informatum – “What has
‘forma’ to do with ‘inform’?” – Grice. While etymologically it means ‘to
mould,’ Lewis and Short render ‘informare’ as “to
inform, instruct, educate (syn.: “instruere, instituere): artes quibus aetas
puerilis ad humanitatem informari solet,” Cic. Arch. 3, 4: “animus a natura
bene informatus,” formed, id. Off. 1, 4, 13. I. e. “the soul is well informed
by nature.” Informativus – informational. Grice distinguishes between
the indicative and the informational. “Surely it is stupid to inform myself,
but not Strawson, that it is raining. Grammarians don’t care, but I do!”
information theory, also called communication theory, a primarily mathematical
theory of communication. Prime movers in its development include Claude
Shannon, H. Nyquist, R. V. L. Hartley, Norbert Wiener, Boltzmann, and Szilard.
Original interests in the theory were largely theoretical or applied to
telegraphy and telephony, and early development clustered around engineering
problems in such domains. Philosophers (Bar-Hillel, Dretske, and Sayre, among
others) are mainly interested in information theory as a source for developing
a semantic theory of information and meaning. The mathematical theory has been
less concerned with the details of how a message acquires meaning and more
concerned with what Shannon called the “fundamental problem of communication” –
reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message (that
already has a meaning) selected at another point. Therefore, the two interests
in information – the mathematical and the philosophical – have remained largely
orthogonal. Information is an objective (mind-independent) entity. It can be
generated or carried by messages (words, sentences) or other products of
cognizers (interpreters). Indeed, communication theory focuses primarily on
conditions involved in the generation and transmission of coded (linguistic)
messages. However, almost any event can (and usually does) generate information
capable of being encoded or transmitted. For example, Colleen’s acquiring red
spots can contain information about Colleen’s having the measles and graying
hair can carry information about her grandfather’s aging. This information can
be encoded into messages about measles or aging (respectively) and transmitted,
but the information would exist independently of its encoding or transmission.
That is, this information would be generated (under the right conditions) by
occurrence of the measles-induced spots and the age-induced graying themselves
– regardless of anyone’s actually noticing. This objective feature of
information explains its potential for epistemic and semantic development by
philosophers and cognitive scientists. For example, in its epistemic dimension,
a single (event, message, or Colleen’s spots) that contains informal logic
information theory 435 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 435 (carries) the
information that Colleen has the measles is something from which one (mom,
doctor) can come to know that Colleen has the measles. Generally, an event
(signal) that contains the information that p is something from which one can
come to know that p is the case – provided that one’s knowledge is indeed based
on the information that p. Since information is objective, it can generate what
we want from knowledge – a fix on the way the world objectively is configured.
In its semantic dimension, information can have intentionality or aboutness. What
is happening at one place (thermometer reading rising in Colleen’s mouth) can
carry information about what is happening at another place (Colleen’s body
temperature rising). The fact that messages (or mental states, for that matter)
can contain information about what is happening elsewhere, suggests an exciting
prospect of tracing the meaning of a message (or of a thought) to its
informational origins in the environment. To do this in detail is what a
semantic theory of information is about. The mathematical theory of information
is purely concerned with information in its quantitative dimension. It deals
with how to measure and transmit amounts of information and leaves to others
the work of saying what (how) meaning or content comes to be associated with a
signal or message. In regard to amounts of information, we need a way to
measure how much information is generated by an event (or message) and how to
represent that amount. Information theory provides the answer. Since
information is an objective entity, the amount of information associated with
an event is related to the objective probability (likelihood) of the event.
Events that are less likely to occur generate more information than those more
likely to occur. Thus, to discover that the toss of a fair coin came up heads
contains more information than to discover this about the toss of a coin biased
(.8) toward heads. Or, to discover that a lie was knowingly broadcast by a
censored, state-run radio station, contains less information than that a lie was
knowingly broadcast by a non-censored, free radio station (say, the BBC). A
(perhaps surprising) consequence of associating amounts of information with
objective likelihoods of events is that some events generate no information at
all. That is, that 55 % 3125 or that water freezes at 0oC. (on a specific
occasion) generates no information at all – since these things cannot be
otherwise (their probability of being otherwise is zero). Thus, their
occurrence generates zero information. Shannon was seeking to measure the
amount of information generated by a message and the amount transmitted by its
reception (or about average amounts transmissible over a channel). Since his
work, it has become standard to think of the measure of information in terms of
reductions of uncertainty. Information is identified with the reduction of
uncertainty or elimination of possibilities represented by the occurrence of an
event or state of affairs. The amount of information is identified with how
many possibilities are eliminated. Although other measures are possible, the
most convenient and intuitive way that this quantity is standardly represented
is as a logarithm (to the base 2) and measured in bits (short for how many
binary digits) needed to represent binary decisions involved in the reduction
or elimination of possibilities. If person A chooses a message to send to
person B, from among 16 equally likely alternative messages (say, which number
came up in a fair drawing from 16 numbers), the choice of one message would
represent 4 bits of information (16 % 24 or log2 16 % 4). Thus, to calculate
the amount of information generated by a selection from equally likely messages
(signals, events), the amount of information I of the message s is calculated
I(s) % logn. If there is a range of messages (s1 . . . sN) not all of which are
equally likely (letting (p (si) % the probability of any si’s occurrence), the
amount of information generated by the selection of any message si is
calculated I(si) % log 1/p(si) % –log p(si) [log 1/x % –log x] While each of
these formulas says how much information is generated by the selection of a
specific message, communication theory is seldom primarily interested in these
measures. Philosophers are interested, however. For if knowledge that p requires
receiving the information that p occurred, and if p’s occurrence represents 4
bits of information, then S would know that p occurred only if S received
information equal to (at least) 4 bits. This may not be sufficient for S to
know p – for S must receive the right amount of information in a non-deviant
causal way and S must be able to extract the content of the information – but
this seems clearly necessary. Other measures of information of interest in
communication theory include the average information, or entropy, of a source,
information theory information theory 436 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page
436 I(s) % 9p(si) $ I(si), a measure for noise (the amount of information that
person B receives that was not sent by person A), and for equivocation (the
amount of information A wanted or tried to send to B that B did not receive).
These concepts from information theory and the formulas for measuring these
quantities of information (and others) provide a rich source of tools for
communication applications as well as philosophical applications. informed
consent, voluntary agreement in the light of relevant information, especially
by a patient to a medical procedure. An example would be consent to a specific
medical procedure by a competent adult patient who has an adequate
understanding of all the relevant treatment options and their risks. It is
widely held that both morality and law require that no medical procedures be
performed on competent adults without their informed consent. This doctrine of
informed consent has been featured in case laws since the 1950s, and has been a
focus of much discussion in medical ethics. Underwritten by a concern to
protect patients’ rights to self-determination and also by a concern with
patients’ well-being, the doctrine was introduced in an attempt to delineate
physicians’ duties to inform patients of the risks and benefits of medical
alternatives and to obtain their consent to a particular course of treatment or
diagnosis. Interpretation of the legitimate scope of the doctrine has focused
on a variety of issues concerning what range of patients is competent to give
consent and hence from which ones informed consent must be required; concerning
how much, how detailed, and what sort of information must be given to patients
to yield informed consent; and concerning what sorts of conditions are required
to ensure both that there is proper understanding of the information and that
consent is truly voluntary rather than unduly influenced by the institutional
authority of the physician.
ingarden: a leading phenomenologist,
who taught in Lvov and Cracow and became prominent in the English-speaking
world above all through his work in aesthetics and philosophy of literature.
His Literary Work of Art (German 1931, English 1973) presents an ontological
account of the literary work as a stratified structure, including word sounds
and meanings, represented objects and aspects, and associated metaphysical and
aesthetic qualities. The work forms part of a larger ontological project of combating
the transcendental idealism of his teacher Husserl, and seeks to establish the
essential difference in structure between minddependent ‘intentional’ objects
and objects in reality. Ingarden’s ontological investigations are set out in
his The Controversy over the Existence of the World (Polish 1947/48, German
1964–74, partial English translation as Time and Modes of Being, 1964). The
work rests on a tripartite division of formal, material, and existential
ontology and contains extensive analyses of the ontological structures of
individual things, events, processes, states of affairs, properties and
relations. It culminates in an attempted refutation of idealism on the basis of
an exhaustive account of the possible relations between consciousness and reality.
inscriptum -- inscriptionalism -- nominalism. While Grice pours scorn
on the American School of Latter-Day
Nominalists, nominalism, as used by Grice is possibly a misnomer. He
doesn’t mean Occam, and Occam did not use ‘nominalismus.’ “Terminimus’ at most.
So one has to be careful. The implicaturum is that the nominalist calls a
‘name’ what others shouldn’t. Mind,
Grice had two nominalist friends: S. N. Hamphsire (Scepticism and meaning”) and
A. M. Quinton, of the play group! In “Properties and classes,” for the
Aristotelian Society. And the best Oxford philosophical stylist, Bradley, is
also a nominalist. There are other, more specific arguments against universals.
One is that postulating such things leads to a vicious infinite regress. For
suppose there are universals, both monadic and relational, and that when an
entity instantiates a universal, or a group of entities instantiate a
relational universal, they are linked by an instantiation relation. Suppose now
that a instantiates
the universal F. Since
there are many things that instantiate many universals, it is plausible to
suppose that instantiation is a relational universal. But if instantiation is a
relational universal, when a instantiates F, a, F and
the instantiation relation are linked by an instantiation relation. Call this
instantiation relation i2 (and suppose it, as is plausible, to be
distinct from the instantiation relation (i1) that links a and F). Then
since i2 is
also a universal, it looks as if a, F, i1 and i2 will have to
be linked by another instantiation relation i3, and so on ad infinitum.
(This argument has its source in Bradley 1893, 27–8.)
insinuatum: Cf. ‘indirectum’ Oddly, Ryle found an ‘insinuation’
abusive, which Russell found abusive. When McGuinness listed the abusive terms
by Gellner, ‘insinuation’ was one of them, so perhaps Grice should take note! insinuation
insinuate. The etymology is abscure. Certainly not Ciceronian. A bit of
linguistic botany, “E implicates that p” – implicate to do duty for, in
alphabetic order: mean, suggest, hint, insinuate, indicate, implicitly convey,
indirectly convey, imply. Intransitive meaning "hint obliquely" is from
1560s. The problem is that Grice possibly used it transitively, with a
‘that’-clause. “Emissor E communicates that p, via insinuation,” i.e. E
insinuates that p.” In fact, there’s nothing odd with the ‘that’-clause
following ‘insinuate.’ Obviosuly, Grice will be saying that what is a mere
insinuation it is taken by Austin, Strawson, Hart or Hare or Hampshire – as he
criticizes him in the “Mind” article on intention and certainty -- (to restrict
to mistakes by the play group) as part of the ‘analysans.’ `Refs. D. Holdcroft,
“Forms of indirect communication,” Journal of Rhetoric, H. P. Grice,
“Communicatum: directum-indirectum.”
Swinehead: “I like
Swinehead – it sounds almost like Grice!” – Grice.
solubile -- insolubile: “As
opposed to the ‘piece-of-cake’ solubilia” – Grice. A solubile is a piece of a
cake. An insolubile is a sentences embodying a semantic antinomy such as the
liar paradox. The insolubile is used by philosophers to analyze a self-nullifying
sentences, the possibility that every sentence implies that they are true, and
the relation between a communicatum and an animatum (psi). At first, Grice
focuses on nullification to explicate a sentence like ‘I am lying’ (“Mento.”
“Mendax”) which, when spoken, entails that the utterer “says nothing.” Grice:
“Bradwardine suggests that such a sentence as “Mento” signifies that it is at
once true and false, prompting Burleigh to argue that every sentences implies
that it is true.” “Swineshead uses the insolubile to distinguish between truth and
correspondence to reality.” While ‘This sentence is false’ is itself false, it
corresponds to reality, while its contradiction, ‘This sentence is not false,’
does not, although the latter is also false. “Wyclif uses the insolubile to
describe the senses (or implicatura) in which a sentence can be true, which led
to his belief in the reality of logical beings or entities of reason, a central
tenet of his realism.” “d’Ailly uses the insolubile to explain how the animatum
(or soul) differs from the communicatum, holding that there is no insoluble in
the soul, but that communication lends itself to the phenomenon by admitting a
single sentence corresponding to two distinct states of the soul. Grice: “Of
course that was Swine’s unEnglish overstatement, ‘unsolvable;’ everything is
solvable!” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Liars at Oxford.”
institutum – Grice speaks of
the institution of decision as the goal of conversation -- institution. (1) An
organization such as a corporation or college. (2) A social practice such as
marriage or making promises. (3) A system of rules defining a possible form of
social organization, such as capitalist versus Communist principles of economic
exchange. In light of the power of institutions to shape societies and
individual lives, writers in professional ethics have explored four main
issues. First, what political and legal institutions are feasible, just, and
otherwise desirable (Plato, Republic; Rawls, A Theory of Justice)? Second, how
are values embedded in institutions through the constitutive rules that define
them (for example, “To promise is to undertake an obligation”), as well as
through regulatory rules imposed on them from outside, such that to participate
in institutions is a value-laden activity (Searle, Speech Acts, 1969)? Third,
do institutions have collective responsibilities or are the only
responsibilities those of individuals, and in general how are the responsibilities
of individuals, institutions, and communities related? Fourth, at a more
practical level, how can we prevent institutions from becoming corrupted by
undue regard for money and power (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981) and by
patriarchal prejudices (Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family,
1989)? -- institutional theory of art, the view that something becomes an
artwork by virtue of occupying a certain position within the context of a set
of institutions. George Dickie originated this theory of art (Art and the
Aesthetic, 1974), which was derived loosely from Arthur Danto’s “The Artworld”
(Journal of Philosophy, 1964). In its original form it was the view that a work
of art is an artifact that has the status of candidate for appreciation
conferred upon it by some person acting on behalf of the art world. That is,
there are institutions – such as museums, galleries, and journals and
newspapers that publish reviews and criticism – and there are individuals who
work within those institutions – curators, directors, dealers, performers,
critics – who decide, by accepting objects or events for discussion and
display, what is art and what is not. The concept of artifactuality may be
extended to include found art, conceptual art, and other works that do not
involve altering some preexisting material, by holding that a use, or context
for display, is sufficient to make something into an artifact. This definition
of art raises certain questions. What determines – independently of such
notions as a concern with art – whether an institution is a member of the art
world? That is, is the definition ultimately circular? What is it to accept
something as a candidate for appreciation? Might not this concept also threaten
circularity, since there could be not only artistic but also other kinds of
appreciation?
instrumentum:
is
Grice an instrumentalist? According to C. Lord (“Griceian instrumentalism”) he
is – but he is not! Lord takes ‘tool’ literally. In Grice’s analysandum of the
act of the communicatum, Lord takes ‘x’ to be a ‘tool’ or instrument for the
production of a response in the emisor’s sendee. But is this the original Roman
meaning of ‘instrumentum’? Griceian aesthetic instrumetalism according to
Catherine Lord. instrumentalism, in its most common meaning, a kind of
anti-realistic view of scientific theories wherein theories are construed as
calculating devices or instruments for conveniently moving from a given set of
observations to a predicted set of observations. As such the theoretical statements
are not candidates for truth or reference, and the theories have no ontological
import. This view of theories is grounded in a positive distinction between
observation statements and theoretical statements, and the according of
privileged epistemic status to the former. The view was fashionable during the
era of positivism but then faded; it was recently revived, in large measure
owing to the genuinely perplexing character of quantum theories in physics.
’Instrumentalism’ has a different and much more general meaning associated with
the pragmatic epistemology of Dewey. Deweyan instrumentalism is a general
functional account of all concepts (scientific ones included) wherein the
epistemic status of concepts and the rationality status of actions are seen as
a function of their role in integrating, predicting, and controlling our
concrete interactions with our experienced world. There is no positivistic
distinction instantiation instrumentalism 438 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM
Page 438 between observation and theory, and truth and reference give way to
“warranted assertability.”
intellectum: hile the ‘dianoia’ is the intellectus, the ‘intellectum’
is the Griceian diaphanous ‘what is understood.’ (dianoia): Grice was
fascinated by Cicero. “The way he managed to translate the Grecian ‘dia’ by the
‘inter is genial!” As Short and Lewis have it, it’s from
“inter-legere,” to see into, perceive, understand. “intelligere,” originally meaning to comprehend, appeared
frequently in Cicero, then underwent a slippage in its passive form,
“intelligetur,” toward to understand, to communicate, to mean, ‘to give it to
be understood.’ What is understood – INTELLECTUM -- by an expression can be not
only its obvious sense but also something that is connoted, implied, insinuated,
IMPLICATED, as Grice would prefer. Verstand, corresponding to Greek dianoia and
Latin intellectio] Kant distinguished understanding from sensibility and
reason. While sensibility is receptive, understanding is spontaneous. While
understanding is concerned with the range of phenomena and is empty without
intuition, reason, which moves from judgment to judgment concerning phenomena,
is tempted to extend beyond the limits of experience to generate fallacious
inferences. Kant claimed that the main act of understanding is judgment and
called it a faculty of judgment. He claimed that there is an a priori concept
or category corresponding to each kind of judgment as its logical function and
that understanding is constituted by twelve categories. Hence understanding is
also a faculty of concepts. Understanding gives the synthetic unity of
appearance through the categories. It thus brings together intuitions and
concepts and makes experience possible. It is a lawgiver of nature. Herder
criticized Kant for separating sensibility and understanding. Fichte and Hegel
criticized him for separating understanding and reason. Some neo-Kantians
criticized him for deriving the structure of understanding from the act of
judgment. “Now we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgements, and
the understanding may therefore be represented as a faculty of judgement.”
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Intellectus -- dianoia, Grecian term for the faculty
of thought, specifically of drawing conclusions from assumptions and of constructing
and following arguments. The term may also designate the thought that results
from using this faculty. We would use dianoia to construct a mathematical
proof; in contrast, a being if there is
such a being it would be a god that
could simply intuit the truth of the theorem would use the faculty of
intellectual intuition, noûs. In contrast with noûs, dianoia is the distinctly
human faculty of reason. Plato uses noûs and dianoia to designate,
respectively, the highest and second levels of the faculties represented on the
divided line Republic 511de. PLATO.
E.C.H. dialectical argument dianoia 233
233 dichotomy paradox. Refs: Grice, “The criteria of intelligence.”
intensionalism: Grice finds a way to relieve a predicate that is vacuous
from the embarrassing consequence of denoting or being satisfied by the empty
set. Grice exploits the nonvoidness of a predicate which is part of the
definition of the void predicate. Consider the vacuous predicate:‘... is
married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope.'The class '... is a
daugther of an English queen and a pope.'is co-extensive with the
predicate '... stands in relation to a sequence composed of the
class married to, daughters, English queens, and popes.'We correlate the
void predicate with the sequence composed of relation R, the set ‘married
to,’ the set ‘daughters,’ the set ‘English queens,’ and the set ‘popes.'Grice
uses this sequence, rather than the empty set, to determine the explanatory
potentiality of a void predicate. The admissibility of a nonvoid predicate
in an explanation of a possible phenomenon (why it would happen if it did
happen) may depends on the availability of a generalisation whithin which the
predicate specifies the antecedent condition. A non-trivial generalisations
of this sort is certainly available if derivable from some further
generalisation involving a less specific antecedent condition, supported by an
antecedent condition that is specified by means a nonvoid predicate. intension, the
meaning or connotation of an expression, as opposed to its extension or
denotation, which consists of those things signified by the expression. The
intension of a declarative sentence is often taken to be a proposition and the
intension of a predicate expression (common noun, adjective) is often taken to
be a concept. For Frege, a predicate expression refers to a concept and the
intension or Sinn (“sense”) of a predicate expression is a mode of presentation
distinct from the concept. Objects like propositions or concepts that can be the
intension of terms are called intensional objects. (Note that ‘intensional’ is
not the same word as ‘intentional’, although the two are related.) The
extension of a declarative sentence is often taken to be a state of affairs and
that of a predicate expression to be the set of objects that fall under the
concept which is the intension of the term. Extension is not the same as
reference. For example, the term ‘red’ may be said to refer to the property
redness but to have as its extension the set of all red things. Alternatively
properties and relations are sometimes taken to be intensional objects, but the
property redness is never taken to be part of the extension of the adjective
‘red’. intensionality, failure of extensionality. A linguistic context is extensional
if and only if the extension of the expression obtained by placing any
subexpression in that context is the same as the extension of the expression
obtained by placing in that context any subexpression with the same extension
as the first subexpression. Modal, intentional, and direct quotational contexts
are main instances of intensional contexts. Take, e.g., sentential contexts.
The extension of a sentence is its truth or falsity (truth-value). The
extension of a definite description is what it is true of: ‘the husband of
Xanthippe’ and ‘the teacher of Plato’ have the same extension, for they are
true of the same man, Socrates. Given this, it is easy to see that
‘Necessarily, . . . was married to Xanthippe’ is intensional, for ‘Necessarily,
the husband of Xanthippe was married to Xanthippe’ is true, but ‘Necessarily,
the teacher of Plato was married to Xanthippe’ is not. Other modal terms that
generate intensional contexts include ‘possibly’, ‘impossibly’, ‘essentially’,
‘contingently’, etc. Assume that Smith has heard of Xanthippe but not Plato.
‘Smith believes that . . . was married to Xanthippe’ is intensional, for ‘Smith
believes that the husband of Xanthippe was married to Xanthippe’ is true, but
‘Smith believes that the teacher of Plato was married to Xanthippe’ is not.
Other intentional verbs that generate intensional contexts include ‘know’,
‘doubt’, ‘wonder’, ‘fear’, ‘intend’, ‘state’, and ‘want’. ‘The fourth word in
“. . . “ has nine letters’ is intensional, for ‘The fourth word in “the husband
of Xanthippe” has nine letters’ is true but ‘the fourth word in “the teacher of
Plato” has nine letters’ is not. intensional logic, that part of deductive
logic which treats arguments whose validity or invalidity depends on strict
difference, or identity, of meaning. The denotation of a singular term (i.e., a
proper name or definite description), the class of things of which a predicate
is true, and the truth or falsity (the truth-value) of a sentence may be called
the extensions of these respective linguistic expressions. Their intensions are
their meanings strictly so called: the (individual) concept conveyed by the
singular term, the property expressed by the predicate, and the proposition
asserted by the sentence. The most extensively studied part of formal logic
deals largely with inferences turning only on extensions. One principle of
extensional logic is that if two singular terms have identical denotations, the
truth-values of corresponding sentences containing the terms are identical.
Thus the inference from ‘Bern is the capital of Switzerland’ to ‘You are in
Bern if and only if you are in the capital of Switzerland’ is valid. But this
is invalid: ‘Bern is the capital of Switzerland. Therefore, you believe that
you are in Bern if and only if you believe that you are in the capital of
Switzerland.’ For one may lack the belief instrumental rationality intensional
logic 439 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 439 that Bern is the capital of
Switzerland. It seems that we should distinguish between the intensional
meanings of ‘Bern’ and of ‘the capital of Switzerland’. One supposes that only
a strict identity of intension would license interchange in such a context, in
which they are in the scope of a propositional attitude. It has been questioned
whether the idea of an intension really applies to proper names, but parallel
examples are easily constructed that make similar use of the differences in the
meanings of predicates or of whole sentences. Quite generally, then, the
principle that expressions with the same extension may be interchanged with
preservation of extension of the containing expression, seems to fail for such
“intensional contexts.” The range of expressions producing such sensitive
contexts includes psychological verbs like ‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘suppose’,
‘assert’, ‘desire’, ‘allege’, ‘wonders whether’; expressions conveying modal
ideas such as necessity, possibility, and impossibility; some adverbs, e.g.
‘intentionally’; and a large number of other expressions – ’prove’, ‘imply’,
‘make probable’, etc. Although reasoning involving some of these is well
understood, there is not yet general agreement on the best methods for dealing
with arguments involving many of these notions.
intentionalism: Grice analyses ‘intend’ in two prongs; the first is a
willing-clause, and the second is a causal clause about the willing causing the
action. It’s a simplified account that he calls Prichardian because he relies
on ‘willin that.’ The intender intends that some action takes place. It does
not have to be an action by the intender. Cf. Suppes’s specific section. when
Anscombe comes out with her “Intention,” Grice’s Play Group does not know what
to do. Hampshire is almost finished with his “Thought and action” that came out
the following year. Grice is lecturing on how a “dispositional” reductive
analysis of ‘intention’ falls short of his favoured instrospectionalism. Had he
not fallen for an intention-based semantics (or strictly, an analysis of
"U means that p" in terms of U intends that p"), Grice
would be obsessed with an analysis of ‘intending that …’ James makes an
observation about the that-clause. I will that the distant table slides over
the floor toward me. It does not. The Anscombe Society. Irish-born Anscombe’s
views are often discussed by Oxonian philosophers. She brings Witters to the
Dreaming Spires, as it were. Grice is especially connected with Anscombes
reflections on intention. While he favoures an approach such as that of
Hampshire in Thought and Action, Grice borrows a few points from Anscombe, notably
that of direction of fit, originally Austin’s. Grice explicitly refers to
Anscombe in “Uncertainty,” and in his reminiscences he hastens to add that
Anscombe would never attend any of the Saturday mornings of the play group, as
neither does Dummett. The view of Ryle is standardly characterised as a
weaker or softer version of behaviourism According to this standard
interpretation, the view by Ryle is that a statements containin this or that
term relating to the ‘soul’ can be translated, without loss of meaning, into an
‘if’ utterance about what an agent does. So Ryle, on this account, is to be
construed as offering a dispositional analysis of a statement about the soul
into a statement about behaviour. It is conceded that Ryle does not confine a description
of what the agent does to purely physical behaviour—in terms, e. g. of a skeletal
or a muscular description. Ryle is happy to speak of a full-bodied action like
scoring a goal or paying a debt. But the soft behaviourism attributed to Ryle
still attempts an analysis or translation of statement about the soul into this
or that dispositional statement which is itself construed as subjunctive if
describing what the agent does. Even this soft behaviourism fails. A
description of the soul is not analysable or translatable into a statement
about behaviour or praxis even if this is allowed to include a
non-physical descriptions of action. The list of conditions and possible
behaviour is infinite since any one proffered translation may be ‘defeated,’ as
Hart and Hall would say, by a slight alteration of the circumstances. The
defeating condition in any particular case may involve a reference to a fact
about the agent’s soul, thereby rendering the analysis circular. In sum, the
standard interpretation of Ryle construes him as offering a somewhat weakened
form of reductive behaviourism whose reductivist ambition, however weakened, is
nonetheless futile. This characterisation of Ryle’s programme is wrong. Although
it is true that he is keen to point out the disposition behind this or that
concept about the soul, it would be wrong to construe Ryle as offering a
programme of analysis of a ‘soul’ predicate in terms of an ‘if’ utterance. The
relationship between a ‘soul’ predicate and the ‘if’ utterance with which he
unpack it is other than that required by this kind of analysis. It is helpful
to keep in mind that Ryle’s target is the official doctrine with its
eschatological commitment. Ryle’s argument serves to remind one that we have in
a large number of cases ways of telling or settling disputes, e. g., about
someone’s character or intellect. If A disputes a characterisation of Smith as
willing that p, or judging that p, B may point to what Smith says and does in
defending the attribution, as well as to features of the circumstances. But the
practice of giving a reason of this kind to defend or to challenge an
ascription of a ‘soul’ predicates would be put under substantial pressure if
the official doctrine is correct. For Ryle to remind us that we do, as a
matter of fact, have a way of settling disputes about whether Smith wills that
he eat an apple is much weaker than saying that the concept of willing is
meaningless unless it is observable or verifiable; or even that the successful
application of a soul predicate requires that we have a way of settling a
dispute in every case. Showing that a concept is one for which, in a large
number of cases, we have an agreement-reaching procedure, even if it do not
always guarantee success, captures an important point, however: it counts
against any theory of, e. g., willing that would render it unknowable in
principle or in practice whether or not the concept is correctly applied
in every case. And this is precisely the problem with the official doctrine
(and is still a problem, with some of its progeny. Ryle points out that there
is a form of dilemma that pits the reductionist against
the dualist: those whose battle-cry is ‘nothing but…’ and those who insist
on ‘something else as well.’ Ryle attempts a dissolution of the dilemma by
rejecting the two horns; not by taking sides with either one, though part of
what dissolution requires in this case, as in others, is a description of how
each side is to be commended for seeing what the other side does not, and
criticised for failing to see what the other side does. The attraction of
behaviourism, Ryle reminds us, is simply that it does not insist on an occult
happening as the basis upon which a ‘soul’ term is given meaning, and points to
a perfectly observable criterion that is by and large employed when we are
called upon to defend or correct our employment of a ‘soul’ term. The problem
with behaviourism is that it has a too-narrow view both of what counts as
behaviour and of what counts as observable. Then comes Grice to play with meaning
and intending, and allowing for deeming an avowal of this or that souly state as,
in some fashion, incorrigible. For Grice, while U does have, ceteris paribus
privileged access to each state of his soul, only his or that avowal of this or
that souly state is deemed incorrigible. This concerns communication as
involving intending. Grice goes back to this at Brighton. He plays with G
judges that it is raining, G judges that G judges that it is raining. Again,
Grice uses a subscript: “G judges2 that it is raining.” If now G
expresses that it is raining, G judges2 that it is raining. A
second-order avowal is deemed incorrigible. It is not surprising the the
contemporary progeny of the official doctrine sees a behaviourist in Grice. Yet
a dualist is badly off the mark in his critique of Grice. While Grice does
appeal to a practice and a habif, and even the more technical ‘procedure’ in
the ordinary way as ‘procedure’ is used in ordinary discussion. Grice does not
make a technical concept out of them as one expect of some behavioural
psychologist, which he is not. He is at most a philosophical psychologist, and
a functionalist one, rather than a reductionist one. There is nothing in any
way that is ‘behaviourist’ or reductionist or physicalist about Grice’s talk.
It is just ordinary talk about behaviour. There is nothing exceptional in
talking about a practice, a customs, or a habit regarding communication. Grice
certainly does not intend that this or that notion, as he uses it, gives anything
like a detailed account of the creative open-endedness of a
communication-system. What this or that anti-Griceian has to say IS essentially
a diatribe first against empiricism (alla Quine), secondarily against a
Ryle-type of behaviourism, and in the third place, Grice. In more reasoned and
dispassionate terms, one would hardly think of Grice as a behaviourist (he in
fact rejects such a label in “Method”), but as an intentionalist. When we call
Grice an intentionalist, we are being serious. As a modista, Grice’s keyword is
intentionalism, as per the good old scholastic ‘intentio.’ We hope so. This is
Aunt Matilda’s conversational knack. Grice keeps a useful correspondence with
Suppes which was helpful. Suppes takes Chomsky more seriously than an Oxonian
philosopher would. An Oxonian philosopher never takes Chomsky too seriously. Granted,
Austin loves to quote “Syntactic Structures” sentence by sentence for fun,
knowing that it would never count as tutorial material. Surely “Syntactic
Structures” would not be a pamphlet a member of the play group would use to
educate his tutee. It is amusing that when he gives the Locke lectures, Chomsky
cannot not think of anything better to do but to criticise Grice, and citing him
from just one reprint in the collection edited by, of all people, Searle. Some
gratitude. The references are very specific to Grice. Grice feels he needs to
provide, he thinks, an analysis ‘mean’ as metabolically applied to an expression.
Why? Because of the implicaturum. By uttering x (thereby explicitly conveying
that p), U implicitly conveys that q iff U relies on some procedure in his and
A’s repertoire of procedures of U’s and A’s communication-system. It is this
talk of U’s being ‘ready,’ and ‘having a procedure in his repertoire’ that
sounds to New-World Chomsky too Morrisian, as it does not to an Oxonian.
Suppes, a New-Worlder, puts himself in Old-Worlder Grice’s shoes about this. Chomsky
should never mind. When an Oxonian philosopher, not a psychologist, uses ‘procedure’
and ‘readiness,’ and having a procedure in a repertoire, he is being Oxonian
and not to be taken seriously, appealing to ordinary language, and so on.
Chomsky apparently does get it. Incidentally, Suppess has defended Grice
against two other targets, less influential. One is Hungarian-born J. I. Biro,
who does not distinguish between reductive analysis and reductionist analysis,
as Grice does in his response to Somervillian Rountree-Jack. The other target
is perhaps even less influential: P. Yu in a rather simplistic survey of the
Griceian programme for a journal that Grice finds too specialized to count, “Linguistics
and Philosophy.” Grice is always ashamed and avoided of being described as “our
man in the philosophy of language.” Something that could only have happened in
the Old World in a red-brick university, as Grice calls it. Suppes contributes to PGRICE with an
excellent ‘The primacy of utterers meaning,’ where he addresses what he rightly
sees as an unfair characterisations of Grice as a behaviourist. Suppes’s use of
“primacy” is genial, since its metabole which is all about. Biro actually responds
to Suppes’s commentary on Grice as proposing a reductive but not reductionist
analysis of meaning. Suppes rightly characterises Grice as an Oxonian ‘intentionalist’
(alla Ogden), as one would characterize Hampshire, with philosophical
empiricist, and slightly idealist, or better ideationalist, tendencies, rather.
Suppes rightly observes that Grice’ use of such jargon is meant to impress.
Surely there are more casual ways of referring to this or that utterer having a
basic procedure in his repertoire. It is informal and colloquial, enough,
though, rather than behaviouristically, as Ryle would have it. Grice is very
happy that in the New World Suppes teaches him how to use ‘primacy’ with a
straight face! Intentionalism is also all the vogue in Collingwood reading
Croce, and Gardiner reading Marty via Ogden, and relates to expression. In his
analysis of intending Grice is being very Oxonian, and pre-Austinian: relying,
just to tease leader Austin, on Stout, Wilson, Bosanquet, MacMurray, and
Pritchard. Refs.: There are two sets of essays. An early one on ‘disposition
and intention,’ and the essay for The British Academy (henceforth, BA). Also
his reply to Anscombe and his reply to Davidson. There is an essay on the
subjective condition on intention. Obviously, his account of communication has
been labeled the ‘intention-based semantic’ programme, so references under
‘communication’ above are useful. BANC.Grice's reductIOn, or partial reduction
anyway, of meamng to intention places a heavy load on the theory of intentions.
But in the articles he has written about these matters he has not been very
explicit about the structure of intentIOns. As I understand his position on
these matters, it is his view that the defence of the primacy of utterer's
meaning does not depend on having worked out any detailed theory of intention.
It IS enough to show how the reduction should be thought of in a schematic
fashion in order to make a convincing argument. I do think there is a fairly
straightforward extenSIOn of Grice's ideas that provides the right way of
developing a theory of intentIOns appropnate for Ius theory of utterer's
meaning. Slightly changing around some of the words m Grice we have the
following The Primacy of Utterer's Meaning 125 example. U utters '''Fido is
shaggy", if "U wants A to think that U thinks that Jones's dog is
hairy-coated.'" Put another way, U's intention is to want A to think U
thinks that Jones's dog is hairy-coated. Such intentions clearly have a
generative structure similar but different from the generated syntactic
structure we think of verbal utterances' having. But we can even say that the
deep structures talked about by grammarians of Chomsky's ilk could best be
thought of as intentions. This is not a suggestion I intend to pursue
seriously. The important point is that it is a mistake to think about
classifications of intentions; rather, we should think in terms of mechanisms
for generating intentions. Moreover, it seems to me that such mechanisms in the
case of animals are evident enough as expressed in purposeful pursuit of prey
or other kinds of food, and yet are not expressed in language. In that sense
once again there is an argument in defence of Grice's theory. The primacy of utterer's
meaning has primacy because of the primacy of intention. We can have intentions
without words, but we cannot have words of any interest without intentions. In
this general context, I now turn to Biro's (1979) interesting criticisms of
intentionalism in the theory of meaning. Biro deals from his own standpoint
with some of the issues I have raised already, but his central thesis about
intention I have not previously discussed. It goes to the heart of
controversies about the use of the concept of intention to explain the meaning
of utterances. Biro puts his point in a general way by insisting that utterance
meaning must be separate from and independent of speaker's meaning or, in the
terminology used here, utterer's meaning. The central part of his argument is
his objection to the possibility of explaining meaning in terms of intentions.
Biro's argument goes like this: 1. A central purpose of speech is to enable
others to learn about the speaker's intentions. 2. It will be impossible to
discover or understand the intentions of the speaker unless there are
independent means for understanding what he says, since what he says will be
primary evidence about his intentions. 3. Thus the meaning of an utterance must
be conceptually independent of the intentions of the speaker. This is an
appealing positivistic line. The data relevant to a theory or hypothesis must
be known independently of the hypothesis. Biro is quick to state that he is not
against theoretical entities, but the way in which he separates theoretical
entities and observable facts makes clear the limited role he wants them to
play, in this case the theoretical entities being intentions. The central idea
is to be found in the following passage: The point I am insisting on here is
merely that the ascription of an intention to an agent has the character of an
hypothesis, something invoked to explain phenomena which may be described
independently of that explanation (though not necessarily independently of the
fact that they fall into a class for which the hypothesis in question generally
or normally provides an explanation). (pp. 250-1.) [The italics are Biro's.]
Biro's aim is clear from this quotation. The central point is that the data
about intentions, namely, the utterance, must be describable independently of
hypotheses about the intentions. He says a little later to reinforce this: 'The
central pointis this: it is the intention-hypothesis that is revisable, not the
act-description' (p. 251). Biro's central mistake, and a large one too, is to
think that data can be described independently of hypotheses and that somehow
there is a clean and simple version of data that makes such description a
natural and inevitable thing to have. It would be easy enough to wander off
into a description of such problems in physics, where experiments provide a
veritable wonderland of seemingly arbitrary choices about what to include and
what to exclude from the experimental experience as 'relevant data', and where
the arbitrariness can only be even partly understood on the basis of
understanding the theories bemg tested. Real data do not come in simple linear
strips like letters on the page. Real experiments are blooming confusions that
never get sorted out completely but only partially and schematically, as
appropriate to the theory or theories being tested, and in accordance with the
traditions and conventions of past similar experiments. makes a point about the
importance of convention that I agree but it is irrelevant to my central of
controversy with What I say about
experiments is even more true of undisciplined and unregulated human
interactiono Experiments, especially in physics, are presumably among the best
examples of disciplined and structured action. Most conversations, in contrast,
are really examples of situations of confusion that are only straightened out
under strong hypotheses of intentions on the of speakers and listeners as well.
There is more than one level at which the takes The Primacy of Utterer's
Meaning 127 place through the beneficent use of hypotheses about intentions. I
shall not try to deal with all of them here but only mention some salient
aspects. At an earlier point, Biro says:The main reason for introducing
intentions into some of these analyses is precisely that the public (broadly
speaking) features of utterances -the sounds made, the circumstances in which
they are made and the syntactic and semantic properties of these noises
considered as linguistic items-are thought to be insufficient for the
specification of that aspect of the utterance which we call its meaning. [po
244.] If we were to take this line of thought seriously and literally, we would
begin with the sound pressure waves that reach our ears and that are given the
subtle and intricate interpretation required to accept them as speech. There is
a great variety of evidence that purely acoustical concepts are inadequate for
the analysis of speech. To determine the speech content of a sound pressure
wave we need extensive hypotheses about the intentions that speakers have in
order to convert the public physical features of utterances into intentional
linguistic items. Biro might object at where I am drawing the line between
public and intentional, namely, at the difference between physical and
linguistic, but it would be part of my thesis that it is just because of
perceived and hypothesized intentions that we are mentally able to convert
sound pressure waves into meaningful speech. In fact, I can envisage a kind of
transcendental argument for the existence of intentions based on the
impossibility from the standpoint of physics alone of interpreting sound
pressure waves as speech. Biro seems to have in mind the nice printed sentences
of science and philosophy that can be found on the printed pages of treatises
around the world. But this is not the right place to begin to think about
meaning, only the end point. Grice, and everybody else who holds an intentional
thesis about meaning, recognizes the requirement to reach an account of such
timeless sentence meaning or linguistic meaning.In fact, Grice is perhaps more
ready than I am to concede that such a theory can be developed in a relatively
straightforward manner. One purpose of my detailed discussion of congruence of
meaning in the previous section is to point out some of the difficulties of
having an adequate detailed theory of these matters, certainly an adequate
detailed theory of the linguistic meaning or the sentence meaning. Even if I
were willing to grant the feasibility of such a theory, I would not grant the
use of it that Biro has made. For the purposes of this discussion printed text
may be accepted as well-defined, theoryindependent data. (There are even issues
to be raised about the printed page, but ones that I will set aside in the
present context. I have in mind the psychological difference between perception
of printed letters, words, phrases, or sentences, and that of related but
different nonlinguistic marks on paper.) But no such data assumptions can be
made about spoken speech. Still another point of attack on Biro's positivistic
line about data concerns the data of stress and prosody and their role in
fixing the meaning of an utterance. Stress and prosody are critical to the
interpretation of the intentions of speakers, but the data on stress and
prosody are fleeting and hard to catch on the fly_ Hypotheses about speakers'
intentions are needed even in the most humdrum interpret atins of what a given
prosodic contour or a given point of stress has contributed to the meaning of
the utterance spoken. The prosodic contour and the points of stress of an
utterance are linguistic data, but they do not have the independent physical
description Biro vainly hopes for. Let me put my point still another way. I do
not deny for a second that conventions and traditions of speech play a role in
fixing the meaning of a particular utterance on a particular occasion. It is
not a matter of interpretmg afresh, as if the universe had just begun, a
particular utterance in terms of particular intentions at that time and place
without dependence upon past prior mtentions and the traditions of spoken
speech that have evolved in the community of which the speaker and listener are
a part. It is rather that hypotheses about intentions are operating continually
and centrally in the interpretation of what is said. Loose, live speech depends
upon such active 'on-line' interpretation of intention to make sense of what
has been said. If there were some absolutely agreed-upon concept of firm and
definite linguistlc meaning that Biro and others could appeal to, then it might
be harder to make the case I am arguing for. But I have already argued in the
discussion of congruence of meaning that this is precisely what is not the
case. The absence of any definite and satisfactory theory of linguistic meaning
argues also for movmg back to the more concrete and psychologically richer
concept of utterer's meaning. This is the place to begin the theory of meaning,
and this Itself rests to a very large extent on the concept of intention --
intention, (1) a characteristic of action, as when one acts intentionally or
with a certain intention; (2) a feature of one’s mind, as when one intends (has
an intention) to act in a certain way now or in the future. Betty, e.g.,
intentionally walks across the room, does so with the intention of getting a
drink, and now intends to leave the party later that night. An important
question is: how are (1) and (2) related? (See Anscombe, Intention, 1963, for a
groundbreaking treatment of these and other basic problems concerning intention.)
Some philosophers see acting with an intention as basic and as subject to a
three-part analysis. For Betty to walk across the room with the intention of
getting a drink is for Betty’s walking across the room to be explainable (in
the appropriate way) by her desire or (as is sometimes said) pro-attitude in
favor of getting a drink and her belief that walking across the room is a way
of getting one. On this desire-belief model (or wantbelief model) the main
elements of acting with an intention are (a) the action, (b) appropriate
desires (pro-attitudes) and beliefs, and (c) an appropriate explanatory
relation between (a) and (b). (See Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” in
Essays on Actions and Events, 1980.) In explaining (a) in terms of (b) we give an
explanation of the action in terms of the agent’s purposes or reasons for so
acting. This raises the fundamental question of what kind of explanation this
is, and how it is related to explanation of Betty’s movements by appeal to
their physical causes. What about intentions to act in the future? Consider
Betty’s intention to leave the party later. Though the intended action is
later, this intention may nevertheless help explain some of Betty’s planning
and acting between now and then. Some philosophers try to fit such
futuredirected intentions directly into the desire-belief model. John Austin,
e.g., would identify Betty’s intention with her belief that she will leave
later because of her desire to leave (Lectures on Jurisprudence, vol. I, 1873).
Others see futuredirected intentions as distinctive attitudes, not to be
reduced to desires and/or beliefs. How is belief related to intention? One
question here is whether an intention to A requires a belief that one will A. A
second question is whether a belief that one will A in executing some intention
ensures that one intends to A. Suppose that Betty believes that by walking
across the room she will interrupt Bob’s conversation. Though she has no desire
to interrupt, she still proceeds across the room. Does she intend to interrupt
the conversation? Or is there a coherent distinction between what one intends
and what one merely expects to bring about as a result of doing what one
intends? One way of talking about such cases, due to Bentham (An Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789), is to say that Betty’s
walking across the room is “directly intentional,” whereas her interrupting the
conversation is only “obliquely intentional” (or indirectly intentional). --
intentional fallacy, the (purported) fallacy of holding that the meaning of a
work of art is fixed by the artist’s intentions. (Wimsatt and Beardsintensive
magnitude intentional fallacy 440 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 440 ley,
who introduced the term, also used it to name the [purported] fallacy that the
artist’s aims are relevant to determining the success of a work of art;
however, this distinct usage has not gained general currency.) Wimsatt and
Beardsley were formalists; they held that interpretation should focus purely on
the work of art itself and should exclude appeal to biographical information
about the artist, other than information concerning the private meanings the
artist attached to his words. Whether the intentional fallacy is in fact a
fallacy is a much discussed issue within aesthetics. Intentionalists deny that
it is: they hold that the meaning of a work of art is fixed by some set of the
artist’s intentions. For instance, Richard Wollheim (Painting as an Art) holds
that the meaning of a painting is fixed by the artist’s fulfilled intentions in
making it. Other intentionalists appeal not to the actual artist’s intentions,
but to the intentions of the implied or postulated artist, a construct of
criticism, rather than a real person. See also AESTHETIC FORMALISM, AESTHETICS,
INTENTION. B.Ga. intentionality, aboutness. Things that are about other things
exhibit intentionality. Beliefs and other mental states exhibit intentionality,
but so, in a derived way, do sentences and books, maps and pictures, and other
representations. The adjective ‘intentional’ in this philosophical sense is a
technical term not to be confused with the more familiar sense, characterizing
something done on purpose. Hopes and fears, for instance, are not things we do,
not intentional acts in the latter, familiar sense, but they are intentional
phenomena in the technical sense: hopes and fears are about various things. The
term was coined by the Scholastics in the Middle Ages, and derives from the
Latin verb intendo, ‘to point (at)’ or ‘aim (at)’ or ‘extend (toward)’.
Phenomena with intentionality thus point outside of themselves to something
else: whatever they are of or about. The term was revived by the
nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano, who claimed
that intentionality defines the distinction between the mental and the
physical; all and only mental phenomena exhibit intentionality. Since
intentionality is an irreducible feature of mental phenomena, and since no
physical phenomena could exhibit it, mental phenomena could not be a species of
physical phenomena. This claim, often called the Brentano thesis or Brentano’s
irreducibility thesis, has often been cited to support the view that the mind
cannot be the brain, but this is by no means generally accepted today. There was
a second revival of the term in the 1960s and 1970s by analytic philosophers,
in particular Chisholm, Sellars, and Quine. Chisholm attempted to clarify the
concept by shifting to a logical definition of intentional idioms, the terms
used to speak of mental states and events, rather than attempting to define the
intentionality of the states and events themselves. Intentional idioms include
the familiar “mentalistic” terms of folk psychology, but also their technical
counterparts in theories and discussions in cognitive science, ‘X believes that
p,’ and ‘X desires that q’ are paradigmatic intentional idioms, but according
to Chisholm’s logical definition, in terms of referential opacity (the failure
of substitutivity of coextensive terms salva veritate), so are such less
familiar idioms as ‘X stores the information that p’ and ‘X gives high priority
to achieving the state of affairs that q’. Although there continue to be deep
divisions among philosophers about the proper definition or treatment of the
concept of intentionality, there is fairly widespread agreement that it marks a
feature – aboutness or content – that is central to mental phenomena, and hence
a central, and difficult, problem that any theory of mind must solve.
intersubjective – Grice: “Who was
the first Grecian philosopher to philosophise on conversational
intersubjectivity? Surely Plato! Socrates is just his alter ego – and after
Aeschylus, there is always a ‘deuterogonist’”! conversational
intersubjectivity. Philosophical sociology – While Grice saw himself as a
philosophical psychologist, he would rather be seen dead than as a
philosophical sociologist – ‘intersubjective at most’! -- Comte: A. philosopher
and sociologist, the founder of positivism. He was educated in Paris at l’École
Polytechnique, where he briefly taught mathematics. He suffered from a mental
illness that occasionally interrupted his work. In conformity with empiricism,
Comte held that knowledge of the world arises from observation. He went beyond
many empiricists, however, in denying the possibility of knowledge of
unobservable physical objects. He conceived of positivism as a method of study
based on observation and restricted to the observable. He applied positivism
chiefly to science. He claimed that the goal of science is prediction, to be
accomplished using laws of succession. Explanation insofar as attainable has
the same structure as prediction. It subsumes events under laws of succession;
it is not causal. Influenced by Kant, he held that the causes of phenomena and
the nature of things-in-themselves are not knowable. He criticized metaphysics
for ungrounded speculation about such matters; he accused it of not keeping
imagination subordinate to observation. He advanced positivism for all the
sciences but held that each science has additional special methods, and has
laws not derivable by human intelligence from laws of other sciences. He
corresponded extensively with J. S. Mill, who Comte, Auguste Comte, Auguste
168 168 encouraged his work and
discussed it in Auguste Comte and Positivism 1865. Twentieth-century logical
positivism was inspired by Comte’s ideas. Comte was a founder of sociology,
which he also called social physics. He divided the science into two
branches statics and dynamics dealing
respectively with social organization and social development. He advocated a
historical method of study for both branches. As a law of social development,
he proposed that all societies pass through three intellectual stages, first
interpreting phenomena theologically, then metaphysically, and finally
positivistically. The general idea that societies develop according to laws of
nature was adopted by Marx. Comte’s most important work is his six-volume Cours
de philosophie positive Course in Positive Philosophy, 183042. It is an
encyclopedic treatment of the sciences that expounds positivism and culminates
in the introduction of sociology.
intervention -- intervening variable, in Grice’s
philosophical psychology, a state of an organism, person or, as Grice prefers,
a ‘pirot,’ (vide his ‘pirotology’) or ‘creature,’ postulated to explain the
pirot’s behaviour and defined in ‘functioanlist,’ Aristotelian terms of its
cause (perceptual input) and effect (the behavioural output to be explained by
attribution of a state of the ‘soul’) rather than its intrinsic properties. A
food drive or need for nuts, in a squarrel (as Grice calls his ‘Toby’) conceived
as an intervening variable, is defined in terms of the number of hours without
food (the cause) and the strength or robustness of efforts to secure it
(effect).. The squarrel’s feeling hungry (‘needing a nut), is no longer an
intrinsic property – the theoretical term ‘need’ is introduced in a ramseyified
sentence by describing – and it need not be co-related to a state in the brain
– since there is room for variable realisability. Grice sees at least three
reasons for postulating an intervening variable (like the hours without
nut-hobbling). First, time lapse between stimulus (perceptual input) and
behavioural output may be large, as when an animal – even a squirrel -- eats
food found hours earlier. Why did not the animal hobble the nut when it first
found it? Perhaps at the time of discovery, the squarrel had already eaten, so
food drive (the squarrel’s need) is reduced. Second, Toby may act differently
in the same sort of situation, as when Toby hobbles a nut at noon one day but
delay until sunset the next. Again, this may be because of variation in food
drive or the squarrel’s need. Third, behaviour may occur in the absence of
external stimulation or perceptual input, as when Toby forages for nut for the
winter. This, too, may be explained by the strength of the food drive or
squarrel’s need. An intervening variables has been viewed, as Grice notes
reviewing Oxonian philosophical psychology from Stout to Ryle via Prichard) depending
on the background theory, as a convenient ‘fiction’ (as Ramsey, qua theoretical
construct) or as a psychologically real state, or as a physically real state
with multiple realisability conditions. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Method in
philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,” in “The Conception of
value.”
intuitum: Grice: “At Oxford, the tutor
teaches to trust your ‘intuition’ – and will point to the cognateness of
‘tutor’ and ‘in-tuition’!” – tŭĕor , tuĭtus, 2 ( I.perf. only post-Aug.,
Quint. 5, 13, 35; Plin. Ep. 6, 29, 10; collat. form tūtus, in the part., rare,
Sall. J. 74, 3; Front. Strat. 2, 12, 13; but constantly in the P. a.; inf.
parag. tuerier, Plaut. Rud. 1, 4, 35; collat. form acc. to the 3d conj. tŭor ,
Cat. 20, 5; Stat. Th. 3, 151: “tuĕris,” Plaut. Trin. 3, 2, 82: “tuimur,” Lucr.
1, 300; 4, 224; 4, 449; “6, 934: tuamur,” id. 4, 361: “tuantur,” id. 4, 1004;
imper. tuĕre, id. 5, 318), v. dep. a. [etym. dub.], orig., to see, to look or gaze
upon, to watch, view; hence, pregn., to see or look to, to defend, protect,
etc.: tueri duo significat; unum ab aspectu, unde est Ennii illud: tueor te
senex? pro Juppiter! (Trag. v. 225 Vahl.); “alterum a curando ac tutela, ut cum
dicimus bellum tueor et tueri villam,” Varr. L. L. 7, § 12 Müll.
sq.—Accordingly, I. To look at, gaze at, behold, watch, view, regard, consider,
examine, etc. (only poet.; syn.: specto, adspicio, intueor): quam te post
multis tueor tempestatibus, Pac. ap. Non. 407, 32; 414, 3: “e tenebris, quae
sunt in luce, tuemur,” Lucr. 4, 312: “ubi nil aliud nisi aquam caelumque
tuentur,” id. 4, 434: “caeli templa,” id. 6, 1228 al.: “tuendo Terribiles
oculos, vultum, etc.,” Verg. A. 8, 265; cf. id. ib. 1, 713: “talia dicentem jam
dudum aversa tuetur,” id. ib. 4, 362: “transversa tuentibus hircis,” id. E. 3,
8: “acerba tuens,” looking fiercely, Lucr. 5, 33; cf. Verg. A. 9, 794: “torva,”
id. ib. 6, 467.— (β). With object-clause: “quod multa in terris fieri caeloque
tuentur (homines), etc.,” Lucr. 1, 152; 6, 50; 6, 1163.— II. Pregn., to look
to, care for, keep up, uphold, maintain, support, guard, preserve, defend,
protect, etc. (the predom. class. signif. of the word; cf.: “curo, conservo,
tutor, protego, defendo): videte, ne ... vobis turpissimum sit, id, quod
accepistis, tueri et conservare non posse,” Cic. Imp. Pomp. 5, 12: “ut quisque
eis rebus tuendis conservandisque praefuerat,” Cic. Verr. 2, 4, 63, 140:
“omnia,” id. N. D. 2, 23, 60: “mores et instituta vitae resque domesticas ac
familiares,” id. Tusc. 1, 1, 2: “societatem conjunctionis humanae munifice et
aeque,” id. Fin. 5, 23, 65: “concordiam,” id. Att. 1, 17, 10: rem et gratiam et
auctoritatem suam, id. Fam. 13, 49, 1: “dignitatem,” id. Tusc. 2, 21, 48: “L.
Paulus personam principis civis facile dicendo tuebatur,” id. Brut. 20, 80:
“personam in re publicā,” id. Phil. 8, 10, 29; cf.: tuum munus, Planc. ap. Cic.
Fam. 10, 11, 1: “tueri et sustinere simulacrum pristinae dignitatis,” Cic. Rab.
Post. 15, 41: “aedem Castoris P. Junius habuit tuendam,” to keep in good order,
Cic. Verr. 2, 1, 50, § 130; cf. Plin. Pan. 51, 1: “Bassum ut incustoditum nimis
et incautum,” id. Ep. 6, 29, 10: “libertatem,” Tac. A. 3, 27; 14, 60: “se,
vitam corpusque tueri,” to keep, preserve, Cic. Off. 1, 4, 11: “antea majores
copias alere poterat, nunc exiguas vix tueri potest,” id. Deiot. 8, 22: “se ac
suos tueri,” Liv. 5, 4, 5: “sex legiones (re suā),” Cic. Par. 6, 1, 45:
“armentum paleis,” Col. 6, 3, 3: “se ceteris armis prudentiae tueri atque
defendere,” to guard, protect, Cic. de Or. 1, 38, 172; cf.: “tuemini castra et
defendite diligenter,” Caes. B. C. 3, 94: “suos fines,” id. B. G. 4, 8:
“portus,” id. ib. 5, 8: “oppidum unius legionis praesidio,” id. B. C. 2, 23:
“oram maritimam,” id. ib. 3, 34: “impedimenta,” to cover, protect, Hirt. B. G.
8, 2.—With ab and abl.: “fines suos ab excursionibus et latrociniis,” Cic.
Deiot. 8, 22: “domum a furibus,” Phaedr. 3, 7, 10: mare ab hostibus, Auct. B.
Afr. 8, 2.—With contra: “quos non parsimoniā tueri potuit contra illius audaciam,”
Cic. Prov. Cons. 5, 11: “liberūm nostrorum pueritiam contra inprobitatem
magistratuum,” Cic. Verr. 2, 1, 58, § 153; Quint. 5, 13, 35; Plin. 20, 14, 54,
§ 152; Tac. A. 6, 47 (41).—With adversus: “tueri se adversus Romanos,” Liv. 25,
11, 7: “nostra adversus vim atque injuriam,” id. 7, 31, 3: “adversus Philippum
tueri Athenas,” id. 31, 9, 3; 42, 46, 9; 42, 23, 6: “arcem adversus tres
cohortes tueri,” Tac. H. 3, 78; Just. 17, 3, 22; 43, 3, 4.—In part. perf.:
“Verres fortiter et industrie tuitus contra piratas Siciliam dicitur,” Quint.
5, 13, 35 (al. tutatus): “Numidas in omnibus proeliis magis pedes quam arma
tuta sunt,” Sall. J. 74, 3.!*? 1. Act. form tŭĕo , ēre: “censores vectigalia
tuento,” Cic. Leg. 3, 3, 7: “ROGO PER SVPEROS, QVI ESTIS, OSSA MEA TVEATIS,”
Inscr. Orell. 4788.— 2. tŭĕor , ēri, in pass. signif.: “majores nostri in pace
a rusticis Romanis alebantur et in bello ab his tuebantur,” Varr. R. R. 3, 1,
4; Lucr. 4, 361: “consilio et operā curatoris tueri debet non solum
patrimonium, sed et corpus et salus furiosi,” Dig. 27, 10, 7: “voluntas
testatoris ex bono et aequo tuebitur,” ib. 28, 3, 17.—Hence, tūtus , a, um, P.
a. (prop. well seen to or guarded; hence), safe, secure, out of danger (cf.
securus, free from fear). A. Lit. (α). Absol.: “nullius res tuta, nullius domus
clausa, nullius vita saepta ... contra tuam cupiditatem,” Cic. Verr. 2, 5, 15,
§ 39: “cum victis nihil tutum arbitrarentur,” Caes. B. G. 2, 28: “nec se satis
tutum fore arbitratur,” Hirt. B. G. 8, 27; cf.: “me biremis praesidio scaphae
Tutum per Aegaeos tumultus Aura feret,” Hor. C. 3, 29, 63; Ov. M. 8, 368:
“tutus bos rura perambulat,” Hor. C. 4, 5, 17: “quis locus tam firmum habuit
praesidium, ut tutus esset?” Cic. Imp. Pomp. 11, 31: “mare tutum praestare,”
id. Fl. 13, 31: “sic existimabat tutissimam fore Galliam,” Hirt. B. G. 8, 54:
“nemus,” Hor. C. 1, 17, 5: “via fugae,” Cic. Caecin. 15, 44; cf.: “commodior ac
tutior receptus,” Caes. B. C. 1, 46: “perfugium,” Cic. Rep. 1, 4, 8: “tutum
iter et patens,” Hor. C. 3, 16, 7: “tutissima custodia,” Liv. 31, 23, 9:
“praesidio nostro pasci genus esseque tutum,” Lucr. 5, 874: “vitam consistere
tutam,” id. 6, 11: “tutiorem et opulentiorem vitam hominum reddere,” Cic. Rep.
1, 2, 3: est et fideli tuta silentio Merces, secure, sure (diff. from certa,
definite, certain), Hor. C. 3, 2, 25: “tutior at quanto merx est in classe
secundā!” id. S. 1, 2, 47: “non est tua tuta voluntas,” not without danger, Ov.
M. 2, 53: “in audaces non est audacia tuta,” id. ib. 10, 544: “externā vi non
tutus modo rex, sed invictus,” Curt. 6, 7, 1: “vel tutioris audentiae est,”
Quint. 12, prooem. § 4: “ cogitatio tutior,” id. 10, 7, 19: “fuit brevitas illa
tutissima,” id. 10, 1, 39: “regnum et diadema tutum Deferens uni,” i. e. that
cannot be taken away, Hor. C. 2, 2, 21: male tutae mentis Orestes, i. e.
unsound, = male sanae, id. S. 2, 3, 137: quicquid habes, age, Depone tutis
auribus, qs. carefully guarded, i. e. safe, faithful, id. C. 1, 27, 18 (cf. the
opp.: auris rimosa, id. S. 2, 6, 46).—Poet., with gen.: “(pars ratium) tuta
fugae,” Luc. 9, 346.— (β). With ab and abl.: tutus ab insidiis inimici, Asin.
ap. Cic. Fam. 10, 31, 2: “ab insidiis,” Hor. S. 2, 6, 117: “a periculo,” Caes.
B. G. 7, 14: “ab hoste,” Ov. H. 11, 44: “ab hospite,” id. M. 1, 144: “a
conjuge,” id. ib. 8, 316: “a ferro,” id. ib. 13, 498: “a bello, id. H. (15) 16,
344: ab omni injuriā,” Phaedr. 1, 31, 9.— (γ). With ad and acc.: “turrim
tuendam ad omnis repentinos casus tradidit,” Caes. B. C. 3, 39: “ad id, quod ne
timeatur fortuna facit, minime tuti sunt homines,” Liv. 25, 38, 14: “testudinem
tutam ad omnes ictus video esse,” id. 36, 32, 6.— (δ). With adversus: “adversus
venenorum pericula tutum corpus suum reddere,” Cels. 5, 23, 3: “quo tutiores
essent adversus ictus sagittarum,” Curt. 7, 9, 2: “loci beneficio adversus
intemperiem anni tutus est,” Sen. Ira, 2, 12, 1: “per quem tutior adversus
casus steti,” Val. Max. 4, 7, ext. 2: “quorum praesidio tutus adversus hostes
esse debuerat,” Just. 10, 1, 7.—（ε) With abl.: incendio fere tuta est Alexandria, Auct. B. Alex. 1,
3.— b. Tutum est, with a subj. -clause, it is prudent or safe, it is the part
of a prudent man: “si dicere palam parum tutum est,” Quint. 9, 2, 66; 8, 3, 47;
10, 3, 33: “o nullis tutum credere blanditiis,” Prop. 1, 15, 42: “tutius esse
arbitrabantur, obsessis viis, commeatu intercluso sine ullo vulnere victoriā
potiri,” Caes. B. G. 3, 24; Quint. 7, 1, 36; 11, 2, 48: “nobis tutissimum est,
auctores plurimos sequi,” id. 3, 4, 11; 3, 6, 63.— 2. As subst.: tūtum , i, n.,
a place of safety, a shelter, safety, security: Tr. Circumspice dum, numquis
est, Sermonem nostrum qui aucupet. Th. Tutum probe est, Plaut. Most. 2, 2, 42:
“tuta et parvula laudo,” Hor. Ep. 1, 15, 42: “trepidum et tuta petentem Trux
aper insequitur,” Ov. M. 10, 714: “in tuto ut collocetur,” Ter. Heaut. 4, 3,
11: “esse in tuto,” id. ib. 4, 3, 30: “ut sitis in tuto,” Cic. Fam. 12, 2, 3:
“in tutum eduxi manipulares meos,” Plaut. Most. 5, 1, 7: “in tutum receptus
est,” Liv. 2, 19, 6.— B. Transf., watchful, careful, cautious, prudent (rare
and not ante-Aug.; “syn.: cautus, prudens): serpit humi tutus nimium timidusque
procellae,” Hor. A. P. 28: “tutus et intra Spem veniae cautus,” id. ib. 266:
“non nisi vicinas tutus ararit aquas,” Ov. Tr. 3, 12, 36: “id suā sponte,
apparebat, tuta celeribus consiliis praepositurum,” Liv. 22, 38, 13: “celeriora
quam tutiora consilia magis placuere ducibus,” id. 9, 32, 3.—Hence, adv. in two
forms, tūtē and tūtō , safely, securely, in safety, without danger. a. Posit.
(α). Form tute (very rare): “crede huic tute,” Plaut. Trin. 1, 2, 102: “eum
tute vivere, qui honeste vivat,” Auct. Her. 3, 5, 9: “tute cauteque agere,” id.
ib. 3, 7, 13.— (β). Form tuto (class. in prose and poetry): “pervenire,” Plaut.
Mil. 2, 2, 70; Lucr. 1, 179: “dimicare,” Caes. B. G. 3, 24: “tuto et libere
decernere,” id. B. C. 1, 2: “ut tuto sim,” in security, Cic. Fam. 14, 3, 3: “ut
tuto ab repentino hostium incursu etiam singuli commeare possent,” Caes. B. G.
7, 36. — b. Comp.: “ut in vadis consisterent tutius,” Caes. B. G. 3, 13:
“tutius et facilius receptus daretur,” id. B. C. 2, 30: “tutius ac facilius id
tractatur,” Quint. 5, 5, 1: “usitatis tutius utimur,” id. 1, 5, 71: “ut ubivis
tutius quam in meo regno essem,” Sall. J. 14, 11.— c. Sup. (α). Form tutissime:
nam te hic tutissime puto fore, Pomp. ap. Cic. Att. 8, 11, A.— (β). Form
tutissimo: “quaerere, ubi tutissimo essem,” Cic. Att. 8, 1, 2; cf. Charis. p.
173 P.: “tutissimo infunduntur oboli quattuor,” Plin. 20, 3, 8, § 14. Grice was
especially interested in the misuses of intuition. He found that J. L. Austin
(born in Lancaster) had “Northern intuitions.” “I myself have proper
heart-of-England intuitions.” “Strawson has Cockney intuitions.” “I wonder how
we conducted those conversations on Saturday mornings!” “Strictly, an
intuition is a non-inferential knowledge or grasp, as of a proposition,
concept, or entity, that is not based on perception, memory, or introspection;
also, the capacity in virtue of which such cognition is possible. A person
might know that 1 ! 1 % 2 intuitively, i.e., not on the basis of inferring it
from other propositions. And one might know intuitively what yellow is, i.e.,
might understand the concept, even though ‘yellow’ is not definable. Or one
might have intuitive awareness of God or some other entity. Certain mystics
hold that there can be intuitive, or immediate, apprehension of God. Ethical
intuitionists hold both that we can have intuitive knowledge of certain moral
concepts that are indefinable, and that certain propositions, such as that
pleasure is intrinsically good, are knowable through intuition. Self-evident
propositions are those that can be seen (non-inferentially) to be true once one
fully understands them. It is often held that all and only self-evident
propositions are knowable through intuition, which is here identified with a
certain kind of intellectual or rational insight. Intuitive knowledge of moral
or other philosophical propositions or concepts has been compared to the
intuitive knowledge of grammaticality possessed by competent users of a
language. Such language users can know immediately whether certain sentences
are grammatical or not without recourse to any conscious reasoning. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “My intutions.” BANC.
Ionian-sea-coast philosophy: Grice, “Or
mar ionio, as the Italians have it!” -- the characteristically naturalist and
rationalist thought of Grecian philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries
B.C. who were active in Ionia, the region of ancient Greek colonies on the
coast of Asia Minor and adjacent islands. First of the Ionian philosophers were
the three Milesians. Grice: “It always amused me that they called themselves
Ionians, but then Williams, who founded Providence in the New World, called
himself an Englishman!”. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “The relevance of Ionian philosophy
today.”
Irigaray: philosopher and psychoanalyst.
Her earliest work was in psychoanalysis and linguistics, focusing on the role
of negation in the language of schizophrenics (Languages, 1966). A trained
analyst with a private practice, she attended Lacan’s seminars at the École
Normale Supérieure and for several years taught a course in the psychoanalysis
department at Vincennes. With the publication of Speculum, De l’autre
femme(Speculum of the Other Woman) in 1974 she was dismissed from Vincennes.
She argues that psychoanalysis, specifically its attitude toward women, is
historically and culturally determined and that its phallocentric bias is
treated as universal truth. With the publication of Speculum and Ce Sexe qui
n’en est pas un (This Sex Which Is Not One) in 1977, her work extends beyond
psychoanalysis and begins a critical examination of philosophy. Influenced
primarily by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, her work is a critique of the
fundamental categories of philosophical thought: one/many, identity/difference,
being/non-being, rational/irrational, mind/body, form/matter,
transcendental/sensible. She sets out to show the concealed aspect of
metaphysical constructions and what they depend on, namely, the unacknowledged
mother. In Speculum, the mirror figures as interpretation and criticism of the
enclosure of the Western subject within the mirror’s frame, constituted solely
through the masculine imaginary. Her project is one of constituting the world –
and not only the specular world – of the other as woman. This engagement with
the history of philosophy emphasizes the historical and sexual determinants of
philosophical discourse, and insists on bringing the transcendental back to the
elements of the earth and embodiment. Her major contribution to philosophy is
the notion of sexual difference. An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984) claims
that the central contemporary philosophical task is to think through sexual
difference. Although her notion of sexual difference is sometimes taken to be
an essentialist view of the feminine, in fact it is an articulation of the
difference between the sexes that calls into question an understanding of
either the feminine or masculine as possessing a rigid gender identity.
Instead, sexual difference is the erotic desire for otherness. Insofar as it is
an origin that is continuously differentiating itself from itself, it
challenges Aristotle’s understanding of the arche as solid ground or
hypokeimenon. As aition or first cause, sexual difference is responsible for something
coming into being and is that to which things are indebted for their being.
This indebtedness allows Irigaray to formulate an ethics of sexual difference.
Her latest work continues to rethink the foundations of ethics. Both Towards a
Culture of Difference (1990) and I Love To You (1995) claim that there is no
civil identity proper to women and therefore no possibility of equivalent
social and political status for men and women. She argues for a legal basis to
ground the reciprocity between the sexes; that there is no living universal,
that is, a universal that reflects sexual difference; and that this lack of a
living universal leads to an absence of rights and responsibilities which
reflects both men and women. She claims, therefore, that it is necessary to
“sexuate” rights. These latest works continue to make explicit the erotic and
ethical project that informs all her work: to think through the dimension of
sexual difference that opens up access to the alliances between living beings
who are engendered and not fabricated, and who refuse to sacrifice desire for
death, power, or money.
iron-age
metaphysics:
Euclidean geometry, the version of geometry that includes among its axioms the
parallel axiom, which asserts that, given a line L in a plane, there exists
just one line in the plane that passes through a point not on L but never meets
L. The phrase ‘Euclidean geometry’ refers both to the doctrine of geometry to
be found in Euclid’s Elements fourth century B.C. and to the mathematical
discipline that was built on this basis afterward. In order to present
properties of rectilinear and curvilinear curves in the plane and solids in
space, Euclid sought definitions, axioms, ethics, divine command Euclidean
geometry 290 290 and postulates to
ground the reasoning. Some of his assumptions belonged more to the underlying
logic than to the geometry itself. Of the specifically geometrical axioms, the
least self-evident stated that only one line passes through a point in a plane
parallel to a non-coincident line within it, and many efforts were made to
prove it from the other axioms. Notable forays were made by G. Saccheri, J.
Playfair, and A. M. Legendre, among others, to put forward results logically
contradictory to the parallel axiom e.g., that the sum of the angles between
the sides of a triangle is greater than 180° and thus standing as candidates
for falsehood; however, none of them led to paradox. Nor did logically
equivalent axioms such as that the angle sum equals 180° seem to be more or
less evident than the axiom itself. The next stages of this line of reasoning
led to non-Euclidean geometry. From the point of view of logic and rigor,
Euclid was thought to be an apotheosis of certainty in human knowledge; indeed,
‘Euclidean’ was also used to suggest certainty, without any particular concern
with geometry. Ironically, investigations undertaken in the late nineteenth
century showed that, quite apart from the question of the parallel axiom,
Euclid’s system actually depended on more axioms than he had realized, and that
filling all the gaps would be a formidable task. Pioneering work done
especially by M. Pasch and G. Peano was brought to a climax in 9 by Hilbert,
who produced what was hoped to be a complete axiom system. Even then the axiom
of continuity had to wait for the second edition! The endeavor had consequences
beyond the Euclidean remit; it was an important example of the growth of
axiomatization in mathematics as a whole, and it led Hilbert himself to see
that questions like the consistency and completeness of a mathematical theory
must be asked at another level, which he called metamathematics. It also gave
his work a formalist character; he said that his axiomatic talk of points,
lines, and planes could be of other objects. Within the Euclidean realm,
attention has fallen in recent decades upon “neo-Euclidean” geometries, in
which the parallel axiom is upheld but a different metric is proposed. For
example, given a planar triangle ABC, the Euclidean distance between A and B is
the hypotenuse AB; but the “rectangular distance” AC ! CB also satisfies the
properties of a metric, and a geometry working with it is very useful in, e.g.,
economic geography, as anyone who drives around a city will readily
understand. Grice:
"Much the most significant opposition to my type of philosophising comes
from those like Baron Russell who feel that ‘ “ordinary-language” philosophy’
is an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regard exponents
like me as wantonly dedicating themselves to what the Baron calls 'stone-age
metaphysics', "The Baron claims that 'stone-age metaphysics' is the best
that can be dredged up from a ‘philosophical’ study of an ‘ordinary’ language,
such as Oxonian, as it ain't. "The use made of Russell’s phrase
‘stone-age metaphysics’ has more rhetorical appeal than argumentative
force."“Certainly ‘stone-age’ *physics*, if by that we mean a
'primitive' (as the Baron puts it -- in contrast to 'iron-age physics') set of
hypotheses about how the world goes which might conceivably be embedded somehow
or other in an ‘ordinary’ language such as Oxonian, does not seem to be a
proper object for first-order devotion -- I'll grant the Baron that!"“But
this fact should *not* prevent something derivable or extractable
from ‘stone-age’ (if not 'iron-age') *physics*, perhaps some very
general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target
for serious research.”"I would not be surprised if an extractable
characterization of this may not be the same as that which is extractable from,
or that which underlies, the Baron's favoured iron-age physics!"
non
sequitur
--: irrationality, unreasonableness. Whatever it entails, irrationality can
characterize belief, desire, intention, and action. intuitions irrationality
443 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 443 Irrationality is often explained in
instrumental, or goal-oriented, terms. You are irrational if you (knowingly)
fail to do your best, or at least to do what you appropriately think adequate,
to achieve your goals. If ultimate goals are rationally assessable, as
Aristotelian and Kantian traditions hold, then rationality and irrationality
are not purely instrumental. The latter traditions regard certain specific
(kinds of) goals, such as human well-being, as essential to rationality. This
substantialist approach lost popularity with the rise of modern decision
theory, which implies that, in satisfying certain consistency and completeness
requirements, one’s preferences toward the possible outcomes of available
actions determine what actions are rational and irrational for one by
determining the personal utility of their outcomes. Various theorists have
faulted modern decision theory on two grounds: human beings typically lack the
consistent preferences and reasoning power required by standard decision theory
but are not thereby irrational, and rationality requires goods exceeding
maximally efficient goal satisfaction. When relevant goals concern the
acquisition of truth and the avoidance of falsehood, epistemic rationality and
irrationality are at issue. Otherwise, some species of non-epistemic
rationality or irrationality is under consideration. Species of non-epistemic
rationality and irrationality correspond to the kind of relevant goal: moral,
prudential, political, economic, aesthetic, or some other. A comprehensive
account of irrationality will elucidate epistemic and non-epistemic
irrationality as well as such sources of irrationality as weakness of will and
ungrounded belief.
esse:“est” (“Homo
animale rationalis est” – Aristotle, cited by Grice in “Aristotle on the
multiplicity of being”) – “is” is the third person singular form of the verb
‘be’, with at least three fundamental usages that philosophers distinguish
according to the resources required for a proper semantic representation. First,
there is the ‘is’ of existence, which Grice finds otiose – “Marmaduke Bloggs is
a journalist who climbed Mt Everest on hands and knees – a typical invention by
journalists”. (There is a unicorn in the garden: Dx (Ux8Gx)) uses the existential
quantifier. Bellerophon’s dad: “There is a flying horse in the stable.” “That’s
mine, dad.” – Then, second, there is the ‘is’ of identity (Hesperus is
Phosphorus: j % k) employs the predicate of identity, or dyadic relation of
“=,” as per Leibniz’s problem – “The king of France” – Kx = Ky. Then third
there is the ‘is’ of predication, which can be essential (izzing) or
accidentail (hazzing). (Samson is strong: Sj) merely juxtaposes predicate
symbol and proper name. Some controversy attends the first usage. Some (notably
that eccentric philosopher that went by the name of Meinong) maintain that ‘is’
applies more broadly than ‘exists.’ “Is” produces truths when combined with
‘deer’ and ‘unicorn.’ ‘Exists,’ rather than ‘is’, produces a truth when
combined with ‘deer’ -- but not ‘unicorn’. Aquinas takes “esse” to denote some
special activity that every existing thing necessarily performs, which would seem
to imply that with ‘est’ they attribute more to an object than we do with
‘exists’. Other issues arise in connection with the second usage. Does, e.g. “Hesperus
is Phosphorus,” attribute anything more to the heavenly body than its identity
with itself? Consideration of such a question leads Frege, wrongly to conclude,
in what Ryle calls the “Fido”-Fido theory of meaning that names (and other
meaningful expressions) of ordinary language have a “sense” or “mode of
presenting” the thing to which they refer that representations within our
standard, extensional logical systems fail to expose. The distinction between
the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication parallels Frege’s distinction
between ‘objekt” and concept: words signifying objects stand to the right of
the ‘is’ of identity and those signifying concepts stand to the right of the
‘is’ of predication. Although it seems remarkable that so many deep and
difficult philosophical concepts should link to a single short and commonplace
word, we should perhaps not read too much into that observation. Grecian and
Roman indeed divide the various roles played by English’s compact copula among
several constructions, but there are dialects, even within Oxford, that use the
expression “is” for other purposes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle on the
multiplicity of being.”
-ism: used by Grice
derogatorily. In his ascent to the City of the Eternal Truth, he meets twelve
–isms, which he orders alphabetically. These are: Empiricism. Extensionalism.
Functionalism. MaterialismMechanism. Naturalism. Nominalism. Phenomenalism.
Positivism. Physicalism. Reductionism. Scepticism. Grice’s implicaturum is that
each is a form of, er, minimalism, as opposed to maximalism. He also seems to
implicate that, while embracing one of those –isms is a reductionist vice,
embracing their opposites is a Christian virtue – He explicitly refers to the
name of Bunyan’s protagonist, “Christian” – “in a much more publicized journey,
I grant.” So let’s see how we can correlate each vicious heathen ism with the
Griceian Christian virtuous ism. Empiricism. “Surely not all is experience. My
bones are not.” Opposite: Rationalism. Extensionalism. Surely the empty set
cannot end up being the fullest! Opposite Intensionalism. Functionalism. What
is the function of love? We have to extend functionalism to cover one’s concern
for the other – And also there’s otiosity. Opposite: Mentalism. Materialism –
My bones are ‘hyle,’ but my eternal soul isn’t. Opposite Spiritualism. Mechanism – Surely there is finality in
nature, and God designed it. Opposite Vitalism. Naturalism – Surely Aristotle
meant something by ‘ta meta ta physica,’ There is a transnatural realm.
Opposite: Transnaturalism. Nominalism.
Occam was good, except with his ‘sermo mentalis.’ Opposite: Realism.
Phenomenalism – Austin and Grice soon realised that Berlin was wrong. Opposite
‘thing’-language-ism. Positivism – And then there’s not. Opposite: Negativism. Physicalism – Surely my soul is not a brain
state. Opposite: Transnaturalism, since Physicalismm and Naturalism mean the
same thing, ony in Greek, the other in Latin. Reductionism – Julie is wrong when she thinks
I’m a reductionist. Opposite: Reductivism. Scepticism: Surely there’s common sense.
Opposite: Common-Sensism. Refs: H. P. Grice, “Prejudices and predilections;
which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice,” The Grice Papers, BANC.
isocrates – Grice: “the
chief rival of Plato.” A pupil of Socrates and also of Gorgias, Isocrates founds
a play group or club in Athens – vide H. P. Grice, “Athenian dialectic” -- that
attracts many aristocrats. Many of Isocrates’s philosophy touches on ‘dialectic.’
“Against the Sophists and On the Antidosis are most important in this respect.
“On the antidosis” stands to Isocrates as the “Apology” of Plato stands to
Socrates, a defense of Socrates against an attack not on his life, but on his
property. The aim of Isocrates’s philosophy is good judgment in practical
affairs, and he believes his contribution to Greece through education more
valuable than legislation could possibly be. Isocrates repudiates instruction
in theoretical (what he called ‘otiose’) philosophy, and insisted on
distinguishing his teaching of rhetoric from the sophistry that gives clever
speakers an unfair advantage. In politics Isocrates is a Panhellenic patriot,
and urges the warring Greek city-states to unite under strong leadership and
take arms against the Persian Empire. His most famous work, and the one in
which he took the greatest pride, is the “Panegyricus,” a speech in praise of
Athens. In general, Isocrates supports democracy in Athens, but toward the end
of his life complained bitterly of abuses of the system.
Istituto italiano
per gli studi filosofici: the title is telling, This is an institute for
philosophical studies, aka ‘research.’ Cf. Witters, “Philosophische
untersuchungen,” translated as ‘investigations.’ Grice prefers ‘studio,’ as in
‘studi’ (Studies in the way of words).
Italian: H. P. Grice: “It’s absurd the
little Oxonians know about Italy – it’s all about the Grand Tour! The only
Oxonian seriously into things Italian, that I know of, are Collingwood, Bosanquet,
and the fashionable Hegelians!” “As a response, I propose to lecture on Italian
philosophy, with a view to implicature.” Italy over the ages has had a vast influence on Western
philosophy, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, and going onto Renaissance
humanism, the Age of Enlightenment and modern philosophy. Philosophy is brought to Italy by Pythagoras,
founder of the Italian school of philosophy in Crotone. Major Italian philosophers of the Grecian period
include: Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles, and, lastly, Gorgias, responsible for bringing philosophy to
Athens. There are several
formidable Roman philosophers, such as: Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Clement of Alexandria, Alcinous, Sextus Empiricus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Themistius, Augustine of Hippo, Proclus, Philoponus of Alexandria, Damascius, Boethius, and Simplicius of Cilicia. Roman philosophy is heavily influenced by that
of Greece. Italian mediaeval
philosophy is mainly Christian, and includes several important philosophers and
theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is a student of Albert the Great, a
brilliant Dominican experimentalist, much like the Franciscan Roger Bacon of
Oxford. Aquinas reintroduces
Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. Aquinas believes that there is no contradiction
between faith and secular reason. Aquinas believes that Aristotle achieves the
pinnacle in the human striving for truth, and thus adopts Aristotle's
philosophy as a framework in constructing his theological and philosophical
outlook. Aquinas is a professor
at the prestigious University of Paris. The Renaissance is an essentially Italian
(Florentine) movement, and also a great period of the arts and philosophy. Among the distinctive elements of Renaissance
philosophy are: — the revival
(renaissance means "rebirth") of classical civilisation and learning. — a partial return to the authority of Plato
over Aristotle, who had come to dominate later medieval philosophy; and — among some philosophers, enthusiasm for the
occult and Hermeticism. As with all periods,
there is a wide drift of dates, reasons for categorization and boundaries. In particular, the Renaissance, more than later
periods, is thought to begin in Italy with the Italian Renaissance and roll
through Europe. Renaissance Humanism was
a European intellectual movement that was a crucial component of the
Renaissance, beginning in Florence, and affected most of Italy. The humanist movement develops from the
rediscovery by European scholars of Latin literary and Greek literary texts. Initially, a humanist was simply a scholar or
teacher of Latin literature. Humanism describes a curriculum – the “studia humanitatis” –
consisting of grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry, and history, as
studied via Latin and Greek literary authors. Humanism offers the necessary intellectual and
philological tools for the first critical analysis of texts. An early triumph of textual criticism by Lorenzo
Valla reveals the Donation of Constantine to be an early medieval forgery
produced in the Curia. This textual criticism
creates sharper controversy when Erasmus follows Valla in criticising the
accuracy of the Vulgate translation of the New Testament, and promoting
readings from the original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Italian Renaissance humanists believe that the
liberal arts (art, music, grammar, rhetoric, oratory, history, poetry, using
classical texts, and the studies of all of the above) should be practiced by
all levels of "richness". Italian humanists also approve of self, human
worth and individual dignity. Italian humanists hold the belief that everything in life has a
determinate nature, but man's privilege is to be able to choose his own path. Pico della Mirandola writes the following
concerning the creation of the universe and man's place in it: “But when the work was finished, the Craftsman
kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to
love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness.” “Therefore, when everything was done, He finally
took thought concerning the creation of man.” “He therefore took man as a creature of
indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world,
addressed him thus.” “”Neither a fixed abode
nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we
given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy
judgement thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form and what functions
thou thyself shalt desire.”” “”The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within
the bounds of law.”” “”Thou shalt have the
power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish.”” “”Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's
judgement, to be born into the higher forms, which are divine."” Italy is also affected by a movement called
Neoplatonism, which is a movement which had a general revival of interest in
Classical antiquity. Interest in Platonism is
especially strong in Florence under the Medici. During the sessions at Florence of the Council
of Ferrara-Florence, during the failed attempts to heal the schism of the
Orthodox and Catholic churches, Cosimo de' Medici and his intellectual circle
make acquaintance with the Neoplatonic philosopher George Gemistos Plethon. Plethon’s discourses upon Plato and the
Alexandrian mystics so fascinate the learned society of Florence that they name
him the second Plato. John Argyropoulos is
lecturing on Greek language and literature at Florence, and Marsilio Ficino
becomes his pupil. When Cosimo de’ Medici
decides to refound Plato's Academy at Florence, his choice to head it is
Ficino, who makes the classic translation of Plato from Greek to Latin, as well
as a translation of a collection of Hellenistic Greek documents of the Hermetic
Corpus, and the writings of many of the Neoplatonists, for example Porphyry,
Iamblichus, Plotinus, et al.. Following suggestions laid out by Gemistos Plethon, Ficino tries
to synthesize Christianity and Platonism. Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli is an
Italian philosopher, and is considered one of the most influential Italian
Renaissance philosophers and one of the main founders of modern political
science. Machiavelli’s most
famous work is “The Prince.” “The Prince”’s contribution to the history of political thought is
the fundamental break between political realism and political idealism. Machiavelli’s best-known essay exposits and
describes the arts with which a ruling prince can maintain control of his
realm. The essay concentrates
on the "new prince", under the presumption that a hereditary prince
has an easier task in ruling, since the people are accustomed to him. To retain power, the hereditary prince must
carefully maintain the socio-political institutions to which the people are
accustomed; whereas a new prince has the more difficult task in ruling, since
he must first stabilize his new-found power in order to build an enduring
political structure. That requires the prince
being a public figure above reproach, whilst privately acting immorally to
maintain his state. The examples are those
princes who most successfully obtain and maintain power, drawn from
Machiavelli’s observations as a Florentine diplomat, and his ancient history
readings; thus, the Latin phrases and Classic examples. “The Prince” politically defines “virtu” as any
quality that helps a prince rule his state effectively. Machiavelli is aware of the irony of good
results coming from evil actions, and because of this, the Catholic Church
proscribes “The Prince,” registering it to the “Index Librorum Prohibitorum,”
moreover, the Humanists also viewed the essay negatively, among them, Erasmus
of Rotterdam. As a treatise, the
primary intellectual contribution of Machiavelli’s “Prince” to the history of
political thought is the fundamental break between political Realism and
political Idealism — thus, “The Prince” is a manual
to acquiring and keeping political power. In contrast with Plato and Aristotle, a
Classical ideal society is not the aim of the prince’s will to power. As a political philosopher, Machiavelli
emphasises necessary, methodical exercise of brute force and deception to
preserve the status quo. Between Machiavelli's
advice to ruthless and tyrannical princes in “The Prince” and his more
republican exhortations in “Discorsi,” some conclude that “The Prince” is
actually only a satire. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
for instance, admires Machiavelli the republican and, consequently, argues that
“The Prince” is an essay for the republicans as it exposes the methods used by
princes. If “The Prince” is only
intended as a manual for tyrannical rulers, it contains a paradox: It is apparently more effective if the secrets
“The Prince” contains would *not* be made publicly available. Also Antonio Gramsci argues that Machiavelli's
audience is the common people because the rulers already know these methods
through their education. This interpretation is
supported by the fact that Machiavelli writes in the vernacular, Italian, not
in Latin (which would have been the language of the ruling elite). Although Machiavelli is supposed to be a
realist, many of his heroes in “The Prince” are in fact mythical or
semi-mythical, and his goal (i.e. the unification of Italy) essentially utopian
at the time of writing. Many of Machiavelli’s
contemporaries associate him with the political tracts offering the idea of
“Reason of State”, an idea proposed most notably in the writings of Jean Bodin
and Giovanni Botero. To this day,
contemporary usage of “Machiavellian” is an adjective describing someone who is
"marked by cunning, duplicty, or bad faith.” “The Prince” is the treatise that is most
responsible for the term being brought about. To this day, "Machiavellian" remains a
popular term used in casual and political contexts, while in psychology,
"Machiavellianism" denotes a personality type. Cesare Beccaria is one of the greatest writers
of the Italian Age of Enlightenment. Italy is also affected by the enlightenment, a
movement which is a consequence of the Renaissance and changes the road of
Italian philosophy. Followers of the group
often meet to discuss in private salons and coffeehouses, notably in the cities
of Milan, Rome and Venice. Cities with important
universities such as Padua, Bologna and Naples, however, also remain great
centres of scholarship and the intellect, with several philosophers, such as
Giambattista Vico (who is widely regarded as being the founder of modern
Italian philosophy) and Antonio Genovesi. Italian society also dramatically changes during
the Enlightenment, with rulers such as Leopold II of Tuscany abolishing the
death penalty. The church's power is
significantly reduced, and it is a period of great thought and invention, with
scientists such as Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani discovering new things
and greatly contributing to Western science. Beccaria is also one of the greatest Italian
Enlightenment writers, who is famous for his masterpiece “Of Crimes and
Punishments.” Italy also has a
renowned philosophical movement with Idealism, Sensism and Empiricism. The main Sensist Italian philosophers are Gioja
and Romagnosi. Criticism of the Sensist
movement comes from other philosophers such as Pasquale Galluppi, who affirms
that a priori relationships are synthetic. Antonio Rosmini, instead, is the founder of
Italian Idealism. The most comprehensive
view of Rosmini's philosophical standpoint is to be found in his “Sistema
filosofico,” in which he sets forth the conception of a complete encyclopaedia
of the human knowable, synthetically conjoined, according to the order of
ideas, in a perfectly harmonious whole. Contemplating the position of recent philosophy
from Locke to Hegel, and having his eye directed to the ancient and fundamental
problem of the origin, truth and certainty of our ideas, Rosmini writes: “If philosophy is to be restored to love and
respect, I think it will be necessary, in part, to return to the teachings of
the ancients, and in part to give those teachings the benefit of modern
methods.” — Theodicy, a. 148. Rosmini examines and analyses the fact of human knowledge, and
obtains the following results: — the notion or idea of being or existence in general enters into,
and is presupposed by, all our acquired cognitions, so that, without it, they
would be impossible. — this idea is
essentially objective, inasmuch as what is seen in it is as distinct from and
opposed to the mind that sees it as the light is from the eye that looks at it. — the idea is essentially true, because being
and truth are convertible terms, and because in the vision of it the mind
cannot err, since error could only be committed by a judgment, and here there
is no judgment, but a pure intuition affirming nothing and denying nothing. — by the application of this essentially
objective and true idea the human being intellectually perceives, first, the
animal body individually conjoined with him, and then, on occasion of the
sensations produced in him not by himself, the causes of those sensations, that
is, from the action felt he perceives and affirms an agent, a being, and
therefore a true thing, that acts on him, and he thus gets at the external
world, these are the true primitive judgments, containing the subsistence of
the particular being (subject), and its essence or species as determined by the
quality of the action felt from it (predicate) — reflection, by separating the essence or
species from the subsistence, obtains the full specific idea
(universalization), and then from this, by leaving aside some of its elements,
the abstract specific idea (abstraction). — the mind, having reached this stage of
development, can proceed to further and further abstracts, including the first
principles of reasoning, the principles of the several sciences, complex ideas,
groups of ideas, and so on without end, and, finally, — the same most universal idea of being, this
generator and formal element of all acquired cognitions, cannot itself be
acquired, but must be innate in us, implanted by God in our nature. Being, as naturally shining to our mind, must
therefore be what men call the light of reason. Hence the name Rosmini gives it of ideal being;
and this he lays down as the fundamental principle of all philosophy and the
supreme criterion of truth and certainty. This Rosmini believes to be the teaching of St
Augustine, as well as of St Thomas, of whom he was an ardent admirer and
defender. In the 19th century,
there are also several other movements which gain some form of popularity in
Italy, such as Ontologism. The main Italian son of
this philosophical movement is Vincenzo Gioberti, a metaphysician. Gioberti's writings are more important than his
political career. In the history of
Italian philosophy they stand apart. As the speculations of Rosmini-Serbati, against
which he wrote, have been called the last link added to medieval thought, so
the system of Gioberti, known as Ontologism, more especially in his greater and
earlier works, is unrelated to other modern schools of thought. It shows a harmony with the Roman Catholic faith
which caused Cousin to declare that Italian philosophy was still in the bonds
of theology, and that Gioberti was no philosopher. Method is with Gioberti a synthetic, subjective
and psychological instrument. Gioberti reconstructs, as he declares, ontology, and begins with
the ideal formula, the "Ens" creates ex nihilo the existent. God is the only being (Ens). All other things are merely existences. God is the origin of all human knowledge (called
lidea, thought), which is one and so to say identical with God himself. It is directly beheld (intuited) by reason, but
in order to be of use it has to be reflected on, and this by means of language. A knowledge of being and existences (concrete,
not abstract) and their mutual relations, is necessary as the beginning of
philosophy. Gioberti is in some
respects a Platonist. Gioberti identifies
religion with civilization, and in his treatise “Del primato morale e civile
degli Italiani” he arrives at the conclusion that the church is the axis on
which the well-being of human life revolves. In it Gioberti affirms the idea of the supremacy
of Italy, brought about by the restoration of the papacy as a moral dominion,
founded on religion and public opinion. In his later works, the “Rinnovamento” and the
“Protologia,” Gioberti is thought by some to have shifted his ground under the
influence of events. Gioberti’s first work
had a personal reason for its existence. A fellow-exile and friend, Paolo Pallia, having
many doubts and misgivings as to the reality of revelation and a future life,
Gioberti at once set to work with “La Teorica del sovrannaturale,” which was
his first publication. After this,
philosophical treatises follow in rapid succession. The “Teorica” is followed by “Introduzione allo
studio della filosofia.” In this work Gioberti
states his reasons for requiring a new method and new terminology. Here Gioberti brings out the doctrine that
religion is the direct expression of the idea in this life, and is one with
true civilization in history. Civilization is a conditioned mediate tendency to perfection, to
which religion is the final completion if carried out. It is the end of the second cycle expressed by
the second formula, the Ens redeems existences. Essays on the lighter and more popular subjects,
“Del bello” and “Del buono,” follow the “Introduzione.” “Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani” and
the “Prolegomeni” to the same, and soon afterwards his triumphant exposure of
the Jesuits, “Il Gesuita moderno,” no doubt hastens the transfer of rule from
clerical to civil hands. It is the popularity of
these semi-political works, increased by other occasional political articles,
and his “Rinnovamento civile d'Italia,” that causes Gioberti to be welcomed
with such enthusiasm on his return to his native country. All these works are perfectly orthodox, and aid
in drawing the liberal clergy into the movement which results since his time in
the unification of Italy. The Jesuits, however,
closed round the pope more firmly after his return to Rome, and in the end
Gioberti's writings are placed on the Index. The remainder of his works, especially “La
Filosofia della Rivelazione” and the “Prolologia,” give his mature views on
many points. Other Ontological
philosophers include Terenzio Mamiani, Luigi Ferri, and Ausonio Franchi. Augusto Vera is probably the greatest Italian
Hegelianist philosopher. It is during his
studies, with his cousin in Paris, that Vera comes to know about philosophy and
through them he acquires knowledge of Hegelianism and it culminates during the
events of the French Revolution. In England Vera continues his studies of Hegelian philosophy. During his years in Naples, Vera maintains
relationships with the Philosophical Society of Berlin, which originally
consists of Hegelians, and keeps up to date with both the German and the French
Hegelian literature. Vera undertakes a close
commentary of Hegel's “Introduzione alla filosofia.” Much of Vera’s work on neo-Hegelian theories are
undertaken with Bertrando Spaventa. Some see the Italian Hegelian doctrine as
leading to Italian Fascism. Some of the most prominent philosophies and ideologies in Italy
also include anarchism, communism, socialism, futurism, fascism, and Christian
democracy. Both futurism and
fascism (in its original form, now often distinguished as Italian fascism) are
developed in Italy at this time. Italian Fascism is the official philosophy and ideology of the
Italian government. Giovanni Gentile is one
of the greatest Italian Idealist/Fascist philosophers, who greatly supports
Benito Mussolini. Gentile has a great
number of developments within his thought and career which define his
philosophy: — the discovery of
Actual Idealism in his work “Theory of the Pure Act” — the political favour he felt for the invasion
of Libya and the entry of Italy into The Great War. — the dispute with Benedetto Croce over the
historic inevitability of Fascism. — his role as education minister. — Gentile’s belief that Fascism can be made to
be subservient to his thought and the gathering of influence through the work
of such students as Ugo Spirito. Benedetto Croce writes that Gentile "holds the honour of
being the most rigorous neo–Hegelian in the entire history of Western
philosophy and the dishonour of being the official philosopher of Fascism in
Italy." Gentile’s philosophical
basis for fascism is rooted in his understanding of ontology and epistemology,
in which he finds vindication for the rejection of individualism, acceptance of
collectivism, with the state as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty
to which the individual found in the conception of individuality no meaning
outside of the state (which in turn justifies totalitarianism). Ultimately, Gentile foresees a social order
wherein opposites of all kinds are not to be given sanction as existing
independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad
interpretations were currently false as imposed by all former kinds of
Government; capitalism, communism, and that only the reciprocal totalitarian
state of Corporative Syndicalism, a Fascist state, could defeat these problems
made from reifying as an external that which is in fact to Gentile only a
thinking reality. Whereas it was common in
the philosophy of the time to see conditional subject as abstract and object as
concrete, Gentile postulates the opposite, that subject is the concrete and
objectification is abstraction (or rather; that what was conventionally dubbed
"subject" is in fact only conditional object, and that true subject
is the 'act of' being or essence above any object). Gentile is a notable philosophical theorist of
his time throughout Europe, since having developed his 'Actual Idealism' system
of Idealism, sometimes called 'Actualism.' It is especially in which his ideas put subject
to the position of a transcending truth above positivism that garnered attention;
by way that all senses about the world only take the form of ideas within one's
mind in any real sense; to Gentile even the analogy between the function and
location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body were a
consistent creation of the mind (and not brain; which was a creation of the
mind and not the other way around). An example of Actual Idealism in Theology is the
idea that although man may have invented the concept of God, it does not make
God any less real in any sense possible as far as it is not presupposed to
exist as abstraction and except in case qualities about what existence actually
entails (i.e. being invented apart from the thinking making it) are
presupposed. Benedetto Croce objects
that Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer's will. Therefore, Gentile proposes a form of what he
calls 'absolute Immanentism' in which the divine is the present conception of
reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing
and dynamic process. Many times accused of
Solipsism, Gentile maintains his philosophy to be a Humanism that senses the
possibility of nothing beyond what was contingent; the self's human thinking,
in order to communicate as immanence is to be human like oneself, makes a
cohesive empathy of the self-same, without an external division, and therefore
not modeled as objects to one's own thinking. Meanwhile, anarchism, communism, and socialism,
though not originating in Italy, take significant hold in Italy with the country
producing numerous significant figures in anarchist, socialist, and communist
thought. In addition,
anarcho-communism first fully forms into its modern strain within the Italian
section of the First International. Italian anarchists often adhere to forms of
anarcho-communism, illegalist or insurrectionary anarchism, collectivist
anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, and platformism. Some of the most important figures in the
anarchist movement include Italians such as: Errico Malatesta, Giuseppe Fanelli, Carlo Cafiero, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Pietro Gori, Luigi Galleani, Severino Di Giovanni, Giuseppe Ciancabilla, Luigi Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Other Italian figures, influential in both the
anarchist and socialist movements, include Carlo Tresca and Andrea Costa, as
well as the author, director, and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini. Antonio Gramsci remains an important philosopher
within Marxist and communist theory, credited with creating the theory of
cultural hegemony. Italian philosophers are
also influential in the development of the non-Marxist liberal socialism
philosophy, including: Carlo Rosselli, Norberto Bobbio, Piero Gobetti, Aldo Capitini, and Guido Calogero. Many Italian left-wing activists adopt the
anti-authoritarian pro-working class leftist theories that become known as
autonomism and “operaismo.” Giuseppe Peano is one of the founders of analytic philosophy and
contemporary philosophy of mathematics. Recent analytic philosophers include: Mauro Dorato, Carlo Penco, Francesco Berto, Emiliano Boccardi, Alessandro Torza, Matteo Plebiani, Luciano Floridi, Luca Moretti, and, among the
Griceians, Anna Maria Ghersi and Luigi Speranza. See also: List of Italian philosophers References: See: Jerry Bentley, “Humanists and holy writ” Princeton University Pico Yates, Frances A. “Giordano
Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition” University of Chicago Press Moschovitis Group
Inc, Christian D. Von Dehsen and Scott L. Harris, “Philosophers and religious
leaders,” The Oryx Press, 117. Definition of MACHIAVELLIAN merriam-webster Skinner,
Quentin “Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction.” OUP Oxford. Christie,
Richard; Geis, Florence L. “Studies in Machiavellianism.” Academic Press. “The Enlightenment throughout
Europe"history-world “History of Philosophy 70". Maritain “Augusto Vera". Facoltà Lettere e Filosofia “La rinascita hegeliana a Napoli" Ex-Regno
delle Due Sicilie. “L'ESCATOLOGIA
PITAGORICA NELLA TRADIZIONE OCCIDENTALE". RITO SIMBOLICO ITALIANO. “Idealismo. Idealistas" Enciclopedia GER. Benedetto Croce, “Guide to Aesthetics,” Tr. by Patrick Romanell,
"Translator's Introduction," The Library of Liberal Arts, The Bobbs–Merrill
Co., Inc. Runes, Dagobert, ed.,
Treasure of Philosophy,” “Gentile, Giovanni" Nunzio Pernicone, "Italian Anarchism",
AK Press. RELATED ARTICLES: Giovanni Gentile, Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist
philosopher. Bertrando Spaventa,
Italian philosopher. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Hegelians and Croceans in the Oxford
I knew.” Grice, “Speranza, our man in Itealian philosophy!” – “Surely he’ll be
offended if you say that!” – Anna Maria Ghersi e Luigi Speranza, “IMPLICATVRA.”
Luigi Speranza, “IMPLICATVRA,” The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria,
Italia.
Società
filosofia italiana
eredità – when a
symposium on Grice was organised at San Marino, this is the word chosen – Eredità.
Oddly, Berkeley preferred ‘legacy,’ as in “Legacy of Grice.” “Heritage” sounds
perhaps more pretentious than “l’eredità di Grice,’ where there is a pun on
‘heritage’ and ‘inheritance’! --.
descriptum
– definite
(“the”) and “indefinite” (“some at least one”). Analysed by Grice in terms of
/\x. “The king of France is bald” There is at least a king of France, there is
at most a king of France, and anything that is a king of France is bald. For
indefinite descriptum he holds the equivalence with \/x, “some (at least one).
– Grice follows Peano in finding the ‘iota’ operator a good abbreviatory device
to avoid the boring ‘Russellian expansion.” “We should forgive Russell – his
background was mathematics not the belles letters as with Bradley and me, and
anyone at Oxford, really.” – Grice. iota
– iota operator used by Grice. Peano uses iota as short for “isos,” Grecian for
‘Same”. Peano defines “ix” as “the class of whatever is the same as x”. Peano
then looked for a symbol for the inverse for this. He first uses a negated
iota, and then an inverted iota, so that inverted iota x reads “the sole
[unique] member of x” “ι” read as “the” -- s the inverted iota or description
operator and is used in expressions for definite descriptions, such as “(ιx)ϕx(ιx)ϕx,”
which is read: the x such that ϕxϕx). [(ιx)ϕx(ιx)ϕx] -- a definite description
in brackets. This is a scope indicator for definite descriptions. The topic of
‘description’ is crucial for Grice, and he regrets Russell focused on the
definite rather than the indefinite descriptor. As a matter of fact, while
Grice follows the custom of referring to the “Russellian expansion” of iota, he
knows it’s ultimately the “Peanoian” expansion. Indeed, Peano uses the
non-inverted iota “i” for the unit class. For the ONLY or UNIQUE member of this
class, i. e. the definite article “the,” Peano uses the inverted iota (cf.
*THE* Twelve Apostles). (On occasion Peano uses the denied iota for that). Peano’s approach to ‘the’ evolve in at least
three stages towards a greater precision in the treatment of the description,
both definite and indefinite. Peano introducesin 1897 the fundamental definition of the unit class
as the class such that ALL of its members are IDENTICAL. In Peanoian symbols, ix
= ye (y = x). Peano approaches the UNIQUE OR ONLY member of such a class, by
way of an indirect definition: “x = ia • = • a = ix.” Regarding the analysis of
the definite article “the,” Peano makes the crucial point that every ‘proposition’
or ‘sentence’ containing “the” (“The apostles were twelve”) can be offered a
reductive AND REDUCTIONIST analysis, first, to. the for,? ia E b, and, second, to
the inclusion of the class in the class (a b), which already supposes the
elimination of “i.” Peano notes he can avoid an identity whose first member
contains “I” (1897:215). One difference between Peano’s and Russell's treatment
of classes in the context of the theory of description is that, while, for
Peano, a description combines a class abstract with the inverse of the unit
class operator, Russell restricts the free use of a class abstract due the risk
of paradox generation. For Peano, it is necessary that there EXIST the class
(‘apostle’), and he uses for this the symbol ‘I,’ which indicates that the
class is not vacuous, void, or empty, and that it have a unique member, the set
of twelve apostles. If either of these two conditions – existence and uniqueness
-- are not met, the symbol is meaningless, or pointless. Peano offers various
instances for handling the symbol of the inverted iota, and the way in which --
starting from that ‘indirect’ or implicit definition, it can be eliminated
altogether. One example is of particular interest, as it states a link between
the reductionist analysis of the inverted iota and the problem of what Peano
calls ‘doubtful’ existence (rather than vacuous, void, or empty). Peano starts
by defining the superlative ‘THE greatEST number of a class of real numbers’ as
‘THE number n such that there is no number of this class being greater than n.’
Peano warns that one should not infer from this definition the ‘existence’ of the
aforementioned greatEST number. Grice does not quite consider this in the
‘definite description’ section of “Vacuous name” but gives a similar example:
“The climber on hands and knees of Mt. Everest does not exist. He was invented
by the journalists.” And in other cases where there is a NON-IDENTIFICATORY use
of ‘the’, which Grice symbolises as ‘the,’ rather than ‘THE’: “The butler
certainly made a mess with our hats and coats – whoever he is --.” As it
happens Strawson mistook the haberdasher to be the butler. So that Strawson is
MIS-IDENTIFYING the denotatum as being ‘the butler’ when it is ‘the
haberdasher.’ The butler doesn’t really exist. Smith dressed the haberdasher as
a butler and made him act as one just to impress. Similarly, as per Russell’s
‘Prince George soon found out that ‘the author of Waverley’ did not exist,”
(variant of his example). Similarly, Peano proves that we can speak
legitimately of “THE GREATEST real number” even if we have doubts it ‘exists.
He just tweaks the original definition to obtain a different expression where
“I” is dropped out. For Peano, then, the reductionist analysis of the definite
article “the” is feasible and indeed advisable for a case of ‘doubtful’ existence.
Grice does not consider ‘doubtful’ but he may. “The climber on hands and knees
of Mt Everest may, but then again may not, attend the party the Merseyside
Geographical Society is giving in his honour. He will attend if he exists; he
will not attend if he doesn’t.” Initially, Peano thinks “I” need not be
equivalent to, in the sense of systematically replaced by, the two clauses
(indeed three) in the expansion which are supposed to give the import of ‘the,’
viz. existence and uniqueness (subdivided in ‘at least’ and ‘at most’). His
reductionism proves later to be absolute. He starts from the definition in terms
of the unit class. He goes on to add a series of "possible"
definitions -- allowing for alternative logical orders. One of this alternative
definitions is stipulated to be a strict equivalence, about which he had
previously been sceptical. Peano asserts that the only unque individual belongs
to a unit. Peano does not put it in so
many words that this expression is meaningless. In the French translation, what
he said is Gallic: “Nous ne donnons pas de signification a ce symbole si la
classe a est nulle, ou si elle contient plusieurs individus.” “We don’t give
signification to this symbol IF the class is void, or if the class contains
more than one individual.” – where we can see that he used ‘iota’ to represent
‘individus,’ from Latin ‘individuum,’ translating Greek ‘a-tomos.’ So it is not
meant to stand for Greek ‘idion,’ as in ‘idiosyncratic.’ But why did he choose
the iota, which is a Grecian letter. Idion is in the air (if not ‘idiot.’).
Thus, one may take the equivalence in practice, given that if the three conditions
in the expansion are met, the symbol cannot be used at all. There are other ways
of providing a reductionist analysis of the same symbols according to Peano, e.
g., laE b. = : a = tx. :Jx • Xc b class (a) such that it belongs to another class
(b) is equal to the EXISTENCE of exactly one (at least one and at most one)
idiosyncratic individual or element such that this idiosyncratic individual is
a member of that class (b), i. e. "the only or unique (the one member)
member of a belongs to b" is to be held equivalent to ‘There is at least
one x such that, first, the unit class a is equal to the class constituted by
x, and, second, x belongs to b.’ Or, ‘The class of x such that a is the class
constituted by x, and that x belongs to b, is not an empty class, and that it
have a unique member.” This is exactly Russell's tri-partite expansion referred
to Russell (‘on whom Grice heaped all the praise,’ to echo Quine). Grice was
not interested in history, only in rebutting Strawson. Of course, Peano
provides his conceptualisations in terms of ‘class’ rather than, as Russell,
Sluga [or ‘Shuga,’ as Cole reprints him] and Grice do, in terms of the ‘propositional
function,’ i. e. Peano reduces ‘the’ in
terms of a property or a predicate, which defins a class. Peano reads the
membership symbol as "is,” which opens a new can of worms for Grice:
“izzing” – and flies out of the fly bottle. Peano is well aware of the
importance of his device to eliminate the definite article “the” to more
‘primitive’ terms. That is why Peano qualifies his definition as an "expriment
la P[proposition] 1 a E b sous une autre forme, OU ne figure plus le signe i;
puisque toute P contenant le signe i a est REDUCTIBLE ala forme ia E b, OU best
une CIs, on pourra ELIMINER le signe i dans toute P.” The once received view that
the symbol "i" is for Peano undefinable and primitive has now been
corrected. Before making more explicit
the parallelism with Whitehead’s and Russell's and Grice’s theory of
description (vide Quine, “Reply to H. P. Grice”) we may consider a few
potential problems. First, while it is true that the symbol ‘i’ has been given
a ‘reductionist analysis’, in the definiens we still see the symbol of the unit
class, which would refer somehow to the idea that is symbolized by ''ix’. Is
this a sign of circularity, and evidence that the descriptor has not been
eliminated? For Peano, there are at least two ways of defining a symbol of the
unit class without using ‘iota’ – straight, inverted, or negated. One way is
directly replacing ix by its value: y 3(y = x). We have: la E b • =: 3x 3{a =y
3(y =x) • X E b}, which expresses the
same idea in a way where a reference to iota has disappeared. We can read now
"the only member of a belongs to b" as "there is at least one x
such that (i) the unit class a is equal to all the y such that y =x, and (ii) x
belongs to b" (or "the class of x such that they constitute the class
of y, and that they constitute the class a, and that in addition they belong to
the class b, is not an empty class"). The complete elimination underlies
the mentioned definition. Peano is just not interested in making the point
explicit. A second way is subtler. By pointing out that, in the
"hypothesis" preceding the quoted definition, it is clearly stated
that the class "a" is defined as the unit class in terms of the
existence and identity of all of their members (i.e. uniqueness): a E Cis. 3a:
x, yEa. X = y: bE CIs • : This is why "a" is equal to the expression
''tx'' (in the second member). One may still object that since "a"
can be read as "the unit class", Peano does not quite provide a
‘reductionist’ analysis as it is shown through the occurrence of these words in
some of the readings proposed above. However, the hypothesis preceding the
definition only states that the meaning of the symbols which are used in the
second member is to be. Thus, "a" is stated as "an existing unit
class", which has to be understood in the following way: 'a' stands for a
non-empty class that all of its members are identical. We can thus can "a",
wherever it occurs, by its meaning, given that this interpretation works as
only a purely ‘nominal’ definition, i.e. a convenient abbreviation. However,
the actual substitution would lead us to rather complicated prolixic expressions
that would infringe Grice’s desideratum of conversational clarity. Peano's
usual way of working can be odd. Starting from this idea, we can interpret the
definition as stating that "ia Eb" is an abbreviation of the
definiens and dispensing with the conditions stating existence and uniqueness
in the hypothesis, which have been incorporated to their new place. The
hypothesis contains only the statement
of "a" and" b" as being classes, and the definition amounts
to: a, bECls.::J :. ME b. =:3XE([{3aE[w, zEa. ::Jw•z' w= z]} ={ye (y= x)}] • XE
b). Peano’s way is characterized as the constant search for SHORTER, briefer,
and more conveniente expressions – which is Grice’s solution to Strawson’s
misconception – there is a principle of conversational tailoring. It is quite
understandable that Peano prefers to avoid long expansions. The important thing
is not the intuitive and superficial similarity between the symbols
"ia" and ''ix'', caused simply by the appearance of the Greek letter iota
in both cases, or the intuitive meaning of
"the unit class.” What is key are the conditions under which these
expressions have been introduced in Peano’s system, which are completely clear
and quite explicit in the first definition. It may still be objected that
Peano’s elimination of ‘the’ is a failure in that it derives from Peano's confusion
between class membership and class inclusion -- a singleton class would be its
sole member – but these are not clearly distinct notions. It follows that (iii)
"a" is both a class and, according to the interpretation of the
definition, an individual (iv), as is shown by joining the hypothesis preceding
the definition and the definition itself. The objection derives from the received
view on Peano, according to which his logic is, compared to Whitehead’s and
Russell’s, not strict or formal enough, but also contains some important confusions
here and there. And certainly Russell
would be more than happy to correct a minor point. Russell always thinks of
Peano and his school as being strangely free of confusions or mistakes. It may
be said that Peano indeed ‘confuses’ membership with inclusion (cf. Grice ‘not
confused, but mistaken’) given that it was he himself who, predating Frege, introduces
the distinction with the symbol "e.” If the objection amounts to Peano admitting
that the symbol for membership holds between class A and class B, it is true
that this is the case when Peano uses it to indicate the meaning of some
symbols, but only through the reading of "is,” which could be" 'a and
b being classes, "the only member of a belongs to b,” to be the same as
"there is at least one x such that (i) 'there is at least one a such that
for ,': and z belonging to a,. w = z' is equal to y such that y =. x' , and
(ii) x belongs to b ,where both the iota and the unit class are eliminated in
the definiens. There is a similar apparent vicious circularity in Frege's definition
of number. "k e K" as "k is a class"; see also the
hypothesis from above for another example). This by no means involves confusion, and is shown
by the fact that Peano soon adds four definite properties distinguishing precisely
both class inclusion and class membership,, which has Russell himself
preserving the useful and convenient reading. "ia" does not stand for the
singleton class. Peano states pretty clearly that" 1" (T) makes sense only when applied to this or that
individual, and ''t'' as applied to this or that class, no matter what symbols
is used for these notions. Thus, ''ta'', like "tx" have to be read as
"the class constituted by ...", and" la" as "the only
member of a". Thus, although Peano never uses "ix" (because he
is thinking in terms of this or that class), had he done so its meaning, of
course, would have been exactly the same as "la", with no confusion
at all. "a" stands for a class because it is so stated in the
hypothesis, although it can represent an individual when preceded by the
descriptor, and together with it, i.e. when both constitute a new symbol as a. Peano's
habit is better understood by interpreting what he is saying it in terms of a
propositional function, and then by seeing" la" as being somewhat
similar to x, no matter what reasons of convenience led him to prefer symbols
generally used for classes ("a" instead of"x"). There is
little doubt that this makes the world of a difference for Russell and Sluga (or
Shuga) but not Strawson or Grice, or Quine (“I’m sad all the praise was heaped
by Grice on Russell, not Peano”). For Peano the inverted iota is the symbol for
an operator on a class, it leads us to a different ‘concept’ when it flanks a
term, and this is precisely the point Shuga (or Sluga) makes to Grice –
‘Presupposition and conversational implicaturum” – the reference to Shuga was
omitted in the reprint in Way of Words). In contrast, for Russell, the iota
operator is only a part of what Whitehead and Russell call an ‘incomplete’
symbol. In fact, Grice borrows the complete-incomplete distinction from
Whitehead and Russell. For Peano, the descriptor can obviously be given a
reductionist eliminationist analysis only in conjunction with the rest of the
‘complete’ symbol, "ia e b.’ Whitehead’s and Russell’s point, again, seems
drawn from Peano. And there is no problem when we join the original hypothesis
with the definition, “a eCis. 3a: x, yea. -::Jx,y. x =y: be CIs • :. . la e b.
=: 3x 3(a =tx. x e b). If it falls within the scope of the quantifier in the
hypothesis, “a” is a variable which occurs both free and bound in the formula –
And it has to be a variable, since qua constant, no quantifier is needed. It is
not clear what Peano’s position would have been. Admittedly, Peano – living
always in a rush in Paris -- does not always display the highest standards of Oxonian
clarity between the several uses of, say, "existence" involved in his
various uses of this or that quantifier. In principle, there would be no problem
when a variable appears both bound and free in the same expression. And this is
so because the variable appears bound in one occurrence and free in another.
And one cannot see how this could affect the main claim. The point Grice is
making here (which he owes to ‘Shuga’) is to recognise the fundamental
similarities in the reductionist analysis of “the” in Peano and Russell. It is
true that Russell objects to an ‘implicit’ or indirect definition under a
hypothesis. He would thus have rejected the Peanoian reductionist analysis of
“the.” However, Whitehead and Russell rejects an ‘implicit’ definition under a
hypothesis in the specific context of the “unrestricted’ variable of “Principia.”
Indeed, Russell had been using, before Whitehead’s warning, this type of
‘implicit’ definition under a hypothesis for a long period the minute he
mastered Peano's system. It is because Russell interprets a definition under a
hypothesis as Peano does, i.e. merely as a device for fixing the denotatum of
this or that symbol in an interpreted formula. When one reads after some symbolic
definition, things like "'x' being ... " or" 'y' being ...
", this counts as a definition under a hypothesis, if only because the
denotatum of the symbol has to be determined. Even if Peano's reductionist
analysis of “the” fails because it within the framework of a merely conditional
definition, the implicaturum of his original insight (“the” is not primitive)
surely influences Whitehead and Russell. Peano is the first who introduces the
the distinction between a free (or ‘real’) and a bound (or ‘apparent’)
variable, and, predating, Frege -- existential and universal quantification,
with an attempt at a substitutional theory based the concept of a ‘proposition,’
without relying on the concepts of ‘class’ or ‘propositional function.’ It may
be argued that Peano could hardly may have thought that he eliminated “the.” Peano
continues to use “the” and his whole system depends on it. Here, a Griceian
practica reason can easily explain Peano’s retaining “the” in a system in cases
where the symbol is merely the abbreviation of something that is in principle
totally eliminable.In the same vein, Whitehead and Russell do continue to use
“the” after the tripartite expansion. Peano, like Whitehead and Russell after
him, undoubtedly thinks, and rightly, too, that the descriptor IS eliminable.If
he does not flourish this elimination with by full atomistic philosophic
paraphernalia which makes Russell's theory of description one of the most
important logical successes of Cambridge philosopher – that was admired even at
Oxford, if by Grice if not by Strawson, that is another thing. Peano somewhat understated
the importance of his reductionist analysis, but then again, his goal is very
different from Whitehead’s and Russell's logicism. And different goals for
different strokes. In any case, the reductionist analysis of “the” is worked
out by Peano with essentially the same symbolic resources that Whitehead
and Russell employ. In a pretty clear
fashion, coming from him, Peano states two of the three conditions -- existence
and uniqueness – subdivided into ‘at least and at most --, as being what it is
explicitly conveyed by “the.” That is why in a negation of a vacuous
description, being true, the existence claim, within the scope of the negation,
is an annullable implicaturum, while in an affirmation, the existence claim is
an entailment rendering the affirmation that predicates a feature of a vacuous definite
description is FALSE. Peano has enough symbolic techniques for dispensing with
‘the’, including those required for constructing a definition in use. If he once
rather cursorily noted that for Peano, “i” (‘the’) is primitive and indefinable,
Quine later recognised Peano’s achievement, and he was “happy to get straight
on Peano” on descriptions, having checked all the relevant references and I
fully realising that he was wrong when he previously stated that the iota
descriptor was for Peano primitive and indefinable. Peano deserves all the
credit for the reductionist analysis that has been heaped on Whitehead and Russell,
except perhaps for Whitehead’s and Russell’s elaboration on the philosophical
lesson of a ‘contextual’ definition.For Peano, “the” cannot be defined in
isolation; only in the context of the class (a) from which it is the UNIQUE member
(la), and also in the context of the (b) from which that class is a member, at
least to the extent that the class a is included in the class b. This carries no
conflation of membership and inclusion. It is just a reasonable reading of "
1a Eb". "Ta" is just meaningless if the conditions of existence
and uniqueness (at least and at most) are not fulfilled. Surely it may be
argued that Peano’s reductionist analysis of “the” is not exactly the same as
Whitehead’s and Russell's. Still, in his own version, it surely influenced
Whitehead and Russell. In his "On Fundamentals,” Russell includes a
definition in terms analogous to Peano's, and with almost the same symbols. The
alleged improvement of Whitehead’s and Russell’s definition is in clarity. The
concept of a ‘propositional function’ is indeed preferable to that of class
membership. Other than that, the symbolic expression of the the three-prong
expansive conditions -- existence and uniqueness (at least and at most) -- is preserved.
Russell develops Peano’s claim to the effect that “ia” cannot be defined alone,
but always in the context of a class, which Russell translates as ‘the context
of a propositional function.’ His version in "On Denoting” is well known.
In an earlier letter to Jourdain, dated,
Jan. 3, 1906 we read: “'JI( lX) (x) • =•(:3b) : x. =x. X = b: 'JIb.” (They
never corresponded about the things Strawson corresponded with Grice –
cricket). As G. Landini has pointed out, there is even an earlier occurrence of
this definition in Russell’s "On Substitution" with only very slight
symbolic differences. We can see the heritage from Peano in a clear way if we
compare the definition with the version for classes in the letter to Jourdain:
'JI(t'u) • = : (:3b) : xEU. =x. X = b: 'JIb. Russell can hardly be accused of
plagiarizing Peano; yet all the ideas and the formal devices which are
important for the reductionist analysis of “the” were developed by in Peano,
complete with conceptual and symbolic resources, and which Russell acknowledged
that he studied in detail before formulating his own theory in “On denoting.”
Regarding Meinong’s ontological jungle, for Russell, the principle of
‘subsistence disappears as a consequence of the reductionist analysis of “the,”
which is an outcome of Russell’s semantic monism. Russell's later attitude to
Meinong as his main enemy is a comfortable recourse (Griffin I977a). As for Bocher, Russell himself admits some
influence from his nominalism. Bacher describes mathematical objects as
"mere symbols" and advises
Russell to follow this line of work in a letter, two months before Russell's
key idea. The 'class as one' is merely a symbol or name which we choose at
pleasure.” It is important to mention MacColl who he speaks of "symbolic
universes", with things like a ‘round square.’MacColl also speaks of
"symbolic ‘existence’". Indeed, Russell publishes “On denoting” as a
direct response to MacColl. Refs.: P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam, “Philosophy of Mathematics,
2nd ed.Cambridge.; M. Bocher, 1904a. "The Fundamental Conceptions and
Methods of Mathematics", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society; M.
A. E. Dummett, The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy; Duckworth), G. Frege,
G., Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Breslau: Koebner), tr. J. L. Austin, The Foundations of Arithmetic,
Blackwell, Partial English trans. (§§55-91, 106-1O7) by M. S. Mahoney in
Benacerraf and Putnam; "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung". Trans. as "On
Sense and Reference" in Frege 1952a, pp. 56-78. --, I892b. "Uber
Begriff und Gegenstand". Trans. as "On Concept and Object" in
Frege I952a, pp. 42-55. --, I893a. Grungesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. I Gena:
Pohle). Partial English trans. by M. Furth, The Basic Laws ofArithmetic
(Berkeley: U. California P., 1964). --, I906a. "Uber die Grundlagen der
Geometrie", Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, 15
(1906): 293-309, 377-403, 423-30. English trans. by Eike-Henner WKluge as
"On the Foundations of Geometry", in On the Foundations of Geometry
and Formal Theories of Arithmetic (New Haven and London, Yale U. P., 1971). --,
I952a. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, tr. by P.
T. Geach and M. Black (Oxford: Blackwell). Grattan-Guinness, L, I977a. Dear
Russell-Dear Jourdain (London: Duckworth). Griffin, N., I977a. "Russell's
'Horrible Travesty' of Meinong", Russell, nos. 25- 28: 39-51. E. D.
Klemke, ed., I970a. Essays on Bertrand Russell (Urbana: U. Illinois P.).
Largeault, ]., I97oa. Logique et philosophie chez Frege (Paris: Nauwelaerts).
MacColl, H., I905a. "Symbolic Reasoning". Repr. in Russell I973a, pp.
308-16. Mosterfn, ]., I968a. "Teoria de las descripciones"
(unpublished PH.D. thesis, U. of Barcelona). Peano, G., as. Opere Scelte, ed.
U. Cassina, 3 vols. (Roma: Cremonese, 1957- 59)· --, I897a. "Studii di
logica matematica". Repr. in 05,2: 201-17. --, I897b. "Logique
mathematique". Repr. in 05,2: 218-81. --, I898a. "Analisi della
teoria dei vettori". Repr. in 05,3: 187-2°7. --, I90oa. "Formules de
logique mathematique". Repr. in 05,2: 304-61. W. V. O. Quine, 1966a.
"Russell's Ontological Development", Journal of Philosophy, 63:
657-67. Repr. in R. Schoenman, ed., Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the
Century (London: Allen and Unwin,1967). Resnik, M., I965a. "Frege's Theory
of Incomplete Entities", Philosophy of Science, 32: 329-41. E. A.
Rodriguez-Consuegra, 1987a. "Russell's Logicist Definitions of Numbers
1899-1913: Chronology and Significance", History and Philosophy of Logic,
8:141- 69. --, I988a. "Elementos logicistas en la obra de Peano y su
escuela", Mathesis, 4: 221-99· --, I989a. "Russell's Theory ofTypes,
1901-1910: Its Complex Origins in the Unpublished Manuscripts", History
and Philosophy ofLogic, 10: 131-64. --, I990a. "The Origins of Russell's
Theory of Descriptions according to the Unpublished Manuscripts", Russell,
n.s. 9: 99-132. --, I99Ia. The Mathematical Philosophy of BertrandRussell:
Origins and Development (Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhauser). --, I992a.
"A New Angle on Russell's 'Inextricable Tangle' over Meaning and
Denotation", Russell, n.s. 12 (1992): 197-207. Russell, B., I903a.
"On the Meaning and Denotation ofPhrases", Papers 4: 283- 96. --,
I905a. "The Existential Import of Propositions", Mind, 14: 398-401.
Repr. in I973a, pp. 98-103. --, I905b. "On Fundamentals", Papers 4:
359....,.413. --, I905c. "On Denoting", Mind, 14: 479-93. Repr. in
LK, pp. 41-56; Papers 4: 415-27. --, I905d "On Substitution".
Unpublished ms. (McMaster U., RAl 220.010940b). --, I906a. "On the
Substitutional Theory of Classes and Relations". In I973a, PP· 165-89· --,
I908a. "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory ofTypes", American
Journal of Mathematics, 30: 222-62. Repr. in LK, pp. 59-102. --, I973a. Essays
in Analysis, ed. D. Lackey (London: Allen & Unwin). Skosnik, 1972a.
"Russell's Unpublished Writings on Truth and Denoting", Russell, no.
7: 12-13. P. F. Strawson, 1950a. "On Referring". Repr. in Klemke
I970a, pp. 147-72. Tichy, P., I988a. The Foundations of Frege's Logic (Berlin:
de Gruyter). J. Walker, A Study o fFrege (Blackwell).
izzing: Athenian and Oxonian
dialectic.As Grice puts it, "Socrates, like us, was really trying to solve
linguistic puzzles."This is especially true in the longer dialogues of
Plato — the 'Republic' and the Laws'— where we learn quite a lot about
Socrates' method and philosophy, filtered, of course, through his devoted
pupil's mind.Some of the Pre-Socratics, who provide Plato and his master with
many of their problems, were in difficulties about how one thing could be two
things at once — say, a white horse. How could you say 'This is a horse
and this is white' without saying 'This one thing is two things'? Socrates
and Plato together solved this puzzle by saying that what was meant by
saying 'The horse is white' is that the horse partakes of the
eternal, and perfect, Form horseness, which was invisible but really more
horselike than any worldly Dobbin; and ditto about the Form whiteness: it was
whiter than any earthly white. The theory of Form covers our whole world
of ships and shoes and humpty-dumptys, which, taken all in all, are shadows —
approximations of those invisible, perfect Forms. Using the sharp tools in
our new linguistic chest, we can whittle Plato down to size and say that he
invented his metaphysical world of Forms to solve the problem of different
kinds of 'is'es -- what Grice calls the 'izz' proper and the 'izz' improper
('strictly, a 'hazz').You see how Grice, an Oxford counterpart of Plato, uses a
very simple grammatical tool in solving problems like this. Instead of
conjuring up an imaginary edifice of Forms, he simply says there are two
different types of 'is'es — one of predication and one of identity -- 'the izz'
and the 'hazz not.' The first, the 'izz' (which is really a 'hazz' -- it
is a 'hizz' for Socrates being 'rational') asserts a quality: this is
white.' The second 'hazz' points to the object named: 'This is a
horse.' By this simple grammatical analysis we clear away the rubble of
what were Plato's Forms. That's why an Oxford philosopher loves Aristotle
-- and his Athenian dialectic -- (Plato worked in suburbia, The Academy) -- who
often, when defining a thing — for example, 'virtue' — asked himself, 'Does the
definition square with the ordinary views (ta legomena) of men?' But while
Grice does have this or that antecedent, he is surely an innovator in
concentrating MOST (if not all) of his attention on what he calls 'the
conversational implicaturum.'Grice has little patience with past
philosophers.Why bother listening to men whose problems arose from bad grammar?
(He excludes Ariskant here). At present, we are mostly preoccupied with
language and grammar. Grice would never dream of telling his tutee what he
ought to do, the kind of life he ought to lead.That was no longer an aim of
philosophy, he explained, but even though philosophy has changed in its aims
and methods, people have not, and that was the reason for the complaining
tutees -- the few of them -- , for the bitter attacks of Times' correspondents,
and even, perhaps, for his turning his back on philosophy. Grice came to
feel that Oxford philosophy was a minor revolutionary movement — at least when
it is seen through the eyes of past philosophers. I asked him about the
fathers of the revolution. Again he was evasive. Strictly speaking,
the minor revolution is fatherless, except that Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore,
and Vitters — all of them, as it happened, Cambridge University figures —
"are responsible for the present state of things at Oxford." under
‘conjunctum,’ we see that there is an alternative vocabulary, of ‘copulatum.’
But Grice prefers to narrow the use of ‘copula’ to izzing’ and ‘hazzing.’ Oddly,
Grice sees izzing as a ‘predicate,’ and symbolises it as Ixy. While he prefers
‘x izzes y,’ he also uses ‘x izz y.’ Under izzing comes Grice’s discussion of
essential predicate, essence, and substance qua predicabilia (secondary
substance). As opposed to ‘hazzing,’ which covers all the ‘ta sumbebeka,’ or
‘accidentia.’ Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle on the multiplicity of ‘being.’”
jacobi: man of letters,
popular novelist, and author of several influential philosophical works. His “Ueber
die Lehre des Spinoza” precipitates a dispute with Mendelssohn on Lessing’s
alleged pantheism. The ensuing Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy)
focused attention on the apparent conflict between human freedom and any
systematic, philosophical interpretation of reality. In the appendix to his
David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus (“David Hume on
Belief, or Idealism and Realism,” 1787), Jacobi scrutinized the new
transcendental philosophy of Kant, and subjected Kant’s remarks concerning
“things-in-themselves” to devastating criticism, observing that, though one
could not enter the critical philosophy without presupposing the existence of
things-in-themselves, such a belief is incompatible with the tenets of that
philosophy. This criticism deeply influenced the efforts of post-Kantians
(e.g., Fichte) to improve transcendental idealism. In 1799, in an “open letter”
to Fichte, Jacobi criticized philosophy in general and transcendental idealism
in particular as “nihilism.” Jacobi espoused a fideistic variety of direct
realism and characterized his own standpoint as one of “nonknowing.” Employing
the arguments of “Humean skepticism,” he defended the necessity of a “leap of
faith,” not merely in morality and religion, but in every area of human life.
Jacobi’s criticisms of reason and of science profoundly influenced German
Romanticism. Near the end of his career he entered bitter public controversies
with Hegel and Schelling concerning the relationship between faith and
knowledge.
james: w. New-World philosopher,
psychologist, and one of the founders of pragmatism. He was born in New York,
the oldest of five children and elder brother of the novelist Henry James and
diarist Alice James. Their father, Henry James, Sr., was an unorthodox
religious philosopher, deeply influenced by the thought of Swedenborg, some of
which seeped into William’s later fascination with psychical research. The
James family relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the father insisted on
his children obtaining an Old-World education, and prolonged trips to England
and the Continent were routine, a procedure that made William multilingual and
extraordinarily cosmopolitan. In fact, a pervasive theme in James’s personal
and creative life was his deep split between things New-World and Old-World
Europe: he felt like a bigamist “coquetting with too many countries.” As a
person, James is extraordinarily sensitive to psychological and bodily
experiences. He could be described as “neurasthenic” – afflicted with constant
psychosomatic symptoms such as dyspepsia, vision problems, and clinical
depression. In 1868 he recorded a profound personal experience, a “horrible
fear of my own existence.” In two 1870 diary entries, James first contemplates
suicide and then pronounces his belief in free will and his resolve to act on
that belief in “doing, suffering and creating.” Under the influence of the then
burgeoning work in experimental psychology, James attempted to sustain, on
empirical grounds, his belief in the self as Promethean, as self-making rather
than as a playing out of inheritance or the influence of social context. This
bold and extreme doctrine of individuality is bolstered by his attack on both
the neo-Hegelian and associationist doctrines. He held that both approaches
miss the empirical reality of relations as affectively experienced and the
reality of consciousness as a “stream,” rather than an aspect of an Absolute or
simply a box holding a chain of concepts corresponding to single sense
impressions. In 1890, James published his masterpiece, The Principles of
Psychology, which established him as the premier psychologist of the
Euro-American world. It was a massive compendium and critique of virtually all
of the psychology literature then extant, but it also claimed that the
discipline was in its infancy. James believed that the problems he had
unearthed could only be understood by a philosophical approach. James held only
one academic degree, an M.D. from Harvard, and his early teaching at Harvard
was in anatomy and physiology. He subsequently became a professor of
psychology, but during the writing of the Principles, he began to teach
philosophy as a colleague of Royce and Santayana. From 1890 forward James saw
the fundamental issues as at bottom philosophical and he undertook an intense
inquiry into matters epistemological and metaphysical; in particular, “the
religious question” absorbed him. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy was published in 1897. The lead essay, “The Will to Believe,” had
been widely misunderstood, partly because it rested on unpublished metaphysical
assumptions and partly because it ran aggressively counter to the reigning
dogmas of social Darwinism and neo-Hegelian absolutism, both of which
denigrated the personal power of the individual. For James, one cannot draw a
conclusion, fix a belief, or hold to a moral or religious maxim unless all
suggestions of an alternative position are explored. Further, some alternatives
will be revealed only if one steps beyond one’s frame of reference, seeks
novelty, and “wills to believe” in possibilities beyond present sight. The risk
taking in such an approach to human living is further detailed in James’s essays
“The Dilemma of Determinism” and “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,”
both of which stress the irreducibility of ambiguity, the presence of chance,
and the desirability of tentativeness in our judgments. After presenting the
Gifford Lectures in 1901– 02, James published his classic work, The Varieties
of Religious Experience, which coalesced his interest in psychic states both
healthy and sick and afforded him the opportunity to present again his firm
belief that human life is characterized by a vast array of personal, cultural,
and religious approaches that cannot and should not be reduced one to the
other. For James, the “actual peculiarities of the world” must be central to
any philosophical discussion of truth. In his Hibbert Lectures of 1909,
published as A Pluralistic Universe, James was to represent this sense of
plurality, openness, and the variety of human experience on a wider canvas, the
vast reach of consciousness, cosmologically understood. Unknown to all but a
few philosophical correspondents, James had been assiduously filling notebooks
with reflections on the mind–body problem and the relationship between meaning
and truth and with a philosophical exploration and extension of his doctrine of
relations as found earlier in the Principles. In 1904–05 James published a
series of essays, gathered posthumously in 1912, on the meaning of experience
and the problem of knowledge. In a letter to François Pillon in 1904, he
writes: “My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a
‘tychism,’ which represents order as being gradually won and always in the
making.” Following his 1889 essay “On Some Omissions of Introspective
Psychology” and his chapter on “The Stream of Thought” in the Principles, James
takes as given that relations between things are equivalently experienced as
the things themselves. Consequently, “the only meaning of essence is
teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological
weapons of the mind.” The description of consciousness as a stream having a
fringe as well as a focus, and being selective all the while, enables him to
take the next step, the formulation of his pragmatic epistemology, one that was
influenced by, but is different from, that of Peirce. Published in 1907,
Pragmatism generated a transatlantic furor, for in it James unabashedly states
that “Truth happens to be an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.” He
also introduces the philosophically notorious claim that “theories” must be
found that will “work.” Actually, he means that a proposition cannot be judged
as true independently of its consequences as judged by experience. James’s
prose, especially in Pragmatism, alternates between scintillating and limpid.
This quality led to both obfuscation of his intention and a lulling of his
reader into a false sense of simplicity. He does not deny the standard
definition of truth as a propositional claim about an existent, for he writes
“woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities
follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false
connexions.” Yet he regards this structure as but a prologue to the creative
activity of the human mind. Also in Pragmatism, speaking of the world as
“really malleable,” he argues that man engenders truths upon reality. This
tension between James as a radical empiricist with the affirmation of the
blunt, obdurate relational manifold given to us in our experience and James as
a pragmatic idealist holding to the constructing, engendering power of the
Promethean self to create its own personal world, courses throughout all of his
work. James was chagrined and irritated by the quantity, quality, and ferocity
of the criticism leveled at Pragmatism. He attempted to answer those critics in
a book of disparate essays, The Meaning of Truth (1909). The book did little to
persuade his critics; since most of them were unaware of his radically
empirical metaphysics and certainly of his unpublished papers, James’s
pragmatism remained misunderstood until the publication of Perry’s magisterial
two-volume study, The Thought and Character of William James (1935). By 1910,
James’s heart disease had worsened; he traveled to Europe in search of some
remedy, knowing full well that it was a farewell journey. Shortly after
returning to his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, he died. One month
earlier he had said of a manuscript (posthumously published in 1911 as Some
Problems in Philosophy), “say that by it I hoped to round out my system, which
is now too much like an arch only on one side.” Even if he had lived much
longer, it is arguable that the other side of the arch would not have appeared,
for his philosophy was ineluctably geared to seeking out the novel, the
surprise, the tychistic, and the plural, and to denying the finality of all
conclusions. He warned us that “experience itself, taken at large, can grow by
its edges” and no matter how laudable or seductive our personal goal, “life is
in the transitions.” The Works of William James, including his unpublished manuscripts,
have been collected in a massive nineteen-volume critical edition by Harvard
University Press (1975–88). His work can be seen as an imaginative vestibule
into the twentieth century. His ideas resonate in the work of Royce, Unamuno,
Niels Bohr, Husserl, M. Montessori, Dewey, and Wittgenstein. Refs.: H. P.
Grice, “William James’s England and what he learned there!”
James-Lange theory, the theory, put
forward by James and independently by Lange, an anatomist, that an emotion is
the felt awareness of bodily reactions to something perceived or thought
(James) or just the bodily reactions themselves (Lange). According to the more
influential version (James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind, 1884), “our natural way
of thinking” mistakenly supposes that the perception or thought causes the
emotion, e.g., fear or anger, which in turn causes the bodily reactions, e.g.,
rapid heartbeat, weeping, trembling, grimacing, and actions such as running and
striking. In reality, however, the fear or anger consists in the bodily
sensations caused by these reactions. In support of this theory, James proposed
a thought experiment: Imagine feeling some “strong” emotion, one with a
pronounced “wave of bodily disturbance,” and then subtract in imagination the
felt awareness of this disturbance. All that remains, James found, is “a cold
and neutral state of intellectual perception,” a cognition lacking in emotional
coloration. Consequently, it is our bodily feelings that emotionalize
consciousness, imbuing our perceptions and thoughts with emotional qualities
and endowing each type of emotion, such as fear, anger, and joy, with its
special feeling quality. But this does not warrant James’s radical conclusion
that emotions or emotional states are effects rather than causes of bodily
reactions. That conclusion requires the further assumption, which James shared
with many of his contemporaries, that the various emotions are nothing but
particular feeling qualities. Historically, the James-Lange theory led to
further inquiries into the physiological and cognitive causes of emotional
feelings and helped transform the psychology of emotions from a descriptive
study relying on introspection to a broader naturalistic inquiry.
Jansenism, a set of doctrines advanced by philosophers
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by a predestinarianism
that emphasized Adam’s fall (“il pecato originale di Adamo”) irresistible
efficacious grace (“grice”), limited atonement, election, and reprobation.
Addressing the issue of free will and grace left open by the Council of Trent, Cornelius
Jansen crystallized the seventeenth-century Augustinian revival, producing a
compilation of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian teachings (Augustinus). Propagated by
Saint Cyran and Antoine Arnauld (On Frequent Communion, 1643), adopted by the
nuns of Port-Royal, and defended against Jesuit attacks by Pascal (Provincial
Letters, 1656–57), Jansenism pervaded Roman Catholicism from Utrecht to Rome
for over 150 years. Condemned by Pope Innocent X (Cum Occasione, 1653) and
crushed by Louis XIV and the French clergy (the 1661 formulary), it survived
outside France and rearmed for a counteroffensive. Pasquier Quesnel’s
(1634–1719) “second Jansenism,” condemned by Pope Clement XI (Unigenitus,
1713), was less Augustinian, more rigorist, and advocated Presbyterianism and
Gallicanism.
jaspers: philosopher, one
of the main representatives of the existentialist movement (although he
rejected ‘existentialism’ as a distortion of the philosophy of existence). Jaspers
studied law and medicine at Heidelberg, Munich, Berlin, and Göttingen. He
concluded his studies with an M.D. (Homesickness and Crime) from Heidelberg. From
1908 until 1915 he worked as a voluntary assistant in the psychiatric clinic,
and published his first major work (Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 1913; General
Psychopathology, 1965). After his habilitation in psychology (1913) Jaspers
lectured as Privatdocent. In 1919 he published Psychologie der Weltanschauung
(“Psychology of Worldviews”). Two years later he became professor in
philosophy. Because of his personal convictions and marriage with Gertrud Mayer
(who was Jewish) the Nazi government took away his professorship in 1937 and
suppressed all publications. He and his wife were saved from deportation
because the American army liberated Heidelberg a few days before the fixed date
of April 14, 1945. In 1948 he accepted a professorship from the University of
Basel. As a student, Jaspers felt a strong aversion to academic philosophy.
However, as he gained insights in the fields of psychiatry and psychology, he
realized that both the study of human beings and the meaning of scientific
research pointed to questions and problems that demanded their own thoughts and
reflections. Jaspers gave a systematic account of them in his three-volume
Philosophie (1931; with postscript, 1956; Philosophy, 1969–71), and in the
1,100 pages of Von der Wahrheit (On Truth, 1947). In the first volume
(“Philosophical World-orientation”) he discusses the place and meaning of
philosophy with regard to the human situation in general and scientific
disciplines in particular. In the second (“Clarification of Existence”), he
contrasts the compelling modes of objective (scientific) knowledge with the
possible (and in essence non-objective) awareness of being in self-relation,
communication, and historicity, both as being oneself presents itself in
freedom, necessity, and transcendence, and as existence encounters its
unconditionality in limit situations (of death, suffering, struggle, guilt) and
the polar intertwining of subjectivity and objectivity. In the third volume
(“Metaphysics”) he concentrates on the meaning of transcendence as it becomes
translucent in appealing ciphers (of nature, history, consciousness, art, etc.)
to possible existence under and against the impact of stranding. His Von der
Wahrheit is the first volume of a projected work on philosophical logic (cf.
Nachlaß zur philosophischen Logik, ed. H. Saner and M. Hänggi, 1991) in which
he develops the more formal aspects of his philosophy as “periechontology”
(ontology of the encompassing, des Umgreifenden, with its modes of being there,
consciousness, mind, existence, world, transcendence, reason) and clarification
of origins. In both works Jaspers focuses on “existential philosophy” as “that
kind of thinking through which man tries to become himself both as thinking
makes use of all real knowledge and as it transcends this knowledge. This
thinking does not recognize objects, but clarifies and enacts at once the being
of the one who thinks in this way” (Philosophische Autobiographie, 1953). In
his search for authentic existence in connection with the elaboration of
“philosophical faith” in reason and truth, Jaspers had to achieve a thorough
understanding of philosophical, political, and religious history as well as an
adequate assessment of the present situation. His aim became a world philosophy
as a possible contribution to universal peace out of the spirit of free and
limitless communication, unrestricted open-mindedness, and unrelenting
truthfulness. Besides a comprehensive history of philosophy (Die groben
Philosophen I, 1957; II and III, 1981; The Great Philosophers, 2 vols., 1962,
1966) and numerous monographs (on Cusanus, Descartes, Leonardo da Vinci,
Schelling, Nietzsche, Strindberg, van Gogh, Weber) he wrote on subjects such as
the university (Die Idee der Universität, 1946; The Idea of the University,
1959), the spiritual situation of the age (Die geistige Situation der Zeit,
1931; Man in the Modern Age, 1933), the meaning of history (Vom Ursprung und
Ziel der Geschichte, 1949; The Origin and Goal of History, in which he
developed the idea of an “axial period”), the guilt question (Die Schuldfrage,
1946; The Question of German Guilt, 1947), the atomic bomb (Die Atombombe und
die Zukunft des Menschen, 1958; The Future of Mankind, 1961), German politics
(Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? 1966; The Future of Germany, 1967). He also
wrote on theology and religious issues (Die Frage der Entymythologisierung.
Eine Diskussion mit Rudolf Bultmann, 1954; Myth and Christianity, 1958; Der
philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, 1962; Philosophical Faith and
Revelation, 1967).
jevons: w. s., philosopher
of science. In economics, he clarified the idea of value, arguing that it is a
function of utility. Later theorists imitated his use of the calculus and other
mathematical tools to reach theoretical results. His approach anticipated the
idea of marginal utility, a notion basic in modern economics. Jevons regarded
J. S. Mill’s logic as inadequate, preferring the new symbolic logic of Boole.
One permanent contribution was his introduction of the concept of inclusive
‘or’, with ‘or’ meaning ‘either or, or both’. To aid in teaching the new logic
of classes and propositions, Jevons invented his “logical piano.” In opposition
to the confidence in induction of Mill and Whewell, both of whom thought, for
different reasons, that induction can arrive at exact and necessary truths,
Jevons argued that science yields only approximations, and that any perfect fit
between theory and observation must be grounds for suspicion that we are wrong,
not for confidence that we are right. Jevons introduced probability theory to
show how rival hypotheses are evaluated. He was a subjectivist, holding that
probability is a measure of what a perfectly rational person would believe
given the available evidence. H. P. Grice: “Jevons’s Aristotle.”
da Floris: Italian philosopher, the
founder the order of Ciscercian order of San Giovanni in Fiore (vide, Grice,
“St. John’s and the Cistercians”). He devoted the rest of his life to
meditation and the recording of his prophetic visions. In his major works Liber
concordiae Novi ac Veteri Testamenti (“Book of the Concordances between the New
and the Old Testament,” 1519), Expositio in Apocalypsim (1527), and Psalterium
decem chordarum (1527), Joachim illustrates the deep meaning of history as he
perceived it in his visions. History develops in coexisting patterns of twos
and threes. The two testaments represent history as divided in two phases
ending in the First and Second Advent, respectively. History progresses also
through stages corresponding to the Holy Trinity. The age of the Father is that
of the law; the age of the Son is that of grace, ending approximately in 1260; the
age of the Spirit will produce a spiritualized church. Some monastic orders
like the Franciscans and Dominicans saw themselves as already belonging to this
final era of spirituality and interpreted Joachim’s prophecies as suggesting
the overthrow of the contemporary ecclesiastical institutions. Some of his
views were condemned by the Lateran Council in 1215.
philoponus: Grecian philosopher and
theologian, who worked in Alexandria (“philoponus,” ‘workaholic’, just a
nickname). A Christian from birth, he was a pupil of the Platonist Ammonius,
and is the first Christian Aristotelian. As such, he challenged Aristotle on
many points where he conflicted with Christian doctrine, e.g. the eternity of
the world, the need for an infinite force, the definition of place, the
impossibility of a vacuum, and the necessity for a fifth element to be the
substance of the heavens. Johannes composed commentaries on Aristotle’s
Categories, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Meteorologics, and On the Soul; and
a treatise Against Proclus: On the Eternity of the World. There is dispute as
to whether the commentaries exhibit a change of mind (away from orthodox
Aristotelianism) on these questions.
Damascenus Chrysorrhoas: Greican theologian
and Eastern church doctor. Born of a well-to-do family in Damascus, he was
educated in Greek. He attained a high position in government but resigned under
the antiChristian Caliph Abdul Malek and became a monk about 700, living
outside Jerusalem. He left extensive writings, most little more than compilations
of older texts. The Iconoclastic Synod of 754 condemned his arguments in
support of the veneration of images in the three Discourses against the
Iconoclasts (726–30), but his orthodoxy was confirmed in 787 at the Second
Council of Nicaea. His Sources of Knowledge consists of a Dialectic, a history
of heresies, and an exposition of orthodoxy. Considered a saint from the end of
the eighth century, he was much respected in the East and was regarded as an
important witness to Eastern Orthodox thought by the West in the Middle Ages.
Poinsot: philosopher, studied at Louvain,
entered the Dominican order (1610), and taught at Piacenza. His most important
works are the Cursus philosophicus, a work on logic and natural philosophy; and
the Cursus theologicus (“Course of Theology,” 1637–44), a commentary on
Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. John considered himself a Thomist, but he modified
Aquinas’s views in important ways. The “Ars Logica,” the first part of the
Cursus philosophicus, is the source of much subsequent Catholic teaching in
logic. It is divided into two parts: the first deals with formal logic and
presents a comprehensive theory of terms, propositions, and reasoning; the
second discusses topics in material logic, such as predicables, categories, and
demonstration. An important contribution in the first is a comprehensive theory
of signs that has attracted considerable attention in the twentieth century
among such philosophers as Maritain, Yves Simon, John Wild, and others. An
important contribution in the second part is the division of knowledge
according to physical, mathematical, and metaphysical degrees, which was later
adopted by Maritain. John dealt with metaphysical problems in the second part
of the Cursus philosophicus and in the Cursus theologicus. His views are
modifications of Aquinas’s. For example, Aquinas held that the principle of
individuation is matter designated by quantity; John interpreted this as matter
radically determined by dimensions, where the dimensions are indeterminate. In contrast
to other major figures of the Spanish Scholasticism of the times, John did not
write much in political and legal theory. He considered ethics and political
philosophy to be speculative rather than practical sciences, and adopted a form
of probabilism. Moreover, when in doubt about a course of action, one may
simply adopt any pertinent view proposed by a prudent moralist.
salisbury: Grice: “One
should not confuse Salisbury with Salisbury.” English philosopher, tutored by
Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers in Paris. It is possible that during this time
he also studied grammar, rhetoric, and part of the quadrivium with Conches at
Chartres. After 1147 he was for a time a member of the Roman Curia, secretary
to Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, and friend of Thomas Becket. For his
role in Becket’s canonization, Louis VII of France rewarded him with the
bishopric of Chartres. Salisbury is a dedicated student of philosophy. In his
letters, biographies of Anselm and Becket, and Memoirs of the Papal Court, Salisbury
provides, in perhaps the best medieval imitation of classical Latin style, an
account of some of the most important ideas, events, and personalities of his
time. Neither these works nor his Polycraticus and “Metalogicon,” for which he
is most celebrated, are systematic philosophical treatises. The “Polycraticus” is,
however, considered one of the first medieval treatises to take up political
theory in any extended way. Salisbury maintains that if a ruler does not
legislate in accordance with natural moral law, legitimate resistance to him
can include his assassination. In the “Metalogicon,” on the other hand,
Salisbury discusses, in a humanist spirit, the benefits for a civilized world
of philosophical training based on Aristotle’s logic. He also presents current
views on the nature of the universale and, not surprisingly, endorses an
Aristotelian view of them as neither extramental entities nor mere expressum,
but a conceptus that nevertheless has a basis in reality insofar as they are
the result of the mind’s abstracting from extramental entities what those entities
have in common.
johnson: Grice, “Not to be
confused with Dr. Johnson – this one was as a philosopher should just be, an
MA, like me!” -- w. e., very English philosopher who lectured on psychology and
logic at Cambridge University. His Logic was published in three parts: Part I
(1921); Part II, Demonstrative Inference: Deductive and Inductive (1922); and
Part III, The Logical Foundations of Science (1924). He did not complete Part
IV on probability, but in 1932 Mind published three of its intended chapters.
Johnson’s other philosophical publications, all in Mind, were not abundant. The
discussion note “On Feeling as Indifference” (1888) deals with problems of
classification. “The Logical Calculus” (three parts, 1892) anticipates the
“Cambridge” style of logic while continuing the tradition of Jevons and Venn;
the same is true of treatments of formal logic in Logic. “Analysis of Thinking”
(two parts, 1918) advances an adverbial theory of experience. Johnson’s
philosophic influence at Cambridge exceeded the influence of these
publications, as one can see from the references to him by John Neville Keynes
in Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic and by his son John Maynard Keynes in
A Treatise on Probability. Logic contains original and distinctive treatments
of induction, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic.
Johnson’s theory of inference proposes a treatment of implication that is an
alternative to the view of Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. He
coined the term ‘ostensive definition’ and introduced the distinction between
determinates and determinables.
jung: founder of
analytical psychology, a form of psychoanalysis that differs from Freud’s
chiefly by an emphasis on the collective character of the unconscious and on
archetypes as its privileged contents. Jung, like Freud, was deeply influenced
by philosophy in his early years. Before his immersion in psychiatry, he wrote
several essays of explicitly philosophical purport. Kant was doubtless the
philosopher who mattered most to Jung, for whom archetypes were conceived as a
priori structures of the human psyche. Plato and Neoplatonists, Schopenhauer
and especially Nietzsche (to whose Zarathustra he devoted a seminar of several
years’ duration) were also of critical importance. Oddly, Jung was a close
reader of James (in German translation, of course), and his Psychological Types
(1921) – in addition to an extended discussion of nominalism versus realism – contains
a detailed treatment of Jamesian typologies of the self. Jung considered the
self to be an amalgamation of an “ectopsyche” – consisting of four functions
(intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking) that surround an ego construed
not as a singular entity but as a “complex” of ideas and emotions – and an
“endosphere” (i.e., consciousness turned inward in memory, affect, etc.). The
personal unconscious, which preoccupied Freud, underlies the endosphere and its
“invasions,” but it is in turn grounded in the collective unconscious shared by
all humankind. The collective unconscious was induced by Jung from his analysis
of dream symbols and psychopathological symptoms. It is an inherited archive of
archaic-mythic forms and figures that appear repeatedly in the most diverse
cultures and historical epochs. Such forms and figures – also called archetypes
– are considered “primordial images” preceding the “ideas” that articulate
rational thought. As a consequence, the self, rather than being autonomous, is embedded
in a prepersonal and prehistoric background from which there is no effective
escape. However, through prolonged psychotherapeutically guided
“individuation,” a slow assimilation of the collective unconscious into daily
living can occur, leading to an enriched and expanded sense of experience and
selfhood.
jurisprudence: McEvoy.
Hart,
Grice’s favourite prudens, iurisprudens: jurisprudence, the science or “knowledge”
of law; thus, in its widest usage, the study of the legal doctrines, rules, and
principles of any legal system, especially that which is valid at Oxford. More
commonly, however, ‘prudens,’ or ‘iurisprudens’ designates the study not of the
actual laws of particular legal systems, but of the general concepts and
principles that underlie a legal system or that are common to every such system
(general jurisprudence). Jurisprudence in this usage, sometimes also called the
philosophy of law – but Grice preferred, “philosophical jurisprudence”) may be
further subdivided according to the major focus of a particular study. Examples
include Roman and English historical jurisprudence (a study of the development
of legal principles over time, often emphasizing the origin of law in custom or
tradition rather than in enacted rules), sociological jurisprudence (an
examination of the relationship between legal rules and the behavior of
individuals, groups, or institutions), functional jurisprudence (an inquiry
into the relationship between legal norms and underlying social interests or
needs), and analytical jurisprudence (an investigation into the connections
among legal concepts). Within analytical jurisprudence the most substantial
body of thought focuses on the meaning of the concept of law itself (legal
theory) and the relationship between that concept and the concept of the moral.
Legal positivism, the view that there is no necessary connection between legal (a
legal right) and the moral (a moral right), opposes the natural law view that
no sharp distinction between these concepts can be drawn. Legal positivism is
sometimes thought to be a consequence of positivism’s insistence that legal
validity is determined ultimately by reference to certain basic social facts:
“the command of the sovereign” (Austin – “the other Austin, the benevolent
one!” -- Grice), the Grundnorm (Kelsen), or “the rule of re-cognition” (Hart).
These different positivist characterizations of the basic, law-determining FACT
yield different claims about the normative character of law, with classical
positivists (e.g., John Austin) insisting that legal systems are essentially
coercive, whereas modern positivists (e.g., Hans Kelsen) maintain that they are
normative. Disputes within legal theory often generate or arise out of disputes
about theories of adjudication, or how a judge does or should decide a case.
Mechanical jurisprudence, or formalism, the theory that all cases can be
decided solely by analyzing a legal concept, is thought by many to have
characterized judicial decisions and legal reasoning in the nineteenth century;
that theory became an easy target in the twentieth century for various forms of
legal ‘realism,’ the view (which Grice found pretentious) that law is better
determined by observing what a court and a citizen actually does than by
analyzing stated legal rules and concepts. Recent developments in the natural
law tradition also focus on the process of adjudication and the normative claim
that accompany the judicial declaration of legal rights and obligations. These
normative claim, the natural law theorist argues, show a legal right is a
species of a political right or a moral right. In consequence, one must either
revise prevailing theories of adjudication and abandon the social-fact theory
of law (New-World Dworkin), or explore the connection between legal theory and
the classical question of political theory. Under what condition does a legal
obligation, even if determined by an inter-subjetctive fact, create a genuine
political obligation (e.g., the meta-obligation to obey the law)? Other
jurisprudential notions that overlap topics in political theory include rule of
law, legal moralism, and civil disobedience. The disputes within legal theory
about the connection between law and morality should not be confused with
discussions of “natural law” within moral theory. In Grice’s meta-ethics,
so-called “natural law” denotes a particular view about the objective status of
a moral norm that has produced a considerable literature, extending from
ancient Grecian and Roman thought, through medieval theological writings, to
contemporary Oxonian ethical thought. Though the claim that one cannot sharply
separate law and morality is often made as part of a general natural law moral
theory, the referents of ‘natural law’ in legal and moral theory do not share
any obvious logical relationship. A moral theorist may conclude that there is
NO necessary connection between law and morality, thus endorsing a positivist
view of law, while consistently advocating a natural law view of morality
itself. Conversely, as Grice notes, a natural law legal theorist, in accepting
the view that there IS a connection (or priority) between law and morality (a
moral right being evaluational prior than a legal right, even if not
epistemically prior), might nonetheless endorse a substantive moral theory different
from that implied by a natural law moral theory. Refs.: G. P. Baker, “Meaning
and defeasibility,” in Festschrift for H. L. A. Hart, G. P. Baker, “Alternative mind styles,” in
Festschrift for H. P. Grice, H. L. A. Hart, “Grice” in “The nightmare,” H. P.
Grice, “Moral right and legal right: three types of conceptual priority.”
jury nullification, a jury’s ability, or
the exercise of that ability, to acquit a criminal defendant despite finding
facts that leave no reasonable doubt about violation of a criminal statute.
This ability is not a right, but an artifact of criminal procedure. In the
common law, the jury has sole authority to determine the facts, and the judge
to determine the law. The jury’s findings of fact cannot be reviewed. The term
‘nullification’ suggests that jury nullification is opposed to the rule of law.
This thought would be sound only if an extreme legal positivism were true –
that the law is nothing but the written law and the written law covers every
possible fact situation. Jury nullification is better conceived as a form of
equity, a rectification of the inherent limits of written law. In nullifying,
juries make law. To make jury nullification a right, then, raises problems of
democratic legitimacy, such as whether a small, randomly chosen group of
citizens has authority to make law.
de
jure:
Or titular, as opposed to ‘de facto.’ Each getting what he is due. Formal
justice is the impartial and consistent application of a Kantian principle,
whether or not the principle itself is just. Substantive justice is closely
associated with rights, i.e., with what individuals can legitimately demand of
one another or what they can legitimately demand of their government (e.g.,
with respect to the protection of liberty or the promotion of equality).
Retributive justice concerns when and why punishment is justified. Debate
continues over whether punishment is justified as retribution for past
wrongdoing or because it deters future wrongdoing. Those who stress retribution
as the justification for punishment usually believe human beings have
libertarian free will, while those who stress deterrence usually accept
determinism. At least since Aristotle, justice has commonly been identified
both with obeying law and with treating everyone with fairness. But if law is,
and justice is not, entirely a matter of convention, then justice cannot be
identified with obeying law. The literature on legal positivism and natural law
theory contains much debate about whether there are moral limits on what
conventions could count as law. Corrective justice concerns the fairness of
demands for civil damages. Commutative justice concerns the fairness of wages,
prices, and exchanges. Distributive justice concerns the fairness of the
distribution of resources. Commutative justice and distributive justice are
related, since people’s wages influence how much resources they have. But the
distinction is important because it may be just to pay A more than B (because A
is more productive than B) but just that B is left with more after-tax
resources (because B has more children to feed than A does). In modern
philosophy, however, the debate about just wages and prices has been
overshadowed by the larger question of what constitutes a just distribution of
resources. Some (e.g., Marx) have advocated distributing resources in
accordance with needs. Others have advocated their distribution in whatever way
maximizes utility in the long run. Others have argued that the fair
distribution is one that, in some sense, is to everyone’s advantage. Still
others have maintained that a just distribution is whatever results from the
free market. Some theorists combine these and other approaches.
iustificatum: “Late Latin; apparently
neither the Grecians nor Cicero saw the need for it!”– Grice. justification, a
concept of broad scope that spans epistemology and ethics and has as special
cases the concepts of apt belief and right action. The concept has, however,
highly varied application. Many things, of many different sorts, can be
justified. Prominent among them are beliefs and actions. To say that X is
justified is to say something positive about X. Other things being equal, it is
better that X be justified than otherwise. However, not all good entities are
justified. The storm’s abating may be good since it spares some lives, but it
is not thereby justified. What we can view as justified or unjustified is what
we can relate appropriately to someone’s faculties or choice. (Believers might
hence view the storm’s abating as justified after all, if they were inclined to
judge divine providence.) Just as in epistemology we need to distinguish
justification from truth, since either of these might apply to a belief in the
absence of the other, so in ethics we must distinguish justification from utility:
an action might be optimific but not justified, and justified but not
optimific. What is distinctive of justification is then the implied evaluation
of an agent (thus the connection, however remote, with faculties of choice). To
say that a belief is (epistemically) justified (apt) or to say that an action
is (ethically) justified (“right” – in one sense) is to make or imply a
judgment on the subject and how he or she has arrived at that action or belief.
Often a much narrower concept of justification is used, one according to which
X is justified only if X has been or at least can be justified through adducing
reasons. Such adducing of reasons can be viewed as the giving of an argument of
any of several sorts: e.g., conclusive, prima facie, inductive, or deductive. A
conclusive justification or argument adduces conclusive reasons for the
possible (object of) action or belief that figures in the conclusion. In turn,
such reasons are conclusive if and only if they raise the status of the
conclusion action or belief so high that the subject concerned would be well
advised to conclude deliberation or inquiry. A prima facie justification or
argument adduces a prima facie reason R (or more than one) in favor of the
possible (object of) action or belief O that figures in the conclusion. In
turn, R is a prima facie reason for O if and only if R specifies an advantage
or positive consideration in favor of O, one that puts O in a better light than
otherwise. Even if R is a prima facie reason for O, however, R can be outweighed,
overridden, or defeated by contrary considerations RH. Thus my returning a
knife that I promised to return to its rightful owner has in its favor the
prima facie reason that it is my legal obligation and the fulfillment of a
promise, but if the owner has gone raving mad, then there may be reasons
against returning the knife that override, outweigh, or defeat. (And there may
also be reasons that defeat a positive prima facie reason without amounting to
reasons for the opposite course. Thus it may emerge that the promise to return
the knife was extracted under duress.) A (valid) deductive argument for a
certain conclusion C is a sequence of thoughts or statements whose last member
is C (not necessarily last temporally, but last in the sequence) and each
member of which is either an assumption or premise of the argument or is based
on earlier members of the sequence in accordance with a sound principle of
necessary inference, such as simplification: from (P & Q) to P; or
addition: from P to (P or Q); or modus ponens: from P and (P only if Q) to Q.
Whereas the premises of a deductive argument necessarily entail the conclusion,
which cannot possibly fail to be true when the justice as fairness
justification 457 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 457 premises are all
true, the premises of an inductive argument do not thus entail its conclusion
but offer considerations that only make the conclusion in some sense more
probable than it would be otherwise. From the premises that it rains and that
if it rains the streets are wet, one may deductively derive the conclusion that
the streets are wet. However, the premise that I have tried to start my car on
many, many winter mornings during the two years since I bought it and that it
has always started, right up to and including yesterday, does not deductively
imply that it will start when I try today. Here the conclusion does not follow
deductively. Though here the reason provided by the premise is only an
inductive reason for believing the conclusion, and indeed a prima facie and
defeasible reason, nevertheless it might well be in our sense a conclusive
reason. For it might enable us rightfully to conclude inquiry and/or
deliberation and proceed to (action or, in this case) belief, while turning our
attention to other matters (such as driving to our destination).
Fides: -- justification by faith, the
characteristic doctrine of the Protestant Reformation that sinful human beings
can be justified before God through faith in Jesus Christ. ‘Being justified’ is
understood in forensic terms: before the court of divine justice humans are not
considered guilty because of their sins, but rather are declared by God to be
holy and righteous in virtue of the righteousness of Christ, which God counts
on their behalf. Justification is received by faith, which is not merely belief
in Christian doctrine but includes a sincere and heartfelt trust and commitment
to God in Christ for one’s salvation. Such faith, if genuine, leads to the
reception of the transforming influences of God’s grace and to a life of love,
obedience, and service to God. These consequences of faith, however, are
considered under the heading of sanctification rather than justification. The
rival Roman Catholic doctrine of justification – often mislabeled by Protestants
as “justification by works” – understands key terms differently. ‘Being just’
is understood not primarily in forensic terms but rather as a comprehensive
state of being rightly related to God, including the forgiveness of sins, the
reception of divine grace, and inner transformation. Justification is a work of
God initially accomplished at baptism; among the human “predispositions” for
justification are faith (understood as believing the truths God has revealed),
awareness of one’s sinfulness, hope in God’s mercy, and a resolve to do what
God requires. Salvation is a gift of God that is not deserved by human beings,
but the measure of grace bestowed depends to some extent on the sincere efforts
of the sinner who is seeking salvation. The Protestant and Catholic doctrines
are not fully consistent with each other, but neither are they the polar
opposites they are often made to appear by the caricatures each side offers of
the other.
Jus ad bellum, jus in bello: a set of
conditions justifying the resort to war (jus ad bellum) and prescribing how war
may permissibly be conducted (jus in bello). The theory is a Western approach
to the moral assessment of war that grew out of the Christian tradition
beginning with Augustine, later taking both religious and secular (including
legalist) forms. Proposed conditions for a just war vary in both number and
interpretation. Accounts of jus ad bellum typically require: (1) just cause: an
actual or imminent wrong against the state, usually a violation of rights, but
sometimes provided by the need to protect innocents, defend human rights, or
safeguard the way of life of one’s own or other peoples; (2) competent
authority: limiting the undertaking of war to a state’s legitimate rulers; (3)
right intention: aiming only at peace and the ends of the just cause (and not
war’s attendant suffering, death, and destruction); (4) proportionality:
ensuring that anticipated good not be outweighed by bad; (5) last resort:
exhausting peaceful alternatives before going to war; and (6) probability of
success: a reasonable prospect that war will succeed. Jus in bellorequires: (7)
proportionality: ensuring that the means used in war befit the ends of the just
cause and that their resultant good and bad, when individuated, be
proportionate in the sense of (4); and (8) discrimination: prohibiting the
killing of noncombatants and/or innocents. Sometimes conditions (4), (5), and
(6) are included in (1). The conditions are usually considered individually
necessary and jointly sufficient for a fully just war. But sometimes strength
of just cause is taken to offset some lack of proportion in means, and
sometimes absence of right intention is taken to render a war evil though not
necessarily unjust. Most just war theorists take jus ad bellum to warrant only
defensive wars. But some follow earlier literature and allow for just offensive
wars. Early theorists deal primarily with jus ad bellum, later writers with
both jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Recent writers stress jus in bello, with
particular attention to deterrence: the attempt, by instilling fear of
retaliation, to induce an adversary to refrain from attack. Some believe that
even though large-scale use of nuclear weapons would violate requirements of
proportionality and discrimination, the threatened use of such weapons can
maintain peace, and hence justify a system of nuclear deterrence.
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