelve parts of speech: each
declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god,
goddess, man, woman, animal, etc.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven
moods, and four voices.These vocal mannerisms will result in the production of
some pretty barbarous English sentences; but we must remember that what I shall
be trying to do, in uttering such sentences, will be to represent supposedly
underlying structure; if that is ones aim, one can hardly expect that ones
speech-forms will be such as to excite the approval of, let us say, Jane Austen
or Lord Macaulay. Cf. the quessertive, or quessertion, possibly iterable,
that Grice cherished. But then you cant have everything. Where would you put
it? Grice: The modal implicaturum.
Grice sees two different, though connected questions about
mode. First, there is the obvious demand for a characterisation, or
partial characterisation, of this or that mode as it emerges in this or that
conversational move, which is plausible to regard as modes primary habitat)
both at the level of the explicatum or the implicaturum, for surely an
indicative conversational move may be the vehicle of an imperatival
implicaturum. A second, question is how, and to what extent, the representation
of mode (Hares neustic) which is suitable for application to this or that
conversational move may be legitimately exported into philosophical psychology,
or rather, may be grounded on questions of philosophical psychology, matters of
this or that psychological state, stance, or attitude (notably desire and
belief, and their species). We need to consider the second question, the
philosophico- psychological question, since, if the general rationality
operator is to read as something like acceptability, as in U accepts, or A
accepts, the appearance of this or that mode within its scope of accepting is
proper only if it may properly occur within the scope of a generic
psychological verb I accept that . Lewis and Short have “accepto,” “v.
freq. a. accipio,” which Short and Lewis render as “to take, receive, accept,”
“argentum,” Plaut. Ps. 2, 2, 32; so Quint. 12, 7, 9; Curt. 4, 6, 5; Dig. 34, 1,
9: “jugum,” to submit to, Sil. Ital. 7, 41. But in Plin. 36, 25, 64, the
correct read. is coeptavere; v. Sillig. a. h. l. The easiest way Grice finds to
expound his ideas on the first question is by reference to a schematic table or
diagram (Some have complained that I seldom use a board, but I will
today. Grice at this point reiterates his temporary contempt for the use/mention
distinction, which which Strawson is obsessed. Perhaps Grices contempt is due
to Strawsons obsession. Grices exposition would make the hair stand on end in
the soul of a person especially sensitive in this area. And Im talking to you,
Sir Peter! (He is on the second row). But Grices guess is that the
only historical philosophical mistake properly attributable to use/mention
confusion is Russells argument against Frege in On denoting, and that there is
virtually always an acceptable way of eliminating disregard of the use-mention
distinction in a particular case, though the substitutes are usually lengthy,
obscure, and tedious. Grice makes three initial assumptions.
He avails himself of two species of acceptance, Namesly, volitive acceptance
and judicative acceptance, which he, on occasion, calls respectively willing
that p and willing that p. These are to be thought of as technical
or semi-technical, theoretical or semi-theoretical, though each is a state
which approximates to what we vulgarly call thinking that p and wanting that p,
especially in the way in which we can speak of a beast such as a little
squarrel as thinking or wanting something ‒ a nut, poor darling
little thing. Grice here treats each will and judge (and accept) as a
primitive. The proper interpretation would be determined by the role of
each in a folk-psychological theory (or sequence of folk-psychological
theories), of the type the Wilde reader in mental philosophy favours at Oxford,
designed to account for the behaviours of members of the animal kingdom, at
different levels of psychological complexity (some classes of creatures being
more complex than others, of course). As Grice suggests in Us meaning,
sentence-meaning, and word-meaning, at least at the point at which (Schema Of
Procedure-Specifiers For Mood-Operators) in ones syntactico-semantical
theory of Pirotese or Griceish, one is introducing this or that mode (and
possibly earlier), the proper form to use is a specifier for this or that
resultant procedure. Such a specifier is of the general form, For the
utterer U to utter x if C, where the blank is replaced by the appropriate
condition. Since in the preceding scheme x represents an utterance or
expression, and not a sentence or open sentence, there is no guarantee that
this or that actual sentence in Pirotese or Griceish contains a perspicuous and
unambiguous modal representation. A sentence may correspond to more than
one modal structure. The sentence is structurally ambiguous
(multiplex in meaning ‒ under the proviso that senses are not to be
multiplied beyond necessity) and will have more than one reading, or parsing,
as every schoolboy at Clifton knows when translating viva voce from Greek or
Latin, as the case might be. The general form of a procedure-specifier for a
modal operator involves a main clause and an antecedent clause, which follows
if. In the schematic representation of the main clause, U represents an
utterer, A his addressee, p the radix or neustic; and Opi represents that
operator whose number is i (1, 2, 3, or 4), e.g g., Op3A represents
Operator 3A, which, since ?⊢ appears in the Operator column for 3A)
would be ?A ⊢ p. This
reminds one of Grandys quessertions, for he did think they were iterable
(possibly)). The antecedent clause consists of a sequence whose elements
are a preamble, as it were, or preface, or prefix, a supplement to a
differential (which is present only in a B-type, or addressee-oriented case), a
differential, and a radix. The preamble, which is always present, is
invariant, and reads: The U U wills (that) A A judges (that) U (For surely meaning is a species of intending
is a species of willing that, alla Prichard, Whites professor,
Corpus). The supplement, if present, is also invariant. And the idea
behind its varying presence or absence is connected, in the first instance,
with the volitive mode. The difference between an ordinary expression of
intention ‒ such as I shall not fail, or They shall not
pass ‒ and an ordinary imperative (Like Be a little kinder to
him) is accommodated by treating each as a sub-mode of the volitive mode,
relates to willing that p) In the intentional case (I shall not fail), the
utterer U is concerned to reveal to his addressee A that he (the utterer U)
wills that p. In the imperative case (They shall not pass), the utterer U is
concerned to reveal to his addressee A that the utterer U wills that the
addresee A will that p. In each case, of course, it is to be
presumed that willing that p will have its standard outcome, viz., the
actualization, or realisation, or direction of fit, of the radix (from
expression to world, downwards). There is a corresponding distinction between
two uses of an indicative. The utterer U may be declaring or
affirming that p, in an exhibitive way, with the primary intention to get his
addressee A to judge that the utterer judges that p. Or the U is telling
(in a protreptic way) ones addressee that p, that is to say, hoping to get
his addressee to judge that p. In the case of an indicative, unlike that of a
volitive, there is no explicit pair of devices which would ordinarily be
thought of as sub-mode marker. The recognition of the sub-mode is
implicated, and comes from context, from the vocative use of the Names of the
addressee, from the presence of a speech-act verb, or from a sentence-adverbial
phrase (like for your information, so that you know, etc.). But Grice
has already, in his initial assumptions, allowed for such a situation. The
exhibitive-protreptic distinction or autophoric-heterophoric distinction, seems
to Grice to be also discernible in the interrogative mode (?).
Each differentials is associated with, and serve to distinguish, each of
the two basic modes (volitive or judicative) and, apart from one detail in the
case of the interrogative mode, is invariant between autophoric-exhibitive) and
heterophoric-protreptic sub-modes of any of the two basic modes. They are
merely unsupplemented or supplemented, the former for an exhibitive sub-mode
and the latter for a protreptic sub-mode. The radix needs (one hopes) no
further explanation, except that it might be useful to bear in mind that Grice
does not stipulated that the radix for an intentional (buletic exhibitive
utterer-based) incorporate a reference to the utterer, or be in the first
person, nor that the radix for an imperative (buletic protreptic
addressee-based) incorporate a reference of the addresee, and be in the second
person. They shall not pass is a legitimate intentional, as is You shall
not get away with it; and The sergeant is to muster the men at dawn, as uttered
said by the captain to the lieutenant) is a perfectly good
imperative. Grice gives in full the two specifiers derived from the
schema. U to utter to A autophoric-exhibitive ⊢ p if U wills that A judges that U
judges p. Again, U to utter to A ! heterophoric-protreptic p if U wills that A
A judges that U wills that A wills that p. Since, of the states denoted by
each differential, only willing that p and judging that p are strictly cases of
accepting that p, and Grices ultimate purpose of his introducing this
characterization of mode is to reach a general account of expressions which are
to be conjoined, according to his proposal, with an acceptability operator, the
first two numbered rows of the figure are (at most) what he has a direct use
for. But since it is of some importance to Grice that his treatment of
mode should be (and should be thought to be) on the right lines, he adds a
partial account of the interrogative mode. There are two varieties of
interrogatives, a yes/no interrogatives (e. g. Is his face clean? Is the king
of France bald? Is virtue a fire-shovel?) and x-interrogatives, on which Grice
qua philosopher was particularly interested, v. his The that and the why.
(Who killed Cock Robin?, Where has my beloved gone?, How did he fix it?). The
specifiers derivable from the schema provide only for yes/no interrogatives,
though the figure could be quite easily amended so as to yield a restricted but
very large class of x-interrogatives. Grice indicates how this could be
done. The distinction between a buletic and a doxastic interrogative
corresponds with the difference between a case in which the utterer U indicates
that he is, in one way or another, concerned to obtain information (Is he at
home?), and a case in which the utterer U indicates that he is concerned to
settle a problem about what he is to do ‒ Am I to leave the door open?, Shall I
go on reading? or, with an heterophoric Subjects, Is the prisoner to be
released? This difference is fairly well represented in grammar, and much better
represented in the grammars of some other languages. The
hetero-phoric-cum-protreptic/auto-phoric-cum- exhibitive difference may
not marked at all in this or that grammar, but it should be marked in Pirotese.
This or that sub-mode is, however, often quite easily detectable. There is
usually a recognizable difference between a case in which the utterer A says,
musingly or reflectively, Is he to be trusted? ‒ a case in which the
utterer might say that he is just wondering ‒ and a case in which he
utters a token of the same sentence as an enquiry. Similarly, one can usually
tell whether an utterer A who utters Shall I accept the invitation? is
just trying to make up his mind, or is trying to get advice or instruction from
his addressee. The employment of the variable α needs to be
explained. Grice borrows a little from an obscure branch of logic, once
(but maybe no longer) practised, called, Grice thinks, proto-thetic ‒ Why?
Because it deals with this or that first principle or axiom, or thesis), the main
rite in which is to quantify over, or through, this or that connective. α is to
have as its two substituents positively and negatively, which may modify either
will or judge, negatively willing or negatively judging that p is judging or
willing that ~p. The quantifier (∃1α) . . . has to be treated
substitutionally. If, for example, I ask someone whether John killed Cock
Robin (protreptic case), I do not want the addressee merely to will that I have
a particular logical quality in mind which I believe to apply. I want the
addressee to have one of the Qualities in mind which he wants me to believe to
apply. To meet this demand, supplementation must drag back the
quantifier. To extend the schema so as to provide specifiers for a single
x-interrogative (i. e., a question like What did the butler see? rather than a
question like Who went where with whom at 4 oclock yesterday afternoon?),
we need just a little extra apparatus. We need to be able to superscribe a
W in each interrogative operator e.g., together with the proviso that a radix
which follows a superscribed operator must be an open radix, which contains one
or more occurrences of just one free variable. And we need a chameleon
variable λ, to occur only in this or that quantifier. (∃λ).Fx is to be regarded as a way of
writing (∃x)Fx. (∃λ)Fy is a way of writing (∃y)Fy. To provide a specifier for a
x-superscribed operator, we simply delete the appearances of α in the specifier
for the corresponding un-superscribed operator, inserting instead the
quantifier (∃1λ) () at the
position previously occupied by (∃1α) (). E.g. the specifiers for Who
killed Cock Robin?, used as an enquiry, would be: U to utter to A killed Cock Robin if U wills A to judge U to
will that (∃1λ) (A should
will that U judges (x killed Cock Robin)); in which (∃1λ) takes on the shape (∃1x) since x is the free variable within
its scope. Grice compares his buletic-doxastic distinction to prohairesis/doxa
distinction by Aristotle in Ethica Nichomachea. Perhaps his simplest
formalisation is via subscripts: I will-b but will-d not. Refs.: The main
references are given above under ‘desirability.’ The most systematic treatment
is the excursus in “Aspects,” Clarendon. BANC. modus. “The
distinction between Judicative and Volitive Interrogatives corresponds with the
difference between cases in which a questioner is indicated as being, in one
way or another, concerned to obtain information ("Is he at home?"),
and cases in which the questioner is indicated as being concerned to settle a
problem about what he is to do ("Am I to leave the door open?",
"Is the prisoner to be released?", "Shall I go on
reading?"). This difference is better represented in Grecian and Roman.”The Greek word was ‘egklisis,’ which Priscian translates as
‘modus’ and defines as ‘inclinatio anima, affectionis demonstrans.’ The Greeks
recognised five: horistike, indicativus, pronuntiativus, finitus, or
definitivus, prostastike, imperativus, euktike, optativus, hypotaktike (subjunctivus,
or conjunnctivus, but also volitivus, hortativus, deliberativus, iussivus,
prohibitivus anticipativus ) and aparemphatos infinitivus or infinitus. Modus -- odus optativus.
optative enclisis (gre: ευκτική έγκλιση, euktike
enclisis, hence it may be seen as a modus optatīvus. Something that fascinated
Grice. The way an ‘action’ is modalised in the way one describes it. He had
learned the basics for Greek and Latin at Oxford, and he was exhilarated to be
able to teach now on the subtleties of the English system of ‘aspect.’ To ‘opt’
is to choose. So ‘optativus’ is the deliberative mode. Grice proved the freedom
of the will with a “grammatical argument.” ‘Given that the Greeks and the
Romans had an optative mode, there is free will.” Romans, having no special
verbal forms recognized as Optative, had no need of the designation modus optativus.
Yet they sometimes used it, ad imitationem. Modus
-- modality:
Grice: “Modality is the manner in which a proposition (or statement) describes
or applies to its subject matter. Derivatively,’ modality’ refers to
characteristics of entities or states of affairs described by this or that
modal proposition. Modalities are classified as follows. An assertoric
proposition is the expression of a mere fact. Alethic modality includes
necessity and possibility. The latter two sometimes are referred to
respectively as the apodeictic modality and the problematic modalityvide
Grice’s category of conversational modewhich covers three categories under what
Kant calls the ‘Funktion’ of Modethe assertoric, the apodeictic and the
problematic). Grice takes ‘must’ as basic and defines ‘may’ in terms of ‘must.’
Causal modality includes causal necessity or empirical necessity and causal
possibility or empirical possibility. The deontic modality includes obligation
and permittedness. Of course this hardly means that ‘must’ is polysemous. It is
‘aequi-vocal’ at most. There is epistemic modality or modalities such as
knowing that and doxastic modality (what Grice calls ‘credibility,’ as opposed
to ‘desirability’) or modalities ones such as believing that. There is
desiderative modality such as ‘willing that’ (what Grice calls ‘desirability’
as prior to ‘credibility.’) Following medieval philosophers, a proposition can
be distinguished on the basis of whether the modality is introduced via
adverbial modification of the “copula” or verb (“sensus divisus”)as in Grice’s
“Fido is shaggy” versus “Fido may be shaggy”(in Roman, “Fidus est fidelis”
versus “Fidus sit fidelis”Grice: “Not to be confused with “Fido, sit!” ) or via
a modal operator that modifies the proposition (“sensus compositus”as preferred
by Strawson: “It is the case that,” “It is not the case that,” “It must be the
case that” and “It may be the case that”). Grice actually calls ‘adverbial
modifier’ the external version. The internal version he just calls, as
everybody at Clifton does, ‘conjugation’ (“We are not Tarzan!”). Grice: "In Gricese, in the instance in which the indicative occurs
after "acsian" here is no doubt in the minds of those who ask the
question, the content of the dependent clause being by them regarded as a fact. Mk. X. 2. Da genealsehton him pharisei and hine axodon hwseber alyfS senegum men his wif forlsetan. Interrogabant eum: INTERROGABANT EUM: SI
LICET Si licet. L. XII. 36. beo gelice pam mannum be hyra hlaforde abidafr hwsenne
he sy fram gyftum gecyrred. L. XXII. 24. hi flitun betwux him hwylc hyra wsere
yldest. J. XIX. 24.
uton hleotan hwylces
ures heo sy. Mk. XV. 24. hi hlotu wurpon, hwset
gehwa name.
mittentes sortem
super eis, quis quid tolleret. MITTENTES SORTEM SVPER EIS, QVIS QVID TOLLERET. M. XXVII. 49. Uton geseon hwseber Helias cume and wylle
hyne alysan. Mk. V. 14. hi ut eodon bset hi
gesawon hwset par gedon wsere. L. XIX. 3.he wolde geseon hwylc se hselend
wsere. Mk. IX. 34.hi on wege smeadon hwylc hyra yldost wsere. Mk. IX.
10. L. XI, 38. XXII. 23. L. XIV. 28. Hwylc eower wyle timbrian anne stypel, hu ne sytt he serest and
teleS pa andfengas be him behefe synt, hwseder he hsebbe hine to
full-fremmenne?
L. I. 29. ba wearS heo on his sprsece gedrefed, and pohte
hwset seo greting wsere.
L. Ill, 15. XIV.
31. L. IX. 46.
bset gepanc eode on hig,
hwylc hyra yldest wsere. Mk. XV. 47. Da com Maria Magdalene and Josepes Maria, and beheoldon hwar he
geled wsere. aspiciebant. ubi poneretur ASPICIEBANT. VBI
PONERETVR.
(Looked around, in order
to discover). The notion of purpose is sometimes involved, the indirect
question having something of the force of a final clause: Mk.
XIII. 11. ne foresmeage ge hwset ge specan. L. XXI. 14. *) Direct rather than indirect question. L. XII. 22. ne beo ge ymbehydige eowre
sawle hwset ge etan, ne eowrum lichaman hwset ge scrydun. M. VI, 25. L. XII. 11. ne beo ge embebencynde hu oSSe hwset ge specon
oSSe andswarian. M. X. 19. ne bence ge hu oSSe hwset ge
sprecun. L. XII. 29.
Nelle ge secean hwset ge
eton oSSe drincon.
J. XIX. 12. and sySSan sohte Pilatus hu he hyne forlete. quaerebat Pilatus dimittere eum. QVAEREBAT PILATVS DIMITTERE EVM 2. When the content of the dependent clause is regarded as an actual
fact, which is the case when the leading verb expresses the act of learning,
perceiving, etc., the indicative is used. M. VI. 28. BesceawiaS secyres Man
hu hig weaxaO. M. XXI. 16.gehyrst bu hwset pas cwseoab? M. XXVII. 13. Ne gehyrst Jm hu fela sagena hig ongen be
secgeaS?
L. XVIII. 6. M. IX.
13.leornigeab hwset is, ic wylle mildheortnesse
nses onssegdnesse. M. XXI. 20. loca nu hu hrsedlice bset fic-treow forscranc. Mk. XV. 4. loca hu mycelum hi be wregea§. M. XII. 4.Ne
rsedde ge hwset David dyde hu he ineode on Godes hus, and set ba offring-hlafas? L. VI, 4. Mk. XII. 26.
Be bam deadum ■ bset hi
arison, ne rsedde ge on Moyses bec hu God to him cwseb? Mk. I, 26. Mk. V. 16. hi rehton him ba Se hit
gesawon hu hit gedon wses. L. VIII. 36. Da cyddon him ba Se gesawon hu he wses hal
geworden. L. XXIII. 55.hig gesawon ba byrgene and hu his lichama
aled wses. J. XX. 14.heo geseah hwar se hselend stod. Vidit Jesum stantem. *) VIDIT IESVM STANTEM. Not the endeavour to learn, perceive, which
would require the SUBJUNCTIVE. L. XXIV. 6.
gebencao hu he spsec wiS
eow. recordamini.
Mk. VIII. 19.
3.After verbs of knowing both the indicative and subjunctive are used, usually
the indicative. See general statement before § 2. a)
Indicative:*) L. XIII. 27. Ne cann ic hwanon ge
synt. Mk. XIV, 68. M. VI. 8. eower fseder wat hwset eow bearf
ys. M. XX. 22.
Gyt nyton hwset gyt
biddab. L. XIII. 25. nat ic hwanon ge
synt. J. IX. 21. we nyton humete he nu
gesyhb. quomodo autem nunc videat, nescimus. QVOMODO AVTEM NVNC, NESCIMVS. J. IX. 25. gif he synful is, bset ic nat. si peccator est, nescio. SI PECCATOR EST, NESCIO. I know not if he is a sinner. gif he synful is, bset ic nat. "Gif he synful is, ᚦaet ic nat." In Oxonian:
"If he sinful is,
that I know not. M. XXVI. 70. Mk. IX. 6. X, 28. XIII, 33, 35. L. IX,
33. XX, 7. XXII, 60. L. XXIII. 34. J. II. 9. III. 8. V. 13. VII.
27, 27, 28. VIII. 14, 14. J. IX. 29. 30. X. 6. XIII. 18. XIV. 5. XV.
15. b)
Indicative and
subjunctive: L. X. 22. nan man nat hwylc IS se
sunu buton se fseder, ne hwylc SI Se fseder buton se sunu. -- In Latin, both times have subjunctive third person singular,
"sit".)
c)
Subjunctive. a. In the protasis of a conditional sentence: J.
VII. 51.Cwyst bu demS ure se senine man buton hyne man ser gehyre and wite
hwset he do? J. XI. 57. pa pharisei hsefdon beboden gif hwa wiste
hwaer he wsere paet he hyt cydde bset hig mihton hine niman. Translating
the Latin subjunctive in 21 instances, the indic. in 9. As a rule, the mood (or mode, as Grice prefers)
of the Latin (or Roman, as Grice prefers) verb does not determine the O. E. (or
A. S., as Grice prefers) usage. In Anglo-Saxon, Oxonian,
and Gricese, "si" seems to be no more than a literal (mimetic)
rendering of Roman "sit," the correct third person singular
subjunctive.
Ms. A. reads
"ys" with'-sy" above. The Lind. gloss reads
"is". M. XXIV. 43. WitaS bset gyf se hiredes ealdor wiste on hwylcere tide se beof
towerd waere witodlice he wolde wacigean. si sciret paterfamilias qua hora fur
venturus esset vigilaret,
(Cf. J. IV, 10. Gif bu wistest — hwaet se is etc. Si scirest quis est. SI SCIREST QVIS EST. /J. In the apodosis of a conditional sentence: J. VII.
17. gyf hwa wyle his willan don he gecwemo (sic. A.B.C. gecnsewS) be
bsere lare hwseber heo si of Gode hwseber be ic he me sylfum
spece. L. VII. 39. Gyf be man witega wsere
witodlice he wiste hwset and hwylc bis wif wsere be his sethrinb bset heo
synful is.
sciret utique quae et qualis
est mulier. SCIRET VTIQVE QVAE ET QVALIS EST MULIER. y. After a hortatory subjunctive. M. VI.
3. Nyte bin wynstre hwset do bin swybre. 4. After verbs of
saying and declaring. a) Here the indicative is used when the
dependent clause contains a statement rather than a question. L. VIII.
39. cyS hu mycel be God gedon h3efS. L. VIII. 47.Da bset wif
geseah bset hit him nses dyrne heo com forht and astrehte hig to his fotum and
geswutulude beforan eallum folce for hwylcum binge heo hit sethran and hu heo wearS
sona hal. ob quam causam tetigerit eum, indicavit; et quemadmodum
confestim SANATA SIT. Further examples of the indicative are. L. XX.
2.*) Sege us on hwylcum anwalde wyrcst bu Sas
bing oSSe hwset ys se Se be be anwald sealde. L. VI. 47. iElc bara be to me cymb and mine sprseca
gehyi*S and pa deb, ic him setywe hwam he gelic is. b) When the subordinate clause refers to the future
both the indicative and subjunctive are used: *) Direct
question, as the order of the words shows. Mk. XIII. 4. Sege us hwsenne bas bing gewurdon (A. geweorSon,
H. gewurSen, R. gewurdon) and hwylc tacen bid
bsenne ealle bas Sing onginnaS beon geendud. (Transition to direct
question.) Dic nobis, quando ista fient? DIC NOBIS, QVANDO ISTA FIENT? et quod signum erit? ET QVOD SIGNVM
ERIT? M. XXIV. 3. Sege us hwsenne bas Sing
gewurbun and hwile tacn si bines to-cymes. J. XVIII. 32. he geswutelode hwylcon deaSe lie swulte. qua
morte ESSET moriturus. c) When the question presents a distinct alternative, so that the
idea of doubt and uncertainty is prominent, the subjunctive in Gricese,
Oxonian, and Anglo-Saxon, qua conjugated version, is used: M. XXVI.
63. Ic halsige be Surh bone lyfiendan God, b*t Su secge us gyf \>u sy
Crist Godes sunu. L. XXII. 67. J. X. 24. d) The following is
hortatory as well as declarative: L. XII. 5. Ic eow setywe
hwsene ge ondredon. Ostendam autem vobis, quem TIMEATIS. 5. In
three indirect questions which in the original are direct, the subjunctive is
used: M. XXIV. 45.Wens (sic. A. H. & R. wenst) \>u
hwa sy getrywe and gleaw BEOW? Quis, putas, EST fidelis
servus? QVIS, PVTAS, EST FIDELIS SERVS. M. XXVI. 25. Cwyst
bu lareow hwseSer ic hyt si? Numquid ego sum? NVMQVID EGO SVM, J. VII. 26. CweSe we hwseber ba ealdras
ongyton set bis IS Crist?
Numquid vere cognoverunt
principes, quia hie EST Christus? § 11. RELATIVE CLAUSES. Except
in the relations discussed in the following the indicative is used in relative
clauses. Grice:
"The verb 'to be' is actually composed of three different stems -- not
only in Aristotle, but in Gricese." CONIUGATVM, persona, s-stem
(cognate with Roman "sit"), b-stem, w-stem (cognate with Roman,
"ero") MODVS INFINITVUM, the verb "sīn,” the verb
"bion,” the verb "wesan.” MODVS INDICATIVM PRAESENS prima singularis:
"ik" -- Oxonian "I" "em" Oxonian, "am."
Bium wisu secunda singularis: "thū" -- Oxonian: "thou"
"art" Oxonian "art" bis(t) wisis tertia singularis:
"hē" Oxonian, 'he' "ist" (Cognate with Roman
"est") Oxonian 'is' *bid wis(id) prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "sindun"
*biod wesad MODVS INDCATIVVM PRAETERITVM prima singularis "was"
Oxonian: "was." seconda singularis ""wāri"
Oxonian "were" tertia singularis "was" Oxonian
"was" prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "wārun" Oxonian
"were" MODVS SVBIVCTIVVM PRAESENS prima, secunda, tertia,
singularis "sīe" (Lost in Oxonian after Occam) "wese"
(cognate with "was", and Roman, "erat") prima, secunda,
tertia, pluralis "sīen" wesen MODVS SVBIVNCTIVVM
PRAETERITUM prima, secunda, tertia, singularis wāri prima, secunda, tertia,
pluralis wārin MODVS IMPERATIVUM singularis "wis,"
"wes" (Cognate with "was" and Roman "erat")
pluralis wesad MODVS PARTICIPIVM PRAESENT wesandi (cognate with Cicero's
"essens" and "essentia" MODVS PARTICIPIVM PRAETERITVM "giwesan"
The present-tense forms of 'be' with the w-stem, "wesan" are
almost never used. Therefore, wesan is used as IMPERATIVE,
in the past tense, and in the participium prasesens versions of
"sīn" -- Grice: "I rue the day when the Bosworth and
Toller left Austin!" -- "Now the OED, is not supposed to include
Anglo-Saxon forms!") and does not have a separate meaning. The b-stem
is only met in the present indicative of wesan, and only for the first and
second persons in the singular. So we see that if Roman had the
'est-sit" distinction, the Oxonians had "The
'ist'/"sīe"/"wese" tryad). Grice:
"To simplify the Oxonian forms and make them correlative to Roman, I shall
reduce the Oxonian triad, 'ist'/'sīe'/"wese" to the division
actually cognate with Roman: 'ist'/'sīe." And so, I
shall speak of the 'ist'/'sīe" distinction, or the 'est-sit'
distinction interchangeably." Today
many deny the distinction or confine attention just to modal operators. Modal
operators in non-assertoric propositions are said to produce referential
opacity or oblique contexts in which truth is not preserved under substitution
of extensionally equivalent expressions. Modal and deontic logics provide
formal analyses of various modalities. Intensional logics investigate the logic
of oblique contexts. Modal logicians have produced possible worlds semantics
interpretations wherein propositions MP with modal operator M are true provided
P is true in all suitable (e.g., logically possible, causally possible, morally
permissible, rationally acceptable) possible worlds. Modal realism grants
ontological status to possible worlds other than the actual world or otherwise
commits to objective modalities in nature or reality. modus: the study of the
logic of the operators ‘it is possible that’ (or, as Grice prefers, “it may be
that”) and ‘it is necessary that’ (or as Grice prefers, “It must be that…”). For
some reason, Grice used ‘mode’ at Oxfordbut ‘manner’ in the New World! The sad
thing is that when he came back to the Old World, to the puzzlmenet of Old-Worlders,
he kept using ‘manner.’ So, everytime we see Grice using ‘manner,’ we need to
translate to either the traditional Oxonian ‘modus,’ or the Gricese ‘mode.’ These
operators Grice symbolizes by a diamond and a square respectively. and each can
be defined in terms of the other. □p (necessarily p)
is equivalent to ¬◇¬p ("not possible
that not-p") ◇p (possibly p) is
equivalent to ¬□¬p ("not necessarily not-p"). To say that Fido
may be shaggy is to say that it is not necessarily false. Thus possP could be
regarded as an abbreviation of -Nec-p Equally, to say that Fido *must* be
shaggy is to deny that its negation is possible. Thus Af could be regarded as
an abbreviation of -B-f. Grice prefers to take ‘poss” as primitive (“for
surely, it may rain before it must pour!”). Grice’s ystem G of modality is
obtained by introducing Poss. and Nec. If system, as Grice’s is, is
classical/intuitionist/minimal, so is the corresponding modal logic. Grice
surely concentrates on the classical case (“Dummett is overconcentraating on
the intuitionist, and nobody at Oxford was, is, or will be minimal!”). As with any kind of logic, there are three
components to a system of modal logic: a syntactics, which determines the system
or calculus + and the notion of well-formed formula (wff). Second, a semantics,
which determines the consequence relation X on +-wffs. Third, a pragmatics or
sub-system of inference, which determines the deductive consequence relation Y
on +-wffs. The syntactis of the modal operators is the same in every system.
Briefly, the modal operator is a one-place or unary ‘connective,’ or operator,
strictly, since it does not connect two atoms into a molecule, like negation.
There are many different systems of modal logic, some of which can be generated
by different ways of setting up the semantics. Each of the familiar ways of
doing this can be associated with a sound and complete system of inference.
Alternatively, a system of inference can be laid down first and we can search
for a semantics for it relative to which it is sound and complete. Grice gives
primacy to the syntactic viewpoint. Semantic consequence is defined in modal
logic in the usual classical way: a set of sentences 9 yields a sentence s, 9 X
s, iff if no “interpretation” (to use Grice’s jargon in “Vacuous Names”) I
makes all members of 9 true and s false. The question is how to extend the
notion of “interpretation” to accommodate for “may be shaggy”and “must be
shaggy”. In classical sentential logic, an interpretation is an assignment to
each sentence letter of exactly one of the two truth-values = and where n % m !
1. So to determine relative possibility in a model, we identify R with a
collection of pairs of the form where each of u and v is in W. If a pair is in
R, v is possible relative to u, and if is not in R, v is impossible relative to
u. The relative possibility relation then enters into the rules for the
evaluating modal operator. We do not want to say, e. g. that at the actual
world, it is possible for Grice to originate from a different sperm and egg,
since the only worlds where this takes place are impossible relative to the
actual world. So we have the rule that B f is true at a world u if f is true at
some world v such that v is possible relative to u. Similarly, Af is true at a
world u if f is true at every world v which is possible relative to u. R may
have simple first-order properties such as reflexivity, (Ex)Rxx, symmetry,
(Ex)(Ey)(Rxy P Ryx), and transitivity, (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Rxy & Ryz) P Rxz), and
different modal systems can be obtained by imposing different combinations of
these on R (other systems can be obtained from higher-order constraints). The
least constrained system is the system Ghp, in which no structural properties
are put on R. In G-hp we have B (B & C) X B B, since if B (B & C) holds
at w* then (B & C) holds at some world w possible relative to w*, and thus
by the truth-function for &, B holds at w as well, so B B holds at w*.
Hence any interpretation that makes B (B & C) true (% true at w*) also
makes B B true. Since there are no restrictions on R in G-hp, we can expect B
(B & C) X B B in every system of modal logic generated by constraining R.
However, for G-hp we also have C Z B C. For suppose C holds at w*. B C holds at
w* only if there is some world possible relative to w* where C holds. But there
need be no such world. In particular, since R need not be reflexive, w* itself
need not be possible relative to w*. Concomitantly, in any system for which we
stipulate a reflexive R, we will have C X B C. The simplest such system is
known as T, which has the same semantics as K except that R is stipulated to be
reflexive in every interpretation. In other systems, further or different
constraints are put on R. For example, in the system B, each interpretation
must have an R that is reflexive and symmetric, and in the system S4, each
interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and transitive. In B we have B
C Z B B C, as can be shown by an interpretation with nontransitive R, while in
S4 we have B AC Z C, as can be shown by an interpretation with non-symmetric R.
Correspondingly, in S4, B C X B B C, and in B, B AC X C. The system in which R
is reflexive, transitive, and symmetric is called S5, and in this system, R can
be omitted. For if R has all three properties, R is an equivalence relation,
i.e., it partitions W into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive
equivalence classes. If Cu is the equivalence class to which u belongs, then
the truth-value of a formula at u is independent of the truth-values of
sentence letters at worlds not in Cu, so only the worlds in Cw* are relevant to
the truth-values of sentences in an S5 interpretation. But within Cw* R is
universal: every world is possible relative to every other. Consequently, in an
S5 interpretation, we need not specify a relative possibility relation, and the
evaluation rules for B and A need not mention relative possibility; e.g., we
can say that B f is true at a world u if there is at least one world v at which
f is true. Note that by the characteristics of R, whenever 9 X s in K, T, B, or
S4, then 9 X s in S5: the other systems are contained in S5. K is contained in
all the systems we have mentioned, while T is contained in B and S4, neither of
which is contained in the other. Sentential modal logics give rise to
quantified modal logics, of which quantified S5 is the bestknown. Just as, in
the sentential case, each world in an interpretation is associated with a
valuation of sentence letters as in non-modal sentential logic, so in
quantified modal logic, each world is associated with a valuation of the sort
familiar in non-modal first-order logic. More specifically, in quantified S5,
each world w is assigned a domain Dwthe things that exist at wsuch that at
least one Dw is non-empty, and each atomic n-place predicate of the language is
assigned an extension Extw of n-tuples of objects that satisfy the predicate at
w. So even restricting ourselves to just the one first-order extension of a
sentential system, S5, various degrees of freedom are already evident. We
discuss the following: (a) variability of domains, (b) interpretation of
quantifiers, and (c) predication. (a) Should all worlds have the same domain or
may the domains of different worlds be different? The latter appears to be the
more natural choice; e.g., if neither of of Dw* and Du are subsets of the
other, this represents the intuitive idea that some things that exist might not
have, and that there could have been things that do not actually exist (though
formulating this latter claim requires adding an operator for ‘actually’ to the
language). So we should distinguish two versions of S5, one with constant
domains, S5C, and the other with variable domains, S5V. (b) Should the truth of
(Dn)f at a world w require that f is true at w of some object in Dw or merely
of some object in D (D is the domain of all possible objects, 4weWDw)? The
former treatment is called the actualist reading of the quantifiers, the
latter, the possibilist reading. In S5C there is no real choice, since for any
w, D % Dw, but the issue is live in S5V. (c) Should we require that for any
n-place atomic predicate F, an n-tuple of objects satisfies F at w only if
every member of the n-tuple belongs to Dw, i.e., should we require that atomic
predicates be existence-entailing? If we abbreviate (Dy) (y % x) by Ex (for ‘x
exists’), then in S5C, A(Ex)AEx is logically valid on the actualist reading of
E (%-D-) and on the possibilist. On the former, the formula says that at each
world, anything that exists at that world exists at every world, which is true;
while on the latter, using the definition of ‘Ex’, it says that at each world,
anything that exists at some world or other is such that at every world, it
exists at some world or other, which is also true; indeed, the formula stays
valid in S5C with possibilist quantifiers even if we make E a primitive logical
constant, stipulated to be true at every w of exactly the things that exist at
w. But in S5V with actualist quantifiers, A(Ex)AEx is invalid, as is
(Ex)AExconsider an interpretation where for some u, Du is a proper subset of Dw*.
However, in S5V with possibilist quantifiers, the status of the formula, if
‘Ex’ is defined, depends on whether identity is existence-entailing. If it is
existenceentailing, then A(Ex)AEx is invalid, since an object in D satisfies
(Dy)(y % x) at w only if that object exists at w, while if identity is not
existence-entailing, the formula is valid. The interaction of the various
options is also evident in the evaluation of two well-known schemata: the
Barcan formula, B (Dx)fx P (Dx) B fx; and its converse, (Dx) B fx P B (Dx)fx.
In S5C with ‘Ex’ either defined or primitive, both schemata are valid, but in
S5V with actualist quantifiers, they both fail. For the latter case, if we
substitute -E for f in the converse Barcan formula we get a conditional whose antecedent
holds at w* if there is u with Du a proper subset of Dw*, but whose consequent
is logically false. The Barcan formula fails when there is a world u with Du
not a subset of Dw*, and the condition f is true of some non-actual object at u
and not of any actual object there. For then B (Dx)f holds at w* while (Dx) B
fx fails there. However, if we require atomic predicates to be
existence-entailing, then instances of the converse Barcan formula with f
atomic are valid. In S5V with possibilist quantifiers, all instances of both
schemata are valid, since the prefixes (Dx) B and B (Dx) correspond to (Dx)
(Dw) and (Dw) (Dx), which are equivalent (with actualist quantifiers, the
prefixes correspond to (Dx 1 Dw*), and (Dw) (Dx 1 Dw) which are non-equivalent
if Dw and Dw* need not be the same set). Finally in S5V with actualist
quantifiers, the standard quantifier introduction and elimination rules must be
adjusted. Suppose c is a name for an object that does not actually exist;
thenEc is true but (Dx)Ex is false. The quantifier rules must be those of free
logic: we require Ec & fc before we infer (Dv)fv and Ec P fc, as well as
the usual EI restrictions, before we infer (Ev)fv. Refs.: H. P. Grice:
“Modality: Desirability and Credibility;” H. P. Grice, “The may and the may
not;” H. P. Grice, “The Big Philosophical Mistake: ‘What is actual is not also
possible’.” modus: Grice: “In Roman,
‘modus’ may have been rendered as ‘way’, ‘fashion’but I will not, and use
‘modus’ as THEY did! ‘Modus’ is used in more than one ‘modus’ in philosophy. In
Ariskantian logic, ‘modus’ refers either to the arrangement of universal,
particular, affirmative, or negative propositions within a syllogism, only
certain of which are valid this is often tr., confusingly, as ‘modus’ in
English“the valid modes, such as Barbara and Celarent.” But then ‘modus’ may be
used to to the property a proposition has by virtue of which it is necessary or
contingent, possible or impossible, or ‘actual.’ In Oxonian scholastic
metaphysics, ‘modus’ is often used in a not altogether technical way to mean
that which characterizes a thing and distinguishes it from others. Micraelius,
in his best-selling “Lexicon philosophicum,” has it that “a mode does not
compose a thing, but distinguishes it and makes it determinate.” ‘Modus’ is also
used in the context of the modal distinction in the theory of distinctions to
designate the distinction that holds between a substance and its modes or
between two modes of a single substance. ‘Modus’ also appears in the technical
vocabulary of medieval speculative ‘grammar’ or ‘semantics’ (“speculative
semantics” makes more sense) -- in connection with the notions of the “modus
significandi,” “the modus intelligendi” (more or less the same thing), and the
“modus essendi.” The term ‘modus’ becomes especially important when Descartes
(vide Grice, “Descartes on clear and distinct perception”), Spinoza (vide S. N.
Hampshire, “Spinoza”), and Locke each take it up, giving it three somewhat
different special meanings within their respective systems. Descartes (vide
Grice, “Descartes on clear and distinct perception”) makes ‘modus’ a central
notion in his metaphysics in his Principia philosophiae. For Descartes, each
substantia is characterized by a principal attribute, ‘cogitatio’ for ‘anima’ and
‘extensio’ for ‘corpus’. Modes, then, are particular ways of being extended or
thinking, i.e., particular sizes, shapes, etc., or particular thoughts,
properties in the broad sense that individual things substances have. In this
way, ‘modus’ occupies the role in Descartes’s philosophy that ‘accident’ does
in Aristotelian philosophy. But for Descartes, each mode must be connected with
the principal attribute of a substance, a way of being extended or a way of
thinking, whereas for the Aristotelian, accidents may or may not be connected
with the essence of the substance in which they inhere. Like Descartes, Spinoza
recognizes three basic metaphysical terms, ‘substania,’ ‘attributum’, and
‘modus’. Recalling Descartes, Spinoza defines ‘modus’ as “the affections of a
substance, or that which is in another, and which is also conceived through
another” Ethics I. But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, which has all
possible attributes. This makes it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what
Spinoza means by ‘modus’, whether they are to be construed as being in some say
a “property” of God, the one infinite substance, or whether they are to be
construed more broadly as simply individual things that depend for their
existence on God, just as Cartesian modes depend on Cartesian substance.
Spinoza also introduces somewhat obscure distinctions between modus infinitus
and modus finitus, and between immediate and mediate infinite modes. Now, much
closer to Grice, Englishman and Oxonian Locke uses ‘mode’ in a way that
evidently derives from Descartes’s usage, but that also differs from it. For
Locke, a ‘modus’ is “such complex ideaas Pegasus the flying horse --, which
however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by
themselves, but are considered as Dependences on, or Affections of Substances”
Essay II. A ‘modus,’ for Locke, is thus an idea that represents to us the a ‘complex’
propertiy of a thing, sc. an idea derived from what Locke a ‘simple’ idea that
come to us from experience. Locke distinguishes between a ‘modus simplex,’ like
number, space, and infinity, which are supposed to be constructed by
compounding the SAME simple idea many times, and ‘modus complexum,’ or ‘modus
mixtum,’ a mode like obligation or theft, which is supposed to be compounded of
at least two simple ideas of a different sort.
Refs.: Grice applies Locke’s idea of the modus mixtum in his ‘labour’
against Empiricism, cf. H. P. Grice, “I may care a hoot what the dictionary
says, but it is not the case that I care a hoot what Micraelius’s “Lexicon
philosophicum” says.” Modusmodulus -- Grice
against a pragmatic or rational module: from Latin ‘modulus,’ ‘little mode.’ the commitment to functionally independent and
specialized cognitive system in psychological organizatio, or, more generally,
in the organization of any complex system. A ‘modulus’ entails that behavior is
the product of components with subordinate functions, that these functions are
realized in discrete physical systems, and that the subsystems are minimally interactive.
Organization in terms of a modulus varies from simple decomposability to what
Herbert Simon calls near decomposability. In the former, component systems are
independent, operating according to intrinsically determined principles; system
behavior is an additive or aggregative function of these independent
contributions. In the latter, the short-run behavior of components is
independent of the behavior of other components; the system behavior is a
relatively simple function of component contributions. Gall defends a modular
organization for the mind/brain, holding that the cerebral hemispheres consist
of a variety of organs, or centers, each subserving specific intellectual and
moral functions. This picture of the brain as a collection of relatively
independent organs contrasts sharply with the traditional view that
intellectual activity involves the exercise of a general unitary ‘faculty’ in a
variety of this or that‘domain’, where a ‘domain’ is not a ‘modulus’ -- a view
that was common to Descartes and Hume as well as Gall’s major opponents such as
Flourens. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bouillaud and Broca (a
French doctor, of Occitan ancestrybrooch, brocathorn --) defended the view that
language is controlled by localized structures in the left hemisphere and is
relatively independent of other cognitive activities. It was later discovered
by Wernicke that there are at least two centers for the control of language,
one more posterior and one more anterior. On these views, there are discrete
physical structures responsible for communication, which are largely
independent of one another and of structures responsible for other
psychological functions. This is therefore a modular organization. This view of
the neurophysiological organization of communication continues to have
advocates, though the precise characterization of the functions these two
centers serve is controversial. Many more recent views have tended to limit
modularity to more peripheral functions such as vision, hearing, and motor
control and speech, but have excluded “what I am interested in, viz. so-called
higher cognitive processes.”H. P. Grice, “The power structure of the soul.” Modus -- modus ponendo ponens: 1 the argument
form ‘If A then B; A; therefore, B’, and arguments of this form compare fallacy
of affirming the consequent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to infer
the consequent of a conditional from that conditional and its antecedent. This
is also known as the rule of /-elimination or rule of /- detachment. modus tollendo tollens: 1 the argument form
‘If A then B; not-B; therefore, not-A’, and arguments of this form compare
fallacy of denying the antecedent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to
infer the negation of the antecedent of a conditional from that conditional and
the negation of its consequent.
molyneux question: also called Molyneux’s
problem, the question that, in correspondence with Locke, William Molyneux or
Molineux, 1656 98, a Dublin lawyer and member of the Irish Parliament, posed and
Locke inserted in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding 1694; book 2, chap. 9, section 8: Suppose a Man born blind, and
now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish a Cube, and a Sphere of the
same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and
t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere
placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quære, Whether by his
sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the
Globe, which the Cube. Although it is tempting to regard Molyneux’s question as
straightforwardly empirical, attempts to gauge the abilities of newly sighted
adults have yielded disappointing and ambiguous results. More interesting,
perhaps, is the way in which different theories of perception answer the
question. Thus, according to Locke, sensory modalities constitute discrete
perceptual channels, the contents of which perceivers must learn to correlate.
Such a theory answers the question in the negative as did Molyneux himself.
Other theories encourage different responses.
mondolfo: essential Italian philosopher. Like
Grice, Mondolfo believed seriously in the longitudinal unity of philosophy and
made original research on the historiography of philosophy, especially during
the Eleatic, Agrigento, and later Roman periods. Rodolfo Mondolfo
Rodolfo Mondolfo Rodolfo Mondolfo (Senigallia, 20 agosto 1877Buenos Aires, 16
luglio 1976) filosofo italiano. Nacque in provincia di Ancona,
ultimogenito di Vito Mondolfo e Gismonda Padovani, una famiglia benestante di
commercianti di origine ebraica. Suo fratello maggiore Ugo Guido (18751958) fu
uno storico, membro del Partito Socialista Italiano sin dalla sua fondazione e
stretto collaboratore di Filippo Turati alla rivista "Critica
sociale". Anche Rodolfo aderisce alle idee marxiste e socialiste.
Tra il 1895 ed il 1899 compie gli studi universitari a Firenze, dove raggiunge
il fratello, anch'egli studente dell'ateneo fiorentino, e si laurea in Lettere
e Filosofia con Felice Tocco, discutendo una tesi su Condillac dal titolo:
"Contributo alla storia della teoria dell'associazione", un lavoro da
cui saranno poi tratti alcuni dei suoi primi saggi di storia della
filosofia. Insieme i due fratelli frequentavano un gruppo di giovani
socialisti, di cui facevano parte Gaetano Salvemini, Cesare Battisti ed Ernesta
Bittanti. Fino al 1904 Mondolfo si dedica all'insegnamento nei licei
nelle città di Potenza, Ferrara e Mantova. Nel 1904 inizia la carriera
universitaria con un incarico all'Padova, in sostituzione di Roberto
Ardigò. Nel 1910 si trasferisce ad insegnare Storia della filosofia
all'Torino, dove rimarrà sino al 1914, anno in cui ottiene la stessa cattedra
all'Bologna. Nell'immediato primo dopoguerra, a Senigallia, viene eletto
consigliere comunale nelle file del Partito Socialista Italiano, al quale
anch'egli aveva aderito sin dagli anni universitari, ma questo sarà l'unico
incarico ufficiale ricoperto da Mondolfo nel partito. Gli anni che vanno
dall'inizio del secolo al 1926 sono forse quelli in cui è più intensa e fervida
l'attività letteraria e politica di Mondolfo: nel 1903 inizia infatti la sua
collaborazione con la rivista "Critica Sociale", protrattasi fino al
1926, anno in cui la rivista viene soppressa dal regime fascista. In
questo stesso periodo pubblica alcune delle sue opere più importanti come i
"Saggi per la storia della morale utilitaria" di Hobbes (1903) ed
Helvetius (1904), "Tra il diritto di natura e il comunismo", (1909),
"Rousseau nella formazione della coscienza moderna" (1912), "Il
materialismo storico in F. Engels" (1912), "Sulle orme di Marx"
(1919). Nel 1925 Mondolfo è tra i firmatari del Manifesto degli intellettuali
antifascisti, redatto da Benedetto Croce. Dopo il 1926, per la soppressione
della rivista a cui collabora più attivamente, e per l'inasprirsi dei controlli
e delle censure poste dal regime fascista, nell'evidente impossibilità di
proseguire i suoi studi sulla dottrina marxista, si dedica allo studio del
pensiero filosofico greco. Ciò nonostante, pur in questo periodo, grazie alla
politica di Giovanni Gentile che volle coinvolgere studiosi di diverso
orientamento nell'impresa, collabora con l'Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana
e scrive la voce Socialismo pubblicata nella prima edizione dell'Enciclopedia
Treccani (Volume XXXI, 1936). Nel maggio 1939, in seguito alle leggi
razziali fasciste che vietavano agli ebrei di ricoprire cariche pubbliche,
Mondolfo scrisse il proprio curriculum di benemerenze e vi inserì lo stesso
Gentile come testimone il quale "nel 1937 ebbe a propormi per il Premio
Reale di filosofia presso la R. Accademia dei Lincei". Gentile autorizzò
Mondolfo a citarlo tra i testimoni e tentò inutilmente di farlo rientrare tra
gli esclusi dalle leggi razziali. Costretto a lasciare l'Italia Gentile scrisse
al filosofo Coriolano Alberini e lo aiutò a trovare lavoro in Argentina dove
intendeva trasferirsi insieme con la moglie e i figli. Qui, nel 1940, dopo un
breve periodo di incertezze, riesce ad ottenere un incarico presso l'Córdoba
per un seminario di filosofia ed una cattedra di greco antico. Mondolfo scrisse
in seguito a Gentile ringraziandolo per l'"amicizia fraterna".
Nel 1946 ha inizio in Argentina il periodo del regime peronista, che si protrarrà
sino al 1955, e di lì a poco sarà seguito dalla dittatura militare argentina.
Sono anni questi che fanno rivivere a Mondolfo molte delle spiacevoli
esperienze passate in Italia durante il fascismo. Anche se in Argentina non si
dedica attivamente alla vita politica, è proprio per contrasti di tipo politico
con l'ambiente universitario di Córdoba che nel 1948 preferisce trasferirsi
all'Tucumán, in cui ottiene la cattedra di Storia della filosofia antica che
mantiene fino al 1952, anno in cui si trasferisce a Buenos Aires dove muore il
16 luglio del 1976. Il suo archivio personale è depositato in parte a Firenze
presso la Fondazione di Studi Storici Filippo Turati ed in parte presso la
Biblioteca di Filosofia Università degli Studi di Milano. Opere Il
materialismo storico in Federico Engels, Formiggimi, 1912; La Nuova Italia,
1952; La Nuova Italia, 1973. Sulle orme di Marx (1919), Cappelli, 1923.
L'infinito nel pensiero dei Greci, Felice Le Monnier, 1934; La Nuova Italia,
1968. Problemi e metodi di ricerca nella storia della filosofia, Zanichelli,
1935; La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1952 (nuova edizione Milano, Bompiani ). Gli
albori della filosofia in Grecia, «La Nuova Italia», n. 1, 20 gennaio 1936;
Editrice Petite Plaisance, Pistoia, . La comprensione del soggetto umano nella
cultura antica (1955), La Nuova Italia, 1967 (nuova edizione Milano, Bompiani
). Alle origini della filosofia della cultura, Il Mulino, 1956. Il pensiero
politico nel Risorgimento italiano, Nuova accademia, 1959. Cesare Beccaria, Nuova
Accademia Editrice, 1960. Moralisti greci: la coscienza morale da Omero a
Epicuro, Ricciardi, 1960. Da Ardigò a Gramsci, Nuova Accademia, 1962. Il
concetto dell'uomo in Marx, Città di Senigallia, 1962. Momenti del pensiero
greco e cristiano, Morano, 1964. Umanismo di Marx. Studi filosofici 1908-1966,
Einaudi, 1968. Il contributo di Spinoza alla concezione storicistica, Lacaita,
1970. Polis, lavoro e tecnica, Feltrinelli, 1982. Educazione e socialismo,
Lacaita, 2005. Gli eleati, Bompiani, . Note Vedi Paolo Favilli,
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, riferimenti in . Fu una delle prime donne italiane a
conseguire la laurea (cfr. Le donne nell'Firenze). Il 7 agosto 1899 sposò
civilmente a Firenze in Palazzo Vecchio Cesare Battisti. La sorella di Ernesta,
Irene, sposerà Giovanni Battista Trener, per anni collaboratore di Cesare. Amedeo Benedetti, L'Enciclopedia Italiana
Treccani e la sua biblioteca, "Biblioteche Oggi", Milano, n. 8,
ottobre 200540. Enciclopedia Treccani,
vedi alla voce futuro di Cesare Medail, Corriere della Sera, 11 ottobre 200035,
Archivio storico. Rodolfo Mondolfo,
«SOCIALISMO» la voce nella Enciclopedia Italiana, Volume XXXI, Roma, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1936. Paolo
Simoncelli41. Paolo Simoncelli42.
Paolo Simoncelli43. Vedi Fabio Frosini, Il contributo italiano
alla storia del PensieroFilosofia, riferimenti in . Archivio Rodolfo Mondolfo. Inventari Stefano
Vitali e Piero Giordanetti. Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali.
Ufficio Centrale per i beni archivistici.
Archivio Rodolfo Mondolfo. Inventari, Stefano Vitali e Piero
Giordanetti, Roma, Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali. Ufficio
Centrale per i beni archivistici, 1997. Paolo Simoncelli "Non credo neanch'io
alla razza" Gentile e i colleghi ebrei, Le Lettere, Firenze, L. Vernetti, R. Mondolfo e la filosofia della
prassi, Morano, 1966. E. Bassi, Rodolfo Mondolfo nella vita e nel pensiero
socialista, Tamari, 1968. A. Santucci , Pensiero antico e pensiero moderno in
Rodolfo Mondolfo, Cappelli, Bologna 1979. N. Bobbio, Umanesimo di Rodolfo
Mondolfo, in Maestri e compagni, Passigli Editore, Firenze 1984. M. Pasquini,
Del Vecchio, il kantismo giuridico e la sua incidenza nell'elaborazione di
Rodolfo Mondolfo (1906-1909), Alfagrafica, Città di Castello, 1999. C. Calabrò,
Il socialismo mite. Rodolfo Mondolfo tra marxismo e democrazia, Polistampa,
Firenze 2007. E. Amalfitano, Dalla parte dell'essere umano. Il socialismo di
Rodolfo Mondolfo, L'asino d'oro, Roma . Altri progetti Collabora a Wikisource
Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Rodolfo Mondolfo Collabora a
Wikiquote Citazionio su Rodolfo Mondolfo Collabora a Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file su Rodolfo Mondolfo Rodolfo Mondolfo, su Treccani.itEnciclopedie
on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
Rodolfo Mondolfo, in Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana. Rodolfo Mondolfo, in
Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Rodolfo Mondolfo, su siusa.archivi.beniculturali.it,
Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche. Opere di Rodolfo Mondolfo, su openMLOL,
Horizons Unlimited srl. Opere di Rodolfo Mondolfo, . Fabio Frosini, MONDOLFO, Rodolfo, in Il
contributo italiano alla storia del Pensiero: Filosofia, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, . Rodolfo Mondolfo. Vita opere e pensiero Diego
Fusaro, sito "filosofico.net". Fondo Rodolfo Mondolfo Università
degli Studi di Milano. Biblioteca di Filosofia. Fondo Rodolfo Mondolfo Fondazione
di Studi Storici Filippo Turati. V D M Vincitori del Premio Marzotto Filosofia
Università Università Filosofo Professore1877
1976 20 agosto 16 luglio Senigallia Buenos Aires -- Italiani emigrati in Argentina -- Refs.:
Luigi Speranza, "Grice, Mondolfo, e la filosofia greco-romana," per
il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria,
Italia.
Monte: essential Italian
philosopher. Guidobaldo Del Monte Ritratto.
Il marchese Guidobaldo Del Monte o Guidubaldo Bourbon Del Monte (Pesaro), filosofo.
Mecanicorum liber, 1615 Suo padre, Ranieri, originario da un famiglia
benestante di Urbino, discendente dalla schiatta dei Bourbon del Monte Santa
Maria, fu notato per il suo ruolo bellico e fu autore di due libri
sull'architettura militare. Il duca di Urbino, Guidobaldo II della Rovere, gli
attribuì, per meriti, il titolo di Marchese del Monte, dunque la famiglia
divenne nobile solo un generazione prima di Guidobaldo. Alla morte del padre,
ottenne il titolo di Marchese.
Guidobaldo studiò matematica all'Padova, nel 1564. Mentre era lì,
strinse una grande amicizia con il poeta Torquato Tasso (1544-1595). Guidobaldo poi combatté nel conflitto in
Ungheria, tra l'impero degli Asburgo e l'Impero Ottomano. Al termine della
guerra, tornò nella sua tenuta a Mombaroccio, vicino Urbino, dove passava i
giorni studiando matematica, meccanica, astronomia e ottica. Studiò matematica
con l'aiuto di Federico Commandino (1509-1575). Divenne amico di Bernardino
Baldi (1533-1617), che fu anch'esso studente di Commandino. Nel 1588 venne
nominato ispettore delle fortificazioni del Granducato di Toscana, pur
continuando a risiedere nel Ducato di Urbino.
In quegli anni, Del Monte corrispondeva con numerosi matematici inclusi
Giacomo Contarini (1536-1595), Francesco Barozzi (1537-1604) e Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642), e con alcuni di loro si dice abbia avuto anche relazioni più che
professionali. L'invenzione per la
costruzione di poligoni regolari e per dividere in un numero determinato di
segmento qualsiasi linea fu incorporata come caratteristica del compasso
geometrico e militare di Galileo. Proprio Guidobaldo fu fondamentale
nell'aiutare Galilei nella sua carriera universitaria, che a 26 anni era un
promessa ma disoccupato. Del Monte raccomandò il toscano al suo fratello
Cardinale, che a sua volta parlò con il potente Duca di Toscana, Ferdinando I
de' Medici. Sotto la sua protezione, Galileo ebbe una cattedra di matematica
all'Pisa, nel 1589. Guidobaldo divenne un amico fidato di Galileo e lo aiutò
nuovamente nel 1592, quando dovette necessariamente fare domanda per poter
insegnare matematica all'Padova, a causa dell'odio e della macchinazione di
Giovanni de' Medici, un figlio di Cosimo de' Medici, contro Galileo. Nonostante
la loro amicizia, Guidobaldo fu un critico di alcune teorie di Galileo, come
quella relativa alla legge dell'isocronismo delle oscillazioni. Guidobaldo scrisse un importante libro sulla
prospettiva, intitolato Perspectivae Libri VI, pubblicato a Pesaro nel 1600, che
avrà ampia diffusione nel corso del XVII. Fu sicuramente, anche secondo il
parere di Galileo, uno dei massimi studiosi di meccanica e matematica del
Cinquecento. Mechanicorum liber,
Pisauri, 1577 Opere di Del Monte
Guidobaldo Dal Monte, Mechanicorum liber, Pisauri, Girolamo Concordia,
1577. 14 giugno . Guidobaldo Dal Monte,
Planisphaeriorum universalium theorica, Pisauri, Girolamo Concordia, 1579. 14
giugno . Guidobaldo Dal Monte, De
ecclesiastici calendarii restitutione, Pisauri, Girolamo Concordia, 1580. 14
giugno . Guidobaldo Dal Monte,
Perspectivae libri sex, Pisauri, Girolamo Concordia, 1600. 14 giugno . Guidobaldo Dal Monte, Problematum
astronomicorum libri septem, Venetiis, Bernardo Giunta, Giovanni Battista &
C Ciotti, 1609. 14 giugno . Guidobaldo
Dal Monte, De cochlea, Venetiis, Evangelista Deuchino, 1615. 14 giugno . Guidobaldo Dal Monte, Mecanicorum liber,
Venetiis, Evangelista Deuchino, 1615. 14 giugno . Opere su Del Monte Le mechaniche dell'illustriss. sig. Guido
Vbaldo de' marchesi Del Monte: tradotte in volgare dal sig. Filippo Pigafetta,
Venetia, 1581 Le mechaniche dell'illustriss. sig. Guido Vbaldo de' marchesi Del
Monte: tradotte in volgare dal sig. Filippo Pigafetta nelle quali si contiene
la vera dottrina di tutti gli istrumenti principali da mouer pesi grandissimi con
picciola forza, in Venetia, appresso Francesco di Franceschi senese, 1581. Due
lettere inedite di Guidobaldo del Monte a Giacomo Contarini, pubblicate ed
illustrate [da] Antonio Favaronota, Venezia, [900. I sei libri della
prospettiva di Guidobaldo dei marchesi Del Monte dal latino tradotti
interpretati e commentati da Rocco Sinisgalli, presentazione di Gaspare De
Fiore, Roma, 1984. La teoria sui planisferi universali di Guidobaldo Del Monte,
Rocco Sinisgalli, Salvatore Vastola, Firenze, 1994. Note "Solo nel settembre del 1592 Galileo
(che nel frattempo era stato molto probabilmente anche suo ospite) poteva
occupare la cattedra di Padova, grazie anche all’intervento del D., che
nell’ambiente veneto poteva contare, oltre che sull’amicizia di un Contarini e
di un Pinelli, sull’autorità e l’influenza di Giambattista Del Monte, generale
delle fanterie della Repubblica":
fondazionecardinalefrancescomariadelmonte.it/guidobaldo-del-monte/. Questo testo proviene in parte dalla relativa
voce del progetto Mille anni di scienza in Italia, opera del Museo Galileo.
Istituto Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze (home page), pubblicata sotto
licenza Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0 G.
Galilei, Le opere, t. VI, Società editrice fiorentina, Firenze 1847, su
books.google.it. S. Hildebrandt, The Parsimonious Universe: Shape and Form in
the Natural World, Springer Verlag, 1996.
0387979913 Lives of Eminent Persons, Baldwin and Cradock, London 1833.
A. Giostra, La stella o cometa nelle lettere di Guidobaldo dal Monte a pier Matteo
Giordani, Giornale di Astronomia, 29 n°
3, 2003. A. BecchiD. Bertoloni MeliE. Gamba (eds): Guidobaldo del Monte. Theory
and Practice of the Mathematical Disciplines from Urbino to Europe, Edition
Open Access, Berlin . Galileo Galilei
Guidobaldo II della Rovere Mombaroccio. Guidobaldo Del Monte, in Enciclopedia
Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
Guidobaldo Del Monte, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Guidobaldo Del Monte, su MacTutor, University of St
Andrews, Scotland. Opere di Guidobaldo
Del Monte / Guidobaldo Del Monte (altra versione) / Guidobaldo Del Monte (altra
versione), su openMLOL, Horizons Unlimited srl. Opere di Guidobaldo Del Monte,
. Aterini B. (),‘Guidobaldo del Monte (1545 -1607)’, in Cigola, M. (Ed.),
Distinguished Figures in Descriptive Geometry and Its Applications for
Mechanism Science: From the Middle Ages to the 17th Century , 30 serie 'History of Mechanism and Machine
Science',direction by Ceccarelli M., New York, London: Ed. Springer, 153180.
978-3-319-6-2 (Print). DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-7-9 7.
Online:link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-7-9_7#page-1 Biografia di
Guidobaldo Del Monte sul sito del comune di Mombaroccio, su mombaroccio.eu. 9
marzo 2007 9 ottobre 2007). Biografia in The Galileo Project, su galileo.rice.edu.
Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e del Monte," per Il Club
Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
Montanism, a charismatic, schismatic
movement in early Christianity, originating in Phrygia in the late second
century. It rebuked the mainstream church for laxity and apathy, and taught
moral purity, new, i.e. postbiblical, revelation, and the imminent end of the
world. Traditional accounts, deriving from critics of the movement, contain
exaggerations and probably some fabrications. Montanus himself, abetted by the
prophetesses Maximilla and Prisca, announced in ecstatic speech a new, final
age of prophecy. This fulfilled the biblical promises that in the last days the
Holy Spirit would be poured out universally Joel 2: 28ff.; Acts 2: 16ff. and
would teach “the whole truth” Jon. 14:26; 16:13. It also empowered the
Montanists to enjoin more rigorous discipline than that required by Jesus. The
sect denied that forgiveness through baptism covered serious subsequent sin;
forbade remarriage for widows and widowers; practiced fasting; and condemned
believers who evaded persecution. Some later followers may have identified
Montanus with the Holy Spirit itself, though he claimed only to be the Spirit’s
mouthpiece. The “new prophecy” flourished for a generation, especially in North
Africa, gaining a famous convert in Tertullian. But the church’s bishops
repudiated the movement’s criticisms and innovations, and turned more resolutely
against postapostolic revelation, apocalyptic expectation, and ascetic
extremes.
mooreism: g. e. and his paradox: cited by H. P. Grice.
Irish London-born philosopher who spearheaded the attack on idealism and was a
major supporter of realism in all its forms: metaphysical, epistemological, and
axiological. He was born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London; did his
undergraduate work at Cambridge ; spent 84 as a fellow of Trinity ; returned to
Cambridge in 1 as a lecturer; and was granted a professorship there in 5. He
also served as editor of Mind. The bulk of his work falls into four categories:
metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical methodology. Metaphysics.
In this area, Moore is mainly known for his attempted refutation of idealism
and his defense thereby of realism. In his “The Refutation of Idealism” 3, he
argued that there is a crucial premise that is essential to all possible
arguments for the idealistic conclusion that “All reality is mental spiritual.”
This premise is: “To be is to be perceived” in the broad sense of ‘perceive’.
Moore argued that, under every possible interpretation of it, that premise is
either a tautology or false; hence no significant conclusion can ever be
inferred from it. His positive defense of realism had several prongs. One was
to show that there are certain claims held by non-realist philosophers, both
idealist ones and skeptical ones. Moore argued, in “A Defense of Common Sense”
5, that these claims are either factually false or self-contradictory, or that in
some cases there is no good reason to believe them. Among the claims that Moore
attacked are these: “Propositions about purported material facts are false”;
“No one has ever known any such propositions to be true”; “Every purported
physical fact is logically dependent on some mental fact”; and “Every physical
fact is causally dependent on some mental fact.” Another major prong of Moore’s
defense of realism was to argue for the existence of an external world and
later to give a “Proof of an External World” 3. Epistemology. Most of Moore’s
work in this area dealt with the various kinds of knowledge we have, why they
must be distinguished, and the problem of perception and our knowledge of an
external world. Because he had already argued for the existence of an external
world in his metaphysics, he here focused on how we know it. In many papers and
chapters e.g., “The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception,” 6 he examined
and at times supported three main positions: naive or direct realism,
representative or indirect realism, and phenomenalism. Although he seemed to
favor direct realism at first, in the majority of his papers he found
representative realism to be the most supportable position despite its
problems. It should also be noted that, in connection with his leanings mood
toward representative realism, Moore maintained the existence of sense-data and
argued at length for an account of just how they are related to physical
objects. That there are sense-data Moore never doubted. The question was, What
is their ontological status? With regard to the various kinds of knowledge or
ways of knowing, Moore made a distinction between dispositional or
non-actualized and actualized knowledge. Within the latter Moore made
distinctions between direct apprehension often known as knowledge by
acquaintance, indirect apprehension, and knowledge proper or propositional
knowledge. He devoted much of his work to finding the conditions for knowledge
proper. Ethics. In his major work in ethics, Principia Ethica 3, Moore maintained
that the central problem of ethics is, What is good? meaning by this, not what things are good,
but how ‘good’ is to be defined. He argued that there can be only one answer,
one that may seem disappointing, namely: good is good, or, alternatively,
‘good’ is indefinable. Thus ‘good’ denotes a “unique, simple object of thought”
that is indefinable and unanalyzable. His first argument on behalf of that
claim consisted in showing that to identify good with some other object i.e.,
to define ‘good’ is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. To commit this fallacy
is to reduce ethical propositions to either psychological propositions or
reportive definitions as to how people use words. In other words, what was
meant to be an ethical proposition, that X is good, becomes a factual
proposition about people’s desires or their usage of words. Moore’s second
argument ran like this: Suppose ‘good’ were definable. Then the result would be
even worse than that of reducing ethical propositions to non-ethical propositions ethical propositions would be tautologies!
For example, suppose you defined ‘good’ as ‘pleasure’. Then suppose you
maintained that pleasure is good. All you would be asserting is that pleasure
is pleasure, a tautology. To avoid this conclusion ‘good’ must mean something
other than ‘pleasure’. Why is this the naturalistic fallacy? Because good is a
non-natural property. But even if it were a natural one, there would still be a
fallacy. Hence some have proposed calling it the definist fallacy the fallacy of attempting to define ‘good’ by
any means. This argument is often known as the open question argument because
whatever purported definition of ‘good’ anyone offers, it would always be an
open question whether whatever satisfies the definition really is good. In the
last part of Principia Ethica Moore turned to a discussion of what sorts of
things are the greatest goods with which we are acquainted. He argued for the
view that they are personal affection and aesthetic enjoyments. Philosophical
methodology. Moore’s methodology in philosophy had many components, but two
stand out: his appeal to and defense of common sense and his utilization of
various methods of philosophical/conceptual analysis. “A Defense of Common
Sense” argued for his claim that the commonsense view of the world is wholly
true, and for the claim that any view which opposed that view is either
factually false or self-contradictory. Throughout his writings Moore
distinguished several kinds of analysis and made use of them extensively in dealing
with philosophical problems. All of these may be found in the works cited above
and other essays gathered into Moore’s Philosophical Studies2 and Philosophical
Papers 9. These have been referred to as refutational analysis, with two
subforms, showing contradictions and “translation into the concrete”;
distinctional analysis; decompositional analysis either definitional or
divisional; and reductional analysis. Moore was greatly revered as a teacher.
Many of his students and colleagues have paid high tribute to him in very warm
and grateful terms. Moore’s paradox, as
first discussed by G. E. Moore, the perplexity involving assertion of what is
expressed by conjunctions such as ‘It’s raining, but I believe it ’t’ and ‘It’s
raining, but I don’t believe it is’. The oddity of such presenttense
first-person uses of ‘to believe’ seems peculiar to those conjunctions just
because it is assumed both that, when asserting
roughly, representing as true a
conjunction, one also asserts its conjuncts, and that, as a rule, the assertor
believes the asserted proposition. Thus, no perplexity arises from assertions
of, for instance, ‘It’s raining today, but I falsely believed it wasn’t until I
came out to the porch’ and ‘If it’s raining but I believe it ’t, I have been misled
by the weather report’. However, there are reasons to think that, if we rely
only on these assumptions and examples, our characterization of the problem is
unduly narrow. First, assertion seems relevant only because we are interested
in what the assertor believes. Secondly, those conjunctions are disturbing only
insofar as they show that Moore’s paradox Moore’s paradox 583 583 some of the assertor’s beliefs, though
contingent, can only be irrationally held. Thirdly, autobiographical reports
that may justifiably be used to charge the reporter with irrationality need be
neither about his belief system, nor conjunctive, nor true e.g., ‘I don’t
exist’, ‘I have no beliefs’, nor false e.g., ‘It’s raining, but I have no
evidence that it is’. So, Moore’s paradox is best seen as the problem posed by
contingent propositions that cannot be justifiably believed. Arguably, in
forming a belief of those propositions, the believer acquires non-overridable
evidence against believing them. A successful analysis of the problem along
these lines may have important epistemological consequences. Refs.: Grice, “Oxford seminars.” Grice
dedicated a full chapter to the Moore paradox. Mainly, Moore is confused in
lexicological ways. An emisor EXPRESSES the belief that p. What the emisor
communicates is that p, not that he believes that p. He does not convey
explicitly that he believes that p, nor implicitly. Belief and its expression
is linked conceptually with the modeindicative (‘est’); as is desire and its
expression with the imperative mode (“sit”).
mos,
ethos: ethos:
Grice: “I love Lorenz, and he loved his geese.” -- Grice: “In German, ‘deutsche’ means
‘tribal.’” -- philosophical ethologyphrase used by Grice for his creature
construction routine. ethical constructivism, a form of anti-realism about
ethics which holds that there are moral facts and truths, but insists that
these facts and truths are in some way constituted by or dependent on our moral
beliefs, reactions, or attitudes. For instance, an ideal observer theory that
represents the moral rightness and wrongness of an act in terms of the moral
approval and disapproval that an appraiser would have under suitably idealized
conditions can be understood as a form of ethical constructivism. Another form
of constructivism identifies the truth of a moral belief with its being part of
the appropriate system of beliefs, e.g., of a system of moral and nonmoral
beliefs that is internally coherent. Such a view would maintain a coherence
theory of moral truth. Moral relativism is a constructivist view that allows
for a plurality of moral facts and truths. Thus, if the idealizing conditions
appealed to in an ideal observer theory allow that different appraisers can
have different reactions to the same actions under ideal conditions, then that
ideal observer theory will be a version of moral relativism as well as of
ethical constructivism. Or, if different systems of moral beliefs satisfy the
appropriate epistemic conditions e.g. are equally coherent, then the truth or
falsity of particular moral beliefs will have to be relativized to different
moral systems or codes. -- ethical objectivism, the view that the objects of
the most basic concepts of ethics which may be supposed to be values,
obligations, duties, oughts, rights, or what not exist, or that facts about
them hold, objectively and that similarly worded ethical statements by
different persons make the same factual claims and thus do not concern merely
the speaker’s feelings. To say that a fact is objective, or that something has
objective existence, is usually to say that its holding or existence is not
derivative from its being thought to hold or exist. In the Scholastic
terminology still current in the seventeenth century ‘objective’ had the more
or less contrary meaning of having status only as an object of thought. In
contrast, fact, or a thing’s existence, is subjective if it holds or exists
only in the sense that it is thought to hold or exist, or that it is merely a
convenient human posit for practical purposes. A fact holds, or an object
exists, intersubjectively if somehow its acknowledgment is binding on all
thinking subjects or all subjects in some specified group, although it does not
hold or exist independently of their thinking about it. Some thinkers suppose
that intersubjectivity is all that can ever properly be meant by objectivity.
Objectivism may be naturalist or non-naturalist. The naturalist objectivist
believes that values, duties, or whatever are natural phenomena detectable by
introspection, perception, or scientific inference. Thus values may be
identified with certain empirical qualities of anybody’s experience, or duties
with empirical facts about the effects of action, e.g. as promoting or
hindering social cohesion. The non-naturalist objectivist eschewing what Moore
called the naturalistic fallacy believes that values or obligations or whatever
items he thinks most basic in ethics exist independently of any belief about
them, but that their existence is not a matter of any ordinary fact detectable
in the above ways but can be revealed to ethical intuition as standing in a
necessary but not analytic relation to natural phenomena. ‘Ethical
subjectivism’ usually means the doctrine that ethical statements are simply
reports on the speaker’s feelings though, confusingly enough, such statements
may be objectively true or false. Perhaps it ought to mean the doctrine that
nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Attitude theories of morality,
for which such statements express, rather than report upon, the speaker’s
feelings, are also, despite the objections of their proponents, sometimes
called subjectivist. In a more popular usage an objective matter of fact is one
on which all reasonable persons can be expected to agree, while a matter is
subjective if various alternative opinions can be accepted as reasonable. What
is subjective in this sense may be quite objective in the more philosophical
sense in question above. -- ethics, the
philosophical study of morality. The word is also commonly used interchangeably
with ‘morality’ to mean the subject matter of this study; and sometimes it is
used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition,
group, or individual. Christian ethics and Albert Schweitzer’s ethics are
examples. In this article the word will be used exclusively to mean the
philosophical study. Ethics, along with logic, metaphysics, and epistemology,
is one of the main branches of philosophy. It corresponds, in the traditional
division of the field into formal, natural, and moral philosophy, to the last
of these disciplines. It can in turn be divided into the general study of
goodness, the general study of right action, applied ethics, metaethics, moral
psychology, and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. These divisions are not
sharp, and many important studies in ethics, particularly those that examine or
develop whole systems of ethics, are interdivisional. Nonetheless, they
facilitate the identification of different problems, movements, and schools
within the discipline. The first two, the general study of goodness and the
general study of right action, constitute the main business of ethics.
Correlatively, its principal substantive questions are what ends we ought, as
fully rational human beings, to choose and pursue and what moral principles
should govern our choices and pursuits. How these questions are related is the
discipline’s principal structural question, and structural differences among
systems of ethics reflect different answers to this question. In contemporary ethics,
the study of structure has come increasingly to the fore, especially as a
preliminary to the general study of right action. In the natural order of
exposition, however, the substantive questions come first. Goodness and the
question of ends. Philosophers have typically treated the question of the ends
we ought to pursue in one of two ways: either as a question about the
components of a good life or as a question about what sorts of things are good
in themselves. On the first way of treating the question, it is assumed that we
naturally seek a good life; hence, determining its components amounts to
determining, relative to our desire for such a life, what ends we ought to
pursue. On the second way, no such assumption about human nature is made;
rather it is assumed that whatever is good in itself is worth choosing or
pursuing. The first way of treating the question leads directly to the theory
of human well-being. The second way leads directly to the theory of intrinsic
value. The first theory originated in ancient ethics, and eudaimonia was the
Grecian word for its subject, a word usually tr. ‘happiness,’ but sometimes tr.
‘flourishing’ in order to make the question of human well-being seem more a
matter of how well a person is doing than how good he is feeling. These
alternatives reflect the different conceptions of human well-being that inform
the two major views within the theory: the view that feeling good or pleasure
is the essence of human well-being and the view that doing well or excelling at
things worth doing is its essence. The first view is hedonism in its classical
form. Its most famous exponent among the ancients was Epicurus. The second view
is perfectionism, a view that is common to several schools of ancient ethics.
Its adherents include Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Among the moderns, the
best-known defenders of classical hedonism and perfectionism are respectively
J. S. Mill and Nietzsche. Although these two views differ on the question of
what human well-being essentially consists in, neither thereby denies that the
other’s answer has a place in a good human life. Indeed, mature statements of
each typically assign the other’s answer an ancillary place. Thus, hedonism, as
expounded by Epicurus, takes excelling at things worth doing exercising one’s intellectual powers and
moral virtues in exemplary and fruitful ways, e.g. as the tried and true means to experiencing
life’s most satisfying pleasures. And perfectionism, as developed in
Aristotle’s ethics, underscores the importance of pleasure the deep satisfaction that comes from doing
an important job well, e.g. as a natural
concomitant of achieving excellence in things that matter. The two views, as
expressed in these mature statements, differ not so much in the kinds of
activities they take to be central to a good life as in the ways they explain
the goodness of such a life. The chief difference between them, then, is
philosophical rather than prescriptive. The second theory, the theory of
intrinsic value, also has roots in ancient ethics, specifically, Plato’s theory
of Forms. But unlike Plato’s theory, the basic tenets of which include certain
doctrines about the reality and transcendence of value, the theory of intrinsic
value neither contains nor presupposes any metaphysical theses. At issue in the
theory is what things are good in themselves, and one can take a position on
this issue without committing oneself to any thesis about the reality or
unreality of goodness or about its transcendence or immanence. A list of the
different things philosophers have considered good in themselves would include
life, happiness, pleasure, knowledge, virtue, friendship, beauty, and harmony.
The list could easily be extended. An interest in what constitutes the goodness
of the various items on the list has brought philosophers to focus primarily on
the question of whether something unites them. The opposing views on this
question are monism and pluralism. Monists affirm the list’s unity; pluralists
deny it. Plato, for instance, was a monist. He held that the goodness of
everything good in itself consisted in harmony and therefore each such thing
owed its goodness to its being harmonious. Alternatively, some philosophers
have proposed pleasure as the sole constituent of goodness. Indeed, conceiving of
pleasure as a particular kind of experience or state of consciousness, they
have proposed this kind of experience as the only thing good in itself and
characterized all other good things as instrumentally good, as owing their
goodness to their being sources of pleasure. Thus, hedonism too can be a
species of monism. In this case, though, one must distinguish between the view
that it is one’s own experiences of pleasure that are intrinsically good and
the view that anyone’s experiences of pleasure, indeed, any sentient being’s
experiences of pleasure, are intrinsically good. The former is called by
Sidgwick egoistic hedonism, the latter universal hedonism. This distinction can
be made general, as a distinction between egoistic and universal views of what
is good in itself or, as philosophers now commonly say, between agent-relative
and agent-neutral value. As such, it indicates a significant point of
disagreement in the theory of intrinsic value, a disagreement in which the
seeming arbitrariness and blindness of egoism make it harder to defend. In
drawing this conclusion, however, one must be careful not to mistake these
egoistic views for views in the theory of human well-being, for each set of
views represents a set of alternative answers to a different question. One must
be careful, in other words, not to infer from the greater defensibility of
universalism vis-à-vis egoism that universalism is the predominant view in the
general study of goodness. Right action. The general study of right action
concerns the principles of right and wrong that govern our choices and
pursuits. In modern ethics these principles are typically given a jural
conception. Accordingly, they are understood to constitute a moral code that
defines the duties of men and women who live together in fellowship. This
conception of moral principles is chiefly due to the influence of Christianity
in the West, though some of its elements were already present in Stoic ethics.
Its ascendancy in the general study of right action puts the theory of duty at
the center of that study. The theory has two parts: the systematic exposition
of the moral code that defines our duties; and its justification. The first
part, when fully developed, presents complete formulations of the fundamental
principles of right and wrong and shows how they yield all moral duties. The
standard model is an axiomatic system in mathematics, though some philosophers
have proposed a technical system of an applied science, such as medicine or
strategy, as an alternative. The second part, if successful, establishes the
authority of the principles and so validates the code. Various methods and
criteria of justification are commonly used; no single one is canonical.
Success in establishing the principles’ authority depends on the soundness of
the argument that proceeds from whatever method or criterion is used. One
traditional criterion is implicit in the idea of an axiomatic system. On this
criterion, the fundamental principles of right and wrong are authoritative in
virtue of being self-evident truths. That is, they are regarded as comparable
to axioms not only in being the first principles of a deductive system but also
in being principles whose truth can be seen immediately upon reflection. Use of
this criterion to establish the principles’ authority is the hallmark of
intuitionism. Once one of the dominant views in ethics, its position in the
discipline has now been seriously eroded by a strong, twentieth-century tide of
skepticism about all claims of self-evidence. Currently, the most influential
method of justification consistent with using the model of an axiomatic system
to expound the morality of right and wrong draws on the jural conception of its
principles. On this method, the principles are interpreted as expressions of a
legislative will, and accordingly their authority derives from the sovereignty
of the person or collective whose will they are taken to express. The oldest
example of the method’s use is the divine command theory. On this theory, moral
principles are taken to be laws issued by God to humanity, and their authority
thus derives from God’s supremacy. The theory is the original Christian source
of the principles’ jural conception. The rise of secular thought since the
Enlightenment has, however, limited its appeal. Later examples, which continue
to attract broad interest and discussion, are formalism and contractarianism.
Formalism is best exemplified in Kant’s ethics. It takes a moral principle to
be a precept that satisfies the formal criteria of a universal law, and it
takes formal criteria to be the marks of pure reason. Consequently, moral
principles are laws that issue from reason. As Kant puts it, they are laws that
we, as rational beings, give to ourselves and that regulate our conduct insofar
as we engage each other’s rational nature. They are laws for a republic of
reason or, as Kant says, a kingdom of ends whose legislature comprises all
rational beings. Through this ideal, Kant makes intelligible and forceful the
otherwise obscure notion that moral principles derive their authority from the
sovereignty of reason. Contractarianism also draws inspiration from Kant’s
ethics as well as from the social contract theories of Locke and Rousseau. Its
fullest and most influential statement appears in the work of Rawls. On this
view, moral principles represent the ideal terms of social cooperation for
people who live together in fellowship and regard each other as equals.
Specifically, they are taken to be the conditions of an ideal agreement among
such people, an agreement that they would adopt if they met as an assembly of
equals to decide collectively on the social arrangements governing their
relations and reached their decision as a result of open debate and rational
deliberation. The authority of moral principles derives, then, from the
fairness of the procedures by which the terms of social cooperation would be
arrived at in this hypothetical constitutional convention and the assumption
that any rational individual who wanted to live peaceably with others and who imagined
himself a party to this convention would, in view of the fairness of its
procedures, assent to its results. It derives, that is, from the hypothetical
consent of the governed. Philosophers who think of a moral code on the model of
a technical system of an applied science use an entirely different method of
justification. In their view, just as the principles of medicine represent
knowledge about how best to promote health, so the principles of right and
wrong represent knowledge about how best to promote the ends of morality. These
philosophers, then, have a teleological conception of the code. Our fundamental
duty is to promote certain ends, and the principles of right and wrong organize
and direct our efforts in this regard. What justifies the principles, on this
view, is that the ends they serve are the right ones to promote and the actions
they prescribe are the best ways to promote them. The principles are
authoritative, in other words, in virtue of the wisdom of their prescriptions.
Different teleological views in the theory of duty correspond to different
answers to the question of what the right ends to promote are. The most common
answer is happiness; and the main division among the corresponding views
mirrors the distinction in the theory of intrinsic value between egoism and
universalism. Thus, egoism and universalism in the theory of duty hold,
respectively, that the fundamental duty of morality is to promote, as best as
one can, one’s own happiness and that it is to promote, as best as one can, the
happiness of humanity. The former is ethical egoism and is based on the ideal
of rational self-love. The latter is utilitarianism and is based on the ideal
of rational benevolence. Ethical egoism’s most famous exponents in modern
philosophy are Hobbes and Spinoza. It has had few distinguished defenders since
their time. Bentham and J. S. Mill head the list of distinguished defenders of
utilitarianism. The view continues to be enormously influential. On these
teleological views, answers to questions about the ends we ought to pursue
determine the principles of right and wrong. Put differently, the general study
of right action, on these views, is subordinate to the general study of
goodness. This is one of the two leading answers to the structural question
about how the two studies are related. The other is that the general study of
right action is to some extent independent of the general study of goodness. On
views that represent this answer, some principles of right and wrong, notably
principles of justice and honesty, prescribe actions even though more evil than
good would result from doing them. These views are deontological. Fiat justitia
ruat coelum captures their spirit. The opposition between teleology and
deontology in ethics underlies many of the disputes in the general study of
right action. The principal substantive and structural questions of ethics
arise not only with respect to the conduct of human life generally but also
with respect to specific walks of life such as medicine, law, journalism,
engineering, and business. The examination of these questions in relation to
the common practices and traditional codes of such professions and occupations
has resulted in the special studies of applied ethics. In these studies, ideas
and theories from the general studies of goodness and right action are applied
to particular circumstances and problems of some profession or occupation, and
standard philosophical techniques are used to define, clarify, and organize the
ethical issues found in its domain. In medicine, in particular, where rapid
advances in technology create, overnight, novel ethical problems on matters of
life and death, the study of biomedical ethics has generated substantial
interest among practitioners and scholars alike. Metaethics. To a large extent,
the general studies of goodness and right action and the special studies of
applied ethics consist in systematizing, deepening, and revising our beliefs
about how we ought to conduct our lives. At the same time, it is characteristic
of philosophers, when reflecting on such systems of belief, to examine the
nature and grounds of these beliefs. These questions, when asked about ethical
beliefs, define the field of metaethics. The relation of this field to the
other studies is commonly represented by taking the other studies to constitute
the field of ethics proper and then taking metaethics to be the study of the
concepts, methods of justification, and ontological assumptions of the field of
ethics proper. Accordingly, metaethics can proceed from either an interest in
the epistemology of ethics or an interest in its metaphysics. On the first
approach, the study focuses on questions about the character of ethical
knowledge. Typically, it concentrates on the simplest ethical beliefs, such as ‘Stealing
is wrong’ and ‘It is better to give than to receive’, and proceeds by analyzing
the concepts in virtue of which these beliefs are ethical and examining their
logical basis. On the second approach, the study focuses on questions about the
existence and character of ethical properties. Typically, it concentrates on
the most general ethical predicates such as goodness and wrongfulness and
considers whether there truly are ethical properties represented by these
predicates and, if so, whether and how they are interwoven into the natural
world. The two approaches are complementary. Neither dominates the other. The
epistemological approach is comparative. It looks to the most successful
branches of knowledge, the natural sciences and pure mathematics, for
paradigms. The former supplies the paradigm of knowledge that is based on
observation of natural phenomena; the latter supplies the paradigm of knowledge
that seemingly results from the sheer exercise of reason. Under the influence
of these paradigms, three distinct views have emerged: naturalism, rationalism,
and noncognitivism. Naturalism takes ethical knowledge to be empirical and
accordingly models it on the paradigm of the natural sciences. Ethical
concepts, on this view, concern natural phenomena. Rationalism takes ethical
knowledge to be a priori and accordingly models it on the paradigm of pure
mathematics. Ethical concepts, on this view, concern morality understood as
something completely distinct from, though applicable to, natural phenomena, something
whose content and structure can be apprehended by reason independently of
sensory inputs. Noncognitivism, in opposition to these other views, denies that
ethics is a genuine branch of knowledge or takes it to be a branch of knowledge
only in a qualified sense. In either case, it denies that ethics is properly
modeled on science or mathematics. On the most extreme form of noncognitivism,
there are no genuine ethical concepts; words like ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, and
‘evil’ have no cognitive meaning but rather serve to vent feelings and
emotions, to express decisions and commitments, or to influence attitudes and
dispositions. On less extreme forms, these words are taken to have some
cognitive meaning, but conveying that meaning is held to be decidedly secondary
to the purposes of venting feelings, expressing decisions, or influencing
attitudes. Naturalism is well represented in the work of Mill; rationalism in
the works of Kant and the intuitionists. And noncognitivism, which did not
emerge as a distinctive view until the twentieth century, is most powerfully
expounded in the works of C. L. Stevenson and Hare. Its central tenets,
however, were anticipated by Hume, whose skeptical attacks on rationalism set
the agenda for subsequent work in metaethics. The metaphysical approach is
centered on the question of objectivity, the question of whether ethical
predicates represent real properties of an external world or merely apparent or
invented properties, properties that owe their existence to the perception, feeling,
or thought of those who ascribe them. Two views dominate this approach. The
first, moral realism, affirms the real existence of ethical properties. It
takes them to inhere in the external world and thus to exist independently of
their being perceived. For moral realism, ethics is an objective discipline, a
discipline that promises discovery and confirmation of objective truths. At the
same time, moral realists differ fundamentally on the question of the character
of ethical properties. Some, such as Plato and Moore, regard them as purely
intellective and thus irreducibly distinct from empirical properties. Others,
such as Aristotle and Mill, regard them as empirical and either reducible to or
at least supervenient on other empirical properties. The second view, moral
subjectivism, denies the real existence of ethical properties. On this view, to
predicate, say, goodness of a person is to impose some feeling, impulse, or
other state of mind onto the world, much as one projects an emotion onto one’s circumstances
when one describes them as delightful or sad. On the assumption of moral
subjectivism, ethics is not a source of objective truth. In ancient philosophy,
moral subjectivism was advanced by some of the Sophists, notably Protagoras. In
modern philosophy, Hume expounded it in the eighteenth century and Sartre in
the twentieth century. Regardless of approach, one and perhaps the central
problem of metaethics is how value is related to fact. On the epistemological
approach, this problem is commonly posed as the question of whether judgments
of value are derivable from statements of fact. Or, to be more exact, can there
be a logically valid argument whose conclusion is a judgment of value and all
of whose premises are statements of fact? On the metaphysical approach, the
problem is commonly posed as the question of whether moral predicates represent
properties that are explicable as complexes of empirical properties. At issue,
in either case, is whether ethics is an autonomous discipline, whether the study
of moral values and principles is to some degree independent of the study of
observable properties and events. A negative answer to these questions affirms
the autonomy of ethics; a positive answer denies ethics’ autonomy and implies
that it is a branch of the natural sciences. Moral psychology. Even those who
affirm the autonomy of ethics recognize that some facts, particularly facts of
human psychology, bear on the general studies of goodness and right action. No
one maintains that these studies float free of all conception of human appetite
and passion or that they presuppose no account of the human capacity for
voluntary action. It is generally recognized that an adequate understanding of
desire, emotion, deliberation, choice, volition, character, and personality is
indispensable to the theoretical treatment of human well-being, intrinsic
value, and duty. Investigations into the nature of these psychological
phenomena are therefore an essential, though auxiliary, part of ethics. They
constitute the adjunct field of moral psychology. One area of particular
interest within this field is the study of those capacities by virtue of which
men and women qualify as moral agents, beings who are responsible for their
actions. This study is especially important to the theory of duty since that
theory, in modern philosophy, characteristically assumes a strong doctrine of
individual responsibility. That is, it assumes principles of culpability for
wrongdoing that require, as conditions of justified blame, that the act of
wrongdoing be one’s own and that it not be done innocently. Only moral agents
are capable of meeting these conditions. And the presumption is that normal,
adult human beings qualify as moral agents whereas small children and nonhuman
animals do not. The study then focuses on those capacities that distinguish the
former from the latter as responsible beings. The main issue is whether the
power of reason alone accounts for these capacities. On one side of the issue
are philosophers like Kant who hold that it does. Reason, in their view, is
both the pilot and the engine of moral agency. It not only guides one toward
actions in conformity with one’s duty, but it also produces the desire to do
one’s duty and can invest that desire with enough strength to overrule
conflicting impulses of appetite and passion. On the other side are
philosophers, such as Hume and Mill, who take reason to be one of several
capacities that constitute moral agency. On their view, reason works strictly
in the service of natural and sublimated desires, fears, and aversions to
produce intelligent action, to guide its possessor toward the objects of those
desires and away from the objects of those fears. It cannot, however, by itself
originate any desire or fear. Thus, the desire to act rightly, the aversion to
acting wrongly, which are constituents of moral agency, are not products of
reason but are instead acquired through some mechanical process of
socialization by which their objects become associated with the objects of
natural desires and aversions. On one view, then, moral agency consists in the
power of reason to govern behavior, and being rational is thus sufficient for
being responsible for one’s actions. On the other view, moral agency consists
in several things including reason, but also including a desire to act rightly
and an aversion to acting wrongly that originate in natural desires and
aversions. On this view, to be responsible for one’s actions, one must not only
be rational but also have certain desires and aversions whose acquisition is
not guaranteed by the maturation of reason. Within moral psychology, one
cardinal test of these views is how well they can accommodate and explain such
common experiences of moral agency as conscience, weakness, and moral dilemma.
At some point, however, the views must be tested by questions about freedom.
For one cannot be responsible for one’s actions if one is incapable of acting
freely, which is to say, of one’s own free will. The capacity for free action
is thus essential to moral agency, and how this capacity is to be explained,
whether it fits within a deterministic universe, and if not, whether the notion
of moral responsibility should be jettisoned, are among the deepest questions
that the student of moral agency must face. What is more, they are not
questions to which moral psychology can furnish answers. At this point, ethics
descends into metaphysics. ethnography,
an open-ended family of techniques through which anthropologists investigate
cultures; also, the organized descriptions of other cultures that result from
this method. Cultural anthropology
ethnology is based primarily on
fieldwork through which anthropologists immerse themselves in the life of a
local culture village, neighborhood and attempt to describe and interpret
aspects of the culture. Careful observation is one central tool of
investigation. Through it the anthropologist can observe and record various
features of social life, e.g. trading practices, farming techniques, or
marriage arrangements. A second central tool is the interview, through which
the researcher explores the beliefs and values of members of the local culture.
Tools of historical research, including particularly oral history, are also of
use in ethnography, since the cultural practices of interest often derive from
a remote point in time. ethnology, the
comparative and analytical study of cultures; cultural anthroplogy.
Anthropologists aim to describe and interpret aspects of the culture of various
social groups e.g., the hunter-gatherers
of the Kalahari, rice villages of the Chin. Canton Delta, or a community of
physicists at Livermore Laboratory. Topics of particular interest include
religious beliefs, linguistic practices, kinship arrangements, marriage
patterns, farming technology, dietary practices, gender relations, and power
relations. Cultural anthropology is generally conceived as an empirical
science, and this raises several methodological and conceptual difficulties.
First is the role of the observer. The injection of an alien observer into the
local culture unavoidably disturbs that culture. Second, there is the problem
of intelligibility across cultural systems
radical translation. One goal of ethnographic research is to arrive at
an interpretation of a set of beliefs and values that are thought to be
radically different from the researcher’s own beliefs and values; but if this
is so, then it is questionable whether they can be accurately tr. into the
researcher’s conceptual scheme. Third, there is the problem of empirical
testing of ethnographic interpretations. To what extent do empirical procedures
constrain the construction of an interpretation of a given cultural milieu?
Finally, there is the problem of generalizability. To what extent does
fieldwork in one location permit anthropologists to generalize to a larger
context other villages, the dispersed
ethnic group represented by this village, or this village at other times? ethnomethodology, a phenomenological approach
to interpreting everyday action and speech in various social contexts. Derived
from phenomenological sociology and introduced by Harold Garfinkel, the method
aims to guide research into meaningful social practices as experienced by
participants. A major objective of the method is to interpret the rules that
underlie everyday activity and thus constitute part of the normative basis of a
given social order. Research from this perspective generally focuses on mundane
social activities e.g., psychiatrists
evaluating patients’ files, jurors deliberating on defendants’ culpability, or
coroners judging causes of death. The investigator then attempts to reconstruct
an underlying set of rules and ad hoc procedures that may be taken to have
guided the observed activity. The approach emphasizes the contextuality of
social practice the richness of unspoken
shared understandings that guide and orient participants’ actions in a given
practice or activity. H. P. Grice, “The Teutons, according to Tacitus.”
dilemma. Grice: “Ryle overuses the word
dilemma in his popularization, “Dilemmas”.” 1 Any problem where morality is
relevant. This broad use includes not only conflicts among moral reasons but
also conflicts between moral reasons and reasons of law, religion, or
self-interest. In this sense, Abraham is in a moral dilemma when God commands
him to sacrifice his son, even if he has no moral reason to obey. Similarly, I
am in a moral dilemma if I cannot help a friend in trouble without forgoing a
lucrative but morally neutral business opportunity. ’Moral dilemma’ also often
refers to 2 any topic area where it is not known what, if anything, is morally
good or right. For example, when one asks whether abortion is immoral in any
way, one could call the topic “the moral dilemma of abortion.” This epistemic
use does not imply that anything really is immoral at all. Recently, moral
philosophers have discussed a much narrower set of situations as “moral
dilemmas.” They usually define ‘moral dilemma’ as 3 a situation where an agent
morally ought to do each of two acts but cannot do both. The bestknown example
is Sartre’s student who morally ought to care for his mother in Paris but at
the same time morally ought to go to England to join the Free and fight the Nazis. However, ‘ought’ covers
ideal actions that are not morally required, such as when someone ought to give
to a certain charity but is not required to do so. Since most common examples
of moral dilemmas include moral obligations or duties, or other requirements,
it is more accurate to define ‘moral dilemma’ more narrowly as 4 a situation
where an agent has a moral requirement to do each of two acts but cannot do
both. Some philosophers also refuse to call a situation a moral dilemma when
one of the conflicting requirements is clearly overridden, such as when I must
break a trivial promise in order to save a life. To exclude such resolvable
conflicts, ‘moral dilemma’ can be defined as 5 a situation where an agent has a
moral requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and neither requirement is
overridden, but the agent cannot fulfill both. Another common move is to define
‘moral dilemma’ as 6 a situation where every alternative is morally wrong. This
is equivalent to 4 or 5, respectively, if an act is morally wrong whenever it
violates any moral requirement or any non-overridden moral requirement.
However, we usually do not call an act wrong unless it violates an overriding
moral requirement, and then 6 rules out moral dilemmas by definition, since
overriding moral requirements clearly cannot conflict. Although 5 thus seems
preferable, some would object that 5 includes trivial requirements and
conflicts, such as conflicts between trivial promises. To include only tragic
situations, we could define ‘moral dilemma’ as 7 a situation where an agent has
a strong moral obligation or requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and
neither is overridden, but the agent cannot adopt both alternatives. This
definition is strong enough to raise the important controversies about moral
dilemmas without being so strong as to rule out their possibility by
definition. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Ryle’s dilemmas: are they?”
epistemology, the discipline, at the
intersection of ethics and epistemology, that studies the epistemic status and
relations of moral judgments and principles. It has developed out of an interest,
common to both ethics and epistemology, in questions of justification and
justifiability in epistemology, of
statements or beliefs, and in ethics, of actions as well as judgments of
actions and also general principles of judgment. Its most prominent questions
include the following. Can normative claims be true or false? If so, how can
they be known to be true or false? If not, what status do they have, and are
they capable of justification? If they are capable of justification, how can
they be justified? Does the justification of normative claims differ with
respect to particular claims and with respect to general principles? In
epistemology recent years have seen a tendency to accept as valid an account of
knowledge as entailing justified true belief, a conception that requires an
account not just of truth but also of justification and of justified belief.
Thus, under what conditions is someone justified, epistemically, in believing
something? Justification, of actions, of judgments, and of principles, has long
been a central element in ethics. It is only recently that justification in
ethics came to be thought of as an epistemological problem, hence ‘moral
epistemology’, as an expression, is a fairly recent coinage, although its
problems have a long lineage. One long-standing linkage is provided by the
challenge of skepticism. Skepticism in ethics can be about the existence of any
genuine distinction between right and wrong, or it can focus on the possibility
of attaining any knowledge of right and wrong, good or bad. Is there a right
answer? is a question in the metaphysics of ethics. Can we know what the right
answer is, and if so how? is one of moral epistemology. Problems of perception
and observation and ones about observation statements or sense-data play an
important role in epistemology. There is not any obvious parallel in moral
epistemology, unless it is the role of prereflective moral judgments, or
commonsense moral judgments moral
judgments unguided by any overt moral theory
which can be taken to provide the data of moral theory, and which need
to be explained, systematized, coordinated, or revised to attain an appropriate
relation between theory and data. This would be analogous to taking the data of
epistemology to be provided, not by sense-data or observations but by judgments
of perception or observation statements. Once this step is taken the parallel
is very close. One source of moral skepticism is the apparent lack of any
observational counterpart for moral predicates, which generates the question
how moral judgments can be true if there is nothing for them to correspond to.
Another source of moral skepticism is apparently constant disagreement and
uncertainty, which would appear to be explained by the skeptical hypothesis
denying the reality of moral distinctions. Noncognitivism in ethics maintains
that moral judgments are not objects of knowledge, that they make no statements
capable of truth or falsity, but are or are akin to expressions of attitudes.
Some other major differences among ethical theories are largely epistemological
in character. Intuitionism maintains that basic moral propositions are knowable
by intuition. Empiricism in ethics maintains that moral propositions can be
established by empirical means or are complex forms of empirical statements.
Ethical rationalism maintains that the fundamental principles of morality can
be established a priori as holding of necessity. This is exemplified by Kant’s
moral philosophy, in which the categorical imperative is regarded as synthetic
a priori; more recently by what Alan Gewirth b.2 calls the “principle of
generic consistency,” which he claims it is selfcontradictory to deny. Ethical
empiricism is exemplified by classical utilitarianism, such as that of Bentham,
which aspires to develop ethics as an empirical science. If the consequences of
actions can be scientifically predicted and their utilities calculated, then
ethics can be a science. Situationism is equivalent to concrete case
intuitionism in maintaining that we can know immediately what ought to be done
in specific cases, but most ethical theories maintain that what ought to be
done is, in J. S. Mill’s words, determined by “the application of a law to an
individual case.” Different theories differ on the epistemic status of these
laws and on the process of application. Deductivists, either empiricistic or
rationalistic, hold that the law is essentially unchanged in the application;
non-deductivists hold that the law is modified in the process of application.
This distinction is explained in F. L. Will, “Beyond Deduction.” There is
similar variation about what if anything is selfevident, Sidgwick maintaining
that only certain highly abstract principles are self-evident, Ross that only
general rules are, and Prichard that only concrete judgments are, “by an act of
moral thinking.” Other problems in moral epistemology are provided by the
factvalue distinction and controversies
about whether there is any such distinction
and the isought question, the question how a moral judgment can be
derived from statements of fact alone. Naturalists affirm the possibility,
non-naturalists deny it. Prescriptivists claim that moral judgments are
prescriptions and cannot be deduced from descriptive statements alone. This
question ultimately leads to the question how an ultimate principle can be
justified. If it cannot be deduced from statements of fact, that route is out;
if it must be deduced from some other moral principle, then the principle
deduced cannot be ultimate and in any case this process is either circular or
leads to an infinite regress. If the ultimate principle is self-evident, then
the problem may have an answer. But if it is not it would appear to be
arbitrary. The problem of the justification of an ultimate principle continues
to be a leading one in moral epistemology. Recently there has been much
interest in the status and existence of “moral facts.” Are there any, what are
they, and how are they established as “facts”? This relates to questions about
moral realism. Moral realism maintains that moral predicates are real and can
be known to be so; anti-realists deny this. This denial links with the view
that moral properties supervene on natural ones, and the problem of
supervenience is another recent link between ethics and epistemology.
Pragmatism in ethics maintains that a moral problem is like any problem in that
it is the occasion for inquiry and moral judgments are to be regarded as
hypotheses to be tested by how well they resolve the problem. This amounts to
an attempt to bypass the isought problem and all such “dualisms.” So is
constructivism, a development owing much to the work of Rawls, which contrasts
with moral realism. Constructivism maintains that moral ideas are human
constructs and the task is not epistemological or metaphysical but practical
and theoretical that of attaining
reflective equilibrium between considered moral judgments and the principles
that coordinate and explain them. On this view there are no moral facts. Opponents
maintain that this only replaces a foundationalist view of ethics with a
coherence conception. The question whether questions of moral epistemology can
in this way be bypassed can be regarded as itself a question of moral
epistemology. And the question of the foundations of morality, and whether
there are foundations, can still be regarded as a question of moral
epistemology, as distinct from a question of the most convenient and efficient
arrangement of our moral ideas. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Our knowledge of right and
wrong: do we have it? Is it intuitive as Oxonians believe?”
mos: ethos -- meta-ethics:
morality, an informal public system applying to all rational persons, governing
behavior that affects others, having the lessening of evil or harm as its goal,
and including what are commonly known as the moral rules, moral ideals, and
moral virtues. To say that it is a public system means that all those to whom
it applies must understand it and that it must not be irrational for them to
use it in deciding what to do and in judging others to whom the system applies.
Games are the paradigm cases of public systems; all games have a point and the
rules of a game apply to all who play it. All players know the point of the
game and its rules, and it is not irrational for them to be guided by the point
and rules and to judge the behavior of other players by them. To say that
morality is informal means that there is no decision procedure or authority
that can settle all its controversial questions. Morality thus resembles a
backyard game of basketball more than a professional game. Although there is
overwhelming agreement on most moral matters, certain controversial questions
must be settled in an ad hoc fashion or not settled at all. For example, when,
if ever, abortion is acceptable is an unresolvable moral matter, but each
society and religion can adopt its own position. That morality has no one in a
position of authority is one of the most important respects in which it differs
from law and religion. Although morality must include the commonly accepted
moral rules such as those prohibiting killing and deceiving, different
societies can interpret these rules somewhat differently. They can also differ
in their views about the scope of morality, i.e., about whether morality
protects newborns, fetuses, or non-human animals. Thus different societies can
have somewhat different moralities, although this difference has limits. Also
within each society, a person may have his own view about when it is justified
to break one of the rules, e.g., about how much harm would have to be prevented
in order to justify deceiving someone. Thus one person’s morality may differ
somewhat from another’s, but both will agree on the overwhelming number of
non-controversial cases. A moral theory is an attempt to describe, explain, and
if possible justify, morality. Unfortunately, most moral theories attempt to
generate some simplified moral code, rather than to describe the complex moral
system that is already in use. Morality does not resolve all disputes. Morality
does not require one always to act so as to produce the best consequences or to
act only in those ways that one would will everyone to act. Rather morality
includes both moral rules that no one should transgress and moral ideals that
all are encouraged to follow, but much of what one does will not be governed by
morality. H. P. Grice, “Meta-ethics in postwar Oxford philosophy: Hare,
Nowell-Smith, myself, and others!” mos,
ethosmeta-ethical -- meta-ethics:, Grice: “The Romans should have a verb for
‘mos,’ since it’s very nominational!” Surely what we need is something like
Austin’s ‘doing things.’” mos ,
mōris, m. etym. dub.; perh. root ma-, measure; cf.: maturus, matutinus; prop.,
a measuring or guiding rule of life; hence, I.manner, custom, way, usage,
practice, fashion, wont, as determined not by the laws, but by men's will and
pleasure, humor, self-will, caprice (class.; cf.: consuetudo, usus). I. Lit.:
“opsequens oboediensque'st mori atque imperiis patris,” Plaut. Bacch. 3, 3, 54: Grice: “Cicero was
being brilliant when he found that ‘mos’ nicely translates Grecian ‘ethos’cf.
Grice’s ethology. Ethologica -- Philosophical
ethology -- 1 the subfield of psychology that traces the development over time
of moral reasoning and opinions in the lives of individuals this subdiscipline
includes work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan; 2 the part
of philosophy where philosophy of mind and ethics overlap, which concerns all
the psychological issues relevant to morality. There are many different
psychological matters relevant to ethics, and each may be relevant in more than
one way. Different ethical theories imply different sorts of connections. So
moral psychology includes work of many and diverse kinds. But several
traditional clusters of concern are evident. Some elements of moral psychology
consider the psychological matters relevant to metaethical issues, i.e., to
issues about the general nature of moral truth, judgment, and knowledge.
Different metaethical theories invoke mental phenomena in different ways:
noncognitivism maintains that sentences expressing moral judgments do not function
to report truths or falsehoods, but rather, e.g., to express certain emotions
or to prescribe certain actions. So some forms of noncognitivism imply that an
understanding of certain sorts of emotions, or of special activities like
prescribing that may involve particular psychological elements, is crucial to a
full understanding of how ethical sentences are meaningful. Certain forms of
cognitivism, the view that moral declarative sentences do express truths or
falsehoods, imply that moral facts consist of psychological facts, that for
instance moral judgments consist of expressions of positive psychological
attitudes of some particular kind toward the objects of those judgments. And an
understanding of psychological phenomena like sentiment is crucial according to
certain sorts of projectivism, which hold that the supposed moral properties of
things are mere misleading projections of our sentiments onto the objects of
those sentiments. Certain traditional moral sense theories and certain
traditional forms of intuitionism have held that special psychological
faculties are crucial for our epistemic access to moral truth. Particular views
in normative ethics, particular views about the moral status of acts, persons,
and other targets of normative evaluation, also often suggest that an
understanding of certain psychological matters is crucial to ethics. Actions,
intentions, and character are some of the targets of evaluation of normative
ethics, and their proper understanding involves many issues in philosophy of
mind. Also, many normative theorists have maintained that there is a close
connection between pleasure, happiness, or desiresatisfaction and a person’s
good, and these things are also a concern of philosophy of mind. In addition,
the rightness of actions is often held to be closely connected to the motives,
beliefs, and other psychological phenomena that lie behind those actions.
Various other traditional philosophical concerns link ethical and psychological
issues: the nature of the patterns in the long-term development in individuals
of moral opinions and reasoning, the appropriate form for moral education and
punishment, the connections between obligation and motivation, i.e., between
moral reasons and psychological causes, and the notion of free will and its
relation to moral responsibility and autonomy. Some work in philosophy of mind
also suggests that moral phenomena, or at least normative phenomena of some
kind, play a crucial role in illuminating or constituting psychological
phenomena of various kinds, but the traditional concern of moral psychology has
been with the articulation of the sort of philosophy of mind that can be useful
to ethics. Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Meta-ethics in post-war Oxford philosophy: Hare, Nowell-Smith, myself, and
others!” H. P. Grice, “The morality of morality.” H. P. Grice, “Lorenz and the
‘ethologie der ganse.’”
“practical reason”Grice: “In ‘practical
reason,’ we have Aristotle at his best: the category is ‘action,’ and the
praedicabile is ‘rational.’ Now ‘action’ is supracategorial: It’s STRAWSON who
acts, not his action!” -- -- “Or ‘to do things,’ as Austin would put it!” -- moral
rationalism, the view that the substance of morality, usually in the form of
general moral principles, can be known a priori. The view is defended by Kant
in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, but it goes back at least to Plato.
Both Plato and Kant thought that a priori moral knowledge could have an impact
on what we do quite independently of any desire that we happen to have. This
motivational view is also ordinarily associated with moral rationalism. It
comes in two quite different forms. The first is that a priori moral knowledge
consists in a sui generis mental state that is both belief-like and
desire-like. This seems to have been Plato’s view, for he held that the belief
that something is good is itself a disposition to promote that thing. The
second is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a belief that is capable of
rationally producing a distinct desire. Rationalists who make the first claim
have had trouble accommodating the possibility of someone’s believing that
something is good but, through weakness of will, not mustering the desire to do
it. Accordingly, they have been forced to assimilate weakness of will to
ignorance of the good. Rationalists who make the second claim about reason’s
action-producing capacity face no such problem. For this reason, their view is
often preferred. The best-known anti-rationalist about morality is Hume. His
Treatise of Human Nature denies both that morality’s substance can be known by
reason alone and that reason alone is capable of producing action.
Griceian realism: a metaethical view
committed to the objectivity of ethics. It has 1 metaphysical, 2 semantic, and
3 epistemological components. 1 Its metaphysical component is the claim that
there are moral facts and moral properties whose existence and nature are
independent of people’s beliefs and attitudes about what is right or wrong. In
this claim, moral realism contrasts with an error theory and with other forms
of nihilism that deny the existence of moral facts and properties. It contrasts
as well with various versions of moral relativism and other forms of ethical
constructivism that make moral facts consist in facts about people’s moral beliefs
and attitudes. 2 Its semantic component is primarily cognitivist. Cognitivism
holds that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral
properties of actions, persons, policies, and other objects of moral
assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such
objects, that moral judgments or the propositions that they express can be true
or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive attitude of belief toward
the propositions that moral judgments express. These cognitivist claims
contrast with the noncognitive claims of emotivism and prescriptivism,
according to which the primary purpose of moral judgments is to express the
appraiser’s attitudes or commitments, rather than to state facts or ascribe
properties. Moral realism also holds that truth for moral judgments is
non-epistemic; in this way it contrasts with moral relativism and other forms
of ethical constructivism that make the truth of a moral judgment epistemic.
The metaphysical and semantic theses imply that there are some true moral
propositions. An error theory accepts the cognitivist semantic claims but
denies the realist metaphysical thesis. It holds that moral judgments should be
construed as containing referring expressions and having truth-values, but
insists that these referring expressions are empty, because there are no moral
facts, and that no moral claims are true. Also on this theory, commonsense
moral thought presupposes the existence of moral facts and properties, but is
systematically in error. In this way, the error theory stands to moral realism
much as atheism stands to theism in a world of theists. J. L. Mackie introduced
and defended the error theory in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 7. 3
Finally, if moral realism is to avoid skepticism it must claim that some moral
beliefs are true, that there are methods for justifying moral beliefs, and that
moral knowledge is possible. While making these metaphysical, semantic, and
epistemological claims, moral realism is compatible with a wide variety of
other metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological principles and so can take
many different forms. The moral realists in the early part of the twentieth
century were generally intuitionists. Intuitionism combined a commitment to
moral realism with a foundationalist moral epistemology according to which
moral knowledge must rest on self-evident moral truths and with the
nonnaturalist claim that moral facts and properties are sui generis and not
reducible to any natural facts or properties. Friends of noncognitivism found
the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of intuitionism extravagant
and so rejected moral realism. Later moral realists have generally sought to
defend moral realism without the metaphysical and epistemological trappings of
intuitionism. One such version of moral realism takes a naturalistic form. This
form of ethical naturalism claims that our moral beliefs are justified when
they form part of an explanatorily coherent system of beliefs with one another
and with various non-moral beliefs, and insists that moral properties are just
natural properties of the people, actions, and policies that instantiate them.
Debate between realists and anti-realists and within the realist camp centers
on such issues as the relation between moral judgment and action, the rational
authority of morality, moral epistemology and methodology, the relation between
moral and non-moral natural properties, the place of ethics in a naturalistic
worldview, and the parity of ethics and the sciences.
Quinque sense: visum, olfactum, gustum,
tactum, auditumquinque organa: oculus, etc. Grice: “I am particularly irritated
by Pitcher, of all people, quoting me to refute my idea that a ‘pain-sense’ is
an otiosity! Of course it is!”“And I
used to like Pitcher when he was at Oxford!” -- Some reamarks about ‘senusus.’Grice’s
Modified occam’s razor: “Do not multiply senses beyond necessitylet there be
five: visum, auditum, tactum, gustum, and olfactum --. “Some remarks about the (five?)
senses”Grice: “Grice: “And then there’s Shaftesbury who thinks he is being
witty when he speaks of a ‘moral’ “sense”!” -- moral sense theory, an ethical
theory, developed by some British philosophers
notably Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume
according to which the pleasure or pain a person feels upon thinking
about or “observing” certain character traits is indicative of the virtue or
vice, respectively, of those features. It is a theory of “moral perception,”
offered in response to moral rationalism, the view that moral distinctions are
derived by reason alone, and combines Locke’s empiricist doctrine that all
ideas begin in experience with the belief, widely shared at the time, that
feelings play a central role in moral evaluation and motivation. On this
theory, our emotional responses to persons’ characters are often “perceptions”
of their morality, just as our experiences of an apple’s redness and sweetness
are perceptions of its color and taste. These ideas of morality are seen as
products of an “internal” sense, because they are produced in the “observer”
only after she forms a concept of the conduct or trait being observed or
contemplated as when a person realizes
that she is seeing someone intentionally harm another and reacts with displeasure
at what she sees. The moral sense is conceived as being analogous to, or
possibly an aspect of, our capacity to recognize varying degrees of beauty in
things, which modern writers call “the sense of beauty.” Rejecting the popular
view that morality is based on the will of God, Shaftesbury maintains rather
that morality depends on human nature, and he introduces the notion of a sense
of right and wrong, possessed uniquely by human beings, who alone are capable
of reflection. Hutcheson argues that to approve of a character is to regard it
as virtuous. For him, reason, which discovers relations of inanimate objects to
rational agents, is unable to arouse our approval in the absence of a moral
sense. Ultimately, we can explain why, for example, we approve of someone’s
temperate character only by appealing to our natural tendency to feel pleasure
sometimes identified with approval at the thought of characters that exhibit
benevolence, the trait to which all other virtues can be traced. This
disposition to feel approval and disapproval is what Hutcheson identifies as
the moral sense. Hume emphasizes that typical human beings make moral
distinctions on the basis of their feelings only when those sentiments are
experienced from a disinterested or “general” point of view. In other words, we
turn our initial sentiments into moral judgments by compensating for the fact
that we feel more strongly about those to whom we are emotionally close than
those from whom we are more distant. On a widely held interpretation of Hume,
the moral sense provides not only judgments, but also motives to act according
to those judgments, since its feelings may be motivating passions or arouse
such passions. Roderick Firth’s 787 twentieth-century ideal observer theory,
according to which moral good is designated by the projected reactions of a hypothetically
omniscient, disinterested observer possessing other ideal traits, as well as
Brandt’s contemporary moral spectator theory, are direct descendants of the
moral sense theory. Refs: H. P. Grice:
“Shaftesbury’s moral sense: some remarks about the ‘senses’ of this
‘expression’!” Refs.: H. P. Grice, G. J. Warnock, and J. O. Urmson: “The Roman
names for the five senses.” Luigi Speranza, “The senses in iconography.” The
Anglo-American Club. --.
MEDIUS
-- mediautum-inmediatum distinction, the: mediatum: Grice is all
about the mediatum. This he call a ‘soul-to-soul’ transfer. Imagine you pick up
a rose, the thorn hurts you. You are in pain. You say “Ouch.” You transmit this
to the fellow gardener. The mediacy means, “Beware of the thorn. It may hurt
you.” “I am amazed that in The New World, it’s all about immediacy (Chisholm)
when there’s so much which is mediately of immediate philosophical importance!”
immediatum: Grice: “Here the ‘in-’
is negative!”the presence to the mind without intermediaries. The term
‘immediatum’ and its cognates have been used extensively throughout the history
of philosophy, generally without much explanation. Descartes, e.g., explains
his notion of thought thus: “I use this term to include everything that is
within us in a way that we are IMMEDIATELY aware of it” (Second Replies).
Descartes offers no explanation of immediate awareness, but the implicaturum is
“contextually cancellable.” “Only an idiot would not realise that he is
opposing it to mediated experience.”Grice. Grice is well aware of this. “Check
with Lewis and Short.” “mĕdĭo , 1, v. a. medius, I.to
halve, divide in the middle (post-class.), Apic. 3, 9. — B. Neutr., to be in
the middle: “melius Juno mediante,” Pall. Mart. 10, 32.” “So you see, ‘mediare’
can be transitive, but surely Descartes means it in the intransitive
waysomething mediates or something doesn’tClear as water!” However, when
used as a primitive in this way, ‘immediatum’ may simply mean that thoughts are
the immediate objects of perception because thoughts are the only things
perceived in the strict and proper sense that no perception of an intermediary
is required for the person’s awareness of them. Sometimes ‘immediate’ means
‘not mediated’. (1) An inference from a premise to a conclusion can exhibit
logical immediacy because it does not depend on other premises. This is a
technical usage of proof theory to describe the form of a certain class of
inference rules. (2) A concept can exhibit conceptual immediacy because it is definitionally
primitive, as in the Berkeleian doctrine that perception of qualities is
immediate, and perception of objects is defined by the perception of their
qualities, which is directly understood. (3) Our perception of something can
exhibit causal immediacy because it is not caused by intervening acts of
perception or cognition, as with seeing someone immediately in the flesh rather
than through images on a movie screen. (4) A belief-formation process can
possess psychological immediacy because it contains no subprocess of reasoning
and in that sense has no psychological mediator. (5) Our knowledge of something
can exhibit epistemic immediacy because it is justified without inference from
another proposition, as in intuitive knowledge of the existence of the self,
which has no epistemic mediator. A noteworthy special application of immediacy
is to be found in Russell’s notion of knowledge by acquaintance. This notion is
a development of the venerable doctrine originating with Plato, and also found
in Augustine, that understanding the nature of some object requires that we can
gain immediate cognitive access to that object. Thus, for Plato, to understand
the nature of beauty requires acquaintance with beauty itself. This view
contrasts with one in which understanding the nature of beauty requires
linguistic competence in the use of the word ‘beauty’ or, alternatively, with
one that requires having a mental representation of beauty. Russell offers
sense-data and universals as examples of things known by acquaintance. To these
senses of immediacy we may add another category whose members have acquired
special meanings within certain philosophical traditions. For example, in
Hegel’s philosophy if (per impossibile) an object were encountered “as existing
in simple immediacy” it would be encountered as it is in itself, unchanged by
conceptualization. In phenomenology “immediate” experience is, roughly,
bracketed experience.
Monti: Paolo Rossi Monti
(Urbino), filosofo. Firma di Paolo Rossi Monti in una lettera a Antonio Banfi
datata 6 febbraio 1946 Paolo Rossi ha studiato prima ad Ancona e poi a
Bologna, dove nel 1942 si è iscritto a filosofia. Si è laureato nel 1946 a
Firenze, con il filosofo dell'umanesimo Eugenio Garin, con il quale nel 1947 ha
conseguito anche il diploma di perfezionamento. Fra il 1947 e il 1949 ha
insegnato storia e filosofia al Liceo Classico "Plinio il Giovane" di
Città di Castello (PG). Dal 1950 al 1959 è stato assistente di Antonio Banfi
all'Università degli Studi di Milano. Fra il 1950 e il 1955 ha lavorato
all'Enciclopedia dei ragazzi presso la casa editrice Mondadori. Dal 1955
ha insegnato storia della filosofia, prima all'Università degli Studi di Milano
(fino al 1961), poi a Cagliari (1961-1962) e Bologna. Nel 1962 è stato
adottato dalla zia materna Elena Monti. Di conseguenza il suo cognome e quello
dei suoi figli è diventato Rossi Monti nei documenti ufficiali. Tuttavia,
poiché all'epoca il filosofo aveva già pubblicato tre libri e diversi saggi con
il cognome Rossi, ha deciso per chiarezza di continuare ad utilizzare,
nell'attività culturale, il solo cognome Rossi. Dal 1966 si è
definitivamente stabilito a Firenze, dove ha tenuto fino al 1999 la cattedra di
storia della filosofia presso la facoltà di lettere dell'Università. Nello stesso
1999 è stato nominato professore emerito dall'Firenze. Fra i suoi figli,
Mario Rossi Monti (1953), psichiatra, è ordinario di psicologia
all'Urbino. Attività pubblicistica Paolo Rossi si è sempre occupato di
storia della filosofia e della scienza, con particolare riguardo al Cinquecento
e al Seicento, pubblicando centinaia di saggi e articoli su riviste italiane e
straniere. Ha curato edizioni di diversi autori, tra i quali Cattaneo
(Mondadori), Bacone (UTET), Vico (Rizzoli), Diderot (Feltrinelli), Rousseau
(Sansoni), e diretto diverse collane scientifiche e filosofiche per le case
editrici Feltrinelli, Sansoni e La Nuova Italia. Ha diretto la collana
"Storia della scienza" dell'editore Olschki insieme con il filosofo
Walter Bernardi. Ha partecipato alla direzione di varie riviste, tra le
quali la Rivista di filosofia, e ai comitati di consulenza di numerose altre,
tra le quali European Journal of Philosophy, Révue internationale d'histoire et
méthodologie de la psychiatrie, Science in Context, Time and Society. Le
collaborazioni con giornali italiani vanno dalla rubrica "Scienza e
filosofia" sul settimanale Panorama alla rubrica "Storia delle
idee" per il supplemento culturale La Domenica del quotidiano Il Sole 24
ore (dal 1999 alla morte). Nel 1988 è stato eletto presidente del
comitato scientifico del centro di studi filosofici "Antonio Banfi"
di Reggio Emilia. È stato membro dell'Accademia Europea dal 1989 e membro
onorario della Società Italiana di Psicopatologia. Nel 1997 è stato nominato
presidente della «Società italiana per lo studio dei rapporti tra scienza e
letteratura». È stato uno dei promotori del "Festival della
Filosofia della Scienza di Città di Castello", del quale è stato direttore
scientifico negli anni 2008, 2009 e . Pensiero Ha dedicato studi
particolarmente approfonditi a Francesco Bacone(che per primo fece conoscere al
pubblico italiano), ma il campo nel quale ha dato il contributo più innovativo
è quello della cosiddetta "rivoluzione scientifica" del Seicento. Rossi
sostiene che la scienza, a cavallo tra XVI e XVII secolo, ha vissuto un vero e
proprio mutamento di paradigma. Il carattere rivoluzionario dei mutamenti nel
modo di fare scienza avvenuti all'epoca di Bacone e Galileo grazie a una serie
di fattori: la nuova visione della natura, non più divisa tra corpi naturali e
"artificiali", la dimensione continentale (e, in prospettiva,
mondiale) della nuova cultura scientifica, l'autonomia dal pensiero religioso,
la pubblicità dei risultati. Un'altra importante novità fu costituita, secondo
Rossi, dal formarsi di un'autonoma comunità scientifica internazionale,
"una sorta di autonoma Repubblica della Scienza [...] dove non esiste
l'ipse dixit". Si è dedicato per oltre trent'anni al tema della
memoria, in chiave filosofica e storica, al quale ha dedicato nel 1991 il
saggio Il passato, la memoria, l'oblio con il quale ha vinto il Premio
Viareggio. Nei suoi ultimi anni ha analizzato e denunciato l'esistenza di
diverse forme di "ostilità alla scienza" (il "primitivismo"
e l'"antiscienza") che, come forma di reazione allo sviluppo
tecnologico e industriale, propugnano come soluzione di tutti i mali il ritorno
a un mondo premoderno idealizzato e il rifiuto della razionalità.
Riconoscimenti Nel 1972 è stato eletto membro del "Comitato 08" del
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (rieletto nel 1977). È stato presidente sia
della Società Filosofica Italiana (dal 1980 al 1983) sia della Società Italiana
di Storia della Scienza (dal 1983 al 1990). È stato socio corrispondente
dell'Accademia Pontaniana di Napoli dal 1981, socio corrispondente
dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei dal 1988 e socio nazionale della stessa dal
1992. Nel 1985 ha ricevuto la Medaglia Sarton per la storia della scienza
dalla «American History of Science Society» (USA) e successivamente la Medaglia
Pictet dalla «Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève». Il 7
settembre 2009 gli è stato conferito il Premio Balzan per la storia delle
scienze "per i suoi decisivi contributi allo studio dei fondamenti intellettuali
della scienza dal Rinascimento all'Illuminismo". La Società Psicoanalitica
Italiana lo ha insignito del Premio Musatti nel 2008. L'archivio e la
biblioteca Paolo Rossi ha lasciato la propria collezione privata di libri e
documenti alla biblioteca del Museo Galileo, che nel giugno ne ha ricevuta una prima tranche. Il
materiale archivistico raccoglie scritti e appunti a tema storico-filosofico e
storico-scientifico, relazioni tenute a convegni e conferenze, minute, bozze di
stampa e materiali preparatori per pubblicazioni, documenti attinenti
all'attività di docenza e divulgazione, nonché un'ampia selezione di ritagli e
articoli di argomento vario tratti dalle maggiori testate italiane e una
raccolta di documenti di Antonio Banfi. Nella biblioteca privata, invece,
ai numerosi testi di storia della filosofia e storia della scienza, si
affiancano volumi di argomento diverso, che rispecchiano i molteplici interessi
di chi li ha raccolti, così come si sono evoluti nel corso di una vita:
politica, sociologia, religione, in una ricca raccolta di monografie,
miscellanee e periodici. Opere Giacomo Aconcio, Milano, F.lli Bocca, 1952
L'interpretazione baconiana delle favole antiche, Milano, F.lli Bocca. 1952
Francesco Bacone: dalla magia alla scienza, Bari, Laterza, 1957 Clavis
Universalis: arti della memoria e logica combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz,
Milano, Napoli, R. Ricciardi, 1960 I filosofi e le macchine: 1400-1700, Milano,
Feltrinelli, 1962 Galilei, Roma-Milano, CEI-Compagnia Edizioni Internazionali,
1966 Il pensiero di Galileo Galilei: una antologia dagli scritti, Torino,
Loescher Editore, 1968 Le sterminate antichità: studi vichiani, Pisa,
Nistri-Lischi, 1969 Storia e filosofia: saggi sulla storiografia filosofica,
Torino, Einaudi, 1969 Aspetti della rivoluzione scientifica, Napoli, A. Morano,
1971 La rivoluzione scientifica: da Copernico a Newton, Torino, Loescher, 1973
(nuova edizione Pisa, Edizioni ETS, ) Immagini della scienza, Roma, Editori
Riuniti, 1977 I segni del tempo: storia della Terra e storia delle nazioni da
Hooke a Vico, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1979 I ragni e le formiche: un'apologia
della storia della scienza, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1986 Storia della scienza
moderna e contemporanea (direzione dell'opera) , Torino, Utet, 1988 La scienza
e la filosofia dei moderni: aspetti della rivoluzione scientifica, Torino,
Bollati Boringhieri, 1989 Paragone degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni,
Bologna, Il Mulino, 1989 Il passato, la memoria, l'oblio: sei saggi di storia
delle idee, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1991, (Premio Viareggio, 1992) La filosofia
(direzione dell'opera), Torino, Utet, 1995 Naufragi senza spettatore: l'idea di
progresso, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1995 La nascita della scienza moderna in Europa,
Roma, Laterza, 1997 Le sterminate antichità e nuovi saggi vichiani, Scandicci,
La Nuova Italia, 1999 Un altro presente: saggi sulla storia della filosofia,
Bologna, Il Mulino, 1999 Bambini, sogni, furori: tre lezioni di storia delle
idee, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2001 Il tempo dei maghi: Rinascimento e modernità,
Milano, R. Cortina, 2006 Speranze, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008 Mangiare, Bologna,
Il Mulino, Un breve viaggio e altre
storie: le guerre, gli uomini, la memoria, Milano, R. Cortina, Note
Premio letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci, su
premioletterarioviareggiorepaci.it. 9 agosto .
Vincitori del Premio Musatti su
SpiWebSocietà Psicoanalitica Italiana. 15 gennaio . Inventario del Fondo archivistico , su
opac.museogalileo.it. Fondo librario: le
monografie moderne , su opac.museogalileo.it.
Fondo librario: le miscellanee , su opac.museogalileo.it. Fondo librario: i periodici , su
opac.museogalileo.it. Storia della
filosofia, Storia della scienza: saggi in onore di Paolo Rossi, Antonello La
Vergata e Alessandro Pagnini, Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1995. Segni e percorsi
della modernità: saggi in onore di Paolo Rossi, Ferdinando Abbri e Marco
Segala, Dipartimento di Studi Filosofici dell'Siena, 2000. Antonio
Rainone, «Rossi Monti, Paolo» in Enciclopedia ItalianaVI Appendice, Roma,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000. John L. Heilbron , Advancements of
learning: essays in honour of Paolo Rossi, Firenze, L.S. Olschki, Ferdinando
Abbri, Paolo Rossi (30 December 1923-14 January ), in Nuncius, 27, n. 1, ,
1-10. , «Rossi (propr. Rossi Monti), Paolo» in Dizionario di filosofia,
Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009. Paolo Rossi, un maestro, Pisa,
Edizioni della Normale, Pietro Rossi, Tra Banfi e Garin: la formazione
filosofica di Paolo Rossi, in Rivista di filosofia, , n. 2,
168-184. Altri progetti Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio su Paolo Rossi
Monti Paolo Rossi Monti, su
Treccani.itEnciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Paolo Rossi Monti, in Enciclopedia Italiana,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
Paolo Rossi Monti, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Paolo Rossi
Monti, su siusa.archivi.beniculturali.it, Sistema Informativo Unificato per le
Soprintendenze Archivistiche. Opere di
Paolo Rossi Monti, su openMLOL, Horizons Unlimited srl. Registrazioni di Paolo Rossi Monti, su
RadioRadicale.it, Radio Radicale. Sito
ufficiale Paolo Rossi, su paolorossimonti.altervista.org. 29 aprile 5 marzo ). Biografia dell'enciclopedia
multimediale RAI delle scienze filosofiche, su emsf.rai.it. 28 febbraio 2006 12
agosto 2009). Rassegna stampa del sito web italiano per la filosofia, su
lgxserver.uniba.it. 28 febbraio 2006 2 novembre ). Per una scienza libera,
intervista a Paolo Rossi (2003) Opere di Paolo Rossi su StoriaModerna.it, su
stmoderna.it. intervista (giugno 2006) Società Psicoanalitica Italiana,
videointervista (giugno )[collegamento interrotto] Paolo Rossi: memoria e
reminiscenza, sul RAI Filosofia, su
filosofia.rai.it. Il Fondo Rossi nella biblioteca del Museo Galileo, su
museogalileo.it.
mos, costumeGrice: “Can a single
individual have an idio-mos, a practice? He certainly can device a set of
pratices that nobody ever puts into use, as in my New Hightway Code, or my
Deutero-Esperanto.” moral scepticism, any metaethical view that raises
fundamental doubts about morality as a whole. Different kinds of doubts lead to
different kinds of moral skepticism. The primary kinds of moral skepticism are
epistemological. Moral justification skepticism is the claim that nobody ever
has any or adequate justification for believing any substantive moral claim.
Moral knowledge skepticism is the claim that nobody ever knows that any
substantive moral claim is true. If knowledge implies justification, as is
often assumed, then moral justification skepticism implies moral knowledge
skepticism. But even if knowledge requires justification, it requires more, so
moral knowledge skepticism does not imply moral justification skepticism.
Another kind of skeptical view in metaethics rests on linguistic analysis. Some
emotivists, expressivists, and prescriptivists argue that moral claims like
“Cheating is morally wrong” resemble expressions of emotion or desire like
“Boo, cheating” or prescriptions for action like “Don’t cheat”, which are
neither true nor false, so moral claims themselves are neither true nor false.
This linguistic moral skepticism, which is sometimes called noncognitivism,
implies moral knowledge skepticism if knowledge implies truth. Even if such
linguistic analyses are rejected, one can still hold that no moral properties
or facts really exist. This ontological moral skepticism can be combined with
the linguistic view that moral claims assert moral properties and facts to
yield an error theory that all positive moral claims are false. A different
kind of doubt about morality is often raised by asking, “Why should I be
moral?” Practical moral skepticism answers that there is not always any reason
or any adequate reason to be moral or to do what is morally required. This view
concerns reasons to act rather than reasons to believe. Moral skepticism of all
these kinds is often seen as immoral, but moral skeptics can act and be
motivated and even hold moral beliefs in much the same way as non-skeptics.
Moral skeptics just deny that their or anyone else’s moral beliefs are justified
or known or true, or that they have adequate reason to be moral. moral
status, the suitability of a being to be viewed as an appropriate object of
direct moral concern; the nature or degree of a being’s ability to count as a
ground of claims against moral agents; the moral standing, rank, or importance
of a kind of being; the condition of being a moral patient; moral
considerability. Ordinary moral reflection involves considering others. But
which others ought to be considered? And how are the various objects of moral
consideration to be weighed against one another? Anything might be the topic of
moral discussion, but not everything is thought to be an appropriate object of
direct moral concern. If there are any ethical constraints on how we may treat a
ceramic plate, these seem to derive from considerations about other beings, not
from the interests or good or nature of the plate. The same applies,
presumably, to a clod of earth. Many philosophers view a living but insentient
being, such as a dandelion, in the same way; others have doubts. According to
some, even sentient animal life is little more deserving of moral consideration
than the clod or the dandelion. This tradition, which restricts significant
moral status to humans, has come under vigorous and varied attack by defenders
of animal liberation. This attack criticizes speciesism, and argues that
“humanism” is analogous to theories that illegitimately base moral status on
race, gender, or social class. Some philosophers have referred to beings that
are appropriate objects of direct moral concern as “moral patients.” Moral
agents are those beings whose actions are subject to moral evaluation;
analogously, moral patients would be those beings whose suffering in the sense
of being the objects of the actions of moral agents permits or demands moral
evaluation. Others apply the label ‘moral patients’ more narrowly, just to
those beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not
also moral agents. The issue of moral status concerns not only whether beings
count at all morally, but also to what degree they count. After all, beings who
are moral patients might still have their claims outweighed by the preferred
claims of other beings who possess some special moral status. We might, with
Nozick, propose “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people.” Similarly,
the bodily autonomy argument in defense of abortion, made famous by Thomson,
does not deny that the fetus is a moral patient, but insists that her/his/its
claims are limited by the pregnant woman’s prior claim to control her bodily
destiny. It has often been thought that moral status should be tied to the
condition of “personhood.” The idea has been either that only persons are moral
patients, or that persons possess a special moral status that makes them
morally more important than nonpersons. Personhood, on such theories, is a
minimal condition for moral patiency. Why? Moral patiency is said to be
“correlative” with moral agency: a creature has both or neither. Alternatively,
persons have been viewed not as the only moral patients, but as a specially
privileged elite among moral patients, possessing rights as well as
interests.
more grice to
the mill: SOUS-ENTENDU,
-UE, part. passé, adj. et subst. masc. I. − Part. passé de sous-entendre*. A. −
Empl. impers. Il est sous-entendu que + complét. à l'ind. Il est inutile de
préciser que. Synon. il va sans dire que.Elle lui écrivit (...) que (...) elle
aurait enfin, après avoir été si souvent reçue chez eux, le plaisir de les inviter
à son tour. De lui, elle ne disait pas un mot, il était sous-entendu que leur
présence excluait la sienne (Proust,Swann,1913301). B. − Empl. ell. à valeur de
prop. part. Sous-entendu (inv., le locuteur suppléant ce qui n'est pas exprimé
mais suggéré). Ce qui signifie par là (que). Mon cher Ami, Encore une!
sous-entendu: demande de croix d'honneur (Flaub.,Corresp.,1871287). II. −
Adjectif A. − Synon. implicite, tacite; anton. avoué, explicite, formulé. 1.
Qu'on laisse entendre sans l'exprimer. Le lendemain, à table, mon mari me dit
(je me demandai d'abord s'il n'y avait pas là quelque dessein sous-entendu): −
Sais-tu ce que m'a annoncé Brassy? Gurgine a essayé de se tuer
(Daniel-Rops,Mort,1934291). 2. Qui reste implicite. Je me rappelle (...)
d'avoir lu dans la déclaration des droits de l'homme cette maxime sous-entendue
dans tous les codes qu'on nous a donnés depuis: « Tout ce qui n'est pas défendu
par la loi ne peut être empêché, et nul ne peut être contraint à faire ce
qu'elle n'ordonne pas » (Bonald,Législ. primit.,t. 1, 1802152).Toute mélodie
commence par une anacrouse exprimée ou sous-entendue (D'Indy,Compos. mus.,t. 1,
1897-190035). B. − GRAMM. Qui n'est pas exprimé, mais que le sens ou la syntaxe
pourrait suppléer aisément. Observez qu'ainsi est tantôt adverbe, tantôt
conjonction. (...) Il est encore adverbe dans celle-ci [cette phrase], ainsi
que la vertu, le crime a ses degrés; il signifie de la même manière. C'est que,
qui est la conjonction qui lie ensemble la phrase exprimée, le crime a ses degrés,
avec la phrase sous-entendue, la vertu a ses degrés (Destutt de Tr.,Idéol.
2,1803140).L'intelligence fait donc naturellement usage des rapports
d'équivalent à équivalent, de contenu à contenant, de cause à effet, etc.,
qu'implique toute phrase, où il y a un sujet, un attribut, un verbe, exprimé ou
sous-entendu (Bergson,É créatr.,1907149). III. − Subst. masc. A. − Au sing.
Comportement de celui qui sous-entend les choses sans les exprimer
explicitement. C'est la plus immense personnalité que je connaisse [Zola], mais
elle est toute dans le sous-entendu: l'homme ne parle pas de lui, mais toutes
les théories, toutes les idées, toutes les logomachies qu'il émet combattent
uniquement, à propos de tout et de n'importe quoi, en faveur de sa littérature
et de son talent (Goncourt, Journal, 1883251). B. − P. méton. 1. Parfois péj.
Ce qui est sous-entendu, insinué dans des propos ou dans un texte, ou p. ext.,
par un comportement. Synon. allusion, insinuation.Plus libre que ses confrères,
il ne craignait pas, − bien timidement encore, avec des clignements d'yeux et
des sous-entendus, − de fronder les gens en place (Rolland,J.-Chr.,Adolesc.,
1905365). − Au sing. à valeur de neutre. Henry Céard a passé avec moi toute la
journée, causant du roman qu'il fait, − et qu'il veut faire dans le gris, le
voilé, le sous-entendu (Goncourt,, Journal18781276). − En partic. Allusion
grivoise. Les conversations fourmillaient d'allusions et de sous-entendus dont
la grivoiserie me choquait (Beauvoir,Mém. j. fille,1958165). 2. Ce qui n'est
pas exprimé explicitement. Synon. restriction, réticence.Personne ne dit: « Je
suis », si ce n'est dans une certaine attitude très instable et généralement
apprise, et on ne le dit alors qu'avec quantité de sous-entendus: il y faut
parfois un long commentaire (Valéry, Variété IV,1938228). REM. Sous-entente,
subst. fém.,vx. a) Action de sous-entendre par artifice; p. méton., ce qui est
ainsi sous-entendu. Il ne parle jamais qu'il n'y ait quelque sous-entente à ce
qu'il dit. Il y a quelque sous-entente à cela (Ac. 1798-1878). b) Gramm. Synon.
de sous-entendu. (Ds Bally 1951). Prononc. et Orth.: [suzɑ ̃tɑ ̃dy]. Ac. 1694:
sousentendu, -ue, 1718: sousentendu, -üe, dep. 1740: sous-entendu, -ue. Fréq.
abs. littér.: 249. Fréq. rel. littér.: xixes.: a) 189, b) 230; xxes.: a) 480,
b) 484. Bbg. Ducrot (O.). Le Dire et le dit. Paris, 1984, 13-31. − Kerbrat-Orecchioni (C.).
L'Énonciation. De la subjectivité ds le lang. Paris, 1980, 290 p., passim. more grice to the mill: sous-entendu:
used by, of all people, Mill. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's
Philosophybooks.google.com › books ... and speak with any approach to
precision, and adopting into [the necessary sufficient clauses of a piece of
philosophical conceptual analysis] a mere sous-entendu of common conversation
in its most unprecise form. If I say to any one, Cf. understatement, as opposed
to overstatement. The ‘statement’ thing complicates things,
‘underunderstanding’ seems better, or ‘sub-understanding,’ strictly. Trust
Grice to bring more Grice to the Mill and provide a full essay, indeed theory,
and base his own philosophy, on the sous-tentendu! Cf. Pears, Pears
Cyclopaedia. “The English love meiosis, litotes, and understatement. The French
don’t.” Note all the figures of rhetoric cited by Grice, and why they have
philosophical import. Many entries here: hyperbole, meiosis, litotes, etc.
Grice took ‘sous-entendu’ etymologically serious. It is UNDERSTOOD. Nobody
taught you, but it understood. It is understood is like It is known. So “The
pillar box seems red” is understood to mean, “It may not be.” Now a
sous-entendu may be cancellable, in which case it was MIS-understood, or the
emissor has changed his mind. Grice considers the paradoxes the understanding
under ‘uptake,’ just to make fun of Austin’s informalism. The ‘endendu’ is what
the French understand by ‘understand,’ the root being Latin intellectus, or
intendo.
macaulay: Grice: “Unlike Whitehead, I care
for style; so when it comes to ‘if,’ we
have to please Macaulaythe verbs change, for each modeand sub-mode!” -- Grice: A curious phenomenon comes to light. I began by
assuming (or stipulating) that the verbs 'judge' and 'will' (acceptance-verbs)
are to be 'completed' by radicals (phrastics). Yet when the machinery developed
above has been applied, we find that the verb 'accept' (or 'think') is to be
completed by something of the form 'Op + p', that is, by a sentence. Perhaps we
might tolerate this syntactical ambivalence; but if we cannot, the remedy is
not clear. It would, for example, not be satisfactory to suppose that 'that',
when placed before a sentence, acts as a 'radicalizer' (is a functor expressing
a function which takes that sentence on to its radical); for that way we should
lose the differentiations effected by varying mode-markers, and this would be
fatal to the scheme. This phenomenon certainly suggests that the attempt to
distinguish radicals from sentences may be misguided; that if radicals are to
be admitted at all, they should be identified with indicative sentences. The operator '⊢' would then be a
'semantically vanishing' operator. But this does not wholly satisfy me; for, if
'⊢'
is semantically vacuous, what happens to the subordinate distinction made by
'A' and 'B' markers, which seems genuine enough? We might find these markers
'hanging in the air', like two smiles left behind by the Cheshire Cat. Whatever
the outcome of this debate, however, I feel fairly confident that I could
accommodate the formulation of my discussion to it. Fuller Exposition of the
'Initial Idea' First, some preliminary points. To provide at least a modicum of
intelligibility for my discourse, I shall pronounce the judicative end p.72
operator '⊢'
as 'it is the case that', and the volitive operator '!' as 'let it be that';
and I shall pronounce the sequence 'φ, ψ' as 'given that φ, ψ'. These vocal
mannerisms will result in the production of some pretty barbarous 'English
sentences'; but we must remember that what I shall be trying to do, in uttering
such sentences, will be to represent supposedly underlying structure; if that
is one's aim, one can hardly expect that one's speech-forms will be such as to
excite the approval of, let us say, Jane Austen or Lord Macaulay. In any case,
less horrendous, though (for my purposes) less perspicuous, alternatives will,
I think, be available. Further, I am going to be almost exclusively concerned
with alethic and practical arguments, the proximate conclusions of which will
be, respectively, of the forms 'Acc (⊢ p)' and 'Acc (! p)'; for example, 'acceptable (it is the
case that it snows)' and 'acceptable (let it be that I go home)'. There will be
two possible ways of reading the latter sentence. We might regard 'acceptable'
as a sentential adverb (modifier) like 'demonstrably'; in that case to say or
think 'acceptable (let it be that I go home)' will be to say or think 'let it
be that I go home', together with the qualification that what I say or think is
acceptable; as one might say, 'acceptably, let it be that I go home'. To adopt
this reading would seem to commit us to the impossibility of incontinence; for
since 'accept that let it be that I go home' is to be my rewrite for 'Vaccept
(will) that I go home', anyone x who concluded, by practical argument, that
'acceptable let it be that x go home' would ipso facto will to go home.
Similarly (though less paradoxically) any one who concluded, by alethic
argument, 'acceptable it is the case that it snows', would ipso facto judge
that it snows. So an alternative reading 'it is acceptable that let it be that
I go home', which does not commit the speaker or thinker to 'let it be that I
go home', seems preferable. We can, of course, retain the distinct form
'acceptably, let it be that (it is the case that) p' for renderings of
'desirably' and 'probably'. Let us now tackle the judicative cases. I start
with the assumption that arguments of the form 'A, so probably B' are sometimes
(informally) valid; 'he has an exceptionally red face, so probably he has high
blood pressure' might be informally valid, whereas 'he has an exceptionally red
face, so probably he has musical talent' is unlikely to be allowed informal
validity. end p.73 We might re-express this assumption by saying that it is
sometimes the case that A informally yields-with-probability that B (where
'yields' is the converse of 'is inferable from'). If we wish to construct a
form of argument the acceptability of which does not depend on choice of
substituends for 'A' and 'B', we may, so to speak, allow into the
object-language forms of sentence which correspond to metastatements of the
form: 'A yields-with-probability that B'; we may allow ourselves, for example,
such a sentence as "it is probable, given that he has a very red face,
that he has high blood pressure". This will provide us with the
argument-patterns: “Probable, given A, that B A So, probably, B” or “Probable,
given A, that B A So probably that B” To take
the second pattern, the legitimacy of such an inferential transition will not
depend on the identity of 'A' or of 'B', though it will depend (as was stated
in the previous chapter) on a licence from a suitably formulated 'Principle of
Total Evidence'. The proposal which I am considering (in pursuit of the 'initial
idea') would (roughly) involve rewriting the second pattern of argument so that
it reads: It is acceptable, given that it is the case that A, that it is the
case that B. It is the case that A. To apply this schema to a particular case,
we generated the particular argument: It is acceptable, given that it is the
case that Snodgrass has a red face, that it is the case that Snodgrass has high
blood pressure. It is the case that Snodgrass has a red face. So, it is
acceptable that it is the case that Snodgrass has high blood pressure. end p.74
If we make the further assumption that the singular 'conditional' acceptability
statement which is the first premiss of the above argument may be (and perhaps
has to be) reached by an analogue of the rule of universal instantiation from a
general acceptability statement, we make room for such general acceptability
sentences as: It is acceptable, given that it is the case that x has a red
face, that it is the case that x has high blood pressure. which are of the form
"It is acceptable, given that it is the case that Fx, that it is the case
that Gx'; 'x' here is, you will note, an unbound variable; and the form might
also (loosely) be read (pronounced) as: "It is acceptable, given that it
is the case that one (something) is F, that it is the case that oneis G."
All of this is (I think) pretty platitudinous; which is just as well, since it
is to serve as a model for the treatment of practical argument. To turn from
the alethic to the practical dimension. Here (the proposal goes) we may
proceed, in a fashion almost exactly parallel to that adopted on the alethic
side, through the following sequence of stages: (1) Arguments (in thought or
speech) of the form: Let it be that A It is the case that B so, with some
degree of desirability, let it be that C are sometimes (and sometimes not)
informally valid (or acceptable). (2) Arguments of the form: It is desirable,
given that let it be that A and that it is the case that B, that let it be that
C Let it be that A It is the case that B so, it is desirable that let it be
that C should, therefore, be allowed to be formally acceptable, subject to
licence from a Principle of Total Evidence. (3) In accordance with our proposal
such arguments will be rewritten: end p.75 It is acceptable, given that let it
be A and that it is the case that B, that let it be that C Let it be that A It
is the case that B so, it is desirable that let it be that C (4) The first
premisses of such arguments may be (and perhaps have to be) reached by
instantiation from general acceptability statements of the form: "It is
acceptable, given that let one be E and that it is the case that one is F, that
let it be that one is G." We may note that sentences like "it is
snowing" can be trivially recast so as (in effect) to appear as third
premisses in such arguments (with 'open' counterparts inside the acceptability
sentence; they can be rewritten as, for example, "Snodgrass is such that
it is snowing"). We are now in possession of such exciting general acceptability
sentences as: "It is acceptable, given that let it be that one keeps dry
and that it is the case that one is such that it is raining, that let one take
with one one's umbrella." (5) A
special subclass of general acceptability sentences (and of practical arguments)
can be generated by 'trivializing' the predicate in the judicative premiss
(making it a 'universal predicate'). If, for example, I take 'x is F' to
represent 'x is identical with x' the judicative subclause may be omitted from
the general acceptability sentence, with a corresponding 'reduction' in the
shape of the related practical argument. We have therefore such argument
sequences as the following: (P i ) It is acceptable, given that let it be that
one survives, that let it be that one eats So (by U i ) It is acceptable, given
that let it be that Snodgrass survives, that let it be that Snodgrass eats (P 2
) Let it be that Snodgrass survives So (by Det) It is acceptable that let it be
that Snodgrass eats. We should also, at some point, consider further
transitions to: (a) Acceptably, let it be that Snodgrass eats, and to: (b) Let
it be that Snodgrass eats. end p.76 And we may also note that, as a more
colloquial substitute for "Let it be that one (Snodgrass) survives
(eats)" the form "one (Snodgrass) is to survive (eat)" is
available; we thus obtain prettier inhabitants of antecedent clauses, for
example, "given that Snodgrass is to survive". We must now pay some
attention to the varieties of acceptability statement to be found within each
of the alethic and practical dimensions; it will, of course, be essential to
the large-scale success of the proposal which I am exploring that one should be
able to show that for every such variant within one dimension there is a
corresponding variant within the other. Within the area of defeasible
generalizations, there is another variant which, in my view, extends across the
board in the way just indicated, namely, the unweighted acceptability
generalization (with associated singular conditionals), or, as I shall also call
it, the ceteris paribus generalization. Such generalization I take to be of the
form "It is acceptable (ceteris paribus), given that φX, that ψX" and
I think we find both practical and alethic examples of the form; for example,
"It is ceteris paribus acceptable, given that it is the case that one
likes a person, that it is the case that one wants his company", which is
not incompatible with "It is ceteris paribus acceptable, given that it is
the case that one likes a person and that one is feeling ill, that one does not
want his company". We also find "It is ceteris paribus acceptable,
given that let it be that one leaves the country and given that it is the case
that one is an alien, that let it be that one obtains a sailing permit from Internal
Revenue", which is compatible with "It is ceteris paribus acceptable,
given that let it be that one leaves the country and given that it is the case
that one is an alien and that one is a close friend of the President, that let
it be that one does not obtain a sailing permit, and that one arranges to
travel in Air Force I". I discussed this kind of generalization, or 'law',
briefly in "Method in Philosophical Psychology"1 and shall not dilate
on its features here. I will just remark that it can be adapted to handle
'functional laws' (in the way suggested in that address), and that end p.77 it
is different from the closely related use of universal generalizations in
'artificially closed systems', where some relevant parameter is deliberately
ignored, to be taken care of by an extension to the system; for in that case,
when the extension is made, the original law has to be modified or corrected,
whereas my ceteris paribus generalization can survive in an extended system;
and I regard this as a particular advantage to philosophical psychology. In
addition to these two defeasible types of acceptability generalization (each
with alethic and practical sub-types), we have non-defeasible acceptability
generalizations, with associated singular conditionals, exemplifying what I
might call 'unqualified', 'unreserved', or 'full' acceptability claims. To
express these I shall employ the (constructed) modal 'it is fully acceptable
that . . .'; and again there will be occasion for its use in the representation
both of alethic and of practical discourse. We have, in all, then, three
varieties of acceptability statement (each with alethic and practical
sub-types), associated with the modals "It is fully acceptable that . . .
" (non-defeasible), 'it is ceteris paribus acceptable that . . . ', and
'it is to such-and-such a degree acceptable that . . . ', both of the latter
pair being subject to defeasibility. (I should re-emphasize that, on the
practical side, I am so far concerned to represent only statements which are
analogous with Kant's Technical Imperatives ('Rules of Skill').)
more, H: “Not to be confused with the
other More, who was literally beheaded when he refused to swear to the Act of
Supremacy which metaphorically named Henry VIII the head of the C. of E.” -- English
philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most prolific of the Cambridge
Platonists. He entered Christ’s , where he spent the rest of his life after
becoming Fellow . He was primarily an apologist of anti-Calvinist,
latitudinarian stamp whose inalienable philosophico- theological purpose was to
demonstrate the existence and immortality of the soul and to cure “two enormous
distempers of the mind,” atheism and “enthusiasm.” He describes himself as “a
Fisher for Philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the
Christian Faith.” His eclectic method deployed Neoplatonism notably Plotinus
and Ficino, mystical theologies, cabalistic doctrines as More misconceived
them, empirical findings including reports of witchcraft and ghosts, the new
science, and the new philosophy, notably the philosophy of Descartes. Yet he
rejected Descartes’s beast-machine doctrine, his version of dualism, and the
pretensions of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to explain all physical
phenomena. Animals have souls; the universe is alive with souls. Body and
spirit are spatially extended, the former being essentially impenetrable,
inert, and discerpible divisible into parts, the latter essentially penetrable,
indiscerpible, active, and capable of a spiritual density, which More called essential
spissitude, “the redoubling or contracting of substance into less space than it
does sometimes occupy.” Physical processes are activated and ordered by the
spirit of nature, a hylarchic principle and “the vicarious power of God upon
this great automaton, the world.” More’s writings on natural philosophy,
especially his doctrine of infinite space, are thought to have influenced
Newton. More attacked Hobbes’s materialism and, in the 1660s and 1670s, the
impieties of Dutch Cartesianism, including the perceived atheism of Spinoza and
his circle. He regretted the “enthusiasm” for and conversion to Quakerism of
Anne Conway, his “extramural” tutee and assiduous correspondent. More had a
partiality for coinages and linguistic exotica. We owe to him ‘Cartesianism’
coined a few years before the first appearance of the equivalent, and the substantive
‘materialist.’ “But he never coined ‘implicaturum,’”Grice.
more, Sir Thomas: English humanist,
statesman, martyr, and saint. A lawyer by profession, he entered royal service and
became lord chancellor. After refusing to swear to the Act of Supremacy, which
named (“metaphorically,”Grice) Henry VIII
the head of the C. of E. h, More was (“ironically, but literally”Grice) beheaded
as a traitor. Although his writings include biography, poetry, letters, and
anti-heretical tracts, his only philosophical work, Utopia published in Latin,
1516, is his masterpiece. Covering a wide variety of subjects including
government, education, punishment, religion, family life, and euthanasia,
Utopia contrasts European social institutions with their counterparts on the
imaginary island of Utopia. Inspired in part by Plato’s Republic, the Utopian
communal system is designed to teach virtue and reward it with happiness. The
absence of money, private property, and most social distinctions allows
Utopians the leisure to develop the faculties in which happiness consists.
Because of More’s love of irony, Utopia has been subject to quite different
interpretations. H. P. Grice, “A personal guide to the 39 articles, compleat
with their 39 implicatura.”
Morelli: Raffaele
Morelli (Milano), filosofo. Si laurea in Medicina e Chirurgia presso
l'Università degli Studi di Pavia nel 1973, e l'anno dopo assolve all'obbligo
di leva a Trieste dove presta attenzione alle problematiche relazionali dei
militari nello svolgimento delle proprie mansioni; si è poi specializzato in
Psichiatria presso l'Università degli Studi di Milano nel 1977. Dal 1979
è direttore dell'Istituto Riza, gruppo di ricerca che pubblica la rivista Riza
Psicosomatica ed altre pubblicazioni specializzate, con lo scopo di
"studiare l'uomo come espressione della simultaneità psicofisica
riconducendo a questa concezione l'interpretazione della malattia, della sua
diagnosi e della sua cura". Inoltre è direttore delle riviste Dimagrire e
Salute Naturale. Dall'attività dell'Istituto Riza è sorta anche la Scuola
di Formazione in Psicoterapia ad indirizzo psicosomatico, riconosciuta
ufficialmente dal Ministero dell'università e della ricerca scientifica e
tecnologica nell'ottobre del 1994. Raffaele Morelli è anche
vicepresidente della SIMP (Società Italiana di Medicina Psicosomatica).
Ha partecipato a numerose trasmissioni televisive sia per la RAI sia per
Mediaset (Maurizio Costanzo Show, Tutte le mattine, Matrix, ecc.) e per la
radio. Nelle sue opere ci sono molti riferimenti alle dottrine
orientali.[senza fonte] Opere Verso la concezione di un sé psicosomatico.
Il corpo è come un grande sogno della mente, con Diego Frigoli e Gianlorenzo
Masaraki, Milano, UNICOPLI, 1979; Milano, Edizioni Libreria Cortina, 1980. 88-7043-011-1 La dimensione respiratoria.
Studio psicosomatico del respiro, con Gianlorenzo Masaraki, Milano, Masson
Italia, 1981. 88-214-1950-9. Dove va la
medicina psicosomatica, a cura di, Milano-Roma, Riza libri, Endas, 1982. Il
sacro. Antropoanalisi, psicosomatica, comunicazione, con Erminio Gius e Carlo
Tosetti, Milano, Riza-Endas, 1983. Convegno internazionale Mente-corpo: il
momento unificante. Milano, 24-26 ottobre 1986. Atti, e con Piero Parietti,
Milano, UNICOPLI, Riza, 1987.
88-7061-321-6. I sogni dell'infinito, e con Franco Sabbadini, Milano,
Riza, 1989. 88-7071-031-9. Autostima. Le
regole pratiche, Milano, a cura dell'Istituto Riza di medicina psicosomatica,
1997. 88-900173-0-9. Il talento. Come
scoprire e realizzare la tua vera natura, Milano, Riza, Ansia, con testi di
Piero Parietti e Vittorio Caprioglio, Milano, Riza, 1999. 88-7071-029-7. Insonnia, con testi di Piero
Parietti e Vittorio Caprioglio, Milano, Riza, 1999. 88-7071-030-0. Cefalea, con testi di Piero
Parietti e Vittorio Caprioglio, Milano, Riza, 1999. 88-7071-031-9. Lo psichiatra e l'alchimista.
Romanzo, Milano, Riza, 2000.
88-7071-040-8. Le nuove vie dell'autostima. Se piaci a te stesso ogni
miracolo è possibile, Milano, Riza, 2001.
88-7071-047-5. Conosci davvero tuo figlio? Sconosciuto in casa. Dal
delitto di Novi Ligure al disagio di una generazione, con Gianna Schelotto, Milano,
Riza, Come essere felici, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. Cosa dire e non dire nella
coppia, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. Come mantenere il cervello giovane, Milano,
A. Mondadori, 2003. Come affrontare lo stress, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. Come
amare ed essere amati, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. Come dimagrire senza
soffrire, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. Come risvegliare l'eros, Milano, A.
Mondadori, 2003. Come star bene al lavoro, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. Come
essere single e felici, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. Cosa dire o non dire ai
nostri figli, Milano, A. Mondadori, 2003. La rinascita interiore, Milano, Riza,
2003. 88-7071-064-5 Volersi bene. Tutto
ciò che conta è già dentro di noi, Milano, Riza, 2003. L'amore giusto. C'è una
persona che aspetta solo te, Milano, Riza, 2004. Vincere i disagi. Puoi farcela
da solo perché li hai creati tu, Milano, Riza, 2004. Felici sul lavoro. Come
ritrovare il benessere in ufficio, Milano, Riza, 2004. I figli felici.
Aiutiamoli a diventare se stessi, Milano, Riza, 2004. La gioia di vivere.
Scorre spontaneamente dentro di noi, Milano, Riza, 2004. Essere se stessi.
L'unica via per incontrare il benessere, Milano, Riza, 2004. Accendi la
passione. È la scintilla che risveglia l'energia vitale, Milano, Riza, 2004.
Alle radici della felicità. Editoriali dal 1980 al 1990 pubblicati su Riza
psicosomatica, rivista mensile delle Edizioni Riza, Milano, Riza, 2004. 88-7071-072-6 Ciascuno è perfetto. L'arte di
star bene con se stessi, Milano, Mondadori, 2004. 88-04-52085-X. Il segreto di vivere.
Aforismi, Milano, Riza, Realizzare se stessi, Milano, Riza, 2005. Vincere la
solitudine, Milano, Riza, 2005. Dimagrire senza fatica, Milano, Riza, 2005.
Amare senza soffrire, Milano, Riza, 2005. Guarire con la psiche, Milano, Riza,
2005. Superare il tradimento, Milano, Riza, 2005. Dizionario della felicità, 6
voll, Milano, Riza, 2005. Non siamo nati per soffrire, Milano, Mondadori, 2005.
L'autostima. Le cinque regole. Vivere la vita. Adesso, Milano, Riza, 2006.
Conoscersi. L'arte di valorizzare se stessi. Via le zavorre dalla mente,
Milano, Riza, 2006. I figli difficili sono i figli migliori, Milano, Riza,
2006. Il matrimonio è in crisi... che fortuna!, Milano, Riza, 2006. Autostima
2007. I consigli di Raffaele Morelli per un anno di felicità, Milano, Riza,
2006. Le parole che curano, Milano, Riza, 2006.
88-7071-095-5 Perché le donne non ne possono più... degli uomini,
Milano, Riza, 2006. Le piccole cose che cambiano la vita, Milano, Mondadori,
2006. 88-04-56010-X. Come trovare
l'armonia in se stessi, Milano, Oscar Mondadori, 2007. 978-88-04-57101-8. Ama e non pensare, Milano,
Mondadori, 2007. 978-88-04-57240-4.
Curare il panico. Gli attacchi vengono per farci esprimere le parti migliori di
noi stessi, con Vittorio Caprioglio, Milano, Riza, 2007. Non dipende da te.
Affidati alla vita così realizzi i tuoi desideri, Milano, Mondadori, L'alchimia.
L'arte di trasformare se stessi, Milano, Riza, 2008. Il sesso è amore. Vivere
l'eros senza sensi di colpa, Milano, Mondadori, 2008. 978-88-04-58339-4. Puoi fidarti di te,
Milano, Mondadori, 2009.
978-88-04-59350-8. La felicità è dentro di te, Milano, Mondadori,L'unica
cosa che conta, Milano, Mondadori, .
978-88-04-59811-4. La felicità è qui. Domande e risposte sulla vita,
l'amore, l'eternità, con Luciano Falsiroli, Milano, Mondadori, , 978-88-04-61173-8. Guarire senza medicine. La
vera cura è dentro di te, Milano, Mondadori, .
978-88-04-62394-6. Lezioni di autostima. Come imparare a stare beni con
se stessi e con gli altri, Milano, Mondadori, .Il segreto dell'amore felice,
Milano, Mondadori, . 978-88-04-63356-3.
La saggezza dell'anima. Quello che ci rende unici, Milano, Mondadori, .Pensa
magro. Le 6 mosse psicologiche per dimagrire senza dieta, Milano, Mondadori,
. 978-88-04-64048-6. Vincere il panico.
[Le parole per capirlo, i consigli per affrontarlo, cosa fare per guarirlo],
con Vittorio Caprioglio, Milano, Mondadori, .
978-88-04-64423-1. Nessuna ferita è per sempre. Come superare i dolori
del passato, Milano, Mondadori, Solo la mente può bruciare i grassi. Come
attivare l'energia dimagrante che è dentro di noi, Milano, Mondadori, . 978-88-04-66352-2. Breve corso di felicità.
Le antiregole che ti danno la gioia di vivere, Milano, Mondadori, . 978-88-04-67954-7. La vera cura sei tu,
Milano, Mondadori, . Il meglio deve ancora arrivare. Come attivare l'energia
che ringiovanisce, Milano, Mondadori, .
978-88-04-68355-1. Il potere curativo del digiuno. La pratica che
rigenera corpo e mente, con Michael Morelli, Milano, Mondadori, . 978-88-04-68504-3. Segui il tuo destino. Come
riconoscere se sei sulla strada giusta, Milano, Mondadori, .Il manuale della
felicità. Le dieci regole pratiche che ti miglioreranno la vita, Milano, Mondadori,
.Pronto soccorso per le emozioni. Le parole da dirsi nei momenti difficili,
Milano, Mondadori, .Sito Mondadori
SIMPDirettivo, simpitalia.com. 4riza.itSito ufficiale dell'istituto
Riza, su riza.it.Raffaele Morelli, su Internet Movie Database, IMDb.com.
Moretti: Giampiero Moretti (Roma),
filosofo. Nasce a Roma, nel borghese quartiere Trieste, primo di due fratelli.
Ottiene nel 1973 il diploma di maturità classica presso il Liceo Giulio Cesare.
Successivamente, nel 1977, consegue una prima laurea in Giurisprudenza, con una
tesi in filosofia del diritto, e, nel 1980, una seconda in filosofia, con una
tesi in filosofia morale, entrambe presso l'Roma La Sapienza. È poi borsista
presso l'Friburgo in Brisgovia, dove imposta un progetto di ricerca che,
partendo dall'interpretazione del pensiero di Martin Heidegger, mira ad
un'analisi critica delle categorie filosofico-estetiche del “romantico” in
Germania, con particolare attenzione alle opere di autori del romanticismo di
Heidelberg, quali Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, i Fratelli Grimm e Johann
Jakob Bachofen, che contribuisce a tradurre e a far conoscere in Italia. Al suo
rientro insegna dapprima materie letterarie nelle scuole medie e, in seguito,
filosofia presso la Scuola germanica di Roma.
La sua ricerca si amplia poi al pensiero estetico di Novalis, di cui
cura la prima edizione completa in lingua italiana della Opera filosofica;
durante questo periodo consegue il dottorato di ricerca in Estetica presso
l'Bologna. Nel 1992 vince la cattedra di professore associato di Estetica
all'Bari; dal 2000 è Professore di Estetica presso l'Napoli L’Orientale. Redattore di Itinerari e Studi Filosofici,
collabora con varie altre riviste filosofiche (Agalma, Rivista di Estetica,
Studi di Estetica, aut aut, Nuovi Argomenti, Filosofia e Società, Filosofia
Oggi, Estetica) e ha spesso partecipato a trasmissioni RAI su temi filosofici e
a numerosi convegni . Opere originali
Heidelberg romantica. Studio sui rapporti poesia-mito-storia e arte-natura nel
preromanticismo e in J. Görres, F. Creuzer, J. e W. Grimm, J. J. Bachofen,
Itinerari, Lanciano, 1984; seconda edizione rivista e accresciuta, Cosmopoli,
Bologna-Roma, 1995. Anima e immagine. Sul «poetico» in L. Klages, Aesthetica
pre-print, Palermo, 1985 Nichilismo e romanticismo. Estetica e filosofia della
storia fra Ottocento e Novecento, Cadmo, Roma, 1988 Hestia. Interpretazione del
romanticismo tedesco, Ianua, Roma, 1988 L'estetica di Novalis. Analogia e
principio poetico nella profezia romantica, Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino, La
segnatura romantica. Filosofia e sentimento da Novalis a Heidegger, Hestia,
Cernusco L., 1992 Il genio, il Mulino, Bologna, 1998 Il poeta ferito.
Hölderlin, Heidegger e la storia dell'essere, Editrice La Mandragora, Imola,
1999 Anima e immagine. Studi su Ludwig Klages, Mimesis, Milano, 2001 Heidelberg
romantica. Romanticismo tedesco e nichilismo europeo, terza edizione rivista,
Guida Editori, Napoli, 2002 Introduzione all'estetica del Romanticismo tedesco,
Nuova Cultura, Roma, 2007 Il genio, nuova edizione ampliata, Morcelliana,
Brescia. Per immagini. Esercizi di ermeneutica sensibile, Moretti & Vitali,
Bergamo, Heidelberg romantica.
Romanticismo tedesco e nichilismo europeo, nuova edizione rivista, Morcelliana,
Brescia, 978-88-372-2682-4 Novalis.
Pensiero, poesia, romanzo Morcelliana, Brescia,
9788837228309 Opere curate o tradotte Romano Guardini, Hölderlin,
Giampiero Moretti, Morcelliana, Brescia. Novalis, Scritti filosofici, Fabrizio
Desideri e Giampiero Moretti, Morcelliana, Brescia. J. J. Bachofen, Il
matriarcato, scelta antologica con introduzione e note di Moretti, 2ª edizione,
Christian Marinotti Editore, Milano, 2003
Novalis, Opera filosofica, I,
Einaudi, Torino, Un video con una trasmissione RAI del prof. Moretti Un video con un intervento del prof. Moretti.
Mori: Maurizio Mori (Cremona),
filosofo. Professore di Filosofia morale e bioetica all’Torino e presidente
della Consulta di Bioetica Onlus, un'associazione di volontariato culturale per
la promozione della bioetica laica. L’etica e la bioetica con le varie
problematiche connesse sono le tematiche al centro dei suoi interessi filosofici
e teorici. Mori ha studiato
all’Università degli Studi di Milano, dove ha conseguito la laurea (con Andrea
Bonomi e Claudio Pizzi) e il dottorato sotto la guida di Uberto Scarpelli e
Mario Jori. Ha studiato due semestri all’Helsinki con G.H. von Wright, e ha un
M.A. in Philosophy dalla University of Arizona, dove ha studiato con Joel
Feinberg, Allen Buchanan e Jules Coleman. In Italia ha insegnato all’Università
del Piemonte Orientale (Alessandria) e all’Pisa, prima di essere chiamato a
Torino. Temi di ricerca Mori ha studiato
i temi della metaetica e della logica dell’etica con le problematiche della
teoria etica. Ha tradotto in italiano i Metodi dell’etica di Henry Sidgwick e
Etica di W.K. Frankena. È stato tra i primi in Italia a occuparsi di bioetica,
nella quale ha dato contributi in tutti i principali settori, con particolare
attenzione all’aborto e alla fecondazione assistita. Sollecitato dai casi Welby
e Englaro ha dato contributi anche sul fine-vita a difesa dell’autonomia
individuale. Per primo ha teorizzato la contrapposizione paradigmatica tra
bioetica laica e bioetica cattolica, derivante dal fatto che quest’ultima
propone un’etica della sacralità della vita caratterizzata da divieti assoluti,
mentre l’altra avanza un’etica della qualità della vita senza assoluti e soli
divieti prima facie. Infine, sin dalla fine degli anni ’70 ha prestato grande
attenzione al problema della liberazione animale. Riviste Nel 1993 Mori ha fondato Bioetica.
Rivista interdisciplinare (Ananke Lab, Torino), e da allora ne è il direttore.
È membro di numerosi comitati, tra cui il comitato scientifico di Notizie di
Politeia, di Iride del Journal of Medicine and Philosophy e altre. Pubblicazioni Manuale di bioetica. Verso una
civiltà biomedica secolarizzata. Nuova edizione aggiornata, Le Lettere,
Firenze, . Introduzione alla bioetica. 12 temi per capire e discutere, Daniela
Piazza Editore, Torino, . Il caso Eluana Englaro. La “Porta Pia” del vitalismo
ippocratico ovvero perché è moralmente giusto sospendere ogni intervento,
Pendragon, Bologna, 2008. Aborto e morale. Per capire un nuovo diritto,
Einaudi, Torino, 2008. La fecondazione artificiale. Una nuova forma di
riproduzione umana, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1995. La fecondazione artificiale:
questioni morali nell'esperienza giuridica, Giuffrè, Milano, 1988. Utilitarismo
e morale razionale. Per una teoria etica obiettivista, Giuffrè, Milano, 1986.
(In collaborazione con Carlo Flamigni) La legge sulla procreazione medicalmente
assistita. Paradigmi a confronto, Net, Milano, 2005. (In collaborazione con
Giovanni Fornero) Laici e cattolici in bioetica: storia e teoria di un
confronto, Le Lettere, Firenze, . (In collaborazione con Carlo Flamigni) La
fecondazione assistita dopo 10 anni di legge 40. Meglio ricominciare da capo!,
Ananke editore, Torino, . (In collaborazione con Carlo Flamigni) Questa è la
scienza, bellezze! La fecondazione assistita come novo modo di costruire le
famiglie, Ananke Lab, Torino.
Moriggi: Stefano Moriggi (Milano),
filosofo. Specializzato in teoria e modelli della razionalità, fondamenti della
probabilità e di pragmatismo americano.
Docente all'Brescia, Parma, all'Università Statale di Milano e presso la
European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM), è conosciuto al grande pubblico
attraverso la trasmissione TV E se domani di Rai 3 e per alcuni interventi ad
altre trasmissioni (in particolare di Corrado Augias). Pubblicazioni Le tre bocche di Cerbero,
con E. Sindoni (Bompiani, 2004) Perché esiste qualcosa anziché nulla? Vuoto,
Nulla, Zero, con P.Giaretta e G.Federspil (Itaca 2004) Perché la tecnologia ci
rende umani, con G. Nicoletti (Sironi, 2009) Connessi. Beati quelli che
sapranno pensare con le macchine (San Paolo, ) School Rocks! La scuola spacca,
con A. Incorvaia (San Paolo, ), con prefazione rap di Frankie Hi-nrg Note
//wired.it/attualita//04/18/connessi-pensare-la-macchina-pensare-con-le-macchine/
//smau.it/speakers/stefano.moriggi/
unimib.academia.edu/StefanoMoriggi
scholar.google.it/scholar?hl=it&q=stefano+moriggi&btnG=&lr= Sito ufficiale, su stefanomoriggi.it. Blog ufficiale, su stefanomoriggi.it. Opere di Stefano Moriggi, su openMLOL,
Horizons Unlimited srl.
mosca: Essential Italian
philosopher, who made pioneering contributions to the theory of democratic
elitism. Combining the life of a
professor with that of a politician, he taught such subjects as
constitutional law, public law, political science, and history of political
theory; at various times he was also an editor of the Parliamentary
proceedings, an elected member of the Chamber of Deputies, an under-secretary
for colonial affairs, a newspaper columnist, and a member of the Senate. For
Mosca ‘elitism’ refers to the empirical generalization that a society is ruled
by an organised minority. His democratic commitment is embodied in what he
calls juridical defense: the normative principle that political developments
are to be judged by whether and how they prevent any one person, class, force,
or institution from dominating the others. Mosca’s third main contribution is a
framework consisting of two intersecting distinctions that yield four possible
ideal types, defined as follows: in autocracy, authority flows from the rulers
to the ruled. In liberalism, from the ruled to the rulers. In democracy, the
ruling class is open to renewal by members of other classes; in aristocracy it
is not. He was influenced by, and in turn influenced, positivism, for the
elitist thesis presumably constitutes the fundamental “law” of political
“science.” Even deeper is his connection with the tradition of Machiavelli’s
political realism. There is also no question that he practiced an empirical
approach. In the tradition of elitism, he may be compared and contrasted with
Pareto, Michels, and Schumpeter; and in the tradition of political philosophy, to Croce, Gentile, and
Gramsci. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Mosca’s liberalism;” Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Mosca," per il Club Anglo-Italiano,
The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
Motta: Il conte Emiliano Avogadro
della Motta (Vercelli), filosofo. Nacque a Vercelli dal conte Ignazio della
Motta e da Ifigenia Avogadro di Casanova, entrambi appartenenti a nobili
famiglie di vassalli e visconti, i cui antenati risalgono a poco oltre il
mille. Tra gli Avogadro vi fu anche Amedeo, inventore della legge sui fluidi.
Il ramo degli Avogadro della Motta si estinguerà nel 1944, con la morte di
Emiliano II, suo nipote. Emiliano frequentò con profitto gli studi e si
laureò in utroque iure, ma proseguì lo studio in diverse aree della teologia e
della filosofia, trasformando le dimore familiari in “piccole accademie” dove
giuristi, filosofi, studiosi di diritto canonico e vescovi si riunivano, per
discutere vari argomenti ed approfondire la filosofia moderna e i diversi
aspetti del nascente socialismo. Il 13 agosto 1833 ricevette l'incarico,
che già fu del padre e che manterrà fino al 1847, di riformatore degli studi
del Vercellese e in un'epoca in cui si guardava ancora con diffidenza
all'istruzione delle classi popolari, egli visitava ciclicamente le scuole
d'ogni ordine, scegliendone accuratamente gli insegnanti, convinto che
l'istruzione e l'educazione fossero un diritto di tutti e dovessero procedere
simultaneamente. Nel 1837 assunse la carica di Consigliere di Formigliana
e continuò a dedicarsi allo sviluppo culturale della natia Vercelli, ove fondò
la Società di Storia Patria, per incrementare gli studi sul glorioso passato
della città. Nel 1843 divenne membro del Consiglio Generale del Debito Pubblico
e più tardi sindaco di Collobiano e “Consigliere di Sua Maestà per il pubblico
insegnamento”. Nel 1852 la sua notorietà varcò i confini del Piemonte,
allorché ricevette l'eccezionale invito di partecipazione alla fase
preparatoria della definizione del dogma dell'Immacolata e le sue riflessioni
ebbero un seguito fra alcuni importanti gesuiti, come il direttore de La
Civiltà Cattolica, che fece dono a papa Pio IX del Saggio intorno al
socialismo. Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, richiamandosi ad Avogadro, espresse la
propria preferenza per una condanna esplicita di tali errori, da includere
nella bolla di definizione del dogma, ma l'autore sollecitò apertamente la
distinzione di due argomenti (definizione del dogma e condanna degli errori)
dalla portata tanto diversa e lo stesso Pio IX incaricò la Commissione, che
aveva già lavorato sulla definizione del dogma, di esaminare gli errori moderni
e di preparare il materiale necessario per la bolla e chiese al cardinale
Fornari di invitare formalmente alcuni laici a collaborare. Avogadro fu l'unico
laico italiano ad essere interpellato e inviò a Roma una risposta singolare e
ricca di argomentazioni. Ben presto la Commissione incaricata abbandonò la
trattazione univoca dei due argomenti e la solenne definizione su Maria sarà
fatta da Pio IX l'8 dicembre 1854, mentre l'esame degli errori si trascinerà
per altri dieci anni, mentre prevaleva in ambito ecclesiastico l'idea di una
severa condanna. Attività parlamentare Dall'8 dicembre 1853 al 1859
diventò membro attivo nella vita politica, quale deputato eletto nel collegio
di Avigliana e operò nelle file dello stesso schieramento politico della
Destra. La proposta avanzata in Parlamento di ridurre il numero delle feste,
indusse Avogadro a scrivere un apposito opuscolo, per difendere la dignità
dell'uomo che, in quanto essere intelligente e creativo, «senza tempo
libero non vive da uomo, e mal lo conoscono gli economisti che altro non sanno
procacciargli se non “lavoro e pane”». In Parlamento prendeva spesso la parola,
come il 17 gennaio 1857, contro il progetto di legge che prevedeva l'obbligo
del servizio militare e criticò la cessione di Nizza e Savoia alla Francia,
smascherando le reali intenzioni che sull'Italia nutriva l'ambiguo Napoleone
III. Nel 1860 ricevette la decorazione della Croce di Ufficiale dei Santi
Maurizio e Lazzaro e continuò a scrivere, oltre a collaborare con l'Armonia,
l'Unità cattolica, l'Apologista, il Conservatore, rivista quest'ultima stampata
a Bologna e di cui è ritenuto uno dei fondatori e collaboratori. Morì
"giovedì 9 febbraio 1865 alle 3½ in Torino”, come annotano diversi
giornali e riviste, non ultima La Civiltà Cattolica, che gli dedicò un sentito
necrologio. Opere Opere di carattere storico-filosofico-sociale Saggio
intorno al Socialismo e alle dottrine e tendenze socialistiche, Torino, Zecchi
e Bona, 1851. Sul valore scientifico e sulle pratiche conseguenze del sistema
filosofico dell'Abate Rosmini, Napoli, Societa Editrice Fr. Giannini, 1853.
Teorica dell'istituzione del matrimonio e della guerra moltiforme cui soggiace
per Emiliano Avogadro conte della Motta già Riformatore delle R. Scuole provinciali
degli Stati Sardi, a spese della Societa Editrice Speirani e Tortone, 1853.
Teorica dell'istituzione del matrimonio Parte II che tratta della guerra
moltiforme cui soggiace, per E. Avogadro conte della Motta già deputato al
Parlamento Subalpino, Torino, Edizione Speirani e Figli, 1862. Teorica
dell'istituzione del matrimonio e della guerra a cui soggiace, Parte III che
tratta delle difese e dei rimedi, con una Appendice intorno alla ricerca del
principio teorico morale generatore degli uffizi e dei doveri coniugali,
Torino, Edizione Speirani e Tortone, 1854, per Emiliano Avogadro conte della
Motta deputato al Parlamento Nazionale, Torino, Tipografia Speirani e Tortone,
1859. Teorica dell'istituzione del matrimonio e della guerra a cui soggiace,
Parte IV Documenti per E. Avogadro conte della Motta già deputato al parlamento
nazionale, Torino, Edizione Speirani e Tortone, 1860. Gesù Cristo nel secolo
XIX, Studi religiosi e sociali, Modena, Tipografia dell'Immacolata Concezione,
1873. Pubblicazione postuma. La filosofia dell'Abate Antonio Rosmini esaminata
da Emiliano Avogadro-conte Della Motta, Napoli, Societa Editrice Fr. Giannini,
1877. Opuscoli di carattere devozionale La festa di S. Michele e il mese di
ottobre agli angeli santi, Torino, Marietti, 1863. Il mese di novembre dedicato
a suffragio dei morti, 3ª ediz. Torino, Marietti, 1881. Le colonne di S.
Chiesa. Omaggi a S. Giovanni Battista e ai Santi Apostoli nel mese di giugno e
novena per la festa dei Santi Principi Pietro e Paolo, Torino, Marietti, 1863.
Il mese di dicembre in adorazione al Verbo Incarnato Gesu nascente e ad onore
di Maria Madre SS.ma, Torino, Marietti, 1863. Opuscoli di carattere
storico-giuridico Rivista retrospettiva di un fatto seguito in Vercelli con
osservazioni al diritto legale di libera censura, Vercelli, De Gaudenzi, 1848.
Delle feste sacre e loro variazioni nel Regno subalpino, Torino, Marietti,
1849. Quistioni di diritto intorno alle istituzioni religiose e alle loro
persone e proprietà, in occasione della Proposta di Legge fatta al Parlamento
torinese per la soppressione di alcune corporazioni, Torino, Marietti, 1849.
Cenni sulla Congregazione degli Oblati dei SS. Eusebio e Carlo eretta nella
Basilica di S. Andrea in Vercelli e sulla proposta sua soppressione. Per un elettore
Vercellese, Torino, Marietti (non datato). Parole di conciliazione sulla
questione della circolare di S. E. Arcivescovo di Torino, 1850. Del diritto di
petizione e delle petizioni pel ritorno di S. E. l'Arcivescovo di Torino, 1850.
Lo statuto condanna la Legge Siccardi, Torino, Fontana, 1850. Erroneità e
pericoli di alcune teorie ed ipotesi invocate a sostegno della proposta di
Legge di soppressione di vari stabilimenti religiosi, Torino, Speirani e
Tortone, 1855. Alcuni schiarimenti intorno alla natura della Proprietà
Ecclesiastica allo stato di povertà religiosa, ed alle quistioni relative ai
diritti e ai mezzi temporali di sussistenza della Chiesa. Con una Appendice
intorno alla legalità nell'esecuzione della legge 29 maggio 1855 sulle
Corporazioni religiose, Torino, Speirani e Tortone, 1856. Considerazioni sugli
affari dell'Italia e del Papa, Torino, Speirani e Tortone, 1860. Una quistione
preliminare al Parlamento Torinese, Torino, Speirani e Tortone, 1860. Il
progetto di revisione del Codice Civile Albertino e il matrimonio civile in
Italia, Torino, Speirani e Figli, 1861. La Rivoluzione e il Ministero Torinese
in faccia al Papa ed all'Episcopato Italiano. Riflessioni retrospettive e
prospettive, Torino, Speirani, 1861. Articoli di riviste L'Armonia: 16 marzo
1850, 29 settembre 1853, 30 gennaio 1862. Civiltà Cattolica: Serie I, I, 341-352: Recensione a Rivista
retrospettiva sopra la discussione delle leggi Siccardi, Serie I, I, 385-403; Serie I, VIII, 72-82; Serie I, VIII, 377-396; Serie II, II, 434-442; Serie II, III; Serie II, VI, 289-300; Serie II, X, 668-672; Serie IV, VI, 318-329; Serie IV, IX, 325-337; Serie IV, XI, 194-206; Serie V, VII, 343; Serie VI, I, 623; Serie XIV, IV, 707-711. Unità Cattolica: 9 agosto 1861;
9 febbraio 1866; 11 febbraio 1871.
Alcune opere riguardanti l'autore e la sua famiglia Archivio della
Famiglia Avogadro di Collobiano e della Motta, Angelo Ballestreri, segretario
della Famiglia, 1849, presso l'Archivio Storico di Torino. Avogadro della
Motta, in Enciclopedia storico-nobiliare italiana, promossa e diretta dal
marchese Vittorio Spreti, I, Milano
MCMXXVIII. Avogadro di Vigliano F., Pagine di storia Vercellese e Biellese, in
Antologia, M. Cassetti, Vercelli 1989. Avogadro di Vigliano F., Antiche vicende
di alcuni feudi Biellesi degli Avogadro di San Giorgio Monferrato (e poi Conti
di Collobiano e di Motta Alciata), Estratto dalla Illustrazione biellese, XIX,
Biella 1941. Corboli G., Per le nozze del Conte Federico Sclopis di Salerano e
della Contessa Isabella Avogadro, Cremona, Feraboli, 1838. De Gregory G.,
Historia della Vercellese letteratura ed arti, parte IV, Torino 1824. Di
Crollallanza G. B., Dizionario storico-blasonico delle famiglie nobili e
notabili italiane estinte e fiorenti, I,
Sala Bolognese 1986. Dionisotti C., Notizie biografiche dei vercellesi
illustri, Biella, Amos, MDCCCLXI. Manno A., Il patriziato Subalpino. Notizie di
fatto storiche, genealogiche, feudali ed araldiche desunte da documenti, I, Firenze MDCCCXCV. I vescovi di Italia. Il Piemonte,
Savio F., Torino, Bocca, 1898. Bonvegna G., Filosofia sociale e critica dello
Stato moderno nel pensiero di un legittimista italiano: Emiliano Avogadro della
Motta in Annali Italiani. Rivista di studi storici, anno I, n. 2,
luglio-dicembre 2002, 177–196. Bonvegna
G., Il rapporto tra fede e ragione in Avogadro della Motta, in Sensus
Communis, 4 (2003), n. 1
(gennaio-marzo), 19–36. Valentino V., E.
Avogadro della Motta (1798-1865), un difensore rigoroso dei diritti della
Chiesa e del Papa, in Divinitas, rivista internazionale di ricerca e di critica
teologica, anno XLVI, n. 2 (2003). Volumi e tesi sull'autore Bonvegna G.,
Emiliano Avogadro della Motta. Il pensiero filosofico-politico e la critica al
socialismo, Tesi di laurea in Filosofia. Università Cattolica, Milano 2000. De
Gaudenzi L., Ultima parola su di una pretesa ritrattazione del Conte Emiliano
Avogadro della Motta, Mortara, Cortellezzi, 1889. De Gaudenzi L.,
Un'asserzione del P. Fr. Paoli D.I.D.C. riguardante il Conte Emiliano Avogadro-della
Motta, tolta ad esame, Mortara, Cortellezzi, 1889. De Gaudenzi P. G.,
Istruzione del vescovo di Vigevano al Ven.do Suo Clero sul Matrimonio,
Vigevano, Spargella, 1874. Manacorda G., Storiografia e socialismo, Padova
1967. Martire G., E. Avogadro in Enciclopedia Cattolica, II, Roma, 1949, coll. 553-554. Omodeo A.,
L'opera politica del conte di Cavour, Parte I (1848-1857), Firenze 1940. Pirri
P. , Carteggi del P. L. Taparelli d'Azeglio,
XIV di Biblioteca di Storia Italiana Recente (1800-1870), Torino 1932.
La scienza e la fede, XXIV, Napoli 1851.
Spadolini G., L'opposizione cattolica da porta Pia al '98, 3ª edizione, Firenze
1955. Storia del Parlamento Italiano, diretta da N. Rodolico, IV, Palermo 1966. Traniello F., Cattolicesimo
conciliarista. Religione e cultura nella tradizione Rosminiana
Lombardo-Piemontese (1825-1870), Milano 1970. Valentino V., Il matrimonio e la
vita coniugale nel pensiero di Emiliano Avogadro, Tesi di licenza in teologia
presso la Facoltà teologica dell'Italia Centrale, Anno Accademico 1998-1999.
Valentino V., Il conte Emiliano Avogadro 1798-1865. Un'introduzione alla vita e
alle opere, Vercelli, Saviolo, 2001. Valentino V., Un laico tra i teologi,
Vercelli, 2003. Valentino V., E. Avogadro della Motta, Il pensiero di V. Gioberti,
Genova 2009. Verucci G., E. Avogadro in Dizionario Biografico Italiano,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, IV,
Roma. Guido Verucci, Emiliano Avogadro della Motta, in Dizionario biografico
degli italiani, 4, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1962. Opere di Emiliano Avogadro della Motta,
. Emiliano Della Motta (Avogadro), su
storia.camera.it, Camera dei deputati. F
Motterlini: Matteo Motterlini (Milano),
filosofo. Specializzato in filosofia della scienza, economia comportamentale e
neuroeconomia. È noto per i suoi lavori in ambito psicoeconomico su
processi decisionali, emozioni e razionalità umana; e per le sue ricerche in
ambito epistemologico sulla razionalità della scienza e il metodo scientifico,
con particolare riferimento ai contributi di Imre Lakatos e Paul
Feyerabend. Attualmente è E.ON Professor in Behavior Change. Environment,
Heath and Education all'Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele di Milanodove è Professore
di Logica e Filosofia della Scienza. È stato Consigliere per le Scienze
Sociali e Comportamentali della Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (DPCM 5
maggio ) (dal 5.4. all'1.6.). Laureatosi in filosofia all'Milano, dove ha
portato a termine il proprio dottorato in filosofia della scienza, ha
conseguito il Master of Science in Logic and Scientific Method e ottenuto il
Graduate Diploma in Economics alla London School of Economics and Political
Science. È stato ricercatore di economia politica e professore associato di
filosofia della scienza presso l'Trento; Visiting Associate Professor al
Department of Social and Decision Sciences della Carnegie Mellon University di
Pittsburgh, Visiting Research Scholar al Department of Psychology della UCLA.
Dal 2007 è Professore di filosofia della scienza presso l'Università
Vita-Salute San Raffaele. Tra gli altri incarichi è collaboratore de Il
Corriere Economia, Il Corriere della Sera e Il Sole 24 Ore, per cui ha curato
per anni il blog Controvento. È stato consulente scientifico di MilanLab, A.C.
Milan, fondatore e direttore di Anima FinLab, di Anima Sgr, centro di ricerca
di finanza comportamentale e Scientific advisor di MarketPsychData, Ls
Angeles. È direttore del CRESA (Centro di ricerca in epistemologia
sperimentale e applicata), da lui fondato a Milano nel 2007 presso la facoltà di
filosofia dell'Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele. I progetti di ricerca del
centro si concentrano su vari aspetti della cognizione umana, dal linguaggio al
rapporto tra mente e cervello, dall'economia comportamentale alle neuroscienze
cognitive della decisione, con particolare attenzione all'indagine sperimentale
multidisciplinare e alle sue ricadute pratiche e applicative (per esempio
nell'ambito del policy making e dell'evidence-based policy). A inizio ,
ha avviato il progetto di finanza comportamentale per Schroder Italia, dal
quale è nato Investimente, un test psicofinanziario al servizio di
risparmiatori, promotori finanziari e private banker, per raccogliere e quindi
analizzare i dati riguardanti le decisioni di investimento e i bias cognitivi
nell'ambito della gestione del risparmio. Attualmente è direttore
dell'E.ON Customer Behavior Lab e Chief Behavior Officer di E.ON Italia; stesso
incarico che ricopre per il Gruppo Ospedaliero San Donato. Studi e
ricerche Pro e contro il metodo I suoi primi lavori analizzano la proposta
falsificazionista di Karl Popper, rivelando le difficoltà in cui si imbatte il
progetto demarcazionista e anti-induttivista. Affrontano quindi il modo in cui
Imre Lakatos ha preteso superare alcune di queste difficoltà, e insieme raccogliere
la ‘sfida di Duhem' circa il carattere olistico del controllo empirico, tenendo
conto delle immagini che scienziati e matematici hanno avuto della loro stessa
pratica e riferendosi a particolari casi storici come termine di confronto. La
sua ricostruzione del progetto filosofico di Lakatos si avvale di un'originale
analisi del materiale dell'Archivio Lakatos. Una selezione del quale,
accompagnata da un importante apparato critico, è pubblicata in italiano
Sull'orlo della scienza e in edizione ampliata per University of Chicago Press
(1999, For and Against Method). Nel suo Reconstructing Lakatos (Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science) e nella monografia Imre Lakatos. Scienza,
matematica e storia avanza una nuova interpretazione del progetto razionalista
di Lakatos come il prodotto di una peculiare combinazione delle idee di Popper
e di Hegel. Ciò è motivo della straordinaria fecondità del pensiero
lakatosiano, ma anche di una inesauribile tensione al suo interno. Una tensione
che viene illustrata affrontando la relazione tra filosofia della scienza e
storia della scienza in riferimento alla questione della valutazione di una
data metodologia in base alle 'ricostruzioni razionali' a cui essa conduce.
Nell'idea che le varie metodologie vadano confrontate con la storia della
scienza è contenuto il germe di una logica della scoperta in cui i canoni non
siano fissati una volta per sempre, ma mutano nel tempo, anche se con ritmi non
necessariamente uguali a quelli delle teorie scientifiche. Metodo e
cognizione in economia In una fase successiva i suoi studi si sono focalizzati
su questioni di metodologia dell'economia da una prospettiva interdisciplinare
che combina riflessione epistemologica, scienze cognitive, ed economia
sperimentale con aspetti più tecnici di teoria della scelta e della decisione
individuale in condizioni d'incertezza. Le ricerche di questo periodo
analizzano criticamente lo status delle assunzioni della teoria della scelta
razionale, valutando l'impatto delle violazioni comportamentali sistematiche
alle restrizioni assiomatiche imposte dai modelli normativi di razionalità.
Avanzano quindi ragioni epistemologiche per la composizione della frattura
economia e psicologia cognitiva in ambito della teoria della decisione; e suggeriscono
di guardare ai recenti risultati dell'economia cognitiva in prospettiva di una
nuova sintesi 'quasi-razionale' in cui i modelli neoclassici, integrati da
teorie psicologiche che tengano conto dei limiti cognitivi dei soggetti
decisionali, rafforzano le previsioni del comportamento economico degli esseri
umani. Neuroeconomia e evidence-based policy Le sue ricerche indagano le
basi neurobiologiche della razionalità umana attraverso lo studio dei correlati
neurali dei processi decisionali in contesti economico-finanziari, con
particolare attenzione al ruolo svolto dalle emozioni, dal rimpianto, e
dall'apprendimento sociale. Parallelamente progetta ed esperimenta i modi
in cui i risultati dell'economia comportamentale e della neuroeconomia possono
informare politiche pubbliche più efficaci e basate sull'evidenza. Queste
ricerche sono oggetto dei corsi di Filosofia della scienza e di Economia
cognitiva e neuroeconomia che insegna all'università San Raffaele, e hanno
altresì trovato diffusione attraverso numerosi articoli divulgativi e due
libri, Economia emotiva (2006) e Trappole mentali (2008), noti
internazionalmente grazie alle traduzioni in spagnolo, coreano, giapponese e
cinese. Il suo ultimo libro è Psicoeconomia di Charlie Brown. Strategia per una
società più felice (). Pubblicazioni Libri 1995. Sull'orlo della scienza.
Imre Lakatos, Paul K. Feyerabend: Pro e contro il metodo, Cortina, Milano.
1998. Popper, Il Saggiatore-Flammarion, Milano 1999. For and Against Method.
Including Lakatos's Lectures on Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend
Correspondence', University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2000. Imre Lakatos.
Scienza, matematica e storia, Il Saggiatore, Milano 2005. Decisioni mediche. Un
approccio cognitivo (con Vincenzo Crupi), Raffaello Cortina, Milano. 2005. Critica della ragione economica. Tre saggi:
Mc Fadden, Kahneman, Smith (con Massimo Piattelli Palmarini), Il Saggiatore,
Milano 2005. Economia cognitiva &
sperimentale (con Francesco Guala), Università Bocconi Editore, Milano La
dimensione cognitiva dell'errore in medicina (con Vinceno Crupi, Gianfranco
Gensini), a cura di, Fondazione Smith Kline, Franco Angeli, Milano Economia emotiva (Emotional Economics),
Rizzoli, Milano Trappole mentali (Cognitive Traps), Rizzoli, Milano Mente,
Mercati, Decisioni. Introduzione all'economia cognitiva e sperimentale (con
Francesco Guala), Egea, Milano Psicoeconomia di Charlie Brown. Strategia per
una società più felice, Rizzoli, Milano Alcuni articoli scientifici 2002.
Lakatos between the Hegelian devil and the Popperian blue sea. In Kampis, G.,
Kvasz, L., Stoeltzner, M. (eds.), Appraising Lakatos, Mathematics, Methodology,
and the Man. Vienna Circle Institute Library, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002, 23–52 . 2002. Reconstructing Lakatos. A
reassessment of Lakatos' philosophical project in light of the Lakatos Archive
, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science , Considerazioni
epistemologiche e mitologiche sulla relazione tra psicologia ed economia,
Sistemi intelligenti, Il Mulino, Metodo e standard di valutazione in economia.
Dall'apriorismo a Friedman, Studi Economici, 58, Milano, In search of the
neurobiological basis of decision-making, explanation, reduction and emergence
(con Michele Di Francesco e Matteo Colombo), in P. Churchand, M. Di Francesco
(eds.) Functional Neurology, n.4. 2007 ,
197–204. . Understanding Others' Regret: A fMRI Study, con Nicola
Canessa, Cinzia Di Dio, Daniela Perani, Paola Scifo, Stefano F. Cappa, Giacomo
Rizzolatti, PlosONE', Vai in laboratorio e capirai il mercato (con Francesco Guala)
Prefazione a Vernon Smith, La razionalità in economia. Tra teoria e analisi
sperimentale, IBL, Milano. . Neuroeconomia e Teoria del prospetto, voci
Enciclopedia dell'economia Garzanti, Milano. . Learning from other peoples
experience: a neuroimaging study of decisional interactive-learning, con Nicola
Canessa, Federica Alemanno, Daniela Perani, Stefano Cappa, Neuroimage, The
functional and structural neural basis of individual differences in loss
aversion, con Nicola Canessa, Stefano F.Cappa et. al., The Journal of
Neuroscience, Choice Architecture Matters: The Case of Investor Protection
within the Italian Crowdfunding Market”with Elisa Broli European Company Law, “Testing donation menus: on charitable giving
for cancer researchevidence from a natural field experiment” (con Marianna
Baggio), Behavioural Public Policy, Page 1 of 22, Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/b.13 Note A.C. Milan Investimente. Test dell'investitore
consapevole Recensione di Ian Hacking
sulla The London Review of Books IlSole24Ore
22.5.//ilsole24ore.com/art/cultura/-05-18/motterlini-spinta-riforme--173517.shtml?uuid=ADAaR2J
Altri progetti Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio su Matteo Motterlini Sito personale, su matteomotterlini.it. Sito
CRESA, su cresa.eu.
MotusmotivatumGrice, “Must our motives be
impure?” “Obligation cashes out in motivation.” Motivatum -- motivation, a
property central in motivational explanations of intentional conduct. To assert
that Grice is driving to Lord’s today because she wants to see his cricket team
play and believes that they are playing today at Lord’s is to offer an explanation
of Grice’s action. On a popular interpretation, the assertion mentions a pair
of attitudes: a desire and a belief. Grice’s s desire is a paradigmatic
motivational attitude in that it inclines him to bring about the satisfaction
of that very attitude. The primary function of motivational attitudes is to
bring about their own satisfaction by inducing the agent to undertake a
suitable course of action, and, arguably, any attitude that has that function
is, ipso facto, a motivational one. The related thesis that only attitudes
having this function are motivational
or, more precisely, motivation-constituting is implausible. Grice hopes that the
Oxfordshire Cricket Team won yesterday. Plainly, his hope cannot bring about its
own satisfaction, since Grice has no control over the past. Even so, the hope
seemingly may motivate action e.g., Grice’s searching for sports news on her
car radio, in which case the hope is motivation-constituting. Some philosophers
have claimed that our beliefs that we are morally required to take a particular
course of action are motivation-constituting, and such beliefs obviously do not
have the function of bringing about their own satisfaction i.e., their truth.
However, the claim is controversial, as is the related claim that beliefs of
this kind are “besires” that is, not
merely beliefs but desires as well. Refs.: “Desire, belief, and besire.”
Motus -- motivantional explanation -- Grice:
the explanatory-justificatory distinction“To explain” is not to explicate, but
to render ‘plain’To justify is hardly to render ‘plain’! Grice is aware of
this, because he does not use the ‘explicatory-justificatory’ distinction.
Therefore, the ‘justificatory’ is conceptually priora philosopher looks for
justificationhardly to render stuff plain“Quite the opposite: my claim to fame
is to follow the alleged professional duty of a philosophy professor: to render
obscure what is clear, and vice versa!” -- motivational explanation -- a type
of explanation of goal-directed behavior where the explanans appeals to the
motives of the agent. The explanation usually is in the following form: Smith
swam hard in order to win the race. Here the description of what Smith did identifies
the behavior to be explained, and the phrase that follows ‘in order to’
identifies the goal or the state of affairs the obtaining of which was the
moving force behind the behavior. The general presumption is that the agent
whose behavior is being explained is capable of deliberating and acting on the
decisions reached as a result of the deliberation. Thus, it is dubious whether
the explanation contained in ‘The plant turned toward the sun in order to
receive more light’ is a motivational explanation. Two problems are thought to
surround motivational explanations. First, since the state of affairs set as
the goal is, at the time of the action, non-existent, it can only act as the
“moving force” by appearing as the intentional object of an inner psychological
state of the agent. Thus, motives are generally desires for specific objects or
states of affairs on which the agent acts. So motivational explanation is
basically the type of explanation provided in folk psychology, and as such it
inherits all the alleged problems of the latter. And second, what counts as a
motive for an action under one description usually fails to be a motive for the
same action under a different description. My motive for saying “hello” may
have been my desire to answer the phone, but my motive for saying “hello”
loudly was to express my irritation at the person calling me so late at
night.
Motus-motivus -- “Obligation cashes on
motivation.” Grice, “Must our motives be impure?” -- motivational internalism, the view that moral
motivation is internal to moral duty or the sense of duty. The view represents
the contemporary understanding of Hume’s thesis that morality is essentially
practical. Hume went on to point out the apparent logical gap between
statements of fact, which express theoretical judgments, and statements about
what ought to be done, which express practical judgments. Motivational
internalism offers one explanation for this gap. No motivation is internal to
the recognition of facts. The specific internal relation the view affirms is
that of necessity. Thus, motivational internalists hold that if one sees that
one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it, then
necessarily one has a motive to do it. For example, if one sees that it is one’s
duty to donate blood, then necessarily one has a motive to donate blood.
Motivational externalism, the opposing view, denies this relation. Its
adherents hold that it is possible for one to see that one has a duty to do a
certain action or that it would be right to do it yet have no motive to do it.
Motivational externalists typically, though not universally, deny any real gap
between theoretical and practical judgments. Motivational internalism takes
either of two forms, rationalist and anti-rationalist. Rationalists, such as
Plato and Kant, hold that the content or truth of a moral requirement
guarantees in those who understand it a motive of compliance.
Anti-rationalists, such as Hume, hold that moral judgment necessarily has some
affective or volitional component that supplies a motive for the relevant
action but that renders morality less a matter of reason and truth than of
feeling or commitment. It is also possible in the abstract to draw an analogous
distinction between two forms of motivational externalism, cognitivist and
noncognitivist, but because the view springs from an interest in assimilating
practical judgment to theoretical judgment, its only influential form has been
cognitivist.
Musatti: Cesare Luigi Eugenio
Musatti (Dolo), filosofo. Tra i primi che posero le basi della psicoanalisi, in
Italia . Nacque in località Casello 12 a Dolo, sulla riviera del Brenta,
nella casa di campagna del nonno paterno in cui i parenti erano soliti
trascorrere la villeggiatura. Figlio di Elia Musatti, ebreo veneziano e
deputato socialista amico di Giacomo Matteotti, e della napoletana Emma Leanza,
cattolica non praticante, Cesare non fu né circonciso, né battezzato (durante
le persecuzioni razziali si era procurato un falso certificato di battesimo
dalla parrocchia di Santa Maria in Transpontina di Roma) e non professò mai
alcun credo religioso. Frequentò il liceo Foscarini di Venezia, poi si
iscrisse dapprima alla facoltà di Scienze dell'Padova per il corso di
Ingegneria, e immediatamente dopo alla facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, dove si
laureò in filosofia il 3 novembre 1921 con 110 e lode. Dopo la laurea, nel 1921
si iscrisse per due anni al corso di Matematica della facoltà di Scienze
matematiche, fisiche e naturali di Padova, ma non sostenne esame alcuno.
Giovinezza A diciannove anni fu chiamato a Roma per il servizio di leva. Dopo
un periodo di addestramento a Torino, nel 1917 fu mandato al fronte come
ufficiale, con impegni marginali. Finita la guerra tornò a Padova per terminare
gli studi. Sulla cattedra di Psicologia Sperimentale c'era Vittorio Benussi,
allora chiamato per chiara fama nel 1919 a insegnare a Padova dall'Graz.
Musatti si laureò in filosofia nel 1921 e l'anno successivo divenne assistente
volontario del Laboratorio di psicologia sperimentale. Nel 1927 Benussi si
uccise con il cianuro a causa di una grave forma di disturbo bipolare,
lasciando tutto nelle mani di Musatti e di Silvia De Marchi, anch'essa
assistente volontaria, che poi divenne sua moglie. Il suicidio di Benussi fu
scoperto da Musatti, il quale però lo nascose per paura di ripercussioni
negative sulla psicologia italiana in una situazione di fragilità e precarietà
accademica, sottoposta a pressioni da parte sia del regime fascista, con le sue
istanze gentiliane, che della Chiesa Cattolica. Negli anni ottanta Musatti
rivelò che Benussi s'era suicidato, non era morto a causa di un malore.
Nel 1928 Musatti divenne direttore del Laboratorio di Psicologia dell'Padova.
Portò in Italia la Psicologia della Forma con importanti lavori di livello
internazionale. Dopo aver diffuso in Italia la psicologia della Gestalt,
divenne il primo studioso italiano di psicoanalisi. Studiando la
psicologia della suggestione e dell'ipnosi, introdotta in Italia da Vittorio
Benussi, approdò alla psicoanalisi, sulla quale tenne il primo corso
universitario italiano. Il corso si tenne presso l'Padova nell'anno accademico
1933-34. Musatti divenne allora uno dei primi e più importanti rappresentanti
italiani della psicoanalisi. Nell'Italia degli anni '30 le teorie di Freud non
erano state accolte bene né dalle Università, né dalla Chiesa cattolica, a
causa dell'ideologia culturale gentiliana assunta dal fascismo. La Società
psicoanalitica italiana, fondata nel 1925, venne limitata anche dalle leggi
razziali fasciste (1938), che colpirono i membri ebrei della Società. Benché
non fosse ebreo (poiché figlio di madre cattolica), Musatti fu allontanato
dall'insegnamento universitario che svolgeva presso l'Università degli Studi di
Urbino e declassato ad insegnante di liceo. Maturità Nel 1940 fu nominato
professore di Filosofia al Liceo Parini di Milano. Nel 1943 Musatti si
ritrovò con Lelio Basso, Ferrazzutto e altri vecchi socialisti con l'intento di
creare un partito erede del Partito Socialista Italiano; ebbe l'incarico di
trovare denaro per una prima organizzazione e di allacciare rapporti col
Partito Comunista clandestino. Musatti lavorò anche durante la guerra. Nel
1944, nel periodo dell'occupazione nazista, fu tratto in salvo dall'avvocato
Paolo Toffanin (1890-1971), fratello di Giuseppe Toffanin, che lo aiutò a
trasferirsi a Ivrea, ospite dell'amico Adriano Olivetti. Con il suo sostegno
fondò un centro di psicologia del lavoro. Ricoprì anche l'incarico di direttore
della Scuola Allievi Meccanici, scuola aperta per formare operai meccanici
specializzati. Successivamente fu richiamato dall'Esercito per andare sul
fronte francese. Nel 1947 ottenne all'Università degli Studi di Milano la
prima cattedra di Psicologia costituita nel dopoguerra in Italia, presso la
Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia. Vi insegnò per venti anni. A Milano ebbe il
periodo più florido della sua ricerca scientifica: gli studenti affollavano le
sue lezioni. Musatti fu il leader del movimento psicoanalitico italiano nei
primi anni del dopoguerra. A quel periodo risale il suo “Trattato di
Psicoanalisi”, pubblicato da Einaudi nel 1949. Nel 1955 divenne direttore della
“Rivista di psicoanalisi”. Nel 1963 è presidente del Centro Milanese di
Psicoanalisi fondato da Franco Ciprandi, Renato Sigurtà e Pietro Veltri, che
gli verrà intitolato dopo la sua morte. Nel 1976 è diventato curatore della
edizione italiana delle Opere di Sigmund Freud, della Casa Editrice Bollati
Boringhieri di Torino.. Vecchiaia La località a lui dedicata
Musatti scrisse anche libri di letteratura, tra cui Il pronipote di Giulio
Cesare, che nel 1980 gli fece vincere il Premio Viareggio. Fu eletto per due
volte consigliere comunale di Milano nella lista del PSIUP e fu anche
consulente del Tribunale dei Minori del capoluogo lombardo. Sostenne sempre la
pace, il progresso dei lavoratori, l'emancipazione femminile ed i diritti
civili. Cesare Musatti era ateo, come ebbe a dichiarare in più
occasioni, l'ultima delle quali in uno dei "martedì letterari" del
Casinò di Sanremo. Morì nella sua abitazione di via Sabbatini a Milano il 21
marzo 1989; l'indomani dopo una cerimonia laica di commiato celebrata in forma
strettamente privata, la sua salma venne cremata a Lambrate. Le sue ceneri sono
tumulate, secondo le sue ultime volontà, nel cimitero comunale di Brinzio (VA),
località in cui era solito trascorrere i periodi di vacanza. L'archivio
di Cesare Musatti è conservato presso l'AspiArchivio Storico della Psicologia
Italiana dell'Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. Il comune di Dolo
ha ribattezzato la sua località natale Casello 12 località Cesare Musatti e gli
ha intitolato il locale istituto professionale. Musatti e il suicidio di
Benussi Anche dopo la rivelazione che si era trattato di un suicidio, Musatti
non parlò mai volentieri della morte del maestro. Nel generale silenzio dello
studioso di Dolo emerge un'intervista uscita sul quotidiano El País del 21
ottobre 1985. Nell'intervista Musatti confessa di sognare a volte che in una
caserma dei carabinieri in cui viene tradotto, il commissario lo interroga
sulla morte di tre sue mogli (si sposò quattro volte), decedute tragicamente, e
di Vittorio Benussi. A fine colloquio il militare intima a Musatti di
confessare di aver ucciso il maestro per prendere la cattedra di psicologia. «Io
gli rispondoprosegue Musatti, da buon psicoanalistache sicuramente nel mio
subconscio mi sono sentito responsabile per questa e per altre morti. Il
commissario, che non capiva nulla di subconscio, decide: “Mi spiace professore,
ma devo arrestarla”. Io allora gli rispondo: ”Non è possibile commissario,
perché si tratta di delitti commessi più di cinquant'anni fa, e quindi sono
prescritti!”». Note Il nome Cesare
è un riferimento al prozio Cesare Musatti, medico pediatra (uno dei primi in
Italia) che aveva visitato il piccolo, nato settimino; Luigi era il nome del
bonno materno (Luigi Leanza, morto in carcere, partecipò alla rivolta
antiborbonica del 1848); Eugenio era il nome di un altro prozio paterno, lo
storico Eugenio Musatti; cfr. MusattiIX-XIII
"Forse la psicoanalisi in Italia è nata e morta con Cesare
Musatti" (Umberto Galimberti, Idee: il catalogo è questo, Milano,
Feltrinelli, 1992125) Il nome allude
alla fermata della tranvia Padova-Malcontenta-Fusina che il nonno, presidente
della Società Veneta Lagunare, odierna ACTV, aveva fatto aprire per raggiungere
più agevolmente Venezia.
MusattiIX-XIII. Archivio
dell'Università degli Studi di Padova, Carriere scolastiche della Facoltà di
Lettere e filosofia, reg. 2, pag. 174
Archivio dell'Università degli Studi di Padova, Carriere scolastiche
della Facoltà di scienze matematiche, fisiche e naturali, reg. 13, pag.
12. Opuscolo del Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi, a cura del Comitato
Direttivo, redatto da L. AmbrosianoCapazziGammaro Moroni, L.Reatto, L.Schwartz,
M.Sforza, M.Stufflesser, p.4, 1994-1996 Milano
Per una storia del Centro Milanese di PsicoanalisiChiari, Seminario
tenuto il 15 gennaio 2009 presso il Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi Cesare
Musatti, 15 gennaio 2009, Milano Sigmund
Freud, Opere, 12 voll., Cesare Musatti. Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, prima ed.
1976-1980, ultima ed. 2000-2003. Silvia
Giacomoni, Cerimonia privata per Cesare Musatti, la Repubblica, 22 marzo 1989. l'8 settembre
(archiviato l'11 gennaio ).
L'archivio Musatti è consultabile sul
dell'Aspi, all'indirizzo web AspiArchivio storico della psicologia
italiana, Università degli studi di Milano-Bicocca. 7 settembre (archiviato il 12 luglio ). D. Mont D'Arpizio, Vittorio Benussi, Padre
della psicologia padovana[collegamento interrotto], in La Difesa del popolo 2
marzo 200835 Questo testo proviene in
parte dalla relativa voce del progetto Mille anni di scienza in Italia, opera
del Museo Galileo. Istituto Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze (home
page), pubblicata sotto licenza Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0 Cesare Musatti, Mia
sorella gemella la psicoanalisi, 1ª ed., Pordenone, Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1991.
Luciano Mecacci, Cesare L. Musatti, voce dell'Enciclopedia italiana di scienze,
lettere ed arti. Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero. Ottava
appendice, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, , 680–683. Opere 1926: Analisi del concetto di
realtà empirica, Il Solco, Città di Castello 1931: Forma e assimilazione, in:
Archivio italiano di psicologia 9, S. 61-156. 1931: Elementi di psicologia
della testimonianza, nuova edizione in Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1991
1937: Forma e movimento, Officine grafiche C. Ferrari, Venezia 1937, (Estratto
da: Atti del Reale Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti 97, 1937-1938,
seconda parte) 1938: Gli elementi della psicologia della forma, Gruppo
Universitario Fascista, Padova 1949: Trattato di psicoanalisi, Paolo
Boringhieri, Torino 1961: Super io individuale e Super io collettivo, Leo S.
Olschki Firenze 1964: Condizioni dell'esperienza e fondazione della psicologia,
Editrice Universitaria, Firenze 1967: Riflessioni sul pensiero psicoanalitico e
incursioni nel mondo delle immagini, Paolo Boringhieri, Torino 1974: Svevo e la
psicoanalisi, Leo S. Olschki, Firenze 1975: I rapporti personali Freud-Jung
attraverso il carteggio, Leo S. Olschki, Firenze 1977: Commemorazione
accademica, Leo S. Olschki, Firenze 1978: Nino Valeri, Leo S. Olschki Firenze
1979: Il pronipote di Giulio Cesare, Mondadori Milano 1981: A ciascuno la sua morte,
Leo S. Olschki, Firenze 1982: Hanno cancellato Livorno, Leo S. Olschki, Firenze
1982: Mia sorella gemella la psicoanalisi, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1983: Una
famiglia diversa ed un analista di campagna, Leo S. Olschki, Firenze 1983:
Questa notte ho fatto un sogno, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1987: Chi ha paura del
lupo cattivo?, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1988: Psicoanalisti e pazienti a teatro, a
teatro, Mondadori, Milano 1989: Leggere Freud, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino
1991: Curar nevrotici con la propria autoanalisi, Mondadori, Milano : Geometrie
non-euclidee e problema della conoscenza, Aurelio Molaro, prefazione di Mauro
Antonelli, Mimesis, Milano, . Altri progetti Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio
su Cesare Musatti Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene
immagini o altri file su Cesare Musatti
Cesare Musatti, su Treccani.itEnciclopedie on line, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Cesare
Musatti, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana. Cesare Musatti, su
siusa.archivi.beniculturali.it, Sistema Informativo Unificato per le
Soprintendenze Archivistiche. Opere di
Cesare Musatti, su openMLOL, Horizons Unlimited srl. Opere di Cesare Musatti, . italiana di Cesare Musatti, su Catalogo
Vegetti della letteratura fantastica, Fantascienza.com.
Mustè: Marcello Mustè (Roma), filosofo. Laureato in filosofia con una
tesi su Marx, dal 1984 al 1987 è stato borsista dell'Istituto italiano per gli
studi storici di Napoli, dove ha svolto attività didattica e di ricerca, collaborando
con Gennaro Sasso. Dal 1985 al 1987 è stato redattore della “nuova serie” della
“Rivista trimestrale”. Nel 1991 ha conseguito il titolo di dottore di ricerca
alla Sapienza. Dal 1997 al 2005 ha lavorato alla "Fondazione Giovanni
Gentile per gli Studi Filosofici" dell'Università "La Sapienza"
in qualità di “Segretario e Curatore dell'archivio e della biblioteca di
Gentile”. È stato professore a contratto di Storia della filosofia dal 2001 al
2007. Attualmente è professore di filosofia teoretica all'Università La
Sapienza di Roma. È membro del Consiglio scientifico della Fondazione
Gramsci e della Commissione scientifica per la Edizione nazionale degli scritti
di Antonio Gramsci. Ha collaborato con l'Enciclopedia Italiana, in particolare
ai volumi: Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero. Filosofia (ottava
appendice), Enciclopedia machiavelliana e Croce e Gentile. La cultura italiana
e l'Europa. Ha diretto la rivista "Novecento" dal 1991 al 1999. Fa
parte del Comitato scientifico di alcune riviste, tra cui: "Giornale
critico della filosofia italiana", "Annali della Fondazione
Gramsci", “La Cultura”, “Filosofia italiana”. Scrive su diverse riviste
scientifiche, tra le quali, con maggiore continuità: "Giornale critico
della filosofia italiana", "La Cultura", "Studi
storici", "Filosofia italiana". Nel è stato nominato dal Ministero dei beni
culturali Segretario del "Comitato nazionale per il bicentenario della
nascita di Bertrando Spaventa". Dal
al ha insegnato Ermeneutica
filosofica, in qualità di Visiting Professor, alla Pontificia Università
Antonianum. Ricerche Le sue ricerche si sono rivolte alla storia della
filosofia italiana, con contributi dedicati all'idealismo e al marxismo. Per
quanto riguarda l'idealismo italiano, ha indagato i momenti e le figure
fondamentali (sino al profilo complessivo pubblicato nel 2008) e le premesse
nella filosofia dell'Ottocento, specie in relazione al pensiero di Vincenzo
Gioberti (soprattutto con il libro del 2000 su La scienza ideale). Di
particolare interesse gli studi su Bertrando Spaventa e le monografie su Adolfo
Omodeo e Benedetto Croce. Ha dedicato saggi e ricerche al pensiero di Antonio
Gramsci e ad altri momenti del pensiero marxista italiano: del è la monografia su Marxismo e filosofia della
praxis, che ricostruisce la storia del marxismo italiano da Labriola a Gramsci.
Sono noti i suoi studi sul pensiero politico nell'Italia contemporanea, con
particolare riguardo alle figure di Franco Rodano, Felice Balbo, Augusto Del
Noce. Ha approfondito lo studio dell'opera di Marx e in generale la
storia della filosofia tedesca tra Hegel e Nietzsche. Particolare
attenzione ha poi rivolto (con il libro del 2005 su La storia e con altri
scritti, tra cui quelli sull'evento e sulla teoria delle fonti) alle questioni
specifiche della teoria della storiografia. Metodi Conduce l’indagine
teoretica in stretta relazione con gli studi di storia della filosofia e di
storia della storiografia, in generale nell’ambito della storia delle idee,
adottando un metodo storico-critico che spesso privilegia l’uso di fonti
archivistiche e di documentazione inedita. Il suo metodo cerca di coniugare
l'analisi strutturale delle opere filosofiche con la ricerca filologica sulle
fonti e sulla tradizione dei testi, con particolare riguardo ai processi di
lungo periodo della filosofia italiana moderna e contemporanea. Opere
principali Volumi Adolfo Omodeo. Storiografia e pensiero politico, Il Mulino,
Bologna 1990. Benedetto Croce, Morano, Napoli 1990 Franco Rodano. Critica delle
ideologie e ricerca della laicità, Il Mulino, Bologna 1993 (Curatela) Carteggio
Croce-Antoni, Il Mulino, Bologna 1996 Politica e storia in Marc Bloch, Aracne,
Roma 2000 La scienza ideale. Filosofia e politica in Vincenzo Gioberti,
Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2000 Franco Rodano. Laicità, democrazia, società
del superfluo, Studium, Roma 2000 (Curatela) Vincenzo Gioberti, Il governo
federativo, Gangemi Editore, Roma 2002 (Curatela) Franco Rodano, Cristianesimo
e società opulenta, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, Roma 2002 (con Carlo
Scognamiglio), Il giudizio sul nazismo. Le interpretazioni dal 1933 a oggi,
2004,//filosofia.it/archivio/images/download/ebook/Giudizio_sul_nazismo_2004.pdf
La storia: teoria e metodi, Carocci, Roma 2005 (rist. 2006) La filosofia dell'idealismo
italiano, Carocci, Roma 2008 Croce, Carocci, Roma 2009 Tra filosofia e
storiografia. Hegel, Croce e altri studi, Aracne, Roma La prassi e il valore. La filosofia
dell'essere di Felice Balbo, Aracne, Roma
Marxismo e filosofia della praxis. Da Labriola a Gramsci, Viella,
Roma (Con Giuseppe Vacca) In cammino con
Gramsci, Viella, Roma Articoli
(selezione) L'ermeneutica di Hans Georg Gadamer, in «Rivista trimestrale», 1 (1986)
Il problema del mondo nel «Tractatus» di Wittgenstein, in «Rivista trimestrale»,
3 (1987) Le fonti del giudizio marxiano sulla Rivoluzione francese nei
«Kreuznacher Hefte», in «Annali dell'Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici»,
7 (1987) L' «orizzonte liberale» di Dahrendorf, in «Critica marxista», 2 (1990)
Luigi Sturzo e il popolarismo nel giudizio di Piero Gobetti, in Luigi Sturzo e
la democrazia europea, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1990 Benedetto Croce e il problema
del diritto, in «Novecento», 4 (1992) Metodo storico e senso della libertà.
Adolfo Omodeo e i problemi della storiografia crociana, in «La Cultura», 2
(1993) Adolfo Omodeo. Il pensiero politico, in «Annali dell'Istituto Italiano
per gli Studi Storici», 11 (1993) Libertà e storicismo assoluto. Per
un'interpretazione del liberalismo di Croce, in Croce e Gentile fra tradizione
nazionale e filosofia europea, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1993 Hannah Arendt e la
società civile democratica, in «Novecento», 15 (1997) Sul giudizio politico, in
«Novecento», 16 (1998) Il marxismo politico nell'interpretazione di Augusto Del
Noce, in «Poietica», 11 (1999) Gioberti e Cartesio, in Storia, filosofia e
letteratura. Studi in onore di Gennaro Sasso,
Bibliopolis, Napoli, 1999 Comunismo e democrazia, in La democrazia nel
pensiero politico del Novecento, Aracne, Roma 1999 Guido Calogero, in «Belfagor»,
LV (2000), fasc. II (31 mar.) Gioberti e Leopardi, in «La Cultura», Verità e
storia, in «Storiografia», n. 5/2001 Il significato della morale nella
filosofia di Gioberti, in Rosmini e Gioberti. Pensatori europei, G. Beschin e
L. Cristellon, Morcelliana, Brescia 2003 Il destino dell'evento nella “nuova
storia” francese, in «La Cultura», XLI (2003), n. 1 (apr.) Carattere e
svolgimento delle prime teorie estetiche di Benedetto Croce (1885-1913), «La
Cultura», XLI (2003), n. 3 (dic.) Liberalismo etico e liberismo economico, in
Croce filosofo liberale, M. Reale, LUISS University Press, Roma 2004 La teoria
della storia in Benedetto Croce, in «Giornale critico della filosofia
italiana», LXXXIV (2005), fasc. II (mag.-ago.) L'idea di “Risorgimento” in
Gioberti, in «Quaderni della Fondazione Centro Studi Augusto Del Noce»,
2005-2006 Il significato delle fonti storiche, in «La Cultura», XLIV (2006), n.
3 (dic.) La storia: teoria e metodi, in «History and Theory», 45 (February
2006) Il passaggio all'antifascismo. Il 1925 di Benedetto Croce, in Anni di
svolta. Crisi e trasformazione nel pensiero politico della prima età
contemporanea, F.M. Di Sciullo, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2007 Alterità e
principio del dialogo in Guido Calogero, in L'idea e la differenza. Noi e gli
altri, ipotesi di inclusione nel dibattito contemporaneo, M.P. Paternò,
Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2008 Il principio del nous nella filosofia di
Guido Calogero, in «La Cultura», XLVIII (), n. 1 La filosofia come sapere
storico, in Il Novecento di Eugenio Garin. Atti del Convegno di studi, G. Vacca
e S. Ricci, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma, Vincenzo Gioberti, in Il contributo italiano
alla storia del pensiero. Filosofia, M. Ciliberto, Istituto della Enciclopedia
Italiana, Roma , 441–448 Lo storicismo
italiano nel secondo dopoguerra, in Il contributo italiano alla storia del
pensiero. Filosofia, M. Ciliberto, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma
, 706–716 Il problema della libertà
nella filosofia di Luigi Scaravelli, in «La Cultura», LI (), n. 1 La libertà
del volere nella filosofia di Benedetto Croce, in Filosofia e politica. Saggi
in onore di Mario Reale, G. Cesarale, M. Mustè, S. Petrucciani, Mimesis, Milano
, 165–174 Il senso della dialettica
nella filosofia di Bertrando Spaventa, in "Filosofia italiana",
apr. Storia, metodo, verità, in «La
Cultura», , n. 2 Gentile e Marx, «Giornale critico della filosofia italiana»,
XCIV (), XI, fasc. 1 (gen.-apr.), 15–27 Togliatti e De Luca, «Studi storici»,
n. 2/, 312–324 Gentile e Socrate, in La
bandiera di Socrate. Momenti di storiografia filosofica italiana nel Novecento,
E. Spinelli e F. Trabattoni, Sapienza Università Editrice, Roma , 39-58 Gentile e Gioberti, «La Cultura», LIV
(), n. 2 (lug.), 295-323 Gramsci, Croce
e il canto decimo dell’Inferno di Dante, «Giornale critico della filosofia
italiana», , fasc. 1 (gen-giu.), 34-63
Bertrando Spaventa e Gioberti, «Studi storici», , La presenza di Gramsci nella
storiografia filosofica e nella storia della cultura, «Filosofia italiana», n. 2/, 9-29 Dialettica e società civile. Gramsci
“interprete” di Hegel, «Pólemos. Materiali di filosofia e critica sociale», ,
n. 1, 30-46 Marx e i marxismi italiani,
«Giornale critico della filosofia italiana», , fasc. 1, 25-43 La “via alla storia” di Carlo Ginzburg,
in Streghe, sciamani, visionari. In margine a “Storia notturna” di Carlo
Ginzburg, Cora Presezzi, Viella, Roma ,
357-380 Filosofia e storia della filosofia nella riflessione di Gennaro
Sasso, «Filosofia italiana», Opere di Marcello Mustè, . Biografia e
di Mustè sul web Sapienza Roma. Dipartimento di studi filosofici ed
epistemologici, su lettere.uniroma1.it. Intervista di Mustè sulla storia della
"Rivista trimestrale" (versione digitalizzata) Intervista di Mustè su
Benedetto Croce del //diacritica.it/letture-critiche/lo-storicismo-di-croce-e-la-morte-della-metafisica-intervista-a-marcello-muste.html
mystische -- mystical
experience, an experience alleged to reveal some aspect of reality not normally
accessible to sensory experience or cognition. The experience typically characterized by its profound
emotional impact on the one who experiences it, its transcendence of spatial
and temporal distinctions, its transitoriness, and its ineffability is often but not always associated with some
religious tradition. In theistic religions, mystical experiences are claimed to
be brought about by God or by some other superhuman agent. Theistic mystical
experiences evoke feelings of worshipful awe. Their content can vary from
something no more articulate than a feeling of closeness to God to something as
specific as an item of revealed theology, such as, for a Christian mystic, a
vision of the Trinity. Non-theistic mystical experiences are usually claimed to
reveal the metaphysical unity of all things and to provide those who experience
them with a sense of inner peace or bliss. mystische -- ystic -- mysticism, a
doctrine or discipline maintaining that one can gain knowledge of reality that
is not accessible to sense perception or to rational, conceptual thought.
Generally associated with a religious tradition, mysticism can take a theistic
form, as it has in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, or a non-theistic
form, as it has in Buddhism and some varieties of Hinduism. Mystics claim that
the mystical experience, the vehicle of mystic
knowledge, is usually the result of spiritual training, involving some
combination of prayer, meditation, fasting, bodily discipline, and renunciation
of worldly concerns. Theistic varieties of mysticism describe the mystical
experience as granted by God and thus not subject to the control of the mystic.
Although theists claim to feel closeness to God during the mystical experience,
they regard assertions of identity of the self with God as heretical.
Non-theistic varieties are more apt to describe the experience as one that can
be induced and controlled by the mystic and in which distinctions between the
self and reality, or subject and object, are revealed to be illusory. Mystics
claim that, although veridical, their experiences cannot be adequately
described in language, because ordinary communication is based on sense
experience and conceptual differentiation: mystical writings are thus
characterized by metaphor and simile. It is con 593 troversial whether all mystical
experiences are basically the same, and whether the apparent diversity among
them is the result of interpretations influenced by different cultural
traditions. H. P. Grice, “Vitters and the mystic,” Luigi Speranza, “Vitters und
das mystische,” per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming Pool Library, Villa
Grice, Liguria, Italia.
myth: Grice was aware of Grice, the Welsh philosopher. For Grice
had turned a ‘myth,’ the myth of the compact, into a thing that would justify
moral obligationWhen Grice, the Englishman, gives a mythical account of
communication, alla Plato and Paget, he faces the same problemwhich he hopes is
“very minor,” compared to others. In this case, it’s not about ‘moral
obligation’ but about “something else.” Grice was possibly motivated by Quine’s
irreverent, “The mth of meaning,” a talk at France, “Le mythe de la
signification.” It’s odd that he gives the example of a ‘social contract’,
developed by G. R. Grice as a ‘myth’ as his own on ‘expressing pain.’ “My
succession of stages is a methodological myth designed to exhibit the
conceptual link between expression and communication. Rather than Plato, he
appeals to Rawls and the myth of the social conpact! Grice knows a little about
Descartess “Discours de la methode,” and he is also aware of similar obsession by
Collingwood with philosopical methodology. Grice would joke on midwifery, as
the philosopher’s apter method at Oxford: to strangle error at its birth. Grice
typifies a generation at Oxford. While he did not socialize with the crème de
la crème in pre-war Oxford, he shared some their approach. E.g. a love affair
with Russell’s logical construction. After the war, and in retrospect, Grice
liked to associate himself with Austin. He obviously felt the need to belong to
a group, to make a difference, to make history. Many participants of the play group
saw themselves as doing philosophy, rather than reading about it! It was long
after that Grice started to note the differences in methodology between Austin
and himself. His methodology changed a little. He was enamoured with formalism
for a while, and he grants that this love never ceased. In a still later phase,
he came to realise that his way of doing philosophy was part of literature
(essay writing). And so he started to be slightly more careful about his
stylewhich some found florid. The stylistic concerns were serious. Oxonian
philosophers like Holloway had been kept away from philosophy because of the
stereotype that the Oxonian philosophers style is pedantic, when it neednt! A
philosopher should be allowed, as Plato was, to use a myth, if he thinks his
tutee will thank him for that! Grice loved to compare his Oxonian dialectic
with Platos Athenian (strictly, Academic) dialectic. Indeed, there is some
resemblance of the use of myth in Plato and Grice for philosophical
methodological purposes. Grice especially enjoys a myth in his programme in
philosophical psychology. In this, he is very much being a philosopher.
Non-philosophers usually criticise this methodological use of a myth, but they
would, wouldnt they. Grice suggests that a myth has diagogic relevance.
Creature construction, the philosopher as demi-god, if mythical, is an easier
way for a philosophy don to instil his ideas on his tutee than, say, privileged
access and incorrigibility. myth of Er, a tale at the end of Plato’s Republic
dramatizing the rewards of justice and philosophy by depicting the process of
reincarnation. Complementing the main argument of the work, that it is
intrinsically better to be just than unjust, this longest of Plato’s myths
blends traditional lore with speculative cosmology to show that justice also
pays, usually in life and certainly in the afterlife. Er, a warrior who revived
shortly after death, reports how judges assign the souls of the just to heaven
but others to punishment in the underworld, and how most return after a
thousand years to behold the celestial order, to choose their next lives, and
to be born anew. Refs.: The main source is Grice’s essay on ‘myth’, in The H.
P. Grice Papers, BANC.
Nannini:
Sandro Nannini (Siena), filosofo. Ha studiato filosofia
all'Firenze con Sergio Landucci e, inizialmente, con Cesare Luporini. Tra il
1970 e il 1991 ha accompagnato la sua attività di ricerca in campo filosofico
ed i suoi impegni accademici con una intensa attività politica a Siena come
militante del Partito Comunista Italiano. È stato Professore di Filosofia
Morale all'Urbino (1986-1992) e di Filosofia Teoretica all’Università Siena
(1992-), dove ha insegnato per alcuni anni anche filosofia della mente ed è
stato principale cofondatore e direttore di una scuola di dottorato
interdisciplinare in Scienze Cognitive (1999-). È stato inoltre più volte, dal
1989 al , visiting professor presso le Osnabrück, North London, Bremen e
Oldenburg. Attualmente in pensione, è ancora pro tempore Docente Senior presso
l’Siena e dal è direttore di Rivista
Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia (RiFP). I suoi studi giovanili
si sono incentrati sulla filosofia delle scienze sociali, lo strutturalismo
francese e la storia del pensiero antropologico. Successivamente, rivoltosi
alla filosofia analitica ed in particolare alla teoria dell’azione, ha cercato
di sviluppare il “naturalismo metodologico” criticando il ritorno di
neo-wittgesteiniani come G.H. von Wright alla distinzione storicistica tra
scienze della natura e scienze dello spirito. Sempre muovendosi entro la
filosofia analitica, ma rivolgendo il proprio interesse alla filosofia pratica,
ha difeso il non cognitivismo in meta-etica. A partire dagli anni Novanta Professoresi
è infine spostato dalla teoria dell’azione alla filosofia della mente. In una
prima fase si è occupato soprattutto della storia del concetto di mente , per
approdare dopo il 2000 ad una forma di naturalismo cognitivo basata su una
soluzione fisicalistico-eliminativistica del problema mente-corpo. Opere:
Monografie (1981), Il pensiero simbolico: Saggio su Lévi-Strauss, Bologna, Il
Mulino. (1992), Cause e ragioni: Modelli di spiegazione delle azioni umane
nella filosofia analitica, Roma, Editori Riuniti. (1998), Il Fanatico e
l'Arcangelo: Saggi di filosofia analitica pratica, Siena, Protagon. (2002),
L'anima e il corpo: Una introduzione storica alla filosofia della mente,
RomaBari, Laterza; 10ª edizione rivista e ampliata . (2006), Seele, Geist und
Körper: Historische Wurzeln und philosophische Grundlagen der
Kognitionswissenschaften (Deutsche Bearbeitung von Sibylle Mahrdt), Frankfurt
a. M., Peter Lang Verlag. (2007), Naturalismo cognitivo: Per una teoria
materialistica della mente, Macerata, Quodlibet (2008), La Nottola di Minerva:
Storie e dialoghi fantastici sulla filosofia della mente, Milano, Mimesis.
Curatele (1980), Educazione, individuo e società in Emile Durkheim e nei suoi
interpreti, Torino, Loescher. (2000 con H.J. Sandkühler), Naturalism in the
Cognitive Sciences and the Philosophy of Mind, Frankfurt a.M., Peter Lang.
(2007 con C. Lumer), Intentionality, Deliberation and Autonomy: The
Action-Theoretic Basis of Practical Philosophy, London, Ashgate UK. ( con A.
Zeppi), La mente può essere naturalizzata?, Colle di Val D’Elsa (Siena), SeB
Editori. Saggi (1990), Freud e l'antropologia, in «La Cultura. Rivista di
Filosofia, Letteratura e Storia», 28(1), numero monografico “Studi su Sigmund
Freud,” Symbol, Künstliche Intelligenz und Philosophie des Geistes, in «Logos:
Zeitschrift für systematische Philosophie», Il materialismo “primario”, in , Il pensiero
di Cesare Luporini, Milano, Feltrinelli, 140-153. (1999), L'anomalia del
mentale in Donald Davidson, «Rivista di filosofia», 90(1), 71-95. (1999), The
Logical Connection Argument Again, in Egidi R. , In Search of a New Humanism.
The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 103-112. (2000),
Cognitive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind, in Nannini S., Sandkühler H.J.
, Naturalism in the Cognitive Sciences and the Philosophy of Mind, Frankfurt
a.M., Peter Lang, 2000, 41-62. (2004), Mente e corpo nel dibattito
contemporaneo, in A.Vv., L’anima, Milano, Mondadori, 23-40. (2006), Theorien
mentaler Repräsentation, in Sandkühler H.J. , Theorien und Begriffe der
Repräsentation, Bremen, Forschungsprojekt Repräsentation, 91-98. (2006), Mente,
corpo e società nel naturalismo forte, in «Nuova Civiltà delle Macchine», Intentionality
Naturalised, in M. Beaney, C. Penco, Massimiliano Vignolo , Explaining the
Mental: Naturalist and Non-Naturalist Approaches to Mental Acts and Processes,
Newcastle upon Tyne UK, Cambridge Scholars Publ., 124-134. (2007), Realismo
scientifico e ontologia materialistica, in «Giornale di metafisica», 29(2)
(numero Nicolaci G., Perone U., Ontologia e metafisica), 483-496. (2007), Il
concetto di verità in una prospettiva naturalistica, in Amoretti M.C., Marsonet
M. , Conoscenza e verità, Milano, Giuffré, 45-69. (2009), L’Io come Direttore
Assente, in Cardella V., Bruni D. , Cervello, linguaggio, società: Atti del
Convegno 2008 del CODISCO, Coordinamento dei Dottorati Italiani di Scienze
Cognitive, Roma, CORISCO, 177-188. (), Orologi, menti e cervelli: Riflessioni
preliminari su tempo reale e tempo fenomenico tra fisica teorica e filosofia
della mente, in Amoretti M.C. , Natura umana, natura artificiale, Milano,
Angeli, 135-153. (), Cognitive naturalism and cognitive neuroscience: A defence
of eliminativism and a discussion with G. Roth, in De Caro M., Egidi R. , The
Architecture of Knowledge: Epistemology, Agency, and Science, Roma, Carocci, La
naturalizzazione delle rappresentazioni mentali, in «Sistemi intelligenti», Kant
e le scienze cognitive sulla natura dell’Io, in Amoroso L., Ferrarin A., La
Rocca C. , Critica della ragione e forme dell'esperienza: Studi in onore di
Massimo Barale, Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 415-432. (), Realismo scientifico e
naturalismo cognitivo, in Lanfredini R., Peruzzi A. , A plea for balance in
philosophy: Essays in honour of Paolo Parrini, Pisa, ETS, La coscienza può essere naturalizzata?, in
Nannini S., Zeppi A. , La mente può essere naturalizzata?, Colle di Val D’Elsa
(Siena), SeB Editori, Inconscio,
coscienza e intenzionalità nel naturalismo cognitivo, in «Sistemi intelligenti»,
La seconda svolta cognitiva in filosofia della mente, in «Reti, saperi,
linguaggi: Italian Journal of Cognitive Sciences», 3(2), 319-339. (), Time and
Consciousness in Cognitive Naturalism, in «Rivista internazionale di filosofia
e psicologia» 6(3) 458-473. Note Sandro
Nannini, Sandro e Nannini, Il pensiero simbolico: Saggio su Lévi-Strauss, Il
Mulino, 1981. Sandro Nannini, Cause e
ragioni: Modelli di spiegazione delle azioni umane nella filosofia analitica,
Editori Riuniti., 1992. Sandro Nannini,
Il Fanatico e l'Arcangelo: Saggi di filosofia analitica pratica., Protagon,
1998. Sandro Nannini, L'anima e il
corpo: Una introduzione storica alla filosofia della mente, 10ª edizione
rivista e ampliata , Laterza. Sandro
Nannini, Seele, Geist und Körper: Historische Wurzeln und philosophische
Grundlagen der Kognitionswissenschaften, Rielaborazione in tedesco di Sibylle
Mahrdt, Peter Lang Verlag., 2006. Sandro
Nannini, Naturalismo cognitivo: Per una teoria materialistica della mente, Quodlibet,
2007. Sandro Nannini, La Nottola di
Minerva: Storie e dialoghi fantastici sulla filosofia della mente, Mimesis.
Nardi:
Bruno Nardi (Spianate di Altopascio), filosofo. Primogenito di una
famiglia benestante, composta di nove figli, viene avviato sin dalla tenera età
alla carriera ecclesiastica. Nel 1896 entra nel collegio dei frati francescani
a Buggiano e nel 1900, a sedici anni, diventa chierico, assumendo il nome di
frate Angelo. Nel 1901 uscì dal convento di Buggiano perché non aveva
intenzione di continuare nella vita religiosa, avendone perduta la vocazione.
Proseguì gli studi di filosofia e teologia frequentando il convento di
Sant'Agostino di Nicosia in provincia di Pisa. Volendo proseguire gli studi, i
genitori gli indicarono un'unica strada, quella di entrare in seminario e diventare
prete. Nel 1902 Nardi venne ammesso al seminario di Pescia e il 4 marzo 1907
diventò sacerdote. Qui si avvicinò fugacemente al movimento Modernista,
condannato da papa Pio X con l'Enciclica Pascendi. Nel 1908 Nardi
sostenne l'esame di concorso per una borsa di studio triennale conferita
dall'opera Pia Galeotti di Pescia al fine di frequentare un corso di
perfezionamento filosofico presso l'Università Cattolica di Lovanio (Belgio).
Nel 1909 Nardi aveva da poco iniziato a frequentare l'Università Cattolica di
Lovanio che già decise l'argomento della sua tesi di laurea Sigieri di Brabante
nella Divina Commedia e le fonti della filosofia di Dante, che venne discussa
nel 1911 con Maurice De Wulf. La lettura dell'opera di Pierre Mandonnet, nella
parte dedicata a Sigieri, non persuadeva Nardi sulla soluzione data al problema
della presenza di questo averroista nel Paradiso dantesco. Due pregiudizi la
inficiavano: il primo “consisteva in un'inesatta visione storica di quello che
nel Medio Evo e nel Rinascimento era stato l'averroismo. Il secondo pregiudizio
del Mandonnet era quello di ritenere il pensiero filosofico di Dante conforme
in tutto e per tutto a quello di San Tommaso." Nel momento in cui Nardi
entrava a Lovanio abbandonò il modernismo teologico, ma non abbracciò la
filosofia neo-scolastica che quella Università belga stava elaborando. Non
aveva senso per lui ripetere, sul finire dell'Ottocento, nell'epoca del
positivismo, l'operazione culturale di San Tommaso che prevedeva l'unificazione
di fede e ragione. Il metodo di lavoro che Nardi seguì nel corso della
sua vicenda di studioso e ricercatore, rimase sempre improntato al massimo
rigore filosofico, risentendo come una traccia indelebile dell'esperienza di
Lovanio, dove dovette affrontare studi scientifici. Per Nardi l'interpretazione
del testo coincide con la libertà, ma tale atto libero non può attivarsi senza
uno scrupoloso lavoro di scavo e ricerca del materiale documentario, l'esatta
interpretazione filosofica dei testi. Ottenuta un'ulteriore borsa di
studio dall'Opera Pia di Pescia per l'anno scolastico 1911-12, il giovane
sacerdote frequentò corsi di filosofia a Vienna, Berlino, Bonn. Oltre alla
pubblicazione negli anni 1911-12 della propria tesi su Sigieri nella “Rivista
di filosofia neo-scolastica”, Nardi vi pubblicò altri interventi spesso critici
con la linea editoriale del periodico. Intorno al 1912 Nardi si era iscritto ai
corsi dell'Istituto di Studi Superiori di Firenze perché voleva riconoscere in
Italia la sua laurea in filosofia conseguita a Lovanio. A Firenze discuterà la
tesi di laurea in filosofia dedicata alla figura del medico e filosofo padovano
Pietro d'Abano. Nel 1912-13 Nardi collaborava alla “Voce”, rivista fondata da
Giuseppe Prezzolini con il quale mantenne per lunghi anni una fitta
corrispondenza. Nell'autunno 1914 Nardi volle abbandonare il sacerdozio.
In una successiva lettera del 1941 indirizzata al vescovo Angelo Simonetti,
spiegava che era stato l'ambiente familiare a spingerlo nel 1907 a chiedere la
sacra ordinazione, con preghiere e minacce. Nel 1916 si trasferì a Mantova per
insegnare filosofia presso il liceo classico Virgilio, dove vi restò fino al
1934, anno in cui si trasferì a Milano. A Mantova Nardi conobbe Giulietta
Bertoldi che sposò nel 1921. Dal matrimonio nacquero due figli: Tilde e
Franco. Bruno Nardi nel 1938 ebbe da Giovanni Gentile un incarico per
l'insegnamento della filosofia medievale presso la facoltà di lettere
dell'Roma. Tuttavia non ottenne la cattedra universitaria (se non dopo molti anni),
a causa dell'art. 5 del Concordato del 1929 in base al quale la curia romana
escludeva i sacerdoti secolarizzati dall’insegnamento. Nel 1960 gli fu
assegnata la “Penna D’Oro” dal presidente del Consiglio Fernando Tambroni. Nel
1962 gli fu conferita la laurea honoris causa da parte dell’Padova e nel 1964
da parte di quella di Oxford. Le opere e gli studi su Dante Bruno Nardi
si è dedicato instancabilmente per di più in mezzo secolo allo studio del
pensiero di Dante, anche quando si occupava di Virgilio, di Sigieri di
Brabante, di Pietro Pomponazzi. Nardi ha saputo mettere in discussione schemi
consolidati, ha aperto strade nuove, ha formulato proposte inedite che ci
permettono di avere una più esatta comprensione dei testi danteschi. Una
costante di Nardi è di aver conservato sempre una propria autonomia, se non un
vero e proprio distacco, rispetto agli ambienti culturali in cui si era
trovato ad agire, fossero Lovanio, Firenze o Roma. Il coraggio con cui seppe
polemicamente ribaltare tesi consolidate negli ambienti accademici, gli
fruttarono ingiustamente isolamento e non adeguata considerazione rispetto alle
sue acquisizioni veramente anticipatrici. Basti pensare alle sue tesi
sull'averroismo latino, all'importanza data alla figura di Avicenna, di Alberto
Magno, al rifiuto del preteso tomismo di Dante. E se di Gentile parlava come di
un "vero e grande maestro", dandogli ragione nella sua polemica con
il De Wulf (relatore della sua tesi a Lovanio), Nardi pur tuttavia non aderirà
al Neoidealismo, ma vi trarrà soltanto spunti e stimoli per le sue
ricerche. L'incontro con Dante costituisce per Nardi l'episodio decisivo
della sua vita intellettuale e morale. Scriverà nel 1956: "in Dante trovai
il vero e primo maestro, quello a cui debbo la maggior gratitudine". Il senso
della sua ricerca è stato interrogare il "miracolo" della Divina
Commedia, questo "singolare poema sbocciato all'improvviso contro tutte le
buone regole dell'arte e del dittare". Secondo Nardi nella commedia è
custodita la Verità, che si è manifestata ad un poeta ispirato da una profetica
visione. La lunga fatica del Nardi è giunta a concludere che la filosofia di
Dante non si riduce a nessun sistema codificato; è una sintesi complessa
tendente a superare le antinomie e che mantiene intera la sua spiccata
originalità, il suo personalissimo pensiero. Per arrivare a coglierlo occorre
da una parte ristabilire il preciso significato delle parole in rapporto alla
terminologia filosofica e scientifica del Medioevo, e ricostruire dall'altra
l'ambiente culturale e l'atmosfera spirituale nelle quali Dante si muoveva per
arrivare a determinare la fonte, il libro letto da Dante. Nardi ha
gettato luce su molti elementi e suggestioni che Dante derivava dalla filosofia
araba e neoplatonica. Essenziali per comprendere Dante sono per Nardi Alberto
Magno e Sigieri più di Tommaso; così come il neoplatonismo e la cultura araba
più dello scolasticismo aristotelico. A Nardi interessava particolarmente
affrontare il tema della "visione dantesca", esperienza profetica che
seppe tradurre come nessun altro nel linguaggio della Divina Commedia. La
visione di Dante non è finzione letteraria, è rivelazione reale dell'aldilà,
concessa da Dio in virtù di un supremo privilegio. Dante visse il rapimento
mistico ed estatico al terzo cielo come esperienza reale. Dante credette di
essere sceso veramente nell'Inferno, salito veramente al Purgatorio e al
Paradiso. Per Nardi la Commedia si distacca dagli altri scritti di Dante,
perché ne è il loro compimento. Tale culmine si realizza attraverso
un'esperienza eccezionale, di origine mistico-religiosa a lui soltanto
riservata, una rivelazione che ha il potere di trasformare e rendere nuove
tutte le altre opere precedenti. L'opera dantesca, secondo Nardi, si deve
suddividere in tre fasi: la prima fase, che termina a venticinque anni, è sotto
l'influsso di Guinizzelli, assente del tutto la filosofia. La seconda fase,
quella filosofico-politico, coincide con le rime allegoriche, il Convivio, il
De vulgari eloquentia e la Monarchia. La terza fase, quella della poesia
profetica, coincide con la Divina Commedia, poema che segna il ritorno
all'unità della filosofia cristiana. Dante vi compare come profeta che deve
annunciare al mondo l'avvento di un inviato di Dio per la redenzione umana. La
Commedia è "poema sacro", la sua è poesia religiosa. Nardi vede in
questa terza fase finalmente riconciliarsi la speranza cristiana spezzatasi con
l'aristotelismo e l'avverroismo. Per Nardi l'aristotelismo è inconciliabile con
il cristianesimo, e il tomismo pertanto è "il più strano paradosso del
pensiero umano". La Commedia testimonia della riunificazione della
filosofia con la rivelazione di Dio. Dante visse una visione profetica,
esperienza che mancò ad Aristotele. Riconoscimenti Nel 1955 l'Accademia
dei Lincei gli ha conferito il Premio Feltrinelli per la Filosofia. Opere
principali Dante e la cultura medievale: nuovi saggi di filosofia dantesca,
Bari, Laterza, 1949 Saggi e note di critica dantesca, Milano-Napoli, Ricciardi,
1966 Saggi di filosofia dantesca, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1967 Studi di
filosofia medievale, Roma, Ed. di storia e letteratura, 1979 Dante e la cultura
medievale, introduzione di Tullio Gregory, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1985 Note
Paolo Falzone, NARDI, Bruno, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 77, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana, . 25 agosto . Bruno Nardi in
"Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana", XXXV (1956), p.278 Premi Feltrinelli 1950-, su lincei.it. 17
novembre . Medioevo e Rinascimento:
studi in onore di Bruno Nardi, Firenze, Sansoni, 1955 Alberto Asor Rosa,
Dizionario della letteratura italiana del Novecento, ad vocem Sigieri di
Brabante e Alessandro Achillini, (check). Di un nuovo commento alla canzone del
Cavalcanti sull'amore, “Cultura neolatina”,Nardi, Noterella poetica
sull'averroismo di Guido Cavalcanti, Rassegna filosofica, Sigieri di Brabante e
le fonti della filosofia di Dante, in “Rivista di filosofia neoclassica” Sigieri
di Brabante nella Divina Commedia e le fonti della filosofia di Dante,
Spianate, 1912, pag. 11 La teoria dell'anima e la generazione delle forme
secondo Pietro d'Abano, 723–737,
“Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica”, 1912,
81–97 Vittorino da Feltre al paese natale di Virgilio, in “Atti del IV
Congresso nazionale di Studi Romani”, IV, Roma, 1938 174–180 Lyhomo (note al “Baldus” di T.
Folengo), “Giornale critico della filosofia italiana”, 1941. Nel mondo di
Dante, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma, 1944. Sigieri di Brabante nel
pensiero del rinascimento italiano, Edizioni italiane, Roma, 1945. Dante
profeta, in Dante e la cultura medioevale. Nuovi saggi di filosofia dantesca,
Bari, Laterza 1949, 392–393 La mistica
averroistica e Pico della Mirandola, L' aristotelismo padovano dal XIV al XVI
secolo, Firenze, Sansoni 1958; già edita in “Archivio di filosofia, Umanesimo e
Machiavellismo”, Padova 1949, 55–74 Il
naturalismo del Rinascimento, Corso di storia della filosofia. Anno accademico
1948-1949, T. Gregory, Roma, Edizioni Universitarie 1949. L'alessandrinismo nel
Rinascimento, Corso di Storia della filosofia. Anno accademico 1949-1950, I.
Borzi e C. R. Crotti, Roma, “La Goliardica” 1950 La fine dell'averroismo, in
“Pensée humaniste et tradition chrétienne aux XVeme et XVIeme siècle”, Paris,
Boivin Gli scritti del Pomponazzi.
“Giornale critico della filosofia italiana”, 1950, Le opere inedite del
pomponazzi. Il fragmento marciano del commento al “De Anima” e il maestro del
pomponazzi, Pietro Trapolino, 427–442 Il
problema della verità, soggetto e oggetto dell'conoscere nella filosofia antica
e medioevale, Editrice Universale di Roma, Roma, 1951. La crisi del
Rinascimento e il dubbio cartesiano, Corso di storia della filosofia. Anno
accademico 1950-1951, T. Gregory, “La Goliardica” 1951 Il commento di Simplicio
al “De Anima” nelle controversie della fine del sec. XV e del sec. XVI,
“Archivio di filosofia”, Padova 1951. La miscredenza e il carattere morale di
Nicoletto Vernia, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 1951, 103–108 Le opere inedite del Pomponazzi,
“Giornale critico della filosofia italiana” 1951. Le meditazioni di Cartesio,
Lezioni di storia della filosofia. Anno accademico 1951-1952, “La Goliardica”,
Roma, 1952. Pomponazzi… e la cicogna dell'intelletto, “Giornale critico della
filosofia italiana” Il dualismo cartesiano, Corso di storia della filosofia.
Anno accademico 1952-1953, T. Gregory, “La Goliardica”, Roma, 1953. Il dualismo
cartesiano degli Occasionalisti a Leibniz, Corso di storia della filosofia.
Anno accademico 1953-1954, T. Gregory, “La Goliardica”, Roma, 1954. Ancora
qualche notizia e aneddoto su Nicoletto Vernia, Giornale critico della filosofia
italiana, Marcantonio e Teofilo Zimara: due filosofi galatinesi del
Cinquecento, “Archivio storico Pugliese”, 1955 (apparso nel 1957)39
Un'importante notizia su scritti di Sigieri a Bologna e a Padova alla fine del
sec. XV , “Giornale critico della filosofia italiana”, 1956, 204–209 Contributo alla biografia di
Vittorino da Feltre, “Bollettino del Museo civico di Padova”, 1956 (apparso nel
1958)31 Letteratura e cultura del Quattrocento, in “La civiltà veneziana del
Quattrocento”, Firenze, Sansoni 1957,
99–145 Appunti intorno al medico e filosofo padovano Pietro Trapolin, In
Miscellanea in onore di Roberto Cessi, Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, Roma,
1958, 21–46 Copernico studente a Padova,
in Mélanges offerts à Etienne Gilson, de l'Accadémie Française, Toronto-Paris
1959. Studi e problemi di critica testuale. Convegno di studi di filologia
italiana nel centenario della Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, (7-9 aprile 1960)
Bologna, 273–305 L'aristotelismo della
Scolastica e i Francescani, in Studi di Filosofia Medioevale, Edizioni di
Storia e letteratura, Roma 1960206 Pietro Pomponazzi e la teoria di
Avicenna intorno alla generazione spontanea dell'uomo 1962 Mantuanitas vergilana,
Edizioni dell'Ateneo, Roma 1963 La scuola di Rialto e l'Umanesimo veneziano, in
Umanesimo Europeo e Umanesimo veneziano, Sansoni, Firenze 1963, 39–139 Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi, Le
Monnier, Firenze 1965” Saggi sull'Aristotelismo Padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI,
Le Monnier 1965 Corsi manoscritti di lezioni e ritratto di Pietro Pomponazzi,
in Atti del VI Convegno internazionale di studi sul Rinascimento (sett. 1961),
Sansoni, Firenze 1965, 153–200 Studi su
Pietro Pomponazzi, Le Monnier, Firenze 1965. Saggi e note di critica dantesca,
Ricciardi 1966, 268–305 Filosofia e
teologia ai tempi di Dante in rapporto al pensiero del poeta, in Saggi e note
di critica dantesca, Ricciardi, Milano, Napoli, 1966, 3–109 Saggi e note sulla cultura veneta del
Quattro e CinquecentoMazzantini, Editrice Antenore, Padova 1968 Saggi sulla
cultura veneta del Quattro e del CinquecentoMazzantini, Antenore, Padova
1971 Divina Commedia Bruno Nardi, su Treccani.itEnciclopedie on
line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
Bruno Nardi, in Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana. Bruno Nardi, in Dizionario
biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Bruno Nardi, su
siusa.archivi.beniculturali.it, Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze
Archivistiche. Opere di Bruno Nardi, .
Pubblicazioni di Bruno Nardi, su Persée, Ministère de l'Enseignement
supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Innovation.
Tullio Gregory, Nardi, Bruno, in Enciclopedia dantesca, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970. Un profilo biografico nel sito "dante
online", Consulenza scientifica Società Dantesca Italiana.
naso del
camellothing edge of the wedge -- argumentum ad domino: slippery slope argument, an argument that an action
apparently unobjectionable in itself would set in motion a train of events
leading ultimately to an undesirable outcome. The metaphor portrays one on the
edge of a slippery slope, where taking the first step down will inevitably
cause sliding to the bottom. For example, it is sometimes argued that voluntary
euthanasia should not be legalized because this will lead to killing unwanted
people, e.g. the handicapped or elderly, against their will. In some versions
the argument aims to show that one should intervene to stop an ongoing train of
events; e.g., it has been argued that suppressing a Communist revolution in one
country was necessary to prevent the spread of Communism throughout a whole
region via the so-called domino effect. Slippery slope arguments with dubious
causal assumptions are often classed as fallacies under the general heading of
the fallacy of the false cause. This argument is also sometimes called the
wedge argument. There is some disagreement concerning the breadth of the
category of slippery slope arguments. Some would restrict the term to arguments
with evaluative conclusions, while others construe it more broadly so as to
include other sorites arguments.
Natoli: Salvatore Natoli
(Patti), filosofo. Si è laureato in Filosofia presso l'Università Cattolica di
Milano, dove ha trascorso gli anni nel Collegio Augustinianum. Ha insegnato
logica alla Facoltà di Lettere e filosofia dell'Università Ca' Foscari di
Venezia e Filosofia della politica alla Facoltà di Scienze Politiche
dell'Università degli Studi di Milano. Attualmente è Professore di
Filosofia teoretica presso la Facoltà di scienze della formazione
dell'Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. Attività accademica In
particolare, Salvatore Natoli è il propugnatore di un'etica neopagana che,
riprendendo elementi del pensiero greco (in particolare, il senso del tragico),
riesca a fondare una felicità terrena, nella consapevolezza dei limiti
dell'uomo e del suo essere necessariamente un ente finito, in contrapposizione
con la tradizione cristiana. Filosofia del dolore Una particolare e
approfondita analisi sul tema del dolore è stata condotta da Natoli in diverse
sue opere. Il dolore è parte essenziale della vita e per gli antichi
filosofi greci era l'altra faccia della felicità: «I greci si sentono parte
e momento della più grande e generale natura, crudele e insieme divina, si
sentono momento di quest'eterno e irrefrenabile fluire, ove non vi è differenza
tra bene e male allo stesso modo in cui il dolore si volge nella gioia e la
gioia nel dolore» La natura infatti dava la vita e nello stesso tempo
crudelmente la toglieva. Il dolore in realtà fa parte della vita ma non la
nega: il dolore può essere vissuto e reso sopportabile se chi soffre percepisce
non la pietà dell'altro ma che la sua sofferenza è importante per chi entra in
rapporto con lui e con la sua sofferenza. Se chi soffre si sente importante per
qualcuno, anche se soffre ha motivo di vivere. Se non è importante per nessuno
può lasciarsi prendere dalla morte. Secondo Natoli l'esperienza del dolore
ha due aspetti: uno oggettivo, il danno («Nel momento in cui la sofferenza è
motivata attraverso la colpa, colui che soffre non solo patisce il danno, ma ne
diviene anche il responsabile»); e uno soggettivo, cioè come viene vissuta e
motivata la sofferenza. La stessa sofferenza è interpretata in modo differente
da diverse culture: per alcune il dolore fa parte della contingenza del mondo
fenomenico, dell'apparenza per altre invece, è vissuto intensamente come ad
esempio nel cristianesimo dove al dolore viene associata la redenzione. Vi è
una circolarità tra il dolore e il senso che fa sì che, pur essendo il dolore
universale, ad ognuno appartenga un dolore diverso. Vi è dunque un senso
del dolore e un non senso che il dolore causa. Il dolore infatti contraddice la
ragione che non sa darsi spiegazione del perché il dolore abbia colpito proprio
quell'individuo e per quali colpe quello abbia commesso e, infine, perché il
dolore travagli il mondo. Il tentativo di rispondere a queste fondamentali
domande fa sì che l'individuo scopra nuove forze in lui che generino un
vittorioso uomo nuovo che, partendo dall'esperienza del dolore, s'interroghi
sul senso dell'esistere, tenendo sempre presente però, che il dolore può
segnare anche una definitiva sconfitta. Nel dolore l'uomo può scoprire le
sue possibilità di crescita ma questo non vuol dire disprezzare il piacere,
sostenendo che questo, invece, ottunde gli animi. Il piacere invece affina la
sensibilità come accade per chi ascolta frequentemente una buona musica. Il piacere
invece è negativo quando diventa «monomaniaco, eccessivo, quando, anziché
sviluppare la sensibilità, la fossilizza in un punto di eccessiva stimolazione.
E l'eccessivo stimolo distrugge l'organo.» A differenza del piacere, dell'amore
che è dialogo tra due, che è espansivo e affabulatorio anche quando è
silenzioso, l'esperienza del dolore chiude il singolo nella sua individualità e
incomunicabilità, poiché «il corpo sano sente il mondo, il corpo malato sente
il corpo. E quindi il corpo diventa una barriera tra il proprio desiderio,
l'universo delle possibilità, e la realizzabilità delle medesime
possibilità.» Sebbene il dolore sia "insensato" si cerca di
spiegarlo con le parole spesso inutili ed allora si cerca dapprima la parola
"efficace" che offre la tecnica o la parola "efficace"
della preghiera, della fede, che non annulla il dolore, ma dà una speranza nel
miracolo. L'efficace uso della parola per spiegare il dolore fa sì che gli
uomini trovino conforto nella comune sofferenza, in quella universalità del
dolore dove però ognuno rimane nella sua singolarità di senso. La parola
efficace della tecnica per un verso ha alleviato il dolore ma per un altro può
creare delle condizioni di vita tali per cui la stessa tecnica controlla
il dolore senza togliere la malattia, creando così un'esistenza prolungata
senza futuro sotto la continua incombenza della morte: «A partire dal
Settecento, ma ancor più nel corso dell’Ottocento, la tecnica è stata sempre di
più associata alle filosofie del progresso: infatti ha emancipato gli uomini dai
vincoli naturali, ha ridotto il peso della fatica, ha attenuato il dolore, ha
accresciuto il benessere, ha conteso lo spazio alla morte differendola sempre
di più… ma la tecnica, oggi, è nelle condizioni di interferire in modo profondo
nei processi naturali modificandone i cicli…» Una soluzione
all'inevitabilità del dolore può essere l'adesione a un nuovo paganesimo
secondo l'antica visione greca dell'accettazione dell'esistenza del finito e
della morte dell'uomo. «Il cristianesimo ha alterato l'anima pagana. Nel
momento in cui il sogno di un mondo senza dolore è apparso, non ci si adatta
più a questo dolore anche se si crede che un mondo senza dolore non esisterà
mai. La coscienza è stata visitata da un sogno che non si cancella più, e anche
se lo crede inverosimile tuttavia vuole che ci sia.» Anche il
cristianesimo infatti teorizza l'uomo finito, ma non essere naturale destinato
alla morte, ma come creatura di Dio. Per il cristiano la vita finita condotta
secondo il dovere porta all'accettazione della morte come passaggio a Dio. Per
il neopaganesimo la vita finita è degna di essere vissuta senza speranza di
infinitezza ma vivendola secondo un ethos, che non è dovere di obbedire a un
comando morale con la speranza di un premio eterno, ma buona e spontanea
abitudine di una condotta consapevole dell'universale fragilità umana. Magnifying
glass icon mgx2.svgDolore (filosofia). Opere Soggetto e fondamento. Studi su
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, Venezia, Marsilio, 1980. Ermeneutica e genealogia. Filosofia e metodo in
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1981. L'esperienza del
dolore. Le forme del patire nella cultura occidentale, Milano, Feltrinelli,
1986. 88-07-08045-1. Giovanni Gentile
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Scritti di etica e politica, Milano, Feltrinelli, Teatro filosofico. Gli
scenari del sapere tra linguaggio e storia, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1991. 88-07-10139-4. L'incessante meraviglia.
Filosofia, espressione, verità, Milano, Lanfranchi, 1993. 88-363-0035-9. La felicità. Saggio di teoria
degli affetti, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1994.
88-07-10172-6. I nuovi pagani, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1995. 88-428-0251-4. Dizionario dei vizi e delle
virtù, Milano, Feltrinelli, La politica
e il dolore (con Leonardo Verga), Roma, EL, Soggetto e fondamento. Il sapere
dell'origine e la scientificità della filosofia, Milano, Bruno Mondadori, Delle
cose ultime e penultime. Un dialogo (con Bruno Forte), Milano, Mondadori, Dialogo
su Leopardi. Natura, poesia, filosofia (con Antonio Prete), Milano, Bruno
Mondadori, 1998. 88-424-9454-2.
Progresso e catastrofe: dinamiche della modernità, Milano, Marinotti, Dio e il divino. Confronto con il
cristianesimo, Brescia, Morcelliana, La politica e la virtù (con Luigi Franco
Pizzolato), Roma, Lavoro,La felicità di questa vita. Esperienza del mondo e
stagioni dell'esistenza, Milano, Mondadori, L'attimo fuggente o della felicità,
Roma, Edup, 2001. 88-8421-026-7. Stare
al mondo. Escursioni nel tempo presente, Milano, Feltrinelli, Il cristianesimo di un non credente, Magnano,
Qiqajon, Libertà e destino nella tragedia greca, Brescia, Morcelliana, Stare al
mondo. Escursioni nel tempo presente, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2002. 88-07-17062-0. Parole della filosofia o
dell’arte di meditare, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2004 88-07-10365-6. La verità in gioco. Scritti su
Foucault, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2005. 88-07-81839-6. Guida alla formazione del
carattere, Brescia, Morcelliana, 2006.
88-372-2093-6. Sul male assoluto. Nichilismo e idoli nel Novecento,
Brescia, Morcelliana,I dilemmi della speranza: un dialogo (con Nichi Vendola),
Molfetta, La meridiana, La salvezza senza fede, Milano, Feltrinelli, La mia filosofia: Forme del mondo e saggezza
del vivere, Pisa, Ets, L'attimo fuggente
e la stabilità del bene, (contiene la Lettera a Meneceo sulla felicità di
Epicuro), Roma, Edup, Edipo e Giobbe. Contraddizione e paradosso, Brescia,
Morcelliana, Dialogo sui novissimi (con Francesco Brancato), Troina, Città Aperta,
Il crollo del mondo. Apocalisse ed
escatologia, Brescia, Morcelliana, L'edificazione di sé. Istruzioni sulla vita
interiore, Roma-Bari, Laterza, Il buon
uso del mondo. Agire nell'età del rischio, Milano, Mondadori, Figure
d'Occidente. Platone, Nietzsche e Heidegger (con Massimo Donà e Carlo Sini,
introduzione di Erasmo Silvio Storace), Milano, AlboVersorio, . 88-89130-76-8. Eros e Philia, Milano, AlboVersorio,
.Nietzsche e il teatro della filosofia, Milano, Feltrinelli, .Le parole ultime.
Dialogo sui problemi del «fine vita» (con Ivan Cavicchi, Piero Coda e altri),
Bari, Dedalo, . 978-88-220-6317-5. I
comandamenti. Non ti farai idolo né immagine, Bologna, Il mulino, Le verità del
corpo, Milano, AlboVersorio, .Sperare oggi (con Franco Mosconi), Trento, Il
margine, . 978-88-6089-096-2. Note Le virtù dei Giusti e l'identità
dell'Europa Enciclopedia Italiana
Treccani alla voce corrispondente S.
Natoli, La salvezza senza fede, Feltrinelli 2007 Ove non indicato diversamente, le
informazioni contenute nel paragrafo "Filosofia del dolore" hanno
come fonte Enciclopedia multimediale delle Scienze FilosoficheSalvatore
NatoliIl senso del dolore Archiviato il 22 marzo in .
L'esperienza del dolore. Le forme del patire nella cultura occidentale,
La politica e il dolore, Dialogo su Leopardi: natura, poesia, filosofia, Edipo
e Giobbe: contraddizione e paradosso.
S.Natoli, La salvezza senza fede, Feltrinelli 2007 p.61 S.Natoli. op.cit, p.92 S. Natoli, Op, cit. ibidem. S. Natoli, Op. cit. ibidem. S. Natoli, L'esperienza del dolore nell'età
della tecnica Archiviato il 13 luglio in
. Salvatore Natoli: Siamo
"finiti". E anche la tecnica lo è, da Europa, 6 dicembre 2006. S. Natoli, I Nuovi pagani, Il saggiatore,
Milano, 1995 Altri progetti Collabora a Wikiquote Citazionio su Salvatore
Natoli Salvatore Natoli, su
Treccani.itEnciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Opere di Salvatore Natoli / Salvatore Natoli
(altra versione) / Salvatore Natoli (altra versione), su openMLOL, Horizons
Unlimited srl. Opere di Salvatore Natoli, .
Registrazioni di Salvatore Natoli, su RadioRadicale.it, Radio Radicale. Intervista a Salvatore Natoli, per Il Rasoio
di Occam, di Carlo Crosato. Video intervista su Asia.it, su asia.it. Dov'è la
vittoria? Salvatore Natoli e “l'Italia civile che resta minoranza” intervista
di Paolo Barbie, Il Fatto Quotidiano.
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