"Every event has a cause": Kant, Warnock, and Grice, on the synthetic a priori

by J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club.

WARNOCK was perhaps a genius -- I mean, he WAS a genius. He suffered a horrible death of cancer to the throat as perhaps not in the best 'reserved' way displayed publicly in interviews by his wife, Dame Mary Wilson Warnock.

He was a student of Grice -- Warnock was born in the 1920s, in Yorkshire (Leeds) and could harmonise so well with Grice that they loved each other philosophically. They have piles of material that awaits publication (Grice entitled the thing, "Forthcoming, Warnock retrospective"), but he died. I sometimes think that death does not like a philosopher.

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Anyway, his attempt at the 'synthetic a priori' is in "Every event has a cause".

Warnock was Fellow of Hereford College. For one of those chances of life -- no cause really -- he was elected Vice-Chancelor (i.e. the main authority, only below the monarch) of Oxford. And things were never the same!

There was no blurb or promotion of Warnock that would not mention THAT fact, "Vice-Chancelor". And surely it's slightly obscene for a Vice-Chancelor to identify the implicatures of 'seem'.

Chapman, whom I love, refers to Warnock, 7 times in her book on Grice. It is all the time referred to as G. C. Warnock. But it was Sir Geoffrey JAMES. A very ENGLISH physiognomy. I must love the photo of his complete with bowtie in the blurb of his "Language and Morality". There is a youtube with Brian Maggee where they discuss Kant, and it's fascinating to focus on the stiff upper lip of Sir Geoffrey, as he considers what Kant thinks but Kant express about 'Every event has a cause'.

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