-- by JLS
for the GC
E. Kittis quotes online from Quinton on Grice:
"There is a significant difference
between Wittgenstein's attitude to
philosophical puzzlement and that of
the Oxford philosophers of ordinary
language [Ryle, Austin, Grice]. For him
the relief was something he could
compare with psychotherapy; for them, more
breezily, it was a kind of brisk
mental hygiene."
----
"However, he and they agreed, on the whole,
that philosophy should NOT be systematic".
----- a good update on Grice's views on philosophy as entire (like virtue) and the listing of the disciplines he thought himself a master could have done with Baron Quinton!
--
Quinton goes on:
"but, rather, piecemal; it is not a body
of theoretical principles"
---- at this point I'm suspecting some antipathy. After all Quinton supported Ayer as Wykeham chair of logic while Austin, and Grice, supported Strawson. Ayer won.
Quinton:
"but rather a method of treatment to be applied as
and where the need for it is felt."
---- "The Listener", 1976, April 22, pp. 496)
cited in http://www.enl.auth.gr/staff/strands.pdf
This excellent author, E. K. has a beautiful PhD under Holdcroft on Grice -- she choses the right sources and has the right style.
----
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The title of the Quinton piece is "Current trends in philosophy".
ReplyDeleteI am not sure of Quinton's exact metaphysical views, but suspect (as you suggest) he wasn't quite as enthusiastic about speech acts and ord-lang as , well, yr usual suspects; he seems a bit closer to the logicist/positivist project (for good and for ill), tho' he probably shifted sides a bit--like many-- when Russell, Carnap, Ayers, etc (and later Quine) were intellectually demoted. That said, I don't think Ayers was ...Lucifer himself, and at times he seemed to defend rationalism of a sort--as in, empiricism can't explain...say mathematical/logical foundations; ergo, rationalism...including analytical a priori truths, might hold.
ReplyDeleteAn. A-P is probably a matter of convenience for most (excepting the most dogmatic of platonists...or theists). Really I'm for a ...pragmatist view of the Analytical a priori (and agree with the early AP types contra-Kant's synthetic a priori truths, AND yet...also object to Quine's meat-machine brought out in "Two Dogmas"); that doesn't mean mathematical-logical Forms--aka Frege's "abstract entities" are "innate" in terms or knowledge or float in some ethereal abode (does it).
Right. Apparently, Quinton (and his wife, Marcelle) were quite specialists of Frege, and their translation of "The Thought: A logical inquiry" got published in Strawson's Philosophical Logic.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about Quinton not being quite the 'linguistic type' that Grice (or Warnock, talking of philosophy of perception) fit so nicely.
I'll consider your points.
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ReplyDeleteJ is right in testing to how extent Quinton fits the type of Austin or Grice. But there are indeed overlaps with some of the subject that both Grice and Quinton approached, -- and some 'family resemblance' (I think Grice uses this expression elsewhere, relating to method). Quinton's points about the distinction between Wittgenstein and the Oxonians is a good one, if subtle -- 'mental hygiene' is perhaps a bit strong, though. Quinton was very good at popularising the views of others, and his surveys of trends were interesting. If one considers his analysis of the uses of 'appear', for example, one may detect that Grice would go one step further into the provision of a theory that would account for such diversity of uses. Oxford was perhaps in the 1940s and the 1950s the cradle of a new way of doing philosophy and Quinton obviously felt for a time very comfortable with the idiom. It is interseting that his only work in ethics is Not 'meta-ethics' but a textbook on utilitarianism -- which wins Griceanism, in the words of B. J. Harrison, in being the doctrine most beset by counterexamples!
ReplyDelete