plathegel
and ariskant
– Hegel, “one of the most influential and systematic of the idealists” (Grice),
also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion. Life
and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son
of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His
mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology
seminary or Stift attached to the at
Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and became
friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the
great genius of G. Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he
accepted a job as a tutor for a family in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797
for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the
freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to
establish himself in a position. In
1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the town of Jena, already widely known as the
home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few
years, he became a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays
had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture,
and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the G. Romantics
many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European
Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still
enthusiastically championed what he termed the principle of modernity,
“absolute freedom.” Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal
political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of
new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was among that
legion of G. intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority
of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and
legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena,
however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of
Philosophy, and came to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the
critical philosophy or “transcendental idealism” of Kant, and its legacy in the
work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work became much more
influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s
search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated
and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way,
was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness,
interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite
prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free,
self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and
other agents. In his early years at Jena especially before Schelling left in
1803, he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic
philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world
and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on
commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible,
principles. In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a
“Logic” and a “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit.” After 1803,
however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication,
what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of
its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books.
Working at a furious pace, he finished hedonistic paradox Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 365 AM 365 what would be eventually called The
Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil.
During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard
would give birth to his illegitimate son. Ludwig was born in February 1807. And
he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day
Napoleon’s armies captured Jena. It was certainly an unprecedented work. In
conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively
more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast,
heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology
to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there
is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether
it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem,
Hegel often invented his own striking language of “inverted worlds,” “struggles
to the death for recognition,” “unhappy consciousness,” “spiritual animal kingdoms,”
and “beautiful souls.” Continuing his
career at Jena in those times looked out of the question, so Hegel
accepted a job at Bamberg editing a newspaper, and in the following year began
an eight-year stint 180816 as headmaster and philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium
or secondary school at Nürnberg. During this period, at forty-one, he married
the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also wrote what is easily his most
difficult work, and the one he often referred to as his most important, a
magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which attempts to be a philosophical
account of the concepts necessary in all possible kinds of account-givings.
Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair in philosophy at the of Heidelberg, where he published the first
of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, his own
systematic account of the relation between the “logic” of human thought and the
“real” expression of such interrelated categories in our understanding of the
natural world and in our understanding and evaluation of our own activities. In
1818, he accepted the much more prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where
he remained until his death in 1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began
to exert a powerful influence over G. letters and intellectual life. In 1821,
in the midst of a growing political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he
published his controversial book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of
Right. His lectures at the were later
published as his philosophy of history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as
his history of philosophy. Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed
gradually, in response to a number of issues in philosophy and often in
response to historical events. Moreover, his language and approach were so
heterodox that he has inspired as much controversy about the meaning of his
position as about its adequacy. Hence any summary will be as much a summary of
the controversies as of the basic position. His dissatisfactions with the absence
of a public realm, or any forms of genuine social solidarity in the G. states
and in modernity generally, and his distaste with what he called the
“positivity” of the orthodox religions of the day their reliance on law,
scripture, and abstract claims to authority, led him to various attempts to
make use of the Grecian polis and classical art, as well as the early Christian
understanding of love and a renewed “folk religion,” as critical foils to such
tendencies. For some time, he also regarded much traditional and modern
philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless classifying that only contributed to
contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and confusion. These concerns remained with
him throughout his life, and he is thus rightly known as one of the first
modern thinkers to argue that what had come to be accepted as the central
problem of modern social and political life, the legitimacy of state power, had
been too narrowly conceived. There are now all sorts of circumstances, he
argued, in which people might satisfy the modern criterion of legitimacy and
“consent” to the use of some power, but not fully understand the terms within
which such issues are posed, or assent in an attenuated, resentful,
manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would experience no connection
between their individual will and the actual content of the institutions they
are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is as much alienation
Entfremdung as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the product of one’s
will appears “strange” or “alien,” “other,” and which results in much of modern
life, however chosen or willed, being fundamentally unsatisfying. However,
during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed. Most importantly,
philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the Hegelian drama. He no
longer regarded philosophy as some sort of self-undermining activity that
merely prepared one for some leap into genuine “speculation” roughly
Schelling’s position and began to champion a unique kind of comprehensive, very
determinate reflection on the interrelations among all the various classical
alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he also attempted to
understand the way in which such relations and transitions were also reflected
in the history of the art, politics, and religions of various historical
communities. He thus came to think that philosophy should be some sort of
recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere partiality, rather
than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive teaching, and an account
of the centrality of these continuously developing attempts in the development
of other human practices.Through understanding the “logic” of such a
development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications of such a rational
process in contemporary life, or at least with the potentialities inherent in
contemporary life, would be possible. In all such influences and developments,
one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position became clearer. For while Hegel
still frequently argued that the subject matter of philosophy was “reason,” or
“the Absolute,” the unconditioned presupposition of all human account-giving
and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the “whole” within which the
natural world and human deeds were “parts,” he also always construed this claim
to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was the history of human
experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of human change and
development, understood by Hegel to be the collective self-education of the
human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy the more traditional
ideals because, in one of his most famous phrases, “what is actual is
rational,” or because some full account could be given of the logic or
teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and political
changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves that the
way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite or
contingent, but is “identical” with “what there is, in truth.” This identity
theory or Absolute Knowledgemeans that we will then be able to be “at home” in
the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to
understand, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang
together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The way it all hangs
together is, finally, “due to us,” in some collective and historical and
“logical” sense. In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion
lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself
would be over. Several elements in this general position have inspired a good
deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had
to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought:
the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption
means, for example, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to
other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into
existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With
respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common
tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are
also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming
such beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is
simply a consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by
individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the
priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or
Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the
assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be
“coming to self-consciousness” about itself, and this required that he argue
against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual
will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the
formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular
intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance
that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a
“logic” of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at self-knowledge
resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute Spirit, by which he
either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt to know itself, or
the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman transcendence, or
full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance all such claims
about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or reifying such a
subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and thoughts of
individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on one another
even for their very identity, even while they maintain their independence, is
one of the best-known examples of Hegel’s attempt at a dialectical resolution
of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of past thought. Hegel
often argued that what appeared to be contraries in philosophy, such as
mind/body, freedom/determinism, idealism/materialism, universal/particular, the
state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such incompatible alternatives
only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete perspective within which the
oppositions were formulated. So, in one of his more famous attacks on such
dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could not be understood coherently
as some purely rational self-determination, independent of heteronomous
impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual opposition between reason and
sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued for the latter view and Hegel
regularly returned to such Kantian claims about the opposition of duty and
inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism. Hegel claimed that Kant’s
version of a rational principle, the “categorical imperative,” was so formal
and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding it could not coherently rule
in or rule out the appropriate actions, and that the “moral point of view”
rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to which no human agent
could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the dualisms of morality could
be overcome in ethical life Sittlichkeit, those modern social institutions
which, it was claimed, provided the content or true “objects” of a rational
will. These institutions, the family, civil society, and the state, did not
require duties in potential conflict with our own substantive ends, but were
rather experienced as the “realization” of our individual free will. It has
remained controversial what for Hegel a truly free, rational
self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining, our desire for
happiness and self-actualization, amounted to. Many commentators have noted
that, among modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly admired, was
as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a refusal to adopt
the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided against themselves.
In his most ambitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel went so far as to
claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be ultimately compatible
when thought together within some higher-order “Notion” Begriff that resolved or
“sublated” the opposition, but that one term in such opposition could actually
be said to imply or require its contrary, that a “positing” of such a notion
would, to maintain consistency, require its own “negating,” and that it was
this sort of dialectical opposition that could be shown to require a sublation,
or Aufhebung a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously means in G. ‘to
cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’. This claim for a dialectical
development of our fundamental notions has been the most severely criticized in
Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic conceptual
change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely develops
the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or position or
related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of Hegel’s
Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to categorize
anything that is, simply and immediately, as “Being,” is an attempt that both
“negates itself,” or ends up categorizing everything as “Nothing,” and then
that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order category of
“Becoming.” This analysis continues into an extended argument that purports to
show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately make use of
the distinctions of “essence” and “appearance,” and elements of syllogistic and
finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and the grand
design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of controversy.
Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused by the
popular association of the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” with
Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented in
1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and
were never used as terms of art by Hegel. Others have argued that the tensions
Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much broader
analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which positions
are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to the
empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to basic
conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also raised
questions about the logical relation between universal and particular implied
in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian claim about
the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations Kant had written that
“intuitions without concepts are blind”. Hegel charges that Kant did not draw
sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist claim, that he
should have completely rethought the traditional distinction between “what was
given to the mind” and “what the mind did with the given.” By contrast Hegel is
confident that he has a theory of a “concrete universal,” concepts that cannot
be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations of given
particulars, because they are required for particulars to Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 368
AM 368 be apprehended in the
first place. They are not originally dependent on an immediate acquaintance
with particulars; there is no such acquaintance. Critics wonder if Hegel has
much of a theory of particularity left, if he does not claim rather that
particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are only interrelations of
concepts, and in which the actual details of the organization of the natural
world and human history are deduced as conceptual necessities in Hegel’s
Encyclopedia. This interpretation of Hegel, that he believes all entities are
really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a single underlying mental
substance, and that this mind develops and posits itself with some sort of
conceptual necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a term of art coined by
Hermann Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half of the twentieth
century. It is a much-disputed reading. Such critics are especially concerned
with the implications of this issue in Hegel’s political theory, where the
great modern opposition between the state and the individual seems subjected to
this same logic, and the individual’s true individuality is said to reside in
and only in the political universal, the State. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel’s
political philosophy is often praised for its early identification and analysis
of a fundamental, new aspect of contemporary life the categorically distinct realm of political
life in modernity, or the independence of the “State” from the social world of
private individuals engaged in competition and private association “civil
society”. But, on the other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion of
these domains in the State, or that individuals could only be said to be free
in allegiance to a State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most
criticized aspects of his philosophy. Finally, criticisms also frequently
target the underlying intention behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long
insistence on finding some basic unity among the many fragmented spheres of
modern thought and existence, and his demand that this unity be articulated in
a discursive account, that it not be merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated
in edifying speculation. PostHegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of
any such intimations of a whole for modern experience, and have argued that,
with the destruction of the premodern world, we simply have to content
ourselves with the disconnected, autonomous spheres of modern interests. In his
lecture courses these basic themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the
basic institutions of cultural history. History itself is treated as
fundamentally political history, and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major
epochs of political history are claimed to be as they were because of the
internal inadequacies of past epochs, all until some final political
semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art is treated equally
developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through “classical,” to the most
intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic subjectivity, romantic art. The
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody these themes in some of the most
controversial ways, since Hegel often treats religion and its development as a
kind of picture or accessible “representation” of his own views about the
relation of thought to being, the proper understanding of human finitude and
“infinity,” and the essentially social or communal nature of religious life.
This has inspired a characteristic debate among Hegel scholars, with some
arguing that Hegel’s appropriation of religion shows that his own themes are
essentially religious if an odd, pantheistic version of Christianity, while
others argue that he has so Hegelianized religious issues that there is little
distinctively religious left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that
prominent in the post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following
his death, there was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the
history of law, on political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the
prominent academic defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of
these were interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with
traditional Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This
began to change with the work of “young Hegelians” such as D. F. Strauss
180874, Feuerbach 180472, Bruno Bauer 180982, and Arnold Ruge 180380, who
emphasized the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion,
rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary
political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the
productive activity of human spirit eventually focusing on labor rather than
intellectual and cultural life. Strauss himself characterized the fight as
between “left,” “center,” and “right” Hegelians, depending on whether one was
critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of
Hegelian Geist. The most famous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially
during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen
Jahrbücher 1844. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
369 AM
369 In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and
utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part
of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up
some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of
issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy.
The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were
Bosanquet, McTaggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in
many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be
a Hegelian claim for the “internally related” interconnection of all
particulars within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell
waged a hugely successful counterattack in the name of traditional empiricism
and what would be called “analytic philosophy” against such an enterprise and
in this tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel or what was left
of the historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions. In G.y, Hegel has
continued to influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes
itself simply called “Hegelian Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School, or
“critical theory” group especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. And he has
been extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a
brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel
in the 0s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty
and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but
his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human
selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices
and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism. Hegelian
themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in
“communitarianism” in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to
conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for
many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive
tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social
nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often
interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy.
heideggerianism: heideggerian implicaturum of “Nothing noths.” Grice
thought Heidegger was the greatest philosopher that ever lived. Heideggerianism:
Arendt, h. tuteed by Heidegger and Jaspers; fled to France in 3; and emigrated
in 1 to the United States, where she taught at various universities. Her major
works are The Origins of Totalitarianism 1, The Human Condition 8, Between Past
and Future 1, On Revolution 3, Crises of the Republic 2, and The Life of the
Mind 8. In Arendt’s view, for reasons established by Kant and deepened by
Nietzsche, there is a breach between being and thinking, one that cannot be
closed by thought. Understood as philosophizing or contemplation, thinking is a
form of egoism that isolates us from one another and our world. Despite Kant,
modernity remains mired in egoism, a condition compounded by the emergence of a
“mass” that consists of bodies with needs temporarily met by producing and
consuming and which demands governments that minister to these needs. In place
of thinking, laboring, and the administration of things now called democracy,
all of which are instrumental but futile as responses to the “thrown” quality
of our condition, Arendt proposed to those capable of it a mode of being,
political action, that she found in pronounced form in pre-Socratic Greece and
briefly but gloriously at the founding of the Roman and republics. Political action is initiation,
the making of beginnings that can be explained neither causally nor
teleologically. It is done in the space of appearances constituted by the
presence of other political actors whose re-sponses the telling of equally unpredictable stories
concerning one another’s actions
determine what actions are taken and give character to the acting
participants. In addition to the refined discernments already implied,
political action requires the courage to initiate one knows not what. Its
outcome is power; not over other people or things but mutual empowerment to
continue acting in concert and thereby to overcome egoism and achieve positive
freedom and humanity. Heidegger, Martin:
“the greatest philosopher that ever lived” – H. P. Grice. G. philosopher whose
early works contributed to phenomenology and existentialism e.g., Sartre and
whose later works paved the way to hermeneutics Gadamer and post-structuralism
Derrida and Foucault. Born in Messkirch in the Black Forest region, Heidegger
first trained to be a Jesuit, but switched to mathematics and philosophy in 1.
As an instructor at Freiburg , he worked with the founder of phenomenology,
Husserl. His masterwork, Sein und Zeit Being and Time, 7, was published while
he was teaching at Marburg . This work, in opposition to the preoccupation with
epistemology dominant at the time, focused on the traditional question of
metaphysics: What is the being of entities in general? Rejecting abstract
theoretical approaches to this question, Heidegger drew on Kierkegaard’s
religious individualism and the influential movement called
life-philosophy Lebensphilosophie, then
identified with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey
to develop a highly original account of humans as embedded in concrete
situations of action. Heidegger accepted Husserl’s chair at Freiburg in 8; in
3, having been elected rector of the , he joined the Nazi party. Although he
stepped down as rector one year later, new evidence suggests complicity with
the Nazis until the end of the war. Starting in the late thirties, his writings
started to shift toward the “antihumanist” and “poetic” form of thinking
referred to as “later Heidegger.” Heidegger’s lifelong project was to answer
the “question of being” Seinsfrage. This question asks, concerning things in
general rocks, tools, people, etc., what is it to be an entity of these sorts?
It is the question of ontology first posed by ancient Grecian philosophers from
Anaximander to Aristotle. Heidegger holds, however, that philosophers starting
with Plato have gone astray in trying to answer this question because they have
tended to think of being as a property or essence enduringly present in things.
In other words, they have fallen into the “metaphysics of presence,” which
thinks of being as substance. What is overlooked in traditional metaphysics is
the background conditions that enable entities to show up as counting or
mattering in some specific way in the first place. In his early works,
Heidegger tries to bring this concealed dimension of things to light by
recasting the question of being: What is the meaning of being? Or, put
differently, how do entities come to show up as intelligible to us in some
determinate way? And this question calls for an analysis of the entity that has
some prior understanding of things: human existence or Dasein the G. word for
“existence” or “being-there,” used to refer to the structures of humans that
make possible an understanding of being. Heidegger’s claim is that Dasein’s
pretheoretical or “preontological” understanding of being, embodied in its
everyday practices, opens a “clearing” in which entities can show up as, say,
tools, protons, numbers, mental events, and so on. This historically unfolding
clearing is what the metaphysical tradition has overlooked. In order to clarify
the conditions that make possible an understanding of being, then, Being and
Time begins with an analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger notes that traditional
interpretations of human existence have been one-sided to the extent that they
concentrate on our ways of existing when we are engaged in theorizing and
detached reflection. It is this narrow focus on the spectator attitude that
leads to the picture, found in Descartes, of the self as a mind or subject
representing material objects the
so-called subjectobject model. In order to bypass this traditional picture,
Heidegger sets out to describe Dasein’s “average everydayness,” i.e., our
ordinary, prereflective agency when we are caught up in the midst of practical
affairs. The “phenomenology of everydayness” is supposed to lead us to see the
totality of human existence, including our moods, our capacity for authentic
individuality, and our full range of involvements with the world and with
others. The analytic of Dasein is also an ontological hermeneutics to the
extent that it provides an account of how understanding in general is possible.
The result of the analytic is a portrayal of human existence that is in accord
with what Heidegger regards as the earliest Grecian experience of being as an
emerging-into-presence physis: to be human is to be a temporal event of
self-manifestation that lets other sorts of entities first come to “emerge and
abide” in the world. From the standpoint of this description, the traditional
concept of substance whether mental or
physical simply has no role to play in
grasping humans. Heidegger’s brilliant diagnoses or “de-structurings” of the
tradition suggest that the idea of substance arises only when the conditions
making entities possible are forgotten or concealed. Heidegger holds that there
is no pregiven human essence. Instead, humans, as self-interpreting beings,
just are what they make of themselves in the course of their active lives.
Thus, as everyday agency, Dasein is not an object with properties, but is
rather the “happening” of a life course “stretched out between birth and
death.” Understood as the “historicity” of a temporal movement or “becoming,”
Dasein is found to have three main “existentials” or basic structures shared by
every “existentiell” i.e., specific and local way of living. First, Dasein
finds itself thrown into a world not of its choosing, already delivered over to
the task of living out its life in a concrete context. This “facticity” of our
lives is revealed in the moods that let things matter to us in some way or
other e.g., the burdensome feelings of
concern that accompany being a parent in our culture. Second, as projection,
Dasein is always already taking some stand on its life by acting in the world.
Understood as agency, human existence is “ahead of itself” in two senses: 1 our
competent dealings with familiar situations sketch out a range of possibilities
for how things may turn out in the future, and 2 each of our actions is
contributing to shaping our lives as people of specific sorts. Dasein is
futuredirected in the sense that the ongoing fulfillment of possibilities in
the course of one’s active life constitutes one’s identity or being. To say that
Dasein is “being-toward-death” is to say that the stands we take our
“understanding” define our being as a totality. Thus, my actual ways of
treating my children throughout my life define my being as a parent in the end,
regardless of what good intentions I might have. Finally, Dasein is discourse
in the sense that we are always articulating
or “addressing and discussing”
the entities that show up in our concernful absorption in current
situations. These three existentials define human existence as a temporal
unfolding. The unity of these dimensions
being already in a world, ahead of itself, and engaged with things Heidegger calls care. This is what it means
to say that humans are the entities whose being is at issue for them. Taking a
stand on our own being, we constitute our identity through what we do. The
formal structure of Dasein as temporality is made concrete through one’s
specific involvements in the world where ‘world’ is used in the life-world
sense in which we talk about the business world or the world of academia.
Dasein is the unitary phenomenon of being-in-the-world. A core component of
Heidegger’s early works is his description of how Dasein’s practical dealings
with equipment define the being of the entities that show up in the world. In
hammering in a workshop, e.g., what ordinarily shows up for us is not a
hammer-thing with properties, but rather a web of significance relations shaped
by our projects. Hammering is “in order to” join boards, which is “for”
building a bookcase, which is “for the sake of” being a person with a neat
study. The hammer is encountered in terms of its place in this holistic context
of functionality the “ready-to-hand.” In
other words, the being of the equipment
its “ontological definition”
consists of its relations to other equipment and its actual use within
the entire practical context. Seen from this standpoint, the brute, meaningless
objects assumed to be basic by the metaphysical tradition the “present-at-hand” can show up only when there is a breakdown in
our ordinary dealings with things, e.g., when the hammer breaks or is missing.
In this sense, the ready-to-hand is said to be more primordial than the
material objects treated as basic by the natural sciences. It follows, then,
that the being of entities in the world is constituted by the framework of
intelligibility or “disclosedness” opened by Dasein’s practices. This clearing
is truth in the original meaning of the Grecian word aletheia, which Heidegger
renders as ‘un-concealment’. But it would be wrong to think that what is
claimed here is that humans are initially just given, and that they then go on
to create a clearing. For, in Heidegger’s view, our own being as agents of
specific types is defined by the world into which we are thrown: in my workshop,
I can be a craftsman or an amateur, but not a samurai paying court to a daimyo.
Our identity as agents is made possible by the context of shared forms of life
and linguistic practices of a public life-world. For the most part, we exist as
the “they” das Man, participants in the historically constituted “cohappening
of a people” Volk. The embeddedness of our existence in a cultural context
explains our inveterate tendency toward inauthenticity. As we become initiated
into the practices of our community, we are inclined to drift along with the
crowd, doing what “one” does, enacting stereotyped roles, and thereby losing
our ability to seize on and define our own lives. Such falling into public
preoccupations Heidegger sees as a sign that we are fleeing from the fact that
we are finite beings who stand before death understood as the culmination of
our possibilities. When, through anxiety and hearing the call of conscience, we
face up to our being-toward-death, our lives can be transformed. To be authentic
is to clear-sightedly face up to one’s responsibility for what one’s life is
adding up to as a whole. And because our lives are inseparable from our
community’s existence, authenticity involves seizing on the possibilities
circulating in our shared “heritage” in order to realize a communal “destiny.”
Heidegger’s ideal of resolute “taking action” in the current historical
situation no doubt contributed to his leap into politics in the 0s. According
to his writings of that period, the ancient Grecians inaugurated a “first
beginning” for Western civilization, but centuries of forgetfulness beginning
with the Latinization of Grecian words have torn us away from the primal
experience of being rooted in that initial setting. Heidegger hoped that,
guided by the insights embodied in great works of art especially Hölderlin’s
poetry, National Socialism would help bring about a world-rejuvenating “new
beginning” comparable to the first beginning in ancient Greece. Heidegger’s
later writings attempt to fully escape the subjectivism he sees dominating
Western thought from its inception up to Nietzsche. “The Origin of the Work of
Art” 5, for example, shows how a great work of art such as a Grecian temple, by
shaping the world in which a people live, constitutes the kinds of people that
can live in that world. An Introduction to Metaphysics 5 tries to recover the
Grecian experience of humans as beings whose activities of gathering and naming
logos are above all a response to what is more than human. The later writings
emphasize that which resists all human mastery and comprehension. Such terms as
‘nothingness’, ‘earth’, and ‘mystery’ suggest that what shows itself to us
always depends on a background of what does not show itself, what remains
concealed. Language comes to be understood as the medium through which
anything, including the human, first becomes accessible and intelligible.
Because language is the source of all intelligibility, Heidegger says that
humans do not speak, but rather language speaks us an idea that became central to
poststructuralist theories. In his writings after the war, Heidegger replaces
the notions of resoluteness and political activism with a new ideal of
letting-be or releasement Gelassenheit, a stance characterized by meditative
thinking, thankfulness for the “gift” of being, and openness to the silent
“call” of language. The technological “enframing” Gestell of our age encountering everything as a standing reserve
on hand for our use is treated not as
something humans do, but instead as a manifestation of being itself. The
“anti-humanism” of these later works is seen in the description of technology
the mobilization of everything for the sole purpose of greater efficiency as an
epochal event in the “history of being,” a way things have come-into-their-own
Ereignis rather than as a human accomplishment. The history or “sending”
Geschick of being consists of epochs that have all gone increasingly astray
from the original beginning inaugurated by the pre-Socratics. Since human
willpower alone cannot bring about a new epoch, technology cannot be ended by
our efforts. But a non-technological way of encountering things is hinted at in
a description of a jug as a fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and
Heidegger reflects on forms of poetry that point to a new, non-metaphysical way
of experiencing being. Through a transformed relation to language and art, and
by abandoning “onto-theology” the attempt to ground all entities in one supreme
entity, we might prepare ourselves for a transformed way of understanding
being.
hellenistic philosophy:
“Once the Romans defeated Greece, at Oxford we stop talking of ‘Greek’
philosophy, but ‘Hellenistic’ philosophy instead – since most Greeks were
brought to Rome as slaves to teach philosophy to their children” – Grice. Vide
“Roman philosophy” – “Not everybody knows all these Roman philosophers, so
that’s a good thing.” – H. P. Grice. Hellenistic philosophy is the
philosophical systems of the Hellenistic age 32330 B.C., although 31187 B.C.
better defines it as a philosophical era, notably Epicureanism, Stoicism, and
Skepticism. These all emerged in the generation after Aristotle’s death 322
B.C., and dominated philosophical debate until the first century B.C., during
which there were revivals of traditional Platonism and of Aristotelianism. The
age was one in which much of the eastern Mediterranean world absorbed Grecian
culture was “Hellenized,” hence “Hellenistic”, and recruits to philosophy
flocked from this region to Athens, which remained the center of philosophical
activity until 87 B.C. Then the Roman sack of Athens drove many philosophers
into exile, and neither the schools nor the styles of philosophy that had grown
up there ever fully recovered. Very few philosophical writings survive intact
from the period. Our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophers depends mainly on
later doxography, on the Roman writers Lucretius and Cicero both mid-first
century B.C., and on what we learn from the schools’ critics in later
centuries, e.g. Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch. ’Skeptic’, a term not actually
current before the very end of the Hellenistic age, serves as a convenient
label to characterize two philosophical movements. The first is the New
Academy: the school founded by Plato, the Academy, became in this period a largely
dialectical one, conducting searching critiques of other schools’ doctrines
without declaring any of its own, beyond perhaps the assertion however guarded
that nothing could be known and the accompanying recommendation of “suspension
of judgment” epoche. The nature and vivacity of Stoicism owed much to its
prolonged debates with the New Academy. The founder of this Academic phase was
Arcesilaus school head c.268 c.241; its most revered and influential
protagonist was Carneades school head in the mid-second century; and its most
prestigious voice was that of Cicero 10643 B.C., whose highly influential
philosophical works were written mainly from a New Academic stance. But by the
early first century B.C. the Academy was drifting back to a more doctrinal stance,
and in the later part of the century it was largely eclipsed by a second
“skeptic” movement, Pyrrhonism. This was founded by Aenesidemus, a pioneering
skeptic despite his claim to be merely reviving the philosophy of Pyrrho, a
philosophical guru of the early Hellenistic period. His neo-Pyrrhonism survives
today mainly through the writings of Sextus Empiricus second century A.D., an
adherent of the school who, strictly speaking, represents its post-Hellenistic
phase. The Peripatos, Aristotle’s school, officially survived throughout the
era, but it is not regarded as a distinctively “Hellenistic” movement. Despite
the eminence of Aristotle’s first successor, Theophrastus school head 322287,
it thereafter fell from prominence, its fortunes only reviving around the
mid-first century B.C. It is disputed how far the other Hellenistic
philosophers were even aware of Aristotle’s treatises, which should not in any
case be regarded as a primary influence on them. Each school had a location in
Athens to which it could draw pupils. The Epicurean school was a relatively
private institution, its “Garden” outside the city walls housing a close-knit
philosophical community. The Stoics took their name from the Stoa Poikile, the
“Painted Colonnade” in central Athens where they gathered. The Academics were
based in the Academy, a public grove just outside the city. Philosophers were
public figures, a familiar sight around town. Each school’s philosophical
identity was further clarified by its absolute loyalty to the name of its
founder respectively Epicurus, Zeno of
Citium, and Plato and by the polarities
that developed in interschool debates. Epicureanism is diametrically opposed on
most issues to Stoicism. Academic Skepticism provides another antithesis to
Stoicism, not through any positions of its own it had none, but through its
unflagging critical campaign against every Stoic thesis. It is often said that
in this age the old Grecian political institution of the city-state had broken
down, and that the Hellenistic philosophies were an answer to the resulting
crisis of values. Whether or not there is any truth in this, it remains clear
that moral concerns were now much less confined to the individual city-state
than previously, and that at an extreme the boundaries had been pushed back to
include all mankind within the scope of an individual’s moral obligations. Our
“affinity” oikeiosis to all mankind is an originally Stoic doctrine that
acquired increasing currency with other schools. This attitude partly reflects
the weakening of national and cultural boundaries in the Hellenistic period, as
also in the Roman imperial period that followed it. The three recognized
divisions of philosophy were ethics, logic, and physics. In ethics, the central
objective was to state and defend an account of the “end” telos, the moral goal
to which all activity was subordinated: the Epicureans named pleasure, the
Stoics conformity with nature. Much debate centered on the semimythical figure
of the wise man, whose conduct in every conceivable circumstance was debated by
all schools. Logic in its modern sense was primarily a Stoic concern, rejected
as irrelevant by the Epicureans. But Hellenistic logic included epistemology,
where the primary focus of interest was the “criterion of truth,” the ultimate
yardstick against which all judgments could be reliably tested. Empiricism was
a surprisingly uncontroversial feature of Hellenistic theories: there was
little interest in the Platonic-Aristotelian idea that knowledge in the strict
sense is non-sensory, and the debate between dogmatists and Skeptics was more
concerned with the question whether any proposed sensory criterion was
adequate. Both Stoics and Epicureans attached especial importance to prolepsis,
the generic notion of a thing, held to be either innate or naturally acquired
in a way that gave it a guaranteed veridical status. Physics saw an opposition
between Epicurean atomism, with its denial of divine providence, and the Stoic
world-continuum, imbued with divine rationality. The issue of determinism was
also placed on the philosophical map: Epicurean morality depends on the denial
of both physical and logical determinism, whereas Stoic morality is compatible
with, indeed actually requires, the deterministic causal nexus through which
providence operates.
helmholtz: philosopher known for groundbreaking work in the
philosophy of perception. Formally trained as a physician, he distinguished
himself in physics in 1848 as a codiscoverer of the law of conservation of
energy, and by the end of his life was perhaps the most influential figure in
G. physical research. Philosophically, his most important influence was on the
study of space. Intuitionist psychologists held that the geometrical structure
of three-dimensional space was given directly in sensation by innate
physiological mechanisms; Helmholtz brought this theory to severe empirical
trials and argued, on the contrary, that our knowledge of space consists of
inferences from accumulated experience. On the mathematical side, he attacked Kant’s
view that Euclidean geometry is the a priori form of outer intuition by showing
that it is possible to have visual experience of non-Euclidean space “On the
Origins and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” 1870. His crucial insight was that
empirical geometry depends on physical assumptions about the behavior of
measuring instruments. This inspired the view of Poincaré and logical
empiricism that the empirical content of geometry is fixed by physical
definitions, and made possible Einstein’s use of non-Euclidean geometry in
physics.
helvétius: philosopher
prominent in the formative phases of eighteenth-century materialism in France.
His De l’esprit 1758 was widely discussed internationally, but condemned by
the of Paris and burned by the
government. Helvétius attempted to clarify his doctrine in his posthumously
published De l’homme. Following Locke’s criticism of the innate ideas,
Helvétius stressed the function of experience in our acquisition of knowledge.
In accord with the doctrines of d’Holbach, Condillac, and La Mettrie, the
materialist Helvétius regarded the sensations as the basis of all our
knowledge. Only by comparison, abstraction, and combination of sensations do we
reach the level of concepts. Peculiar to Helvétius, however, is the stress on the
social determinations of our knowledge. Specific interests and passions are the
starting point of all our striving for knowledge. Egoism is the spring of our
desires and actions. The civil laws of the enlightened state enabled egoism to
be transformed into social competition and thereby diverted toward public
benefits. Like his materialist contemporary d’Holbach and later Condorcet,
Helvétius sharply criticized the social function of the church. Priests, he
claimed, provided society with wrong moral ideas. He demanded a thorough reform
of the educational system for the purpose of individual and social
emancipation. In contrast to the teachings of Rousseau, Helvétius praised the
further development of science, art, and industry as instruments for the historical
progress of mankind. The ideal society consists of enlightened because
well-educated citizens living in comfortable and even moderately luxurious
circumstances. All people should participate in the search for truth, by means
of public debates and discussions. Truth is equated with the moral good.
Helvétius had some influence on Marxist historical materialism.
hempel: eminent
philosopher of science associated with the Vienna Circle of logical empiricist
philosophers in the early 0s, before his emigration to the United States;
thereafter he became one of the most influential philosophers of science of his
time, largely through groundbreaking work on the logical analysis of the
concepts of confirmation and scientific explanation. Hempel received his doctorate
under Reichenbach at the of Berlin in 4
with a dissertation on the logical analysis of probability. He studied with
Carnap at the of Vienna in 930, where he
participated in the “protocol-sentence debate” concerning the observational
basis of scientific knowledge raging within the Vienna Circle between Moritz
Schlick 26 and Otto Neurath 25. Hempel was attracted to the “radical
physicalism” articulated by Neurath and Carnap, which denied the foundational
role of immediate experience and asserted that all statements of the total
language of science including observation reports or protocol-sentences can be
revised as science progresses. This led to Hempel’s first major publication,
“On the Logical Positivists’ Theory of Truth” 5. He moved to the United States
to work with Carnap at the of Chicago in
738. He also taught at Queens and Yale
before his long career at Princeton 55. In the 0s he collaborated with his
friends Olaf Helmer and Paul Oppenheim on a celebrated series of papers, the
most influential of which are “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” 5 and
“Studies in the Logic of Explanation” 8, coauthored with Oppenheim. The latter
paper articulated the deductive-nomological model, which characterizes
scientific explanations as deductively valid arguments proceeding from general
laws and initial conditions to the fact to be explained, and served as the
basis for all future work on the subject. Hempel’s papers on explanation and
confirmation and also related topics such as concept formation, criteria of
meaningfulness, and scientific theories were collected together in Aspects of
Scientific Explanation 5, one of the most important works in postwar philosophy
of science. He also published a more popular, but extremely influential
introduction to the field, Philosophy of Natural Science 6. Hempel and Kuhn
became colleagues at Princeton in the 0s. Another fruitful collaboration
ensued, as a result of which Hempel moved away from the Carnapian tradition of
logical analysis toward a more naturalistic and pragmatic conception of science
in his later work. As he himself explains, however, this later turn can also be
seen as a return to a similarly naturalistic conception Neurath had earlier
defended within the Vienna Circle.
Heno-theism, allegiance to one supreme
deity while conceding existence to others; also described as monolatry,
incipient monotheism, or practical monotheism. It occupies a middle ground
between polytheism and radical monotheism, which denies reality to all gods
save one. It has been claimed that early Judaism passed through a henotheistic
phase, acknowledging other Middle Eastern deities albeit condemning their
worship, en route to exclusive recognition of Yahweh. But the concept of
progress from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism is a rationalizing
construct, and cannot be supposed to capture the complex development of any
historical religion, including that of ancient Israel.
Henry de Ghent: philosopher. After serving
as a church official at Tournai and Brugge, he taught theology at Paris from
1276. His major writings were “Summa quaestionum ordinariarum” and “Quodlibeta.”
He was the leading representative of the neoAugustinian movement at Paris in
the final quarter of the thirteenth century. His theory of knowledge combines
Aristotelian elements with Augustinian illuminationism. Heavily dependent on
Avicenna for his view of the reality enjoyed by essences of creatures esse
essentiae from eternity, he rejected both real distinction and real identity of
essence and existence in creatures, and defended their intentional distinction.
He also rejected a real distinction between the soul and its powers and
rejected the purely potential character of prime matter. He defended the
duality of substantial form in man, the unicity of form in other material
substances, and the primacy of will in the act of choice.
heraclitus fl. c.500 B.C., Grice
on Heraclitus: They told me,
Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,/They brought me bitter news to hear and
bitter tears to shed./I wept as I remembered how often you and I/Had tired the
sun with talking and sent him down the sky./And now that thou art lying, my
dear old Carian guest,/A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,/Still
are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;/For Death, he taketh all
away, but them he cannot take. Grecian philosopher. A transition figure between the
Milesian philosophers and the later pluralists, Heraclitus stressed unity in
the world of change. He follows the Milesians in positing a series of cyclical
transformations of basic stuffs of the world; for instance, he holds that fire
changes to water and earth in turn. Moreover, he seems to endorse a single
source or arche of natural substances, namely fire. But he also observes that
natural transformations necessarily involve contraries such as hot and cold,
wet and dry. Indeed, without the one contrary the other would not exist, and
without contraries the cosmos would not exist. Hence strife is justice, and war
is the father and king of all. In the conflict of opposites there is a hidden
harmony that sustains the world, symbolized by the tension of a bow or the
attunement of a lyre. Scholars disagree about whether Heraclitus’s chief view
is that there is a one in the many or that process is reality. Clearly the
underlying unity of phenomena is important for him. But he also stresses the
transience of physical substances and the importance of processes and
qualities. Moreover, his underlying source of unity seems to be a law of
process and opposition; thus he seems to affirm both the unity of phenomena and
the reality of process. Criticizing his predecessors such as Pythagoras and
Xenophanes for doing research without insight, Heraclitus claims that we should
listen to the logos, which teaches that all things are one. The logos, a
principle of order and knowledge, is common to all, but the many remain
ignorant of it, like sleepwalkers unaware of the reality around them. All
things come to pass according to the logos; hence it is the law of change, or
at least its expression. Heraclitus wrote a single book, perhaps organized into
sections on cosmology, politics and ethics, and theology. Apparently, however,
he did not provide a continuous argument but a series of epigrammatic remarks
meant to reveal the nature of reality through oracular and riddling language.
Although he seems to have been a recluse without immediate disciples, he may
have stirred Parmenides to his reaction against contraries. In the late fifth
century B.C. Cratylus of Athens preached a radical Heraclitean doctrine
according to which everything is in flux and there is accordingly no knowledge
of the world. This version of Heracliteanism influenced Plato’s view of the
sensible world and caused Plato and Aristotle to attribute a radical doctrine of
flux to Heraclitus. Democritus imitated Heraclitus’s ethical sayings, and in
Hellenistic times the Stoics appealed to him for their basic principles.
herbart: philosopher who
significantly contributed to psychology and the theory of education. Rejecting
the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, he attempted to establish a form of
psychology founded on experience. The task of philosophy is the analysis of
concepts given in ordinary experience. Logic must clarify these concepts,
Metaphysics should correct them, while Aesthetics and Ethics are to complement
them by an analysis of values. Herbart advocated a form of determinism in
psychology and ethics. The laws that govern psychological processes are
identical with those that govern the heavens. He subordinated ethics to
aesthetics, arguing that our moral values originate from certain immediate and
involuntary judgments of like and dislike. The five basic ideas of morality are
inner freedom, perfection, benevolence, law, and justice or equity. Herbart’s
view of education that it should aim at
producing individuals who possess inner freedom and strength of character was highly influential in nineteenth-century
Germany.
herder: philosopher, an
intellectual and literary figure central to the transition from the G. Enlightenment
to Romanticism. He was born in East Prussia and received an early classical
education. About 1762, while studying theology at the of Königsberg, he came under the influence of
Kant. He also began a lifelong friendship with Hamann, who especially
stimulated his interests in the interrelations among language, culture, and
history. After ordination as a Lutheran minister in 1765, he began his
association with the Berlin Academy, earning its prestigious “prize” for his
“Essay on the Origin of Language” 1772. In 1776 he was appointed
Generalsuperintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar through the intercession
of Goethe. He was then able to focus his intellectual and literary powers on
most of the major issues of his time. Of particular note are his contributions
to psychology in Of the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul 1778; to the
philosophy of history and culture in Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of
Mankind 178491, perhaps his most influential work; and to philosophy in Understanding
and Experience 1799, which contains his extensive Metakritik of Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason. Herder was an intellectual maverick and provocateur, writing
when the Enlightenment conception of reason was in decline but before its
limited defense by Kant or its total rejection by Romanticism had become
entrenched in the G.-speaking world. Rejecting any rational system, Herder’s
thought is best viewed as a mosaic of certain ideas that reemerge in various
guises throughout his writings. Because of these features, Herder’s thought has
been compared with that of Rousseau. Herder’s philosophy can be described as
involving elements of naturalism, organicism, and vitalism. He rejected
philosophical explanations, appealing to the supernatural or divine, such as
the concept of the “immortal soul” in psychology, a “divine origin” of
language, or “providence” in history. He sought to discern an underlying
primordial force to account for the psychological unity of the various
“faculties.” He viewed this natural tendency toward “organic formation” as also
operative in language and culture, and as ultimately manifested in the dynamic
development of the various cultures in the form of a universal history.
Finally, he often wrote in a way that suggested the dynamic process of life
itself as the basic metaphor undergirding his thought. His influence can be
traced through Humboldt into later linguistics and through Schelling and Hegel
in the philosophy of history and later G. historicism. He anticipated elements
of vitalism in Schopenhauer and Bergson.
interpretatum:
h
“While ‘heremneia’ sounds poetic and sweet, ‘interpretatio’ sounds thomistic
and rough!” – H. P. Grice. “Plus ‘hermeneia is metaphorical.’ hermeneia: hermeneutics,
the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that
starts with questions of interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly
with interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance
in its historical development and finally became a philosophical position in
twentieth-century G. philosophy. There are two competing positions in
hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Dilthey and sees interpretation or
Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows
Heidegger and sees it as an “ontological event,” an interaction between
interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood.
Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native “really”
meant is a typical problem for the first approach. The interpretation of the
law provides an example for the second view, since the process of applying the
law inevitably transforms it. In general, hermeneutics is the analysis of this
process and its conditions of possibility. It has typically focused on the interpretation
of ancient texts and distant peoples, cases where the unproblematic everyday
understanding and communication cannot be assumed. Schleiermacher’s analysis of
understanding and expression related to texts and speech marks the beginning of
hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific methodology. This emphasis on
methodology continues in nineteenth-century historicism and culminates in
Dilthey’s attempt to ground the human sciences in a theory of interpretation,
understood as the imaginative but publicly verifiable reenactment of the
subjective experiences of others. Such a method of interpretation reveals the
possibility of an objective knowledge of human beings not accessible to
empiricist inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology for the human sciences.
One result of the analysis of interpretation in the nineteenth century was the
recognition of “the hermeneutic circle,” first developed by Schleiermacher. The
circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of parts to the whole: the
interpretation of each part is dependent on the interpretation of the whole.
But interpretation is circular in a stronger sense: if every interpretation is
itself based on interpretation, then the circle of interpretation, even if it
is not vicious, cannot be escaped. Twentieth-century hermeneutics advanced by
Heidegger and Gadamer radicalize this notion of the hermeneutic circle, seeing
it as a feature of all knowledge and activity. Hermeneutics is then no longer
the method of the human sciences but “universal,” and interpretation is part of
the finite and situated character of all human knowing. “Philosophical
hermeneutics” therefore criticizes Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology
and Enlightenment universalism in ethics, seeing science as a cultural practice
and prejudices or prejudgments as ineliminable in all judgments. Positively, it
emphasizes understanding as continuing a historical tradition, as well as
dialogical openness, in which prejudices are challenged and horizons
broadened.
hermetism, also hermeticism, a
philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that
human salvation depends on revealed knowledge gnosis of God and of the human
and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian
version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth
century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Grecian and Latin is a
product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the same literature
exist in Grecian, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of
a discovery made at Nag Hammadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record
hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the same period but
surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy,
magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early
Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iamblichus, pagan
philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic figure,
Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had its
first large effects in the Latin West among the twelfth-century Platonists of
Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the
Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of
Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Grecian discourses in the main body
of the Corpus Hermeticum as distinct from the many Grecian fragments preserved
by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino. Ficino was willing to move so quickly to
Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the
“ancient theology” prisca theologia, a tradition of pagan revelation that ran
parallel to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through
Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he
called the Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which
he theorized later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original
motivation. The Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance,
when Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre
d’Etaples, Symphorien Champier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco
Patrizi, and others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed
Grecian Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the
nineteenth century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline
in the reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614
that the Grecian Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of
primeval Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion
with most Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of
the ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures
even later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science,
so Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd,
whose opponents Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi turned away from the Hermetica and
similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth
century, only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom,
but he was then rediscovered by G. students of Christianity and Hellenistic
religions, especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 4.
The ancient Hermetica are now read in the 654 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J.
Festugière.
Herzen: philosopher, he moved in his
philosophy of history from an early Hegelian rationalism to a “philosophy of
contingency,” stressing the “whirlwind of chances” in nature and in human life
and the “tousled improvisation” of the historical process. He rejected
determinism, emphasizing the “phenomenological fact” of the experienced “sense
of freedom.” Anticipating the Dostoevsky of the “Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor,” he offered an original analysis of the “escape from freedom” and
the cleaving to moral and political authority, and sketched a curiously
contemporary-sounding “emotivist” ethical theory. After 1848, disillusioned
with “bourgeois” Europe and its “selfenclosed individualism,” but equally
disillusioned with what he had come to see as the bourgeois ideal of many
European socialists, Herzen turned to the Russian peasant and the peasant
village commune as offering the best hope for a humane development of society.
In this “Russian socialism” he anticipated a central doctrine of the Russian
populists of the 1870s. Herzen stood alone in resisting the common tendency of
such otherwise different thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, and J. S. Mill to
undervalue the historical present, to overvalue the historical future, and to
treat actual persons as means in the service of remote, merely possible
historical ends. Herzen’s own central emphasis fell powerfully and consistently
on the freedom, independence, and non-instrumentalizable value of living
persons. And he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries that there are
no future persons, that it is only in the present that free human individuals
live and move and have their being.
heuristics, a rule or
solution adopted to reduce the complexity of computational tasks, thereby
reducing demands on resources such as time, memory, and attention. If an
algorithm is a procedure yielding a correct solution to a problem, then a
heuristic procedure may not reach a solution even if there is one, or may
provide an incorrect answer. The reliability of heuristics varies between
domains; the resulting biases are predictable, and provide information about
system design. Chess, for example, is a finite game with a finite number of
possible positions, but there is no known algorithm for finding the optimal
move. Computers and humans both employ heuristics in evaluating intermediate
moves, relying on a few significant cues to game quality, such as safety of the
king, material balance, and center control. The use of these criteria
simplifies the problem, making it computationally tractable. They are heuristic
guides, reliable but limited in success. There is no guarantee that the result
will be the best move or even good. They are nonetheless satisfactory for
competent chess. Work on human judgment indicates a similar moral. Examples of
judgmental infelicities support the view that human reasoning systematically
violates standards for statistical reasoning, ignoring base rates, sample size,
and correlations. Experimental results suggest that humans utilize judgmental
heuristics in gauging probabilities, such as representativeness, or the degree
to which an individual or event resembles a prototypical member of a category.
Such heuristics produce reasonable judgments in many cases, but are of limited
validity when measured by a Bayesian standard. Judgmental heuristics are biased
and subject to systemic errors. Experimental support for the importance of
these heuristics depends on cases in which subjects deviate from the normative
standard.
habitus:
hexis
Grecian, from hexo, ‘to have’, ‘to be disposed’, a good or bad condition,
disposition, or state. The traditional rendering, ‘habit’ Latin habitus, is
misleading, for it tends to suggest the idea of an involuntary and merely
repetitious pattern of behavior. A hexis is rather a state of character or of
mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain
way. The term acquired a quasi-technical status after Aristotle advanced the
view that hexis is the genus of virtue, both moral and intellectual. In the
Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes hexeis from passions pathe and faculties dunamis
of the soul. If a man fighting in the front ranks feels afraid when he sees the
enemy approaching, he is undergoing an involuntary passion. His capacity to be
affected by fear on this or other occasions is part of his makeup, one of his
faculties. If he chooses to stay where his commanders placed him, this is due
to the hexis or state of character we call courage. Likewise, one who is
consistently good at identifying what is best for oneself can be said to
possess a hexis called prudence. Not all states and dispositions are
commendable. Cowardice and stupidity are also hexeis. Both in the sense of
‘state’ and of ‘possession’ hexis plays a role in Aristotle’s Categories.
tisberi -- Heytesbury: w. also
called Hentisberus, Hentisberi, Tisberi before 1313c.1372, English philosopher
and chancellor of Oxford . He wrote Sophismata “Sophisms”, Regulae solvendi
sophismata “Rules for Solving Sophisms”, and De sensu composito et diviso “On
the Composite and Divided Sense”. Other works are doubtfully attributed to him.
Heytesbury belonged to the generation immediately after Thomas Bradwardine and
Kilvington, and was among the most significant members of the Oxford
Calculators, important in the early developemnt of physics. Unlike Kilvington
but like Bradwardine, he appealed to mathematical calculations in addition to
logical and conceptual analysis in the treatment of change, motion,
acceleration, and other physical notions. His Regulae includes perhaps the most
influential treatment of the liar paradox in the Middle Ages. Heytesbury’s work
makes widespread use of “imaginary” thought experiments assuming physical
impossibilities that are yet logically consistent. His influence was especially
strong in Italy in the fifteenth century, where his works were studied widely
and commented on many times.
hierarchy, a division of mathematical
objects into subclasses in accordance with an ordering that reflects their
complexity. Around the turn of the century, analysts interested in the
“descriptive set theory” of the real numbers defined and studied two systems of
classification for sets of reals, the Borel (due to Emil Borel) and the G
hierarchies. In the 1940s, logicians interested in recursion and definability
(most importantly, Stephen Kleene) introduced and studied other hierarchies
(the arithmetic, the hyperarithmetic, and the analytical hierarchies) of reals
(identified with sets of natural numbers) and of sets of reals; the relations
between this work and the earlier work were made explicit in the 1950s by J.
Addison. Other sorts of hierarchies have been introduced in other corners of
logic. All these so-called hierarchies have at least this in common: they
divide a class of mathematical objects into subclasses subject to a natural
well-founded ordering (e.g., by subsethood) that reflects the complexity (in a
sense specific to the hierarchy under consideration) of the objects they
contain. What follows describes several hierarchies from the study of
definability. (For more historical and mathematical information see Descriptive
Set Theory by Y. Moschovakis, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980.) (1)
Hierarchies of formulas. Consider a formal language L with quantifiers ‘E’ and
‘D’. Given a set B of formulas in L, we inductively define a hierarchy that
treats the members of B as “basic.” Set P0 % S0 % B. Suppose sets Pn and Sn of
formulas have been defined. Let Pn!1 % the set of all formulas of the form Q1u1
. . . Qmumw when u1, . . . , um are distinct variables, Q1, . . . , Qm are all
‘E’, m M 1, and w 1 Sn. Let Sn+1 % the set of all formulas of that form for Q1,
. . . , Qm all ‘D’, and w 1 Pn. Here are two such hierarchies for languages of
arithmetic. Take the logical constants to be truthfunctions, ‘E’ and ‘D’. (i)
Let L0 % the first-order language of arithmetic, based on ‘%’, a two-place
predicate-constant ‘‹’, an individual-constant for 0, functionconstants for
successor, addition, and multiplication; ‘first-order’ means that bound
variables are all first-order (ranging over individuals); we’ll allow free
second-order variables (ranging over properties or sets of individuals). Let B
% the set of bounded formulas, i.e. those formed from atomic formulas using
connectives and bounded quantification: if w is bounded so are Eu(u ‹ t / w)
and Du(u ‹ t & w). (ii) Let L1 % the second-order language of arithmetic
(formed from L0 by allowing bound second-order variables); let B % the set of
formulas in which no second-order variable is bound, and take all u1, . . . ,
um as above to be second-order variables. (2) Hierarchies of definable sets.
(i) The Arithmetic Hierarchy. For a set of natural numbers (call such a thing
‘a real’) A : A 1 P0 n [ or S0 n ] if and only if A is defined over the
standard model of arithmetic (i.e., with the constant for 0 assigned to 0,
etc., and with the first-order variables ranging over the natural numbers) by a
formula of L0 in Pn [respectively Sn] as described in (1.i). Set D0 n % P0 n
Thus: In fact, all these inclusions are proper. This hierarchy classifies the
reals simple enough to be defined by arithmetic formulas. Example: ‘Dy x % y !
y’ defines the set even of even natural numbers; the formula 1 S1, so even 1 S0
1; even is also defined by a formula in P1; so even 1 P0 1, giving even 1 D0 1.
In fact, S0 1 % the class of recursively enumerable reals, and D0 1 % the class
of recursive reals. The classification of reals under the arithmetic hierarchy
reflects complexity of defining formulas; it differs from classification in
terms of a notion of degree of unsolvability, that reflecting a notion of comparative
computational complexity; but there are connections between these
classifications. The Arithmetic Hierarchy extends to sets of reals (using a
free second-order variable in defining sentences). Example: ‘Dx (Xx & Dy y
% x ! x)’ 1 S1 and defines the set of those reals with an even number; so that
set 1 S0 1.The Analytical Hierarchy. Given a real A : A 1 P1 n [S1 1] if and
only if A is defined (over the standard model of arithmetic with second-order
variables ranging over all sets of natural numbers) by a formula of L1 in Pn
(respectively Sn) as described in (1.ii); D1 n % P1 n 3 S1 n. Similarly for a
set of reals. The inclusions pictured above carry over, replacing superscripted
0’s by 1’s. This classifies all reals and sets of reals simple enough to have
analytical (i.e., second-order arithmetic) definitions.The subscripted ‘n’ in
‘P0 n’, etc., ranged over natural numbers. But the Arithmetic Hierarchy is
extended “upward” into the transfinite by the ramified-analytical hierarchy.
Let R0 % the class of all arithmetical reals. For an ordinal a let Ra!1 % the
class of all sets of reals definable by formulas of L1 in which second-order
variables range only over reals in Ra – this constraint imposes ramification.
For a limit-ordinal l, let Rl % UaThe above hierarchies arise in arithmetic.
Similar hierarchies arise in pure set theory; e.g. by transferring the
“process” that produced the ramified analytical hierarchy to pure set theory we
obtain the constructible hierarchy, defined by Gödel in his 1939 monograph on
the continuum hypothesis.
Grice’s formalists: Hilbert, D. – G.
mathematician and philosopher of mathematics. Born in Königsberg, he also
studied and served on the faculty there, accepting Weber’s chair in mathematics
at Göttingen in 1895. He made important contributions to many different areas
of mathematics and was renowned for his grasp of the entire discipline. His
more philosophical work was divided into two parts. The focus of the first,
which occupied approximately ten years beginning in the early 1890s, was the
foundations of geometry and culminated in his celebrated Grundlagen der
Geometrie (1899). This is a rich and complex work that pursues a variety of
different projects simultaneously. Prominent among these is one whose aim is to
determine the role played in geometrical reasoning by principles of continuity.
Hilbert’s interest in this project was rooted in Kantian concerns, as is
confirmed by the inscription, in the Grundlagen, of Kant’s synopsis of his
critical philosophy: “Thus all human knowledge begins with intuition, goes from
there to concepts and ends with ideas.” Kant believed that the continuous could
not be represented in intuition and must therefore be regarded as an idea of
pure reason – i.e., as a device playing a purely regulative role in the
development of our geometrical knowledge (i.e., our knowledge of the spatial
manifold of sensory experience). Hilbert was deeply influenced by this view of
Kant’s and his work in the foundations of geometry can be seen, in large part,
as an attempt to test it by determining whether (or to what extent) pure
geometry can be developed without appeal to principles concerning the nature of
the continuous. To a considerable extent, Hilbert’s work confirmed Kant’s view
– showing, in a manner more precise than any Kant had managed, that appeals to
the continuous can indeed be eliminated from much of our geometrical reasoning.
The same basic Kantian orientation also governed the second phase of Hilbert’s
foundational work, where the focus was changed from geometry to arithmetic and
analysis. This is the phase during which Hilbert’s Program was developed. This
project began to take shape in the 1917 essay “Axiomatisches Denken.” (The 1904
paper “Über die Grundlagen der Logik und Arithmetik,” which turned away from
geometry and toward arithmetic, does not yet contain more than a glimmer of the
ideas that would later become central to Hilbert’s proof theory.) It reached
its philosophically most mature form in the 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,”
the 1926 address “Die Grundlagen der Mathematik,” and the somewhat more popular
1930 paper “Naturerkennen und Logik.” (From a technical as opposed to a
philosophical vantage, the classical statement is probably the 1922 essay
“Neubegründung der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung.”) The key elements of the
program are (i) a distinction between real and ideal propositions and methods
of proof or derivation; (ii) the idea that the so-called ideal methods, though,
again, playing the role of Kantian regulative devices (as Hilbert explicitly
and emphatically declared in the 1925 paper), are nonetheless indispensable for
a reasonably efficient development of our mathematical knowledge; and (iii) the
demand that the reliability of the ideal methods be established by real (or
finitary) means. As is well known, Hilbert’s Program soon came under heavy
attack from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (especially the second), which have
commonly been regarded as showing that the third element of Hilbert’s Program
(i.e., the one calling for a finitary proof of the reliability of the ideal
systems of classical mathematics) cannot be carried out. Hilbert’s Program, a
proposal in the foundations of mathematics, named for its developer, the German
mathematician-philosopher David Hilbert, who first formulated it fully in the
1920s. Its aim was to justify classical mathematics (in particular, classical
analysis and set theory), though only as a Kantian regulative device and not as
descriptive science. The justification thus presupposed a division of classical
mathematics into two parts: the part (termed real mathematics by Hilbert) to be
regulated, and the part (termed ideal mathematics by Hilbert) serving as
regulator. Real mathematics was taken to consist of the meaningful, true
propositions of mathematics and their justifying proofs. These proofs –
commonly known as finitary proofs – were taken to be of an especially
elementary epistemic character, reducing, ultimately, to quasi-perceptual
intuitions concerning finite assemblages of perceptually intuitable signs
regarded from the point of view of their shapes and sequential arrangement.
Ideal mathematics, on the other hand, was taken to consist of sentences that do
not express genuine propositions and derivations that do not constitute genuine
proofs or justifications. The epistemic utility of ideal sentences (typically
referred to as ideal propositions, though, as noted above, they do not express
genuine propositions at all) and proofs was taken to derive not from their
meaning and/or evidentness, but rather from the role they play in some formal
algebraic or calculary scheme intended to identify or locate the real truths.
It is thus a metatheoretic function of the formal or algebraic properties
induced on those propositions and proofs by their positions in a larger
derivational scheme. Hilbert’s ideal mathematics was thus intended to bear the
same relation to his real mathematics as Kant’s faculty of pure reason was
intended to bear to his faculty of understanding. It was to be a regulative
device whose proper function is to guide and facilitate the development of our
system of real judgments. Indeed, in his 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,”
Hilbert made just this point, noting that ideal elements do not correspond to
anything in reality but serve only as ideas “if, following Kant’s terminology,
one understands as an idea a concept of reason which transcends all experience
and by means of which the concrete is to be completed into a totality.” The
structure of Hilbert’s scheme, however, involves more than just the division of
classical mathematics into real and ideal propositions and proofs. It uses, in
addition, a subdivision of the real propositions into the problematic and the
unproblematic. Indeed, it is this subdivision of the reals that is at bottom responsible
for the introduction of the ideals. Unproblematic real propositions, described
by Hilbert as the basic equalities and inequalities of arithmetic (e.g., ‘3 (
2’, ‘2 ‹ 3’, ‘2 ! 3 % 3 ! 2’) together with their sentential (and certain of
their bounded quantificational) compounds, are the evidentially most basic
judgments of mathematics. They are immediately intelligible and decidable by
finitary intuition. More importantly, they can be logically manipulated in all
the ways that classical logic allows without leading outside the class of real
propositions. The characteristic feature of the problematic reals, on the other
hand, is that they cannot be so manipulated. Hilbert gave two kinds of examples
of problematic real propositions. One consisted of universal generalizations
like ‘for any non-negative integer a, a ! 1 % 1 ! a’, which Hilbert termed
hypothetical judgments. Such propositions are problematic because their denials
do not bound the search for counterexamples. Hence, the instance of the (classical)
law of excluded middle that is obtained by disjoining it with its denial is not
itself a real proposition. Consequently, it cannot be manipulated in all the
ways permitted by classical logic without going outside the class of real
propositions. Similarly for the other kind of problematic real discussed by
Hilbert, which was a bounded existential quantification. Every such sentence
has as one of its classical consequents an unbounded existential quantification
of the same matrix. Hence, since the latter is not a real proposition, the
former is not a real proposition that can be fully manipulated by classical
logical means without going outside the class of real propositions. It is
therefore “problematic.” The question why full classical logical manipulability
should be given such weight points up an important element in Hilbert’s
thinking: namely, that classical logic is regarded as the preferred logic of
human thinking – the logic of the optimally functioning human epistemic engine,
the logic according to which the human mind most naturally and efficiently
conducts its inferential affairs. It therefore has a special psychological
status and it is because of this that the right to its continued use must be
preserved. As just indicated, however, preservation of this right requires
addition of ideal propositions and proofs to their real counterparts, since
applying classical logic to the truths of real mathematics leads to a system
that contains ideal as well as real elements. Hilbert believed that to justify
such an addition, all that was necessary was to show it to be consistent with
real mathematics (i.e., to show that it proves no real proposition that is
itself refutable by real means). Moreover, Hilbert believed that this must be
done by finitary means. The proof of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem in
1931 brought considerable pressure to bear on this part of Hilbert’s Program
even though it may not have demonstrated its unattainability.
“what-is-hinted”
-- hint hinting. Don’t expect Cicero
used this. It’s Germanic and related to ‘hunt,’ to ‘seize.’ As if you throw
something in the air, and expect your recipient will seize it. Grice spends
quite a long section in “Retrospective epilogue” to elucidate “Emissor E
communicates that p via a hint,” versus “Emissor E communicates that p via a
suggestion.” Some level of explicitness (vide candour) is necessary. If it is
too obscure it cannot be held to have been ‘communicated’ in the first place!
Cf. Holdcroft, “Some forms of indirect communication” for the Journal of
Rhetoric. Grice had to do a bit of linguistic botany for his “E implicates that
p”: To do duty for ‘imply,’ suggest, indicate, hint, mean, -- “etc.” indirectly
or implicitly convey.
hintikka, J. Non-Indo-European Finnish
philosopher who emigrated Finland early on to become the first Finnish Griceian
(vide his contribution in P. G. R. I. C. E.)
with contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology,
linguistics and philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and history of philosophy.
His work on distributive normal forms and model set techniques yielded an
improved inductive logic. Model sets differ from Carnap’s state-descriptions in
being partial and not complete descriptions of “possible worlds.” The
techniques simplified metatheoretical proofs and led to new results in e.g.
probability theory and the semantic theory of information. Their main
philosophical import nevertheless is in bridging the gap between proof theory
and model theory. Model sets that describe several possible “alternative”
worlds lead to the possible worlds semantics for modal and intensional logics.
Hintikka has used them as a foundation for the logic of propositional attitudes
(epistemic logic and the logic of perception), and in studies on individuation,
identification, and intentionality. Epistemic logic also provides a basis for
Hintikka’s logic of questions, in which conclusiveness conditions for answers
can be defined. This has resulted in an interrogative model of inquiry in which
knowledge-seeking is viewed as a pursuit of conclusive answers to initial “big”
questions by strategically organized series of “small” questions (put to nature
or to another source of information). The applications include scientific
discovery and explanation. Hintikka’s independence-friendly logic gives the
various applications a unified basis. Hintikka’s background philosophy and
approach to formal semantics and its applications is broadly Kantian with
emphasis on seeking-andfinding methods and the constitutive activity of the
inquirer. Apart from a series of studies inspired by Kant, he has written
extensively on Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Frege, and Wittgenstein.
Hintikka’s academic career has been not only in Finland, chiefly at the
University of Helsinki, but (especially) in the United States, where he has
held professorships at Stanford, Florida State, and (currently) Boston
University. His students and co-workers in the Finnish school of inductive
logic and in other areas include Leila Haaparanta (b.1954), Risto Hilpinen
(b.1943), Simo Knuuttila (b.1946), Martin Kusch (b.1959), Ilkka Niiniluoto
(b.1946), Juhani Pietarinen (b.1938), Veikko Rantala (b.1933), Gabriel Sandu
(b.1954), Matti Sintonen (b.1951), and Raimo Tuomela (b.1940). Hintikka set,
also called model set, downward saturated set, a set (of a certain sort) of
well-formed formulas that are all true under a single interpretation of their
non-logical symbols (named after Jaakko Hintikka). Such a set can be thought of
as a (partial) description of a logically possible state of affairs, or
possible world, full enough to make evident that the world described is indeed
possible. Thus it is required of a Hintikka set G that it contain no atomic
formula and its negation, that A, B 1 G if A 8 B 1 G, that A 1 G or B 1 G if A
7 B 1 G, and so forth, for each logical constant.
hippocrates, philosopher from Cos. Some
sixty treatises survive under his name, but it is doubtful whether he was the
author of any of them. The Hippocratic corpus contains material from a wide
variety of standpoints, ranging from an extreme empiricism that rejected all
grand theory (On Ancient Medicine) to highly speculative theoretical physiology
(On the Nature of Man, On Regimen). Many treatises were concerned with the
accurate observation and classification of diseases (Epidemics) rather than
treatment. Some texts (On the Art) defended the claims of medicine to
scientific status against those who pointed to its inaccuracies and conjectural
status; others (Oath, On Decorum) sketch a code of professional ethics. Almost
all his treatises were notable for their materialism and rejection of
supernatural “explanations”; their emphasis on observation; and their concern
with the isolation of causal factors. A large number of texts are devoted to
gynecology. The Hippocratic corpus became the standard against which later
doctors measured themselves; and, via Galen’s rehabilitation and extension of
Hippocratic method, it became the basis for Western medicine for two millennia.
historicism, the doctrine that knowledge
of human affairs has an irreducibly historical character and that there can be
no ahistorical perspective for an understanding of human nature and society.
What is needed instead is a philosophical explication of historical knowledge that
will yield the rationale for all sound knowledge of human activities. So
construed, historicism is a philosophical doctrine originating in the
methodological and epistemological presuppositions of critical historiography.
In the mid-nineteenth century certain German thinkers (Dilthey most centrally),
reacting against positivist ideals of science and knowledge, rejected
scientistic models of knowledge, replacing them with historical ones. They
applied this not only to the discipline of history but to economics, law,
political theory, and large areas of philosophy. Initially concerned with
methodological issues in particular disciplines, historicism, as it developed,
sought to work out a common philosophical doctrine that would inform all these
disciplines. What is essential to achieve knowledge in the human sciences is to
employ the ways of understanding used in historical studies. There should in
the human sciences be no search for natural laws; knowledge there will be
interpretive and rooted in concrete historical occurrences. As such it will be
inescapably perspectival and contextual (contextualism). This raises the issue
of whether historicism is a form of historical relativism. Historicism appears
to be committed to the thesis that what for a given people is warrantedly
assertible is determined by the distinctive historical perspective in which
they view life and society. The stress on uniqueness and concrete specificity
and the rejection of any appeal to universal laws of human development
reinforce that. But the emphasis on cumulative development into larger contexts
of our historical knowledge puts in doubt an identification of historicism and
historical relativism. The above account of historicism is that of its main
proponents: Meinecke, Croce, Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and Mannheim. But in
the twentieth century, with Popper and Hayek, a very different conception of
historicism gained some currency. For them, to be a historicist is to believe
that there are “historical laws,” indeed even a “law of historical
development,” such that history has a pattern and even an end, that it is the
central task of social science to discover it, and that these laws should
determine the direction of political action and social policy. They attributed
(incorrectly) this doctrine to Marx but rightly denounced it as pseudo-science.
However, some later Marxists (Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci) were historicists in
the original nonPopperian sense as was the critical theorist Adorno and hermeneuticists
such as Gadamer.
heterological: Grice and Thomson go heterological. Grice was
fascinated by Baron Russell’s remarks on heterological and its implicate. Grice
is particularly interested in Russell’s philosophy because of the usual Oxonian
antipathy towards his type of philosophising. Being an irreverent
conservative rationalist, Grice found in Russell a good point for
dissent! If paradoxes were always sets of propositions or arguments or
conclusions, they would always be meaningful. But some paradoxes are semantically
flawed and some have answers that are backed by a pseudo-argument employing a
defective lemma that lacks a truth-value. Grellings paradox, for instance,
opens with a distinction between autological and heterological words. An
autological word describes itself, e.g., polysyllabic is polysllabic, English
is English, noun is a noun, etc. A heterological word does not describe
itself, e.g., monosyllabic is not monosyllabic, Chinese is not Chinese, verb is
not a verb, etc. Now for the riddle: Is heterological heterological
or autological? If heterological is heterological, since it describes
itself, it is autological. But if heterological is autological, since it
is a word that does not describe itself, it is heterological. The common
solution to this puzzle is that heterological, as defined by Grelling, is not
what Grice a genuine predicate ‒ Gricing is!In other words, Is
heterological heterological? is without meaning. That does not mean that an
utterer, such as Baron Russell, may implicate that he is being very witty by
uttering the Grelling paradox! There can be no predicate that applies to all
and only those predicates it does not apply to for the same reason that there
can be no barber who shaves all and only those people who do not shave
themselves. Grice seems to be relying on his friend at Christ Church,
Thomson in On Some Paradoxes, in the same volume where Grice published his
Remarks about the senses, Analytical Philosophy, Butler (ed.), Blackwell,
Oxford, 104–119. Grice thought that Thomson was a genius, if ever there is
one! Plus, Grice thought that, after St. Johns, Christ Church was the second
most beautiful venue in the city of dreaming spires. On top, it is what makes
Oxford a city, and not, as villagers call it, a town. Refs.: the main source is
Grice’s essay on ‘heterologicality,’ but the keyword ‘paradox’ is useful, too,
especially as applied to Grice’s own paradox and to what, after Moore, Grice
refers to as the philosopher’s paradoxes. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
hobbes: “Hobbes is a
Griceian” – Grice. Grice was a member of the Hobbes Society -- Thomas. English
philosopher whose writings, especially the English version of Leviathan (1651),
strongly influenced all of subsequent English moral and political philosophy.
He also wrote a trilogy comprising De Cive (1642; English version,
Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1651), De Corpore
(On the Body, 1655), and De Homine (On Man, 1658). Together with Leviathan (the
revised Latin version of which was published in 1668), these are his major
philosophical works. However, an early draft of his thoughts, The Elements of
Law, Natural and Political(also known as Human Nature and De Corpore Politico),
was published without permission in 1650. Many of the misinterpretations of
Hobbes’s views on human nature come from mistaking this early work as
representing his mature views. Hobbes was influential not only in England, but
also on the Continent. He is the author of the third set of objections to
Descartes’s Meditations. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus was deeply
influenced by Hobbes, not only in its political views but also in the way it
dealt with Scripture. Hobbes was not merely a philosopher; he was mathematical
tutor to Charles II and also a classical scholar. His first published work was
a translation of Thucydides (1628), and among his latest, about a half-century
later, were translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Hobbes’s philosophical
views have a remarkably contemporary sound. In metaphysics, he holds a strong
materialist view, sometimes viewing mental phenomena as epiphenomenal, but
later moving toward a reductive or eliminative view. In epistemology he held a
sophisticated empiricism, which emphasized the importance of language for
knowledge. If not the originator of the contemporary compatibilist view of the
relationship between free will and determinism (see The Questions Concerning
Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 1656), he was one of the primary influences. He
also was one of the most important philosophers of language, explicitly noting
that language is used not only to describe the world but to express attitudes
and, performatively, to make promises and contracts. One of Hobbes’s
outstanding characteristics is his intellectual honesty. Though he may have
been timid (he himself claims that he was, explaining that his mother gave
birth to him because of fright over the coming of the Spanish Armada), his
writing shows no trace of it. During more than half his long lifetime he
engaged in many philosophical controversies, which required considerably more
courage in Hobbes’s day than at present. Both the Roman Catholic church and
Oxford University banned the reading of his books and there was talk not only
of burning his books but of burning Hobbes himself. An adequate interpretation
of Hobbes requires careful attention to his accounts of human nature, reason,
morality, and law. Although he was not completely consistent, his moral and
political philosophy is remarkably coherent. His political theory is often
thought to require an egoistic psychology, whereas it actually requires only
that most persons be concerned with their own self-interest, especially their
own preservation. It does not require that most not be concerned with other
persons as well. All that Hobbes denies is an undifferentiated natural
benevolence: “For if by nature one man should love another (that is) as man,
there could no reason be returned why every man should not equally love every
man, as being equally man.” His argument is that limited benevolence is not an
adequate foundation upon which to build a state. Hobbes’s political theory does
not require the denial of limited benevolence, he indeed includes benevolence
in his list of the passions in Leviathan: “Desire of good to another,
BENEVOLENCE, GOOD WILL, CHARITY. If to man generally, GOOD NATURE.”
Psychological egoism not only denies benevolent action, it also denies action
done from a moral sense, i.e., action done because one believes it is the
morally right thing to do. But Hobbes denies neither kind of action. But when
the words [’just’ and ‘unjust’] are applied to persons, to be just signifies as
much as to be delighted in just dealing, to study how to do righteousness, or
to endeavor in all things to do that which is just; and to be unjust is to neglect
righteous dealing, or to think it is to be measured not according to my
contract, but some present benefit. Hobbes’s pessimism about the number of just
people is primarily due to his awareness of the strength of the passions and
his conviction that most people have not been properly educated and
disciplined. Hobbes is one of the few philosophers to realize that to talk of
that part of human nature which involves the passions is to talk about human
populations. He says, “though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet
because we cannot distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting,
heeding, anticipating, subjugating, self-defending, ever incident to the most
honest and fairest conditioned.” Though we may be aware of small communities in
which mutual trust and respect make law enforcement unnecessary, this is never
the case when we are dealing with a large group of people. Hobbes’s point is
that if a large group of people are to live together, there must be a common
power set up to enforce the rules of the society. That there is not now, nor
has there ever been, any large group of people living together without such a
common power is sufficient to establish his point. Often overlooked is Hobbes’s
distinction between people considered as if they were simply animals, not
modified in any way by education or discipline, and civilized people. Though
obviously an abstraction, people as animals are fairly well exemplified by
children. “Unless you give children all they ask for, they are peevish, and cry,
aye and strike their parents sometimes; and all this they have from nature.” In
the state of nature, people have no education or training, so there is
“continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, [is]
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But real people have been brought
up in families; they are, at least to some degree, civilized persons, and how
they will behave depends on how they are brought up. Hobbes does not say that
society is a collection of misfits and that this is why we have all the trouble
that we do – a position congenial to the psychological egoist. But he does
acknowledge that “many also (perhaps most men) either through defect of mind,
or want of education, remain unfit during the whole course of their lives; yet
have they, infants as well as those of riper years, a human nature; wherefore
man is made fit for society not by nature, but by education.” Education and
training may change people so that they act out of genuine moral motives. That
is why it is one of the most important functions of the sovereign to provide
for the proper training and education of the citizens. In the current debate
between nature and nurture, on the question of behavior Hobbes would come down
strongly on the side of nurture. Hobbes’s concept of reason has more in common
with the classical philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle,
where reason sets the ends of behavior, than with the modern tradition stemming
from Hume where the only function of reason is to discover the best means to
ends set by the passions. For Hobbes, reason is very complex; it has a goal,
lasting selfpreservation, and it seeks the way to this goal. It also discovers
the means to ends set by the passions, but it governs the passions, or tries
to, so that its own goal is not threatened. Since its goal is the same in all
people, it is the source of rules applying to all people. All of this is
surprisingly close to the generally accepted account of rationality. We
generally agree that those who follow their passions when they threaten their
life are acting irrationally. We also believe that everyone always ought to act
rationally, though we know that few always do so. Perhaps it was just the
closeness of Hobbes’s account of reason to the ordinary view of the matter that
has led to its being so completely overlooked. The failure to recognize that
the avoidance of violent death is the primary goal of reason has distorted
almost all accounts of Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy, yet it is a
point on which Hobbes is completely clear and consistent. He explicitly says
that reason “teaches every man to fly a contra-natural dissolution [mortem
violentam] as the greatest mischief that can arrive to nature.” He continually
points out that it is a dictate of right reason to seek peace when possible
because people cannot “expect any lasting preservation continuing thus in the
state of nature, that is, of war.” And he calls temperance and fortitude
precepts of reason because they tend to one’s preservation. It has not
generally been recognized that Hobbes regarded it as an end of reason to avoid
violent death because he often talks of the avoidance of death in a way that
makes it seem merely an object of a passion. But it is reason that dictates
that one take all those measures necessary for one’s preservation; peace if
possible, if not, defense. Reason’s dictates are categorical; it would be a
travesty of Hobbes’s view to regard the dictates of reason as hypothetical
judgments addressed to those whose desire for their own preservation happens to
be greater than any conflicting desire. He explicitly deplores the power of the
irrational appetites and expressly declares that it is a dictate of reason that
one not scorn others because “most men would rather lose their lives (that I
say not, their peace) than suffer slander.” He does not say if you would rather
die than suffer slander, it is rational to do so. Hobbes, following Aristotle,
regards morality as concerned with character traits or habits. Since morality
is objective, it is only those habits that are called good by reason that are
moral virtues. “Reason declaring peace to be good, it follows by the same
reason, that all the necessary means to peace be good also; and therefore that
modesty, equity, trust, humanity, mercy (which we have demonstrated to be
necessary to peace), are good manners or habits, that is, virtues.” Moral
virtues are those habits of acting that the reason of all people must praise.
It is interesting to note that it is only in De Homine that Hobbes explicitly
acknowledges that on this account, prudence, temperance, and courage are not
moral virtues. In De Cive he distinguishes temperance and fortitude from the
other virtues and does not call them moral, but he does not explicitly deny
that they are moral virtues. But in De Homine, he explicitly points out that
one should not “demand that the courage and prudence of the private man, if
useful only to himself, be praised or held as a virtue by states or by any
other men whatsoever to whom these same are not useful.” That morality is
determined by reason and that reason has as its goal self-preservation seems to
lead to the conclusion that morality also has as its goal self-preservation.
But it is not the selfpreservation of an individual person that is the goal of
morality, but of people as citizens of a state. That is, moral virtues are
those habits of persons that make it rational for all other people to praise
them. These habits are not those that merely lead to an individual’s own
preservation, but to the preservation of all; i.e., to peace and a stable
society. Thus, “Good dispositions are those that are suitable for entering into
civil society; and good manners (that is, moral virtues) are those whereby what
was entered upon can be best preserved.” And in De Cive, when talking of
morality, he says, “The goodness of actions consist[s] in this, that it [is] in
order to peace, and the evil in this, that it [is] related to discord.” The
nature of morality is a complex and vexing question. If, like Hobbes, we regard
morality as applying primarily to those manners or habits that lead to peace,
then his view seems satisfactory. It yields, as he notes, all of the moral
virtues that are ordinarily considered such, and further, it allows one to
distinguish courage, prudence, and temperance from the moral virtues. Perhaps
most important, it provides, in almost self-evident fashion, the justification
of morality. For what is it to justify morality but to show that reason favors
it? Reason, seeking self-preservation, must favor morality, which seeks peace
and a stable society. For reason knows that peace and a stable society are
essential for lasting preservation. This simple and elegant justification of
morality does not reduce morality to prudence; rather it is an attempt, in a
great philosophical tradition stemming from Plato, to reconcile reason or
rational self-interest and morality. In the state of nature every person is and
ought to be governed only by their own reason. Reason dictates that they seek
peace, which yields the laws of nature, but it also allows them to use any
means they believe will best preserve themselves, which is what Hobbes calls
The Right of Nature. Hobbes’s insight is to see that, except when one is in
clear and present danger, in which case one has an inalienable right to defend
oneself, the best way to guarantee one’s longterm preservation is to give up
one’s right to act on one’s own decisions about what is the best way to
guarantee one’s long-term preservation and agree to act on the decisions of
that single person or group who is the sovereign. If all individuals and groups
are allowed to act on the decisions they regard as best, not accepting the
commands of the sovereign, i.e., the laws, as the overriding guide for their
actions, the result is anarchy and civil war. Except in rare and unusual cases,
uniformity of action following the decision of the sovereign is more likely to
lead to long-term preservation than diverse actions following diverse
decisions. And this is true even if each one of the diverse decisions, if
accepted by the sovereign as its decision, would have been more likely to lead
to long-term preservation than the actual decision that the sovereign made.
This argument explains why Hobbes holds that sovereigns cannot commit
injustice. Only injustice can properly be punished. Hobbes does not deny that
sovereigns can be immoral, but he does deny that the immorality of sovereigns
can properly be punished. This is important, for otherwise any immoral act by
the sovereign would serve as a pretext for punishing the sovereign, i.e., for
civil war. What is just and unjust is determined by the laws of the state, what
is moral and immoral is not. Morality is a wider concept than that of justice
and is determined by what leads to peace and stability. However, to let justice
be determined by what the reason of the people takes to lead to peace and
stability, rather than by what the reason of the sovereign decides, would be to
invite discord and civil war, which is contrary to the goal of morality: a
stable society and peace. One can create an air of paradox by saying that for
Hobbes it is immoral to attempt to punish some immoral acts, namely, those of
the sovereign. Hobbes is willing to accept this seeming paradox for he never
loses sight of the goal of morality, which is peace. To summarize Hobbes’s
system: people, insofar as they are rational, want to live out their natural
lives in peace and security. To do this, they must come together into cities or
states of sufficient size to deter attack by any group. But when people come
together in such a large group there will always be some that cannot be
trusted, and thus it is necessary to set up a government with the power to make
and enforce laws. This government, which gets both its right to govern and its
power to do so from the consent of the governed, has as its primary duty the
people’s safety. As long as the government provides this safety the citizens
are obliged to obey the laws of the state in all things. Thus, the rationality of
seeking lasting preservation requires seeking peace; this in turn requires
setting up a state with sufficient power to keep the peace. Anything that
threatens the stability of the state is to be avoided. As a practical matter,
Hobbes took God and religion very seriously, for he thought they provided some
of the strongest motives for action. Half of Leviathan is devoted to trying to
show that his moral and political views are supported by Scripture, and to
discredit those religious views that may lead to civil strife. But accepting
the sincerity of Hobbes’s religious views does not require holding that Hobbes
regarded God as the foundation of morality. He explicitly denies that atheists
and deists are subject to the commands of God, but he never denies that they
are subject to the laws of nature or of the civil state. Once one recognizes
that, for Hobbes, reason itself provides a guide to conduct to be followed by
all people, there is absolutely no need to bring in God. For in his moral and
political theory there is nothing that God can do that is not already done by
reason. Grice read most of Hobbes, both in Latin (for his Lit. Hum.) and in
English. When in “Meaning,” Grice says “this is what people are getting at with
their natural versus artificial signs” – he means Hobbes.
Hobson’s choice: willkür –
Hobson’s choice. One of Grice’s favourite words from Kant – “It’s so Kantish!”
I told Pears about this, and having found it’s cognate with English ‘choose,’
he immediately set to write an essay on the topic!” f., ‘option, discretion,
caprice,’ from MidHG. willekür,
f., ‘free choice, free will’; gee kiesen and Kur-kiesen, verb, ‘to select,’ from Middle
High German kiesen, Old
High German chiosan, ‘to
test, try, taste for the purpose of testing, test by tasting, select after
strict examination.’ Gothic kiusan,
Anglo-Saxon ceósan,
English to choose.
Teutonic root kus (with
the change of s into r, kur in the participle erkoren, see also Kur,
‘choice’), from pre-Teutonic gus,
in Latin gus-tus, gus-tare, Greek γεύω for γεύσω, Indian root juš, ‘to select, be fond of.’
Teutonic kausjun passed
as kusiti into
Slavonic. There is an oil portrait of Thomas Hobson, in the National Portrait
Gallery, London. He looks straight to the artist and is dressed in typical
Tudor dress, with a heavy coat, a ruff, and tie tails Thomas Hobson, a portrait
in the National Portrait Gallery, London. A Hobson's choice is a free choice in
which only one thing is offered. Because a person may refuse to accept what is
offered, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one
may "take it or leave it". The
phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery
stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either
taking the horse in his stall nearest to the door or taking none at all.
According to a plaque underneath a painting of Hobson donated to Cambridge
Guildhall, Hobson had an extensive stable of some 40 horses. This gave the
appearance to his customers that, upon entry, they would have their choice of
mounts, when in fact there was only one: Hobson required his customers to
choose the horse in the stall closest to the door. This was to prevent the best
horses from always being chosen, which would have caused those horses to become
overused.[1] Hobson's stable was located on land that is now owned by St
Catharine's College, Cambridge. Early
appearances in writing According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first
known written usage of this phrase is in The rustick's alarm to the Rabbies,
written by Samuel Fisher in 1660:[3] If
in this Case there be no other (as the Proverb is) then Hobson's choice...which
is, chuse whether you will have this or none.
It also appears in Joseph Addison's paper The Spectator (No. 509 of 14
October 1712); and in Thomas Ward's 1688 poem "England's
Reformation", not published until after Ward's death. Ward wrote: Where to elect there is but one, 'Tis
Hobson's choice—take that, or none. The term "Hobson's choice" is
often used to mean an illusion of choice, but it is not a choice between two
equivalent options, which is a Morton's fork, nor is it a choice between two
undesirable options, which is a dilemma. Hobson's choice is one between
something or nothing. John Stuart Mill,
in his book Considerations on Representative Government, refers to Hobson's
choice: When the individuals composing
the majority would no longer be reduced to Hobson's choice, of either voting
for the person brought forward by their local leaders, or not voting at all. In
another of his books, The Subjection of Women, Mill discusses marriage: Those who attempt to force women into
marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a
similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to
induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's
thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson's
choice, 'that or none'.... And if men are determined that the law of marriage
shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right in point of mere policy, in
leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case, all that has been
done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a
mistake. They should have never been allowed to receive a literary
education.[7] A Hobson's choice is
different from: Dilemma: a choice between
two or more options, none of which is attractive. False dilemma: only certain
choices are considered, when in fact there are others. Catch-22: a logical
paradox arising from a situation in which an individual needs something that
can only be acquired by not being in that very situation. Morton's fork, and a
double bind: choices yield equivalent, and often undesirable, results.
Blackmail and extortion: the choice between paying money (or some non-monetary
good or deed) or risk suffering an unpleasant action. A common error is to use
the phrase "Hobbesian choice" instead of "Hobson's choice",
confusing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes with the relatively obscure Thomas
Hobson (It's possible they may be
confusing "Hobson's choice" with "Hobbesian trap", which
refers to the trap into which a state falls when it attacks another out of fear).[11]
Notwithstanding that confused usage, the phrase "Hobbesian choice" is
historically incorrect. Common law In Immigration and Naturalization Service v.
Chadha (1983), Justice Byron White dissented and classified the majority's
decision to strike down the "one-house veto" as unconstitutional as
leaving Congress with a Hobson's choice. Congress may choose between
"refrain[ing] from delegating the necessary authority, leaving itself with
a hopeless task of writing laws with the requisite specificity to cover endless
special circumstances across the entire policy landscape, or in the
alternative, to abdicate its lawmaking function to the executive branch and
independent agency". In
Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U.S. 617 (1978),[15] the majority opinion ruled
that a New Jersey law which prohibited the importation of solid or liquid waste
from other states into New Jersey was unconstitutional based on the Commerce
Clause. The majority reasoned that New Jersey cannot discriminate between the
intrastate waste and the interstate waste with out due justification. In
dissent, Justice Rehnquist stated:
[According to the Court,] New Jersey must either prohibit all landfill
operations, leaving itself to cast about for a presently nonexistent solution
to the serious problem of disposing of the waste generated within its own
borders, or it must accept waste from every portion of the United States,
thereby multiplying the health and safety problems which would result if it
dealt only with such wastes generated within the State. Because past precedents
establish that the Commerce Clause does not present appellees with such a
Hobson's choice, I dissent. In Monell v.
Department of Social Services of the City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978)[16]
the judgement of the court was that
[T]here was ample support for Blair's view that the Sherman Amendment,
by putting municipalities to the Hobson's choice of keeping the peace or paying
civil damages, attempted to impose obligations to municipalities by indirection
that could not be imposed directly, thereby threatening to "destroy the
government of the states". In the
South African Constitutional Case MEC for Education, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Others
v Pillay, 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC)[17] Chief Justice Langa for the majority of the
Court (in Paragraph 62 of the judgement) writes that: The traditional basis for invalidating laws
that prohibit the exercise of an obligatory religious practice is that it
confronts the adherents with a Hobson's choice between observance of their
faith and adherence to the law. There is however more to the protection of
religious and cultural practices than saving believers from hard choices. As
stated above, religious and cultural practices are protected because they are
central to human identity and hence to human dignity which is in turn central
to equality. Are voluntary practices any less a part of a person's identity or
do they affect human dignity any less seriously because they are not
mandatory? In Epic Systems Corp. v.
Lewis (2018), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented and added in one of the
footnotes that the petitioners "faced a Hobson’s choice: accept
arbitration on their employer’s terms or give up their jobs". In Trump et al v. Mazars USA, LLP, US Court
of Appeals for the District of Columbia No. 19-5142, 49 (D.C. Cir. 11 October
2019) ("[w]orse still, the dissent’s novel approach would now impose upon
the courts the job of ordering the cessation of the legislative function and
putting Congress to the Hobson’s Choice of impeachment or nothing."). Popular culture Hobson's Choice is a
full-length stage comedy written by Harold Brighouse in 1915. At the end of the
play, the central character, Henry Horatio Hobson, formerly a wealthy,
self-made businessman but now a sick and broken man, faces the unpalatable
prospect of being looked after by his daughter Maggie and her husband Will
Mossop, who used to be one of Hobson's underlings. His other daughters have
refused to take him in, so he has no choice but to accept Maggie's offer which
comes with the condition that he must surrender control of his entire business
to her and her husband, Will. The play
was adapted for film several times, including versions from 1920 by Percy Nash,
1931 by Thomas Bentley, 1954 by David Lean and a 1983 TV movie. Alfred Bester's 1952 short story Hobson's
Choice describes a world in which time travel is possible, and the option is to
travel or to stay in one's native time.
In the 1951 Robert Heinlein book Between Planets, the main character Don
Harvey incorrectly mentions he has a Hobson's choice. While on a space station
orbiting Earth, Don needs to get to Mars, where his parents are. The only
rockets available are back to Earth (where he is not welcome) or on to
Venus. In The Grim Grotto by Lemony
Snicket, the Baudelaire orphans and Fiona are said to be faced with a Hobson's
Choice when they are trapped by the Medusoid Mycelium Mushrooms in the
Gorgonian Grotto: "We can wait until the mushrooms disappear, or we can
find ourselves poisoned".In Bram Stoker's short story "The Burial of
Rats", the narrator advises he has a case of Hobson's Choice while being
chased by villains. The story was written around 1874. The Terminal Experiment, a 1995 science
fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer, was originally serialised under the title
Hobson's Choice. Half-Life, a video game
created in 1998 by Valve includes a Hobson's Choice in the final chapter. A
human-like entity, known only as the 'G-Man', offers the protagonist Gordon
Freeman a job, working under his control. If Gordon were to refuse this offer,
he would be killed in an unwinnable battle, thus creating the 'illusion of free
choice'. In Early Edition, the lead
character Gary Hobson is named after the choices he regularly makes during his adventures. In an episode of Inspector George Gently, a
character claims her resignation was a Hobson's choice, prompting a debate
among other police officers as to who Hobson is. In "Cape May" (The Blacklist season
3, episode 19), Raymond Reddington describes having faced a Hobson's choice in
the previous episode where he was faced with the choice of saving Elizabeth
Keen's baby and losing Elizabeth Keen or losing them both. In his 1984 novel Job: A Comedy of Justice,
Robert A. Heinlein's protagonist is said to have Hobson's Choice when he has
the options of boarding the wrong cruise ship or staying on the island. Remarking about the 1909 Ford Model T, US
industrialist Henry Ford is credited as saying “Any customer can have a car
painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”[19] In 'The Jolly Boys' Outing', a 1989 Christmas
Special episode of Only Fools and Horses, Alan states they are left with
Hobson's Choice after their coach has blown up (due to a dodgy radio, supplied
by Del). There's a rail strike, the last bus has gone, and their coach is out
of action. They can't hitch-hike as there's 27 of them, and the replacement
coach doesn't come till the next morning, thus their only choice is to stay in
Margate for the night. See also
Buckley's Chance Buridan's ass Boulwarism Death and Taxes Locus of control
Morton's fork No-win situation Standard form contract Sophie's Choice Zugzwang
References Barrett, Grant.
"Hobson's Choice", A Way with Words
"Thomas Hobson: Hobson's Choice and Hobson's Conduit".
Historyworks. See Samuel Fisher.
"Rusticus ad academicos in exercitationibus expostulatoriis, apologeticis
quatuor the rustick's alarm to the rabbies or The country correcting the
university and clergy, and ... contesting for the truth ... : in four
apologeticall and expostulatory exercitations : wherein is contained, as well a
general account to all enquirers, as a general answer to all opposers of the
most truly catholike and most truly Christ-like Chistians called Quakers, and
of the true divinity of their doctrine : by way of entire entercourse held in
special with four of the clergies chieftanes, viz, John Owen ... Tho. Danson
... John Tombes ... Rich. Baxter ." Europeana. Retrieved 8 August
2014. See The Spectator with Notes and
General Index, the Twelve Volumes Comprised in Two. Philadelphia: J.J.
Woodward. 1832. p. 272. Retrieved 4 August 2014. via Google Books Ward, Thomas (1853). English Reformation, A
Poem. New York: D.& J. Sadlier & Co. p. 373. Retrieved 8 August 2014.
via Internet Archive See Mill, John
Stuart (1861). Considerations on Representative Government (1 ed.). London:
Parker, Son, & Bourn. p. 145. Retrieved 23 June 2014. via Google Books Mill, John Stuart (1869). The Subjection of
Women (1869 first ed.). London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer. pp. 51–2.
Retrieved 28 July 2014. Hobbes, Thomas
(1982) [1651]. Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil. New York: Viking Press. Martinich, A. P. (1999). Hobbes: A Biography.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN
978-0-521-49583-7. Martin, Gary.
"Hobson's Choice". The Phrase Finder. Archived from the original on 6
March 2009. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
"The Hobbesian Trap" (PDF). 21 September 2010. Retrieved 8
April 2012. "Sunday
Lexico-Neuroticism". boaltalk.blogspot.com. 27 July 2008. Retrieved 7
August 2010. Levy, Jacob (10 June 2003).
"The Volokh Conspiracy". volokh.com. Retrieved 7 August 2010. Oxford English Dictionary, Editor:
"Amazingly, some writers have confused the obscure Thomas Hobson with his
famous contemporary, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The resulting malapropism
is beautifully grotesque". Garner, Bryan (1995). A Dictionary of Modern
Legal Usage (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 404–405. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/437/617/ "Monell v. Department of Soc. Svcs. -
436 U.S. 658 (1978)". justicia.com. US Supreme Court. 6 June 1978. 436
U.S. 658. Retrieved 19 February 2014.
"MEC for Education: Kwazulu-Natal and Others v Pillay (CCT 51/06)
[2007] ZACC 21; 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC); 2008 (2) BCLR 99 (CC) (5 October
2007)". www.saflii.org. Snicket,
Lemony (2004) The Grim Grotto, New York: HarperCollins Publishers p.145 -
147 Henry Ford in collaboration with
Samuel Crowther in My Life and Work. 1922. Page 72 External links Chisholm,
Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hobson's Choice" . Encyclopædia Britannica. 13
(11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 553. Categories: English-language
idiomsFree willMetaphors referring to peopleDilemmas. Refs.: H. P. Grice and D.
F. Pears, The philosophy of action, Pears, Choosing and deciding. The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
hohfeld, of Stanford and
Yale. His main contribution to moral theory was his identification of EIGHT
fundamental conceptions: One person X has a duty to a second person Y to do
some act A when it is required that X to do A for Y. X has a privilege (or
liberty) in face of Y to do A when X has no duty to Y not to do A. X has a right
(or claim) against Y that Y do A when Y has a duty to X to do A. X has a no-right
against Y that Y not do A when Y has a liberty in face of X to do A. X has a power
over Y to effect some consequence C for Y when there is some voluntary action
of X that will bring about C for Y. X has a disability in face of Y to effect C
when there is no action X can perform that will bring about C for Y. X has a liability
in face of Y to effect C when Y has a power to effect C for X. X has a immunity
against Y from C when Y has no power over X to effect C. Philosophers have
adapted Hohfeld’s terminology to express analogous conceptions. In ethics,
these fundamental conceptions provide something like atoms into which all more
complex relationships can be analyzed. Semantically, these conceptions reveal
pairs of correlatives, such as a claim of X against Y and a duty of Y to X,
each of which IMPLIES the other, and pairs of opposites, such as a duty of X to
Y and a liberty of Y in face of X, which are contradictories. In the theory of
rights, his distinctions between liberties, claims, powers, and immunities are
often used to reveal ambiguities in the language of rights or to classify
species of rights – Grice thought this was “all implicatural, and due to an
inability to understand Hohfeld.”
hölderlin:
studied
at Tübingen, where he befriended Schelling and Hegel, and at Jena, where he met
Schiller and Fichte. Since Hölderlin never held an academic position or
published any of his philosophical writings, his influence on philosophy was
primarily through his personality, conversations, and letters. He is widely
viewed as the author of the so-called “Oldest System-Program of German
Idealism,” a fragment that culminates in an exaltation of poetry and a call for
a new “mythology of reason.” This theme is illustrated in the novel Hyperion
(1797/99), which criticizes the subjective heroism of ethical idealism,
emphasizes the sacred character of nature, and attempts to conflate religion
and art as “overseers of reason.” In his veneration of nature and objections to
Fichte’s treatment of the “Not-I,” Hölderlin echoed Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.
In his Hellenism and his critique of the “philosophy of reflection” (see Ueber
Sein und Urteil [“On Being and Judgment”]) he anticipated and influenced Hegel.
In Hölderlin’s exaltation of art as alone capable of revealing the nature of
reality, he betrayed a debt to Schiller and anticipated Romanticism. However,
his view of the poet possesses a tragic dimension quite foreign to Schelling
and the younger Romantics. The artist, as the interpreter of divine nature,
mediates between the gods and men, but for this very reason is estranged from
his fellows. This aspect of Hölderlin’s thought influenced Heidegger.
holism: From Grecian
‘holon,’ Latin ‘totum.’ “One of Quine’s dogma of empiricism – the one I and Sir
Peter had not the slightest intereset in!” – Grice. Holism is one of a wide
variety of theses that in one way or another affirm the equal or greater
reality or the explanatory necessity of the whole of some system in relation to
its parts. In philosophy, the issues of holism (the word is more reasonably,
but less often, spelled ‘wholism’) have appeared Hohenheim, Theophrastus
Bombastus von holism 390 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 390 traditionally
in the philosophy of biology, of psychology, and especially of the human
sciences. In the context of description, holism with respect to some system
maintains that the whole has some properties that its parts lack. This doctrine
will ordinarily be trivially true unless it is further held, in the thesis of
descriptive emergentism, that these properties of the whole cannot be defined
by properties of the parts. The view that all properties of the wholes in
question can be so defined is descriptive individualism. In the context of
explanation, holism with respect to some object or system maintains either (1) that
the laws of the more complex cases in it are not deducible by way of any
composition laws or laws of coexistence from the laws of the less complex cases
(e.g., that the laws of the behavior of people in groups are not deducible by
composition laws or laws of coexistence from the laws of solitary behavior), or
(2) that all the variables that constitute the system interact with each other.
This denial of deducibility is known also as metaphysical or methodological
holism, whereas affirming the deducibility is methodological individualism. In
a special case of explanatory holism that presupposes descriptive emergentism,
holism is sometimes understood as the thesis that with respect to some system
the whole has properties that interact “back” with the properties of its parts.
In the philosophy of biology, any of these forms of holism may be known as
vitalism, while in the philosophy of psychology they have been called Gestalt
doctrine. In the philosophy of the social sciences, where ‘holism’ has had its
most common use in philosophy, the many issues have often been reduced to that
of metaphysical holism versus methodological individualism. This terminology
reflected the positivists’ belief that holism was non-empirical in postulating
social “wholes” or the reality of society beyond individual persons and their
properties and relations (as in Durkheim and other, mostly Continental,
thinkers), while individualism was non-metaphysical (i.e., empirical) in
relying ultimately only on observable properties in describing and explaining
social phenomena. More recently, ‘holism’ has acquired additional uses in
philosophy, especially in epistemology and philosophy of language. Doxastic or
epistemic holism are theses about the “web of belief,” usually something to the
effect that a person’s beliefs are so connected that their change on any topic
may affect their content on any other topic or, perhaps, that the beliefs of a
rational person are so connected. Semantic or meaning holism have both been
used to denote either the thesis that the meanings of all terms (or sentences)
in a language are so connected that any change of meaning in one of them may
change any other meaning, or the thesis that changes of belief entail changes
of meaning. Cited by Grice, “In defense of a dogma” “My defense of the other
dogma must be left for another longer day” Duhem, Pierre-Maurice-Marie,
physicist who wrote extensively on the history and philosophy of science. Like
Georg Helm, Wilhelm Ostwald, and others, he was an energeticist, believing generalized
thermodynamics to be the foundation of all of physics and chemistry. Duhem
spent his whole scientific life advancing energetics, from his failed
dissertation in physics a version of which was accepted as a dissertation in
mathematics, published as Le potentiel thermodynamique 6, to his mature
treatise, Traité d’énergétique 1. His scientific legacy includes the
Gibbs-Duhem and DuhemMargules equations. Possibly because his work was
considered threatening by the Parisian scientific establishment or because of
his right-wing politics and fervent Catholicism, he never obtained the position
he merited in the intellectual world of Paris. He taught at the provincial
universities of Lille, Rennes, and, finally, Bordeaux. Duhem’s work in the
history and philosophy of science can be viewed as a defense of the aims and
methods of energetics; whatever Duhem’s initial motivation, his historical and
philosophical work took on a life of its own. Topics of interest to him
included the relation between history of science and philosophy of science, the
nature of conceptual change, the historical structure of scientific knowledge,
and the relation between science and religion. Duhem was an anti-atomist or
anti-Cartesian; in the contemporary debates about light and magnetism, Duhem’s
anti-atomist stance was also directed against the work of Maxwell. According to
Duhem, atomists resolve the bodies perceived by the senses into smaller,
imperceptible bodies. The explanation of observable phenomena is then referred
to these imperceptible bodies and their motions, suitably combined. Duhem’s
rejection of atomism was based on his instrumentalism or fictionalism: physical
theories are not explanations but representations; they do not reveal the true
nature of matter, but give general rules of which laws are particular cases;
theoretical propositions are not true or false, but convenient or inconvenient.
An important reason for treating physics as nonexplanatory was Duhem’s claim
that there is general consensus in physics and none in metaphysics thus his insistence on the autonomy of
physics from metaphysics. But he also thought that scientific representations
become more complete over time until they gain the status of a natural
classification. Accordingly, Duhem attacked the use of models by some
scientists, e.g. Faraday and Maxwell. Duhem’s rejection of atomism was coupled
with a rejection of inductivism, the doctrine that the only physical principles
are general laws known through induction, based on observation of facts. Duhem’s
rejection forms a series of theses collectively known as the Duhem thesis:
experiments in physics are observations of phenomena accompanied by
interpretations; physicists therefore do not submit single hypotheses, but
whole groups of them, to the control of experiment; thus, experimental evidence
alone cannot conclusively falsify hypotheses. For similar reasons, Duhem
rejected the possibility of a crucial experiment. In his historical studies,
Duhem argued that there were no abrupt discontinuities between medieval and
early modern science the so-called
continuity thesis; that religion played a positive role in the development of
science in the Latin West; and that the history of physics could be seen as a
cumulative whole, defining the direction in which progress could be expected.
Duhem’s philosophical works were discussed by the founders of twentieth-century
philosophy of science, including Mach, Poincaré, the members of the Vienna
Circle, and Popper. A revival of interest in Duhem’s philosophy began with
Quine’s reference in 3 to the Duhem thesis also known as the Duhem-Quine
thesis. As a result, Duhem’s philosophical works were tr. into English as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory 4
and To Save the Phenomena 9. By contrast, few of Duhem’s extensive historical
works Les origines de la statique 2
vols., 608, Études sur Léonard de Vinci 3 vols., 613, and Système du monde 10
vols., 359, e.g. have been tr., with
five volumes of the Système du monde actually remaining in manuscript form
until 459. Unlike his philosophical work, Duhem’s historical work was not
sympathetically received by his influential contemporaries, notably George
Sarton. His supposed main conclusions were rejected by the next generation of
historians of science, who presented modern science as discontinuous with that
of the Middle Ages. This view was echoed by historically oriented philosophers
of science who, from the early 0s, emphasized discontinuities as a recurrent
feature of change in science e.g. Kuhn
in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2.
hologram: the image of an
object in three dimensions created and reproduced by the use of lasers.
Holography is a method for recording and reproducing such images. Holograms are
remarkable in that, unlike normal photographs, every part of them contains the
complete image but in reduced detail. Thus a small square cut from a hologram
can still be laser-illuminated to reveal the whole scene originally
holographed, albeit with loss of resolution. This feature made the hologram
attractive to proponents of the thesis of distribution of function in the
brain, who argued that memories are like holograms, not being located in a
single precise engram – as claimed by advocates of localization of function –
but distributed across perhaps all of the cortex. Although intriguing, the
holographic model of memory storage failed to gain acceptance. Current views
favor D. O. Hebb’s “cell assembly” concept, in which memories are stored in the
connections between a group of neurons.
homœmerum:
an
adjective Grice adored, from Grecian homoiomeres, ‘of like parts’). Aristotle: “A lump of bronze differs
from a statue in being homoeo-merous. The lump of bronze is
divisible into at least two partial lumps of bronze, whereas the statue is not
divisible into statues.” Having parts, no matter how small, that share
the constitutive properties of the whole. The derivative abstract noun is
‘homœomeria’. The Grecian forms of the adjective and of its corresponding
privative ‘anhomoeomerous’ are used by Aristotle to distinguish between (a) non-uniform
parts of living things, e.g., limbs and organs, and (b) biological stuffs,
e.g., blood, bone, sap. In spite of being composed of the four elements, each
biological stuff, when taken individually and without admixtures, is through-and-through
F, where F represents the cluster of the constitutive properties of that stuff.
Thus, if a certain physical volume qualifies as blood, all its mathematically
possible sub-volumes, regardless of size, also qualify as blood. Blood is thus
homoeomerous. By contrast, a face or a stomach or a leaf are an-homoeomerous:
the parts of a face are not a face, etc. In Aristotle’s system, the homœomeria
of the biological stuff is tied to his doctrine of the infinite divisibility of
matter. The homœomerum-heterormerum distinction is prefigured in Plato
(Protagoras 329d). ‘Homœomerous’ is narrow in its application than ‘homogeneous’
and ‘uniform’. We speak of a homogeneous entity even if the properties at issue
are identically present only in samples that fall above a certain size. The
colour of the sea can be homogeneously or uniformly blue; but it is heteromerously
blue. “homoiomeres” and “homoiomereia” also occur –in the ancient sources for a
pre-Aristotelian philosopher, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, with reference to the
constituent things (“chremata”) involved in his scheme of universal mixture.
Moreover, homœeomeria plays a significant role outside ancient Grecian (or
Griceian) philosophy, notably in twentieth-century accounts of the contrast
between mass terms and count terms or sortals, and the discussion was
introduced by Grice. ANAXAGORAS' THEORY OF
MATTER-I. 17 homoeomerous in Anaxagoras' system falls into one of
these three class. (I. 834), for example, says: 'When he ... by FM Cornford - 1930. Refs. Grice, “Cornford on Anaxagoras.”
homomorphism: cf. isomorphism
-- in Grice’s model theory of conversation, a structure-preserving mapping from
one structure to another: thus the demonstratum is isomorph with the implicaturum,
since every conversational implicaturum can be arrived via an argumentum. A
structure consists of a domain of objects together with a function specifying
interpretations, with respect to that domain, of the relation symbols, function
symbols, and individual symbols of a given calculus. Relations, functions, and
individuals in different structures for a system like System GHP correspond to
one another if they are interpretations of the same symbol of GHP. To call a
mapping “structure-preserving” is to say, first, that if objects in the first
structure bear a certain relation to one another, then their images in the
second structure (under the mapping) bear the corresponding relation to one
another; second, that the value of a function for a given object (or ntuple of
objects) in the first structure has as its image under the mapping the value of
the corresponding function for the image of the object (or n-tuple of images)
in the second structure; and third, that the image in the second structure of
an object in the first is the corresponding object. An isomorphism is a
homomorphism that is oneto-one and whose inverse is also a homomorphism.
co-substantia: homoousios.
Athanasius -- early Christian father, bishop, and a leading protagonist in the disputes
concerning Christ’s relationship to God. Through major works like On the
Incarnation, Against the Arians, and Letters on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius
contributed greatly to the classical doctrines of the Incarnation and the
Trinity. Opposing all forms of Arianism, which denies Christ’s divinity and
reduced him to what Grice would call a “creature,” Athanasius teaches, in the
language of the Nicene Creed, that Christ the Son, and likewise the Holy
Spirit, are of the same being as God the Father, cosubstantialis, “homoousios.”
Thus with terminology and concepts drawn from Grecian and Graeco-Roman
philosophy, Athanasius helps to forge the distinctly Christian and
un-Hellenistic doctrine of the eternal tri-une God (“credo quia absurdum est”) who
became enfleshed in time and matter and restored humanity to immortality,
forfeited through sin, by involvement in its condition of corruption and decay.
Homoousios (Greek, ‘of the same substance’), a concept central to the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity, enshrined in the Nicene Creed (Nicaea, “Holy, Holy,
Holy”). It attests that God the Son (and by extension the Spirit) is of one and
the same being or substance (ousia) as the Father. Reflecting the insistence of
Athanasius against Arianism that Christ is God’s eternal, co-equal Son and not
a “creature,” as Grice uses the term, the Nicene “homoousios” is also to be
differentiated from a rival formula, “homoiousios” (Grecian, ‘of SIMILAR substance’),
which affirms merely the Son’s LIKENESS in being to God. Though notoriously and
superficially an argument over one Greek iota, the issue was philosophically
profound and crucial whether or not Jesus of Nazareth incarnated God’s own
being, revealed God’s own truth, and mediated God’s own salvation. If x=x, x is
like x. A horse is like a horse. Grice on implicaturum. “There is only an implicaturum
to the effect that if a horse is a horse a horse is not like a horse.”
“Similarly for Christ and God.” Cicero saw this when he philosophised on ‘idem’
and ‘similis.’
homuncularism
-- Grice on the ‘fallacia homunculi’ Grice borrows ‘homunculus’ from St.
Augustine, for a miniature ‘homo’ held to inhabit the brain (or some other
organ) who perceives all the inputs to the sense organs and initiates all the
commands to the muscles. Any theory that posits such an internal agent risks an
infinite regress (what Grice, after Augustine, calls the ‘fallacia homunculi’) since
we can ask whether there is a little man in the little man’s head, responsible
for his perception and action, and so on. Many familiar views of the mind and
its activities seem to require a homunculus. E. g. models of visual perception
that posit an inner picture as its product apparently require a homunculus to
look at the picture, and models of action that treat intentions as commands to
the muscles apparently require a homunculus to issue the commands. It is never
an easy matter to determine whether a theory is committed to the existence of a
homunculus that vitiates the theory, and in some circumstances, a homunculus
can be legitimately posited at intermediate levels of theory. As Grice says, a
homunculus is, shall we say, a bogey-man (to use a New-World expression) only if
he duplicates entire the talents he is rung in to explain. If one can get a
relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculus to produce the intelligent
behaviour of the whole, this is progress. Grice calls a theory (in philosophoical
psychology) that posit such a homunculus “homuncular functionalism.” Paracelsus is credited with the first mention of the
homunculus in De homunculis (c. 1529–1532),
and De natura rerum (1537).
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Paracelsus.”
horkheimer: philosopher, the leading
theorist of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Both as director of the Institute for Social Research and in his early
philosophical essays published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,
Horkheimer set the agenda for the collaborative work of the Frankfurt School in
the social sciences, including analyses of the developments of state
capitalism, the family, modern culture, and fascism. His programmatic essays on
the relation of philosophy and the social sciences long provided the
philosophical basis for Frankfurt School social criticism and research and have
profoundly influenced Habermas’s reformulation of Frankfurt School critical
theory. In these essays, such as “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy
and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” (1931), Horkheimer
elaborated a cooperative relation between philosophy and the social sciences
through an interdisciplinary historical materialism. His “Traditional and
Critical Theory” (1937) develops the distinction between “critical” and
“traditional” theories in terms of basic goals: critical theories aim at
emancipating human beings rather than describing reality as it is now. In the
darkest days of World War II Horkheimer began collaborating with Adorno on The
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941), in which they see the origins of modern
reason and autonomy in the domination of nature and the inner self. This genealogy
of modern reason argues that myth and enlightenment are inseparably “entwined,”
a view proposed primarily to explain the catastrophe in which Europe found
itself. While Horkheimer thought that a revised notion of Hegelian dialectics
might lead beyond this impasse, he never completed this positive project.
Instead, he further developed the critique of instrumental reason in such works
as Eclipse of Reason (1947), where he argues that modern institutions,
including democracy, are under the sway of formal and instrumental rationality
and the imperatives of self-preservation. While he did little new work after
this period, he turned at the end of his life to a philosophical
reinterpretation of religion and the content of religious experience and concepts,
developing a negative theology of the “completely Other.” His most enduring
influence is his clear formulation of the epistemology of practical and
critical social inquiry oriented to human emancipation.
humanism: Grice
distinguishes between a human and a person – so he is more of a personalist
than a humanism. “But the distinction is implicatural.” He was especially keen
on Italian humanism. a set of
presuppositions that assigns to human beings a special position in the scheme of
things. Not just a school of thought or a collection of specific beliefs or
doctrines, humanism is rather a general perspective from which the world is
viewed. That perspective received a gradual yet persistent articulation during
different historical periods and continues to furnish a central leitmotif of
Western civilization. It comes into focus when it is compared with two
competing positions. On the one hand, it can be contrasted with the emphasis on
the supernatural, transcendent domain, which considers humanity to be radically
dependent on divine order. On the other hand, it resists the tendency to treat
humanity scientifically as part of the natural order, on a par with other
living organisms. Occupying the middle position, humanism discerns in human
beings unique capacities and abilities, to be cultivated and celebrated for
their own sake. The word ‘humanism’ came into general use only in the
nineteenth century but was applied to intellectual and cultural developments in
previous eras. A teacher of classical languages and literatures in Renaissance
Italy was described as umanista (contrasted with legista, teacher of law), and
what we today call “the humanities,” in the fifteenth century was called studia
humanitatis, which stood for grammar, rhetoric, history, literature, and moral
philosophy. The inspiration for these studies came from the rediscovery of
ancient Greek and Latin texts; Plato’s complete works were translated for the
first time, and Aristotle’s philosophy was studied in more accurate versions
than those available during the Middle Ages. The unashamedly humanistic flavor
of classical writings had a tremendous impact on Renaissance scholars. Here,
one felt no weight of the supernatural pressing on the human mind, demanding
homage and allegiance. Humanity – with all its distinct capacities, talents,
worries, problems, possibilities – was the center of interest. It has been said
that medieval thinkers philosophized on their knees, but, bolstered by the new
studies, they dared to stand up and to rise to full stature. Instead of
devotional Church Latin, the medium of expression was the people’s own language
– Italian, French, German, English. Poetical, lyrical self-expression gained
momentum, affecting all areas of life. New paintings showed great interest in
human form. Even while depicting religious scenes, Michelangelo celebrated the
human body, investing it with instrinsic value and dignity. The details of
daily life – food, clothing, musical instruments – as well as nature and
landscape – domestic and exotic – were lovingly examined in paintings and
poetry. Imagination was stirred by stories brought home by the discoverers of
new lands and continents, enlarging the scope of human possibilities as
exhibited in the customs and the natural environments of strange, remote
peoples. The humanist mode of thinking deepened and widened its tradition with
the advent of eighteenth-century thinkers. They included French philosophes
like Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and other European and American figures –
Bentham, Hume, Lessing, Kant, Franklin, and Jefferson. Not always agreeing with
one another, these thinkers nevertheless formed a family united in support of
such values as freedom, equality, tolerance, secularism, and cosmopolitanism.
Although they championed untrammeled use of the mind, they also wanted it to be
applied in social and political reform, encouraging individual creativity and
exalting the active over the contemplative life. They believed in the
perfectibility of human nature, the moral sense and responsibility, and the
possibility of progress. The optimistic motif of perfectibility endured in the
thinking of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury humanists, even though the
accelerating pace of industrialization, the growth of urban populations, and
the rise in crime, nationalistic squabbles, and ideological strife leading to
largescale inhumane warfare often put in question the efficacy of humanistic
ideals. But even the depressing run of human experience highlighted the appeal
of those ideals, reinforcing the humanistic faith in the values of endurance,
nobility, intelligence, moderation, flexibility, sympathy, and love. Humanists
attribute crucial importance to education, conceiving of it as an all-around
development of personality and individual talents, marrying science to poetry
and culture to democracy. They champion freedom of thought and opinion, the use
of intelligence and pragmatic research in science and technology, and social
and political systems governed by representative institutions. Believing that it
is possible to live confidently without metaphysical or religious certainty and
that all opinions are open to revision and correction, they see human
flourishing as dependent on open communication, discussion, criticism, and
unforced consensus. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Italian humanism, Holofernes’s
Mantuan, from Petrarca to Valla.”
human
nature
– Grice distinguishes very sharply between a human and a person – a human
becomes a person via transubstantiation, a metaphysical routine – human nature
is a quality or group of qualities, belonging to all and only humans, that
explains the kind of being we are. We are all two-footed and featherless, but
‘featherless biped’ does not explain our socially significant characteristics.
We are also all both animals and rational beings (at least potentially), and
‘rational animal’ might explain the special features we have that other kinds
of beings, such as angels, do not. The belief that there is a human nature is
part of the wider thesis that all natural kinds have essences. Acceptance of
this position is compatible with many views about the specific qualities that
constitute human nature. In addition to rationality and embodiment,
philosophers have said that it is part of our nature to be wholly
selfinterested, benevolent, envious, sociable, fearful of others, able to speak
and to laugh, and desirous of immortality. Philosophers disagree about how we
are to discover our nature. Some think metaphysical insight into eternal forms
or truths is required, others that we can learn it from observation of biology
or of behavior. Most have assumed that only males display human nature fully,
and that females, even at their best, are imperfect or incomplete exemplars.
Philosophers also disagree on whether human nature determines morality. Some
think that by noting our distinctive features we can infer what God wills us to
do. Others think that our nature shows at most the limits of what morality can
require, since it would plainly be pointless to direct us to ways of living
that our nature makes impossible. Some philosophers have argued that human
nature is plastic and can be shaped in different ways. Others hold that it is
not helpful to think in terms of human nature. They think that although we
share features as members of a biological species, our other qualities are
socially constructed. If the differences between male and female reflect
cultural patterns of child rearing, work, and the distribution of power, our
biologically common features do not explain our important characteristics and
so do not constitute a nature.
Grice
and the humboldts:
Born in Potsdam, Wilhelm, with his brother Alexander, was educated by private
tutors in the enlightened style thought suitable for a Prussian philosopher.This
included Grice’s stuff: philosophy and the two classical languages, with a bit
of ancient and modern history. After his university studies in law at Frankfurt
an der Oder and Göttingen, Humboldt’s career was divided among assorted posts,
philosophising on a broad range of topics, notably his first loves, like
Grice’s: philosophy and the classical languages. Humboldt’s broad-ranging works
reveal the important influences of Herder in his conception of history and
culture, Kant and Fichte in philosophy, and the French “Ideologues” in semiotics.
His most enduring work has proved to be the Introduction to his massive study
of language. Humboldt maintains that language, as a vital and dynamic
“organism,” is the key to understanding both the operations of the soul. A
language such as Latin possesses a distinctive inner form that shapes, in a way
reminiscent of Kant’s more general categories, the subjective experience, the
world-view, and ultimately the institutions of Rome. While all philosophers are
indebted to both his empirical studies and his theoretical insights on culture,
such philosophers as Dilthey and Cassirer acknowledge him as establishing the
Latin language as a central concern for the humanities. H. P. Grice, “Alexander
and all the Humboldts.”
hume:– “My unfavourite
philosopher” – Grice. “His real name was “Home””. See Grice’s “Humean
projection,” or “Humeian projection,” “I like his spread.” Philosopher who may
be aptly considered the leading neo-skeptic of the early modern period. Many of
Hume’s immediate predecessors (Descartes, Bayle, and Berkeley) had grappled
with important elements of skepticism. Hume consciously incorporated many of
these same elements into a philosophical system that manages to be both
skeptical and constructive. Born and educated in Edinburgh, Hume spent three
years (1734–37) in France writing the penultimate draft of A Treatise of Human
Nature. In middle life, in addition to writing a wide-ranging set of essays and
short treatises and a long History of England, he served briefly as companion
to a mad nobleman, then as a military attaché, before becoming librarian of the
Advocates Library in Edinburgh. In 1763 he served as private secretary to Lord
Hertford, the British ambassador in Paris; in 1765 he became secretary to the
embassy there and then served as chargé d’affaires. In 1767–68 he served in London
as under-secretary of state for the Northern Department. He retired to
Edinburgh in 1769 and died there. Hume’s early care was chiefly in the hands of
his widowed mother, who reported that young David was “uncommon wake-minded”
(i.e., uncommonly acute, in the local dialect of the period). His earliest
surviving letter, written in 1727, indicates that even at sixteen he was
engaged in the study that resulted in the publication (1739) of the first two
volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature. By the time he left college (c.1726) he
had a thorough grounding in classical authors, especially Cicero and the major
Latin poets; in natural philosophy (particularly that of Boyle) and
mathematics; in logic or theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and moral
philosophy; and in history. His early reading included many of the major
English and French poets and essayists of the period. He reports that in the
three years ending about March 1734, he read “most of the celebrated Books in Latin,
French & English,” and also learned Italian. Thus, although Hume’s views
are often supposed to result from his engagement with only one or two
philosophers (with either Locke and Berkeley, or Hutcheson or Newton), the
breadth of his reading suggests that no single writer or philosophical
tradition provides the comprehensive key to his thought. Hume’s most often
cited works include A Treatise of Human Nature (three volumes, 1739–40); an
Abstract (1740) of volumes 1 and 2 of the Treatise; a collection of
approximately forty essays (Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, first
published, for the most part, between 1741 and 1752); An Enquiry concerning
Human Understanding (1748); An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals
(1751); The Natural History of Religion (1757); a six-volume History of England
from Roman times to 1688 (1754–62); a brief autobiography, My Own Life (1777);
and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1778). Hume’s neo-skeptical stance
manifests itself in each of these works. He insists that philosophy “cannot go
beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate
original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as
presumptuous and chimerical.” He says of the Treatise that it “is very sceptical,
and tends to give us a notion of the imperfections and narrow limits of the
human understanding.” But he goes well beyond the conventional recognition of
human limitations; from his skeptical starting place he projects an
observationally based science of human nature, and produces a comprehensive and
constructive account of human nature and experience. Hume begins the Treatise
with a discussion of the “elements” of his philosophy. Arguing that it is
natural philosophers (scientists) who should explain how sensation works, he
focuses on those entities that are the immediate and only objects present to
the mind. These he calls “perceptions” and distinguishes into two kinds,
“impressions” and “ideas.” Hume initially suggests that impressions (of which
there are two kinds: of sensation and of reflection) are more forceful or
vivacious than ideas, but some ideas (those of memory, e.g.) do sometimes take
on enough force and vivacity to be called impressions, and belief also adds
sufficient force and vivacity to ideas to make them practically
indistinguishable from impressions. In the end we find that impressions are
clearly distinguished from ideas only insofar as ideas are always causally
dependent on impressions. Thomas Reid charged that the allegedly representative
theory of perception found in Descartes and Locke had served as a philosophical
Trojan horse leading directly to skeptical despair. Hume was fully aware of the
skeptical implications of this theory. He knew well those sections of Bayle and
Locke that reveal the inadequacy of Descartes’s attempts to prove that there is
an external world, and also appreciated the force of the objections brought by
Bayle and Berkeley against the primary–secondary quality distinction championed
by Locke. Hume adopted the view that the immediate objects of the mind are
always “perceptions” because he thought it correct, and in spite of the fact
that it leads to skepticism about the external world. Satisfied that the battle
to establish absolutely reliable links between thought and reality had been
fought and lost, Hume made no attempt to explain how our impressions of
sensation are linked to their entirely “unknown causes.” He instead focused
exclusively on perceptions qua objects of mind: As to those impressions, which
arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly
inexplicable by human reason, and ‘twill always be impossible to decide with
certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc’d by
the creative power of the mind, or are deriv’d from the author of our being.
Nor is such a question any way material to our present purpose. We may draw
inferences from the coherence of our perceptions, whether they be true or
false; whether they represent nature justly, or be mere illusions of the
senses. Book I of the Treatise is an effort to show how our perceptions cohere
to form certain fundamental notions (those of space and time, causal
connection, external and independent existence, and mind) in which, skeptical
doubts notwithstanding, we repose belief and on which “life and action entirely
depend.” According to Hume, we have no direct impressions of space and time,
and yet the ideas of space and time are essential to our existence. This he
explains by tracing our idea of space to a “manner of appearance”: by means of
two senses, sight and touch, we have impressions that array themselves as so
many points on a contrasting background; the imagination transforms these
particulars of experience into a “compound impression, which represents
extension” or the abstract idea of space itself. Our idea of time is, mutatis
mutandis, accounted for in the same way: “As ‘tis from the disposition of
visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, so from the
succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time.” The abstract
idea of time, like all other abstract ideas, is represented in the imagination
by a “particular individual idea of a determinate quantity and quality” joined
to a term, ‘time’, that has general reference. Hume is often credited with
denying there is physical necessity and that we have any idea of necessary
connection. This interpretation significantly distorts his intent. Hume was
convinced by the Cartesians, and especially by Malebranche, that neither the senses
nor reason can establish that one object (a cause) is connected together with
another object (an effect) in such a way that the presence of the one entails
the existence of the other. Experience reveals only that objects thought to be
causally related are contiguous in time and space, that the cause is prior to
the effect, and that similar objects have been constantly associated in this
way. These are the defining, perceptible features of the causal relation. And
yet there seems to be more to the matter. “There is,” he says, a “NECESSARY
CONNECTION to be taken into consideration,” and our belief in that relation
must be explained. Despite our demonstrated inability to see or prove that
there are necessary causal connections, we continue to think and act as if we
had knowledge of them. We act, for example, as though the future will
necessarily resemble the past, and “wou’d appear ridiculous” if we were to say
“that ‘tis only probable the sun will rise to-morrow, or that all men must
dye.” To explain this phenomenon Hume asks us to imagine what life would have
been like for Adam, suddenly brought to life in the midst of the world. Adam
would have been unable to make even the simplest predictions about the future
behavior of objects. He would not have been able to predict that one moving
billiard ball, striking a second, would cause the second to move. And yet we,
endowed with the same faculties, can not only make, but are unable to resist
making, this and countless other such predictions. What is the difference
between ourselves and this putative Adam? Experience. We have experienced the
constant conjunction (the invariant succession of paired objects or events) of
particular causes and effects and, although our experience never includes even
a glimpse of a causal connection, it does arouse in us an expectation that a
particular event (a “cause”) will be followed by another event (an “effect”)
previously and constantly associated with it. Regularities of experience give
rise to these feelings, and thus determine the mind to transfer its attention
from a present impression to the idea of an absent but associated object. The
idea of necessary connection is copied from these feelings. The idea has its
foundation in the mind and is projected onto the world, but there is
nonetheless such an idea. That there is an objective physical necessity to
which this idea corresponds is an untestable hypothesis, nor would
demonstrating that such necessary connections had held in the past guarantee
that they will hold in the future. Thus, while not denying that there may be
physical necessity or that there is an idea of necessary connection, Hume
remains a skeptic about causal necessity. Hume’s account of our belief in
future effects or absent causes – of the process of mind that enables us to
plan effectively – is a part of this same explanation. Such belief involves an
idea or conception of the entity believed in, but is clearly different from
mere conception without belief. This difference cannot be explained by
supposing that some further idea, an idea of belief itself, is present when we
believe, but absent when we merely conceive. There is no such idea. Moreover,
given the mind’s ability to freely join together any two consistent ideas, if
such an idea were available we by an act of will could, contrary to experience,
combine the idea of belief with any other idea, and by so doing cause ourselves
to believe anything. Consequently, Hume concludes that belief can only be a
“different MANNER of conceiving an object”; it is a livelier, firmer, more
vivid and intense conception. Belief in certain “matters of fact” – the belief
that because some event or object is now being experienced, some other event or
object not yet available to experience will in the future be experienced – is
brought about by previous experience of the constant conjunction of two
impressions. These two impressions have been associated together in such a way
that the experience of one of them automatically gives rise to an idea of the
other, and has the effect of transferring the force or liveliness of the
impression to the associated idea, thereby causing this idea to be believed or
to take on the lively character of an impression. Our beliefs in continuing and
independently existing objects and in our own continuing selves are, on Hume’s
account, beliefs in “fictions,” or in entities entirely beyond all experience.
We have impressions that we naturally but mistakenly suppose to be continuing,
external objects, but analysis quickly reveals that these impressions are by
their very nature fleeting and observer-dependent. Moreover, none of our
impressions provides us with a distinctive mark or evidence of an external
origin. Similarly, when we focus on our own minds, we experience only a
sequence of impressions and ideas, and never encounter the mind or self in
which these perceptions are supposed to inhere. To ourselves we appear to be
merely “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each
other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and
movement.” How do we, then, come to believe in external objects or our own
selves and self-identity? Neither reason nor the senses, working with
impressions and ideas, provide anything like compelling proof of the existence
of continuing, external objects, or of a continuing, unified self. Indeed,
these two faculties cannot so much as account for our belief in objects or
selves. If we had only reason and the senses, the faculties championed by,
respectively, the rationalists and empiricists, we would be mired in a
debilitating and destructive uncertainty. So unfortunate an outcome is avoided
only by the operation of an apparently unreliable third faculty, the
imagination. It, by means of what appear to be a series of outright mistakes
and trivial suggestions, leads us to believe in our own selves and in
independently existing objects. The skepticism of the philosophers is in this
way both confirmed (we can provide no arguments, e.g., proving the existence of
the external world) and shown to be of little practical import. An irrational
faculty, the imagination, saves us from the excesses of philosophy: “Philosophy
wou’d render us entirely Pyrrhonian,” says Hume, were not nature, in the form
of the imagination, too strong for it. Books II and III of the Treatise and the
Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals reveal Hume’s concern to explain
our moral behavior and judgments in a manner that is consistent with his
science of human nature, but which nonetheless recognizes the irreducible moral
content of these judgments. Thus he attempted to rescue the passions from the
ad hoc explanations and negative assessments of his predecessors. From the time
of Plato and the Stoics the passions had often been characterized as irrational
and unnatural animal elements that, given their head, would undermine
humankind’s true, rational nature. Hume’s most famous remark on the subject of
the passions, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,”
will be better understood if read in this context (and if it is remembered that
he also claims that reason can and does extinguish some passions). In contrast
to the long-standing orthodoxy, Hume assumes that the passions constitute an
integral and legitimate part of human nature, a part that can be explained without
recourse to physical or metaphysical speculation. The passions can be treated
as of a piece with other perceptions: they are secondary impressions
(“impressions of reflection”) that derive from prior impressions and ideas.
Some passions (pride and humility, love and hatred) may be characterized as
indirect; i.e., they arise as the result of a double relation of impressions
and ideas that gives them one form of intentional character. These passions
have both assignable causes (typically, the qualities of some person or some
object belonging to a person) and a kind of indirect object (the person with
the qualities or objects just mentioned); the object of pride or humility is
always oneself, while the object of love or hatred is always another. The direct
passions (desire, aversion, hope, fear, etc.) are feelings caused immediately
by pleasure or pain, or the prospect thereof, and take entities or events as
their intentional objects. In his account of the will Hume claims that while
all human actions are caused, they are nonetheless free. He argues that our
ascriptions of causal connection have all the same foundation, namely, the
observation of a “uniform and regular conjunction” of one object with another.
Given that in the course of human affairs we observe “the same uniformity and
regular operation of natural principles” found in the physical world, and that
this uniformity results in an expectation of exactly the sort produced by physical
regularities, it follows that there is no “negation of necessity and causes,”
or no liberty of indifference. The will, that “internal impression we feel and
are conscious of when we knowingly give rise to” any action or thought, is an
effect always linked (by constant conjunction and the resulting feeling of
expectation) to some prior cause. But, insofar as our actions are not forcibly
constrained or hindered, we do remain free in another sense: we retain a
liberty of spontaneity. Moreover, only freedom in this latter sense is
consistent with morality. A liberty of indifference, the possibility of
uncaused actions, would undercut moral assessment, for such assessments
presuppose that actions are causally linked to motives. Morality is for Hume an
entirely human affair founded on human nature and the circumstances of human
life (one form of naturalism). We as a species possess several notable
dispositions that, over time, have given rise to morality. These include a
disposition to form bonded family groups, a disposition (sympathy) to
communicate and thus share feelings, a disposition – the moral sense – to feel
approbation and disapprobation in response to the actions of others, and a
disposition to form general rules. Our disposition to form family groups
results in small social units in which a natural generosity operates. The fact
that such generosity is possible shows that the egoists are mistaken, and
provides a foundation for the distinction between virtue and vice. The fact
that the moral sense responds differently to distinctive motivations – we feel
approbation in response to well-intended actions, disapprobation in response to
ill-intended ones – means that our moral assessments have an affective but
nonetheless cognitive foundation. To claim that Nero was vicious is to make a
judgment about Nero’s motives or character in consequence of an observation of
him that has caused an impartial observer to feel a unique sentiment of
disapprobation. That our moral judgments have this affective foundation
accounts for the practical and motivational character of morality. Reason is
“perfectly inert,” and hence our practical, actionguiding moral distinctions
must derive from the sentiments or feelings provided by our moral sense. Hume
distinguishes, however, between the “natural virtues” (generosity, benevolence,
e.g.) and the “artificial virtues” (justice, allegiance, e.g.). These differ in
that the former not only produce good on each occasion of their practice, but
are also on every occasion approved. In contrast, any particular instantiation
of justice may be “contrary to the public good” and be approved only insofar as
it is entailed by “a general scheme or system of action, which is
advantageous.” The artificial virtues differ also in being the result of
contrivance arising from “the circumstances and necessities of life.” In our
original condition we did not need the artificial virtues because our natural
dispositions and responses were adequate to maintain the order of small,
kinshipbased units. But as human numbers increased, so too did the scarcity of
some material goods lead to an increase in the possibility of conflict,
particularly over property, between these units. As a consequence, and out of
self-interest, our ancestors were gradually led to establish conventions
governing property and its exchange. In the early stages of this necessary
development our disposition to form general rules was an indispensable
component; at later stages, sympathy enables many individuals to pursue the
artificial virtues from a combination of self-interest and a concern for
others, thus giving the fully developed artificial virtues a foundation in two
kinds of motivation. Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and his
Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals represent his effort to “recast”
important aspects of the Treatise into more accessible form. His Essays extend
his human-centered philosophical analysis to political institutions, economics,
and literary criticism. His best-selling History of England provides, among
much else, an extended historical analysis of competing Whig and Tory claims
about the origin and nature of the British constitution. Hume’s trenchant
critique of religion is found principally in his Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding, Natural History of Religion, and Dialogues. In an effort to curb
the excesses of religious dogmatism, Hume focuses his attention on miracles, on
the argument from design, and on the origin of the idea of monotheism. Miracles
are putative facts used to justify a commitment to certain creeds. Such
commitments are often maintained with a mind-numbing tenacity and a disruptive
intolerance toward contrary views. Hume argues that the widely held view of
miracles as violations of a law of nature is incoherent, that the evidence for
even the most likely miracle will always be counterbalanced by the evidence
establishing the law of nature that the miracle allegedly violates, and that
the evidence supporting any given miracle is necessarily suspect. His argument
leaves open the possibility that violations of the laws of nature may have occurred,
but shows that beliefs about such events lack the force of evidence needed to
justify the arrogance and intolerance that characterizes so many of the
religious. Hume’s critique of the argument from design has a similar effect.
This argument purports to show that our well-ordered universe must be the
effect of a supremely intelligent cause, that each aspect of this divine
creation is well designed to fulfill some beneficial end, and that these
effects show us that the Deity is caring and benevolent. Hume shows that these
conclusions go well beyond the available evidence. The pleasant and
well-designed features of the world are balanced by a good measure of the
unpleasant and the plainly botched. Our knowledge of causal connections depends
on the experience of constant conjunctions. Such connections cause the vivacity
of a present impression to be transferred to the idea associated with it, and
leave us believing in that idea. But in this case the effect to be explained,
the universe, is unique, and its cause unknown. Consequently, we cannot
possibly have experiential grounds for any kind of inference about this cause.
On experiential grounds the most we can say is that there is a massive, mixed
effect, and, as we have through experience come to believe that effects have
causes commensurate to them, this effect probably does have a commensurately
large and mixed cause. Furthermore, as the effect is remotely like the products
of human manufacture, we can say “that the cause or causes of order in the
universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.” There is
indeed an inference to be drawn from the unique effect in question (the
universe) to the cause of that effect, but it is not the “argument” of the
theologians nor does it in any way support sectarian pretension or intolerance.
The Natural History of Religion focuses on the question of the origin of
religion in human nature, and delivers a thoroughly naturalistic answer: the
widespread but not universal belief in invisible and intelligent power can be
traced to derivative and easily perverted principles of our nature. Primitive
peoples found physical nature not an orderly whole produced by a beneficent
designer, but arbitrary and fearsome, and they came to understand the
activities of nature as the effect of petty powers that could, through
propitiating worship, be influenced to ameliorate their lives. Subsequently,
the same fears and perceptions transformed polytheism into monotheism, the view
that a single, omnipotent being created and still controls the world and all
that transpires in it. From this conclusion Hume goes on to argue that
monotheism, apparently the more sophisticated position, is morally retrograde.
Monotheism tends naturally toward zeal and intolerance, encourages debasing, “monkish
virtues,” and proves itself a danger to society: it is a source of violence and
a cause of immorality. In contrast, polytheism, which Hume here regards as a
form of atheism, is tolerant of diversity and encourages genuine virtues that
improve humankind. From a moral point of view, at least this one form of
atheism is superior to theism.
husserl: philosopher and
founder of phenomenology. Born in Prossnits (now Proste v jov in the Czech
Republic), he studied science and philosophy at Leipzig, mathematics and
philosophy at Berlin, and philosophy and psychology at Vienna and Halle. He
taught at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg (1916–28). Husserl and Frege were the
founders of the two major twentiethcentury trends. Through his work and his
influence on Russell, Wittgenstein, and others, Frege inspired the movement
known as analytic philosophy, while Husserl, through his work and his influence
on Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others, established the movement known
as phenomenology. Husserl began his academic life as a mathematician. He
studied at Berlin with Kronecker and Weierstrass and wrote a dissertation in
mathematics at Vienna. There, influenced by Brentano, his interests turned
toward philosohumors Husserl, Edmund 403 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page
403 phy and psychology but remained related to mathematics. His habilitation,
written at Halle, was a psychological-philosophical study of the concept of
number and led to his first book, The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891). Husserl
distinguishes between numbers given intuitively and those symbolically
intended. The former are given as the objective correlates of acts of counting;
when we count things set out before us, we constitute groups, and these groups
can be compared with each other as more and less. In this way the first few
numbers in the number series can be intuitively presented. Although most
numbers are only symbolically intended, their sense as numbers is derived from
those that are intuitively given. During 1890–1900 Husserl expanded his
philosophical concerns from mathematics to logic and the general theory of
knowledge, and his reflections culminated in his Logical Investigations
(1900–01). The work is made up of six investigations preceded by a volume of
prolegomena. The prolegomena are a sustained and effective critique of
psychologism, the doctrine that reduces logical entities, such as propositions,
universals, and numbers, to mental states or mental activities. Husserl insists
on the objectivity of such targets of consciousness and shows the incoherence
of reducing them to the activities of mind. The rest of the work examines signs
and words, abstraction, parts and wholes, logical grammar, the notion of
presentation, and truth and evidence. His earlier distinction between intuitive
presentation and symbolic intention is now expanded from our awareness of
numbers to the awareness of all sorts of objects of consciousness. The contrast
between empty intention and fulfillment or intuition is applied to perceptual
objects, and it is also applied to what he calls categorial objects: states of
affairs, relationships, causal connections, and the like. Husserl claims that
we can have an intellectual intuition of such things and he describes this
intuition; it occurs when we articulate an object as having certain features or
relationships. The formal structure of categorial objects is elegantly related
to the grammatical parts of language. As regards simple material objects,
Husserl observes that we can intend them either emptily or intuitively, but
even when they are intuitively given, they retain sides that are absent and
only cointended by us, so perception itself is a mixture of empty and filled
intentions. The term ‘intentionality’ refers to both empty and filled, or
signitive and intuitive, intentions. It names the relationship consciousness
has toward things, whether those things are directly given or meant only in
their absence. Husserl also shows that the identity of things is given to us
when we see that the object we once intended emptily is the same as what is
actually given to us now. Such identities are given even in perceptual
experience, as the various sides and aspects of things continue to present one
and the same object, but identities are given even more explicitly in
categorial intuition, when we recognize the partial identity between a thing
and its features, or when we directly focus on the identity a thing has with
itself. These phenomena are described under the general rubric of
identitysynthesis. A weakness in the first edition of Logical Investigations
was the fact that Husserl remained somewhat Kantian in it and distinguished
sharply between the thing as it is given to us and the thing-in-itself; he
claimed that in his phenomenology he described only the thing as it is given to
us. In the decade 1900–10, through deeper reflection on our experience of time,
on memory, and on the nature of philosophical thinking, he overcame this
Kantian distinction and claimed that the thing-in-itself can be intuitively
given to us as the identity presented in a manifold of appearances. His new
position was expressed in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). The book was misinterpreted by many as
adopting a traditional idealism, and many thinkers who admired Husserl’s
earlier work distanced themselves from what he now taught. Husserl published
three more books. Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) was written right
after his retirement; Cartesian Meditations (1931), which appeared in French
translation, was an elaboration of some lectures he gave in Paris. In addition,
some earlier manuscripts on the experience of time were assembled by Edith
Stein and edited by Heidegger in 1928 as Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner
Time-Consciousness. Thus, Husserl published only six books, but he amassed a
huge amount of manuscripts, lecture notes, and working papers. He always
retained the spirit of a scientist and did his philosophical work in the manner
of tentative experiments. Many of his books can be seen as compilations of such
experiments rather than as systematic treatises. Because of its exploratory and
developmental character, his thinking does not lend itself to doctrinal
summary. Husserl was of Jewish ancestry, and after his death his papers were in
danger from the Nazi regime; they were covertly taken out of Germany by a
Belgian scholar, Herman Husserl, Edmund Husserl, Edmund 404 4065h-l.qxd
08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 404 Leo Van Breda, who, after World War II, established
the Husserl Archives at Louvain. This institution, with centers at Cologne,
Freiburg, Paris, and New York, has since supervised the critical edition of
many volumes of Husserl’s writings in the series Husserliana. Husserl believes
that things are presented to us in various ways, and that philosophy should be
engaged in precise description of these appearances. It should avoid
constructing large-scale theories and defending ideologies. It should analyze,
e.g., how visual objects are perceived and how they depend on our cognitive
activity of seeing, focusing, moving about, on the correlation of seeing with
touching and grasping, and so on. Philosophy should describe the different ways
in which such “regions of being” as material objects, living things, other
persons, and cultural objects are given, how the past and the present are
intended, how speech, numbers, time and space, and our own bodies are given to
us, and so on. Husserl carries out many such analyses himself and in all of
them distinguishes between the object given and the subjective conscious
activity we must perform to let it be given. The phenomenological description
of the object is called noematic analysis and that of the subjective intentions
is called noetic analysis. The noema is the object as described phenomenologically,
the noesis is the corresponding mental activity, also as described by
phenomenology. The objective and the subjective are correlative but never
reducible to one another. In working out such descriptions we must get to the
essential structures of things. We do so not by just generalizing over
instances we have experienced, but by a process he calls “free variation” or
“imaginative variation.” We attempt in our imagination to remove various
features from the target of our analysis; the removal of some features would
leave the object intact, but the removal of other features would destroy the
object; hence, when we come upon the latter we know we have hit on something
essential to the thing. The method of imaginative variation thus leads to eidetic
intuition, the insight that this or that feature belongs to the eidos, the
essence, of the thing in question. Eidetic intuition is directed not only
toward objects but also toward the various forms of intentionality, as we try
to determine the essence of perception, memory, judging, and the like. Husserl
thinks that the eidetic analysis of intentionality and its objects yields
apodictic truths, truths that can be seen to be necessary. Examples might be
that human beings could not be without a past and future, and that each
material perceptual object has sides and aspects other than those presented at
any moment. Husserl admits that the objects of perceptual experience, material
things, are not given apodictically to perception because they contain parts that
are only emptily intended, but he insists that the phenomenological reflection
on perceptual experience, the reflection that yields the statement that
perception involves a mixture of empty and filled intentions, can be apodictic:
we know apodictically that perception must have a mixture of empty and filled
intentions. Husserl did admit in the 1920s that although phenomenological
experience and statements could be apodictic, they would never be adequate to
what they describe, i.e., further clarifications of what they signify could
always be carried out. This would mean, e.g., that we can be apodictically sure
that human beings could not be what they are if they did not have a sense of
past and future, but what it is to have a past and future always needs deeper
clarification. Husserl has much to say about philosophical thinking. He
distinguishes between the “natural attitude,” our straightforward involvement
with things and the world, and the “phenomenological attitude,” the reflective
point of view from which we carry out philosophical analysis of the intentions
exercised in the natural attitude and the objective correlates of these
intentions. When we enter the phenomenological attitude, we put out of action
or suspend all the intentions and convictions of the natural attitude; this
does not mean that we doubt or negate them, only that we take a distance from
them and contemplate their structure. Husserl calls this suspension the
phenomenological epoché. In our human life we begin, of course, in the natural
attitude, and the name for the processs by which we move to the
phenomenological attitude is called the phenomenological reduction, a “leading
back” from natural beliefs to the reflective consideration of intentions and
their objects. In the phenomenological attitude we look at the intentions that
we normally look through, those that function anonymously in our
straightforward involvement with the world. Throughout his career, Husserl
essayed various “ways to reduction” or arguments to establish philosophy. At
times he tried to model the argument on Descartes’s methodical doubt; at times
he tried to show that the world-directed sciences need the further supplement
of phenomenological reflection if they are to be truly scientific. One of the
special features of the natural attitude is that it simply accepts the world as
a background or horizon for all our more particular experiences and beliefs.
The world is not a large thing nor is it the sum total of things; it is the
horizon or matrix for all particular things and states of affairs. The world as
noema is correlated to our world-belief or world-doxa as noesis. In the
phenomenological attitude we take a distance even toward our natural being in
the world and we describe what it is to have a world. Husserl thinks that this
sort of radical reflection and radical questioning is necessary for beginning
philosophy and entering into what he calls pure or transcendental
phenomenology; so long as we fail to question our world-belief and the world as
such, we fail to reach philosophical purity and our analyses will in fact
become parts of worldly sciences (such as psychology) and will not be
philosophical. Husserl distinguishes between the apophantic and the ontological
domains. The apophantic is the domain of senses and propositions, while the
ontological is the domain of things, states of affairs, relations, and the
like. Husserl calls “apophantic analytics” the science that examines the
formal, logical structures of the apophantic domain and “formal ontology” the
science that examines the formal structures of the ontological domain. The
movement between focusing on the ontological domain and focusing on the
apophantic domain occurs within the natural attitude, but it is described from
the phenomenological attitude. This movement establishes the difference between
propositions and states of affairs, and it permits scientific verification;
science is established in the zigzag motion between focusing on things and
focusing on propositions, which are then verified or falsified when they are
confirmed or disconfirmed by the way things appear. Evidence is the activity of
either having a thing in its direct presence or experiencing the conformity or
disconformity between an empty intention and the intuition that is to fulfill it.
There are degrees of evidence; things can be given more or less fully and more
or less distinctly. Adequation occurs when an intuition fully satisfies an
empty intention. Husserl also makes a helpful distinction between the passive,
thoughtless repetition of words and the activity of explicit judging, in which
we distinctly make judgments on our own. Explicit thinking can itself fall back
into passivity or become “sedimented” as people take it for granted and go on
to build further thinking upon it. Such sedimented thought must be reactivated
and its meanings revived. Passive thinking may harbor contradictions and
incoherences; the application of formal logic presumes judgments that are
distinctly executed. In our reflective phenomenological analyses we describe
various intentional acts, but we also discover the ego as the owner or agent
behind these acts. Husserl distinguishes between the psychological ego, the ego
taken as a part of the world, and the transcendental ego, the ego taken as that
which has a world and is engaged in truth, and hence to some extent transcends
the world. He often comments on the remarkable ambiguity of the ego, which is
both a part of the world (as a human being) and yet transcends the world (as a
cognitive center that possesses or intends the world). The transcendental ego
is not separable from individuals; it is a dimension of every human being. We
each have a transcendental ego, since we are all intentional and rational
beings. Husserl also devoted much effort to analyzing intersubjectivity and
tried to show how other egos and other minds, other centers of conscious and
rational awareness, can be presented and intended. The role of the body, the
role of speech and other modes of communication, and the fact that we all share
things and a world in common are important elements in these analyses. The
transcendental ego, the source of all intentional acts, is constituted through
time: it has its own identity, which is different from that of the identity of
things or states of affairs. The identity of the ego is built up through the
flow of experiences and through memory and anticipation. One of Husserl’s major
contributions is his analysis of time-consciousness and its relation to the
identity of the self, a topic to which he often returns. He distinguishes among
the objective time of the world, the inner time of the flow of our experiences
(such as acts of perception, judgments, and memories), and a third, still
deeper level that he calls “the consciousness of inner time.” It is this third,
deepest level, the consciousness of inner time, that permits even our mental
acts to be experienced as temporal. This deepest level also provides the
ultimate context in which the identity of the ego is constituted. In one way,
we achieve our conscious identity through the memories that we store and
recall, but these memories themselves have to be stitched together by the
deepest level of temporality in order to be recoverable as belonging to one and
the same self. Husserl observes that on this deepest level of the consciousness
of inner time, we never have a simple atomic present: what we come to as
ultimate is a moving form Husserl, Edmund Husserl, Edmund 406 4065h-l.qxd
08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 406 that has a retention of the immediate past, a protention
of that which is coming, and a central core. This form of inner
time-consciousness, the form of what Husserl calls “the living present,” is
prior even to the ego and is a kind of apex reached by his philosophical
analysis. One of the important themes that Husserl developed in the last decade
of his work is that of the life-world or Lebenswelt. He claims that scientific
and mathematical abstraction has roots in the prescientific world, the world in
which we live. This world has its own structures of appearance, identification,
evidence, and truth, and the scientific world is established on its basis. One
of the tasks of phenomenology is to show how the idealized entities of science
draw their sense from the life-world. Husserl claims, e.g., that geometrical
forms have their roots in the activity of measuring and in the idealization of
the volumes, surfaces, edges, and intersections we experience in the
life-world. The sense of the scientific world and its entities should not be
placed in opposition to the life-world, but should be shown, by
phenomenological analysis, to be a development of appearances found in it. In
addition, the structures and evidences of the lifeworld itself must be
philosophically described. Husserl’s influence in philosophy has been very
great during the entire twentieth century, especially in Continental Europe.
His concept of intentionality is understood as a way of overcoming the
Cartesian dualism between mind and world, and his study of signs, formal
systems, and parts and wholes has been valuable in structuralism and literary
theory. His concept of the life-world has been used as a way of integrating
science with wider forms of human activity, and his concepts of time and
personal identity have been useful in psychoanalytic theory and existentialism.
He has inspired work in the social sciences and recently his ideas have proved
helpful to scholars in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
hutcheson: philosopher who
was the chief exponent of the early modern moral sense theory and of a similar
theory postulating a sense of beauty. He was born in Drumalig, Ireland, and
completed his theological training in 1717 at the University of Glasgow, where
he later taught moral philosophy. He was a Presbyterian minister and founded an
academy for Presbyterian youth in Dublin. Sparked by Hobbes’s thesis, in
Leviathan (1651), that human beings always act out of selfinterest, moral
debate in the eighteenth century was preoccupied with the possibility of a
genuine benevolence. Hutcheson characterized his first work, An Inquiry into
the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), as a defense of the
nonegoistic moral sense theory of his more immediate predecessor, Shaftesbury,
against the egoism of Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733). His second work, An Essay
on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on
the Moral Sense (1728), explores the psychology of human action, apparently
influenced by Butler’s classification of the passions (in his Sermons, 1726).
Hutcheson asserts the existence of several “internal” senses – i.e., capacities
for perceptual responses to concepts (such as one’s idea of Nero’s character),
as opposed to perceptions of physical objects. Among these internal senses are
those of honor, sympathy, morality, and beauty. Only the latter two, however,
are discussed in detail by Hutcheson, who develops his account of each within
the framework of Locke’s empiricist epistemology. For Hutcheson, the idea of
beauty is produced in us when we experience pleasure upon thinking of certain
natural objects or artifacts, just as our idea of moral goodness is occasioned
by the approval we feel toward an agent when we think of her actions, even if
they in no way benefit us. Beauty and goodness (and their opposites) are
analogous to Lockean secondary qualities, such as colors, tastes, smells, and
sounds, in that their existence depends somehow on the minds of perceivers. The
quality the sense of beauty consistently finds pleasurable is a pattern of
“uniformity amidst variety,” while the quality the moral sense invariably
approves is benevolence. A principal reason for thinking we possess a moral
sense, according to Hutcheson, is that we approve of many actions unrelated or
even contrary to our interests – a fact that suggests not all approval is
reason-based. Further, he argues that attempts to explain our feelings of
approval or disapproval without referring to a moral sense are futile: our
reasons are ultimately grounded in the fact that we simply are constituted to
care about others and take pleasure in benevolence (the quality of being
concerned about others for their own sakes). For instance, we approve of
temperance because overindulgence signifies selfishness, and selfishness is
contrary to benevolence. Hutcheson also finds that the ends promoted by the
benevolent person have a tendency to produce the greatest happiness for the
greatest number. Thus, since he regards being motivated by benevolence as what
makes actions morally good, Hutcheson’s theory is a version of motive
utilitarianism. On Hutcheson’s moral psychology, we are motivated, ultimately,
not by reason alone, but by desires that arise in us at the prospect of our own
or others’ pleasure. Hutcheson formulates several quantitative maxims that purport
to relate the strength of motivating desires to the degrees of good, or
benefit, projected for different actions – an analysis that anticipates
Bentham’s hedonic calculus. Hutcheson was also one of the first philosophers to
recognize and make use of the distinction between exciting, or motivating,
reasons and justifying reasons. Exciting reasons are affections, or desires,
ascribed to an agent as motives that explain particular actions. Justifying
reasons derive from the approval of the moral sense and serve to indicate why a
certain action is morally good. The connection between these two kinds of
reasons has been a source of considerable debate. Contemporary critics included
John Balguy (1686–1748), who charged that Hutcheson’s moral theory renders virtue
arbitrary, since it depends on whatever human nature God happened to give us,
which could just as well have been such as to make us delight in malice.
Hutcheson discussed his views in correspondence with Hume, who later sent
Hutcheson the unpublished manuscript of his own account of moral sentiment
(Book III of A Treatise of Human Nature). As a teacher of Adam Smith, Hutcheson
helped shape Smith’s widely influential economic and moral theories.
Hutcheson’s major works also include A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy
(originally published in Latin in 1742) and A System of Moral Philosophy
(1755).
huygens: c., physicist and
astronomer who ranked among the leading experimental scientists of his time and
influenced many other thinkers, including Leibniz. He wrote on physics and
astronomy in Latin (Horologium Oscillatorium, 1673; De Vi Centrifuga, 1703) and
in French for the Journal des Scavans. He became a founding member of the
French Academy of Sciences. Huygens ground lenses, built telescopes, discovered
the rings of Saturn, and invented the pendulum clock. His most popular
composition, Cosmotheoros (1699), inspired by Fontenelle, praises a divine
architect and conjectures the possible existence of rational beings on other
planets.
materia:
One
of Grice’s twelve labours is against Materialism -- Cicero’s translation of
hyle, ancient Greek term for matter. Aristotle brought the word into use in
philosophy by contrast with the term for form, and as designating one of the
four causes. By hyle Aristotle usually means ‘that out of which something has
been made’, but he can also mean by it ‘that which has form’. In Aristotelian
philosophy hyle is sometimes also identified with potentiality and with
substrate. Neoplatonists identified hyle with the receptacle of Plato.
forma: Grice always
found ‘logical form’ redundant (“Surely we are not into ‘matter’ – that would
be cheap!”) – “‘materia-forma’ is the unity, as the Grecians well knew.”- hylomorphism,
the doctrine, first taught by Aristotle, that concrete substance consists of
form in matter (hyle). The details of this theory are explored in the central
books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Zeta, Eta, and Theta).
hylozoism: from Greek hyle,
‘matter’, and zoe, ‘life’), the doctrine that matter is intrinsically alive, or
that all bodies, from the world as a whole down to the smallest corpuscle, have
some degree or some kind of life. It differs from panpsychism though the
distinction is sometimes blurred – in upholding the universal presence of life
per se, rather than of soul or of psychic attributes. Inasmuch as it may also
hold that there are no living entities not constituted of matter, hylozoism is
often criticized by theistic philosophers as a form of atheism. The term was
introduced polemically by Ralph Cudworth, the seventeenth-century Cambridge
Platonist, to help define a position that is significantly in contrast to
soul–body dualism (Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes), reductive materialism
(Democritus, Hobbes), and Aristotelian hylomorphism. So understood, hylozoism
had many advocates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among both
scientists and naturalistically minded philosophers. In the twentieth century,
the term has come to be used, rather unhelpfully, to characterize the animistic
and naive-vitalist views of the early Greek philosophers, especially Thales,
Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Empedocles – who could hardly count as hylozoists
in Cudworth’s sophisticated sense.
substantia – hypostasis, the
process of regarding a concept or abstraction as an independent or real entity.
The verb forms ‘hypostatize’ and ‘reify’ designate the acts of positing objects
of a certain sort for the purposes of one’s theory. It is sometimes implied
that a fallacy is involved in so describing these processes or acts, as in
‘Plato was guilty of the reification of universals’. The issue turns largely on
criteria of ontological commitment.
Hypostasis: Arianism, diverse but related
teachings in early Christianity that subordinated the Son to God the Father. In
reaction the church developed its doctrine of the Trinity, whereby the Son and
Holy Spirit, though distinct persons hypostases, share with the Father, as his
ontological equals, the one being or substance ousia of God. Arius taught in
Alexandria, where, on the hierarchical model of Middle Platonism, he sharply
distinguished Scripture’s transcendent God from the Logos or Son incarnate in
Jesus. The latter, subject to suffering and humanly obedient to God, is
inferior to the immutable Creator, the object of that obedience. God alone is
eternal and ungenerated; the Son, divine not by nature but by God’s choosing,
is generated, with a beginning: the unique creature, through whom all else is
made. The Council of Nicea, in 325, condemned Arius and favored his enemy
Athanasius, affirming the Son’s creatorhood and full deity, having the same
being or substance homoousios as the Father. Arianism still flourished,
evolving into the extreme view that the Son’s being was neither the same as the
Father’s nor like it homoiousios, but unlike it anomoios. This too was
anathematized, by the Council of 381 at Constantinople, which, ratifying what
is commonly called the Nicene Creed, sealed orthodox Trinitarianism and the
equality of the three persons against Arian subordinationism.
suppositum – Cicero for
‘hypothesis’, as in ‘hypothetico-deductive’ – a hypothetico-deductive method, a
method of testing hypotheses. Thought to be preferable to the method of
enumerative induction, whose limitations had been decisively demonstrated by
Hume, the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method has been viewed by many as the
ideal scientific method. It is applied by introducing an explanatory hypothesis
resulting from earlier inductions, a guess, or an act of creative imagination.
The hypothesis is logically conjoined with a statement of initial conditions.
The purely deductive consequences of this conjunction are derived as
predictions, and the statements asserting them are subjected to experimental or
observational test. More formally, given (H • A) P O, H is the hypothesis, A a
statement of initial conditions, and O one of the testable consequences of (H •
A). If the hypothesis is ‘all lead is malleable’, and ‘this piece of lead is
now being hammered’ states the initial conditions, it follows deductively that
‘this piece of lead will change shape’. In deductive logic the schema is
formally invalid, committing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.
But repeated occurrences of O can be said to confirm the conjunction of H and
A, or to render it more probable. On the other hand, the schema is deductively
valid (the argument form modus tollens). For this reason, Karl Popper and his
followers think that the H-D method is best employed in seeking falsifications
of theoretical hypotheses. Criticisms of the method point out that infinitely
many hypotheses can explain, in the H-D mode, a given body of data, so that
successful predictions are not probative, and that (following Duhem) it is
impossible to test isolated singular hypotheses because they are always
contained in complex theories any one of whose parts is eliminable in the face
of negative evidence.
I:
particularis dedicativa.. See Grice, “Circling the Square of Opposition.
ichthyological necessity: topic-neutral:
Originally, Ryle’s term for logical constants, such as “of ” “not,” “every.”
They are not endowed with special meanings, and are applicable to discourse
about any subject-matter. They do not refer to any external object but function
to organize meaningful discourse. J. J. C. Smart calls a term topic-neutral if
it is noncommittal about designating something mental or something physical.
Instead, it simply describes an event without judging the question of its
intrinsic nature. In his central-state theory of mind, Smart develops a
topic-neutral analysis of mental expressions and argues that it is possible to
account for the situations described by mental concepts in purely physical and
topic-neutral terms. “In this respect, statements like ‘I am thinking now’ are,
as J. J. C. Smart puts it, topic-neutral. They say that something is going on
within us, something apt for the causing of certain sorts of behaviour, but
they say nothing of the nature of this process.” D. Armstrong, A Materialist
Theory of the Mind
icon -- Would Ciero
prefer the spelling ‘eiconicus’ or ‘iconicus’? We know Pliny preferred ‘icon.’īcon , ŏnis, f., = εἰκών,I.an image, figure: “fictae ceră icones,” Plin. 8, 54, 80, § 215.Iconicity -- depiction,
pictorial representation, also sometimes called “iconic representation.”
Linguistic representation is conventional: it is only by virtue of a convention
that the word ‘cats’ refers to cats. A picture of a cat, however, seems to
refer to cats by other than conventional means; for viewers can correctly
interpret pictures without special training, whereas people need special
training to learn languages. Though some philosophers, such as Goodman
Languages of Art, deny that depiction involves a non-conventional element, most
are concerned to give an account of what this non-conventional element consists
in. Some hold that it consists in resemblance: pictures refer to their objects partly
by resembling them. Objections to this are that anything resembles anything
else to some degree; and that resemblance is a symmetric and reflexive
relation, whereas depiction is not. Other philosophers avoid direct appeal to
resemblance: Richard Wollheim Painting as an Art argues that depiction holds by
virtue of the intentional deployment of the natural human capacity to see
objects in marked surfaces; and dependence, causal depiction Kendall Walton
Mimesis as Make-Believe argues that depiction holds by virtue of objects
serving as props in reasonably rich and vivid visual games of
make-believe.
forma:
ideatum
– Cicero was a bit at a loss when trying to translate the Greek eidos or idea.
For ‘eidos’ he had forma, but the Romans seemed to have liked the sound of
‘idea,’ and Martianus Capella even coined ‘ideal,’ which Kant and Grice later
used. idea, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whatever is
immediately before the mind when one thinks. The notion of thinking was taken
in a very broad sense; it included perception, memory, and imagination, in
addition to thinking narrowly construed. In connection with perception, ideas
were often (though not always – Berkeley is the exception) held to be
representational images, i.e., images of something. In other contexts, ideas
were taken to be concepts, such as the concept of a horse or of an infinite
quantity, though concepts of these sorts certainly do not appear to be images.
An innate idea was either a concept or a general truth, such as ‘Equals added
to equals yield equals’, that was allegedly not learned but was in some sense
always in the mind. Sometimes, as in Descartes, innate ideas were taken to be
cognitive capacities rather than concepts or general truths, but these
capacities, too, were held to be inborn. An adventitious idea, either an image
or a concept, was an idea accompanied by a judgment concerning the non-mental
cause of that idea. So, a visual image was an adventitious idea provided one
judged of that idea that it was caused by something outside one’s mind, presumably
by the object being seen. From Idea Alston coined ‘ideationalism’ to refer to
Grice’s theory. “Grice’s is an ideationalist theory of meaning, drawn from
Locke.”Alston calls Grice an ideationalist,
and Grice takes it as a term of abuse. Grice would occasionally use ‘mental.’
Short and Lewis have "mens.” “terra corpus est, at mentis ignis est;” so
too, “istic est de sole sumptus; isque totus mentis est;” f. from the root ‘men,’ whence ‘memini,’ and ‘comminiscor.’ Lewis and Short render
‘mens’ as ‘the mind, disposition; the heart, soul.’ Lewis and Short have
‘commĭniscor,’ originally conminiscor ), mentus, from ‘miniscor,’ whence also ‘reminiscor,’
stem ‘men,’ whence ‘mens’ and ‘memini,’
cf. Varro, Lingua Latina 6, § 44. Lewis and Short render the verb as,
literally, ‘to ponder carefully, to reflect upon;’ ‘hence, as a result of
reflection; cf. 1. commentor, II.), to devise something by careful thought, to
contrive, invent, feign. Myro is perhaps unaware of the implicatura of ‘mental’
when he qualifies his -ism with ‘modest.’ Grice would seldom use mind (Grecian
nous) or mental (Grecian noetikos vs. æsthetikos). His sympathies go for more
over-arching Grecian terms like the very Aristotelian soul, the anima, i. e.
the psyche and the psychological. Grice discusses G. Myro’s essay, ‘In defence
of a modal mentalism,’ with attending commentary by R. Albritton and S. Cavell.
Grice himself would hardly use mental, mentalist, or mentalism himself, but
perhaps psychologism. Grice would use mental, on occasion, but his Grecianism
was deeply rooted, unlike Myro’s. At Clifton and under Hardie (let us recall he
came up to Oxford under a classics scholarship to enrol in the Lit. Hum.) he
knows that mental translates mentalis translates nous, only ONE part, one
third, actually, of the soul, and even then it may not include the ‘practical
rational’ one! Cf. below on ‘telementational.’
formalism: Cicero’s
translation for ‘idealism,’ or ideism -- the philosophical doctrine that
reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated – that the real objects
constituting the “external world” are not independent of cognizing minds, but
exist only as in some way correlative to mental operations. The doctrine
centers on the conception that reality as we understand it reflects the workings
of mind. Perhaps its most radical version is the ancient Oriental
spiritualistic or panpsychistic idea, renewed in Christian Science, that minds
and their thoughts are all there is – that reality is simply the sum total of
the visions (or dreams?) of one or more minds. A dispute has long raged within
the idealist camp over whether “the mind” at issue in such idealistic formulas
was a mind emplaced outside of or behind nature (absolute idealism), or a
nature-pervasive power of rationality of some sort (cosmic idealism), or the
collective impersonal social mind of people in general (social idealism), or
simply the distributive collection of individual minds (personal idealism).
Over the years, the less grandiose versions of the theory came increasingly to
the fore, and in recent times virtually all idealists have construed “the
minds” at issue in their theory as separate individual minds equipped with
socially engendered resources. There are certainly versions of idealism short
of the spiritualistic position of an ontological idealism that (as Kant puts it
at Prolegomena, section 13, n. 2) holds that “there are none but thinking
beings.” Idealism need certainly not go so far as to affirm that mind makes or
constitutes matter; it is quite enough to maintain (e.g.) that all of the
characterizing properties of physical existents resemble phenomenal sensory
properties in representing dispositions to affect mind-endowed creatures in a
certain sort of way, so that these properties have no standing without
reference to minds. Weaker still is an explanatory idealism which merely holds
that an adequate explanation of the real always requires some recourse to the
operations of mind. Historically, positions of the generally idealistic type
have been espoused by numerous thinkers. For example, Berkeley maintained that
“to be [real] is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). And while this does not
seem particularly plausible because of its inherent commitment to omniscience,
it seems more sensible to adopt “to be is to be perceivable” (esse est
percipile esse). For Berkeley, of course, this was a distinction without a
difference: if something is perceivable at all, then God perceives it. But if
we forgo philosophical reliance on God, the matter looks different, and pivots
on the question of what is perceivable for perceivers who are physically
realizable in “the real world,” so that physical existence could be seen – not
so implausibly – as tantamount to observability-in-principle. The three
positions to the effect that real things just exactly are things as philosophy
or as science or as “common sense” takes them to be – positions generally
designated as Scholastic, scientific, and naive realism, respectively – are in
fact versions of epistemic idealism exactly because they see reals as
inherently knowable and do not contemplate mind-transcendence for the real.
Thus, the thesis of naive (“commonsense”) realism that ‘External things exist
exactly as we know them’ sounds realistic or idealistic according as one
stresses the first three words of the dictum or the last four. Any theory of
natural teleology that regards the real as explicable in terms of value could
to this extent be counted as idealistic, in that valuing is by nature a mental
process. To be sure, the good of a creature or species of creatures (e.g.,
their well-being or survival) need not be something mind-represented. But
nevertheless, goods count as such precisely because if the creatures at issue
could think about it, they would adopt them as purposes. It is this circumstance
that renders any sort of teleological explanation at least conceptually
idealistic in nature. Doctrines of this sort have been the stock-in-trade of
philosophy from the days of Plato (think of the Socrates of the Phaedo) to
those of Leibniz, with his insistence that the real world must be the best
possible. And this line of thought has recently surfaced once more in the
controversial “anthropic principle” espoused by some theoretical physicists.
Then too it is possible to contemplate a position along the lines envisioned in
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowledge), which sees the ideal as
providing the determining factor for the real. On such a view, the real is not
characterized by the science we actually have but by the ideal science that is
the telos of our scientific efforts. On this approach, which Wilhelm Wundt
characterized as “ideal-realism” (Idealrealismus; see his Logik, vol. 1, 2d
ed., 1895), the knowledge that achieves adequation to the real idea, clear and
distinct idealism (adaequatio ad rem) by adequately characterizing the true
facts in scientific matters is not the knowledge actually afforded by
present-day science, but only that of an ideal or perfected science. Over the
years, many objections to idealism have been advanced. Samuel Johnson thought
to refute Berkeley’s phenomenalism by kicking a stone. He conveniently forgot
that Berkeley goes to great lengths to provide for stones – even to the point
of invoking the aid of God on their behalf. Moore pointed to the human hand as
an undeniably mind-external material object. He overlooked that, gesticulate as
he would, he would do no more than induce people to accept the presence of a
hand on the basis of the handorientation of their experience. Peirce’s “Harvard
Experiment” of letting go of a stone held aloft was supposed to establish
Scholastic realism because his audience could not control their expectation of
the stone’s falling to earth. But an uncontrollable expectation is still an
expectation, and the realism at issue is no more than a realistic
thought-exposure. Kant’s famous “Refutation of Idealism” argues that our
conception of ourselves as mindendowed beings presupposes material objects
because we view our mind-endowed selves as existing in an objective temporal
order, and such an order requires the existence of periodic physical processes
(clocks, pendula, planetary regularities) for its establishment. At most,
however, this argument succeeds in showing that such physical processes have to
be assumed by minds, the issue of their actual mind-independent existence
remaining unaddressed. (Kantian realism is an intraexperiential “empirical”
realism.) It is sometimes said that idealism confuses objects with our
knowledge of them and conflates the real with our thought about it. But this
charge misses the point. The only reality with which we inquirers can have any
cognitive commerce is reality as we conceive it to be. Our only information
about reality is via the operation of mind – our only cognitive access to
reality is through the mediation of mind-devised models of it. Perhaps the most
common objection to idealism turns on the supposed mind-independence of the
real: “Surely things in nature would remain substantially unchanged if there
were no minds.” This is perfectly plausible in one sense, namely the causal one
– which is why causal idealism has its problems. But it is certainly not true
conceptually. The objector has to specify just exactly what would remain the
same. “Surely roses would smell just as sweet in a minddenuded world!” Well . .
. yes and no. To be sure, the absence of minds would not change roses. But
roses and rose fragrance and sweetness – and even the size of roses – are all
factors whose determination hinges on such mental operations as smelling, scanning,
measuring, and the like. Mind-requiring processes are needed for something in
the world to be discriminated as a rose and determined to bear certain
features. Identification, classification, property attribution are all required
and by their very nature are all mental operations. To be sure, the role of
mind is here hypothetical. (“If certain interactions with duly constituted
observers took place, then certain outcomes would be noted.”) But the fact
remains that nothing could be discriminated or characterized as a rose in a
context where the prospect of performing suitable mental operations (measuring,
smelling, etc.) is not presupposed. Perhaps the strongest argument favoring
idealism is that any characterization of the real that we can devise is bound
to be a mind-constructed one: our only access to information about what the
real is is through the mediation of mind. What seems right about idealism is
inherent in the fact that in investigating the real we are clearly constrained
to use our own concepts to address our own issues – that we can learn about the
real only in our own terms of reference. But what seems right about realism is
that the answers to the questions we put to the real are provided by reality
itself – whatever the answers may be, they are substantially what they are
because it is reality itself that determines them to be that way. -- idealism,
Critical.
ordinary
language
– opposed to ‘ideal’ language -- ideal language, a system of notation that
would correct perceived deficiencies of ordinary language by requiring the
structure of expressions to mirror the structure of that which they represent.
The notion that conceptual errors can be corrected and philosophical problems
solved (or dissolved) by properly representing them in some such system figured
prominently in the writings of Leibniz, Carnap, Russell, Wittgenstein, and
Frege, among others. For Russell, the ideal, or “logically perfect,” language
is one in which grammatical form coincides with logical form, there are no vague
or ambiguous expres sions, and no proper names that fail to denote. Frege’s
Begriffsschrift is perhaps the most thorough and successful execution of the
ideal language project. Deductions represented within this system (or its
modern descendants) can be effectively checked for correctness.
Oxford
idealism:
Grice is a member of “The F. H. Bradley Society,” at Mansfield. -- ideal
market, a hypothetical market, used as a tool of economic analysis, in which
all relevant agents are perfectly informed of the price of the good in question
and the cost of its production, and all economic transactions can be undertaken
with no cost. A specific case is a market exemplifying perfect competition. The
term is sometimes extended to apply to an entire economy consisting of ideal
markets for every good. -- ideal
observer, a hypothetical being, possessed of various qualities and traits,
whose moral reactions (judgments or attitudes) to actions, persons, and states
of affairs figure centrally in certain theories of ethics. There are two main
versions of ideal observer theory: (a) those that take the reactions of ideal
observers as a standard of the correctness of moral judgments, and (b) those
that analyze the meanings of moral judgments in terms of the reactions of ideal
observers. Theories of the first sort – ideal observer theories of correctness
– hold, e.g., that judgments like ‘John’s lying to Brenda about her father’s
death was wrong (bad)’ are correct provided any ideal observer would have a
negative attitude toward John’s action. Similarly, ‘Alison’s refusal to divulge
confidential information about her patient was right (good)’ is correct
provided any ideal observer would have a positive attitude toward that action.
This version of the theory can be traced to Adam Smith, who is usually credited
with introducing the concept of an ideal observer into philosophy, though he
used the expression ‘impartial spectator’ to refer to the concept. Regarding
the correctness of moral judgments, Smith wrote: “That precise and distinct measure
can be found nowhere but in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and
well-informed spectator” (A Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759). Theories of a
second sort – ideal observer theories of meaning – take the concept of an ideal
observer as part of the very meaning of ordinary moral judgments. Thus,
according to Roderick Firth (“Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1952), moral judgments of the form ‘x
is good (bad)’, on this view, mean ‘All ideal observers would feel moral
approval (disapproval) toward x’, and similarly for other moral judgments
(where such approvals and disapprovals are characterized as felt desires having
a “demand quality”). Different conceptions of an ideal observer result from variously
specifying those qualities and traits that characterize such beings. Smith’s
characterization includes being well informed and impartial. However, according
to Firth, an ideal observer must be omniscient; omnipercipient, i.e., having
the ability to imagine vividly any possible events or states of affairs,
including the experiences and subjective states of others; disinterested, i.e.,
having no interests or desires that involve essential reference to any
particular individuals or things; dispassionate; consistent; and otherwise a
“normal” human being. Both versions of the theory face a dilemma: on the one
hand, if ideal observers are richly characterized as impartial, disinterested,
and normal, then since these terms appear to be moral-evaluative terms, appeal
to the reactions of ideal observers (either as a standard of correctness or as
an analysis of meaning) is circular. On the other hand, if ideal observers
receive an impoverished characterization in purely non-evaluative terms, then
since there is no reason to suppose that such ideal observers will often all
agree in their reactions to actions, people, and states of affairs, most moral
judgments will turn out to be incorrect. Grice: “We have to distinguish between
idealism and hegelianism; but the English being as they are, they don’t! And
being English, I shouldn’t, either!” – “There is so-called ‘idealist’ logic; if
so, there is so called ‘idealist implicaturum’” “My favourite idealist
philosopher is Bosanquet.” “I like Bradley because Russell was once a
Bradleyian, when it was fashionable to be so! But surely Russell lacked the
spirit to understand, even, Bradley! It is so much easier to mock him!” --. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Pre-war Oxford philosophy.” The
reference to mentalism in the essay on ‘modest mentalism,’ after Myro, in The
H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
ideatum. Quite used by Grice. Cf. Conceptum. Sub-perceptual. Cognate
with ‘eidos,’ that Grice translates as ‘forma.’ Why is an ‘eidos’ an ‘idea’ and
in what sense is an idea a ‘form’? These are deep questions!
idem: a
key philosophical notion that encompasses linguistic, logic, and metaphysical
issues, and also epistemology. Possibly the central question in philosophy.
Vide the principle of ‘identity.’ amicus est tamquam alter idem,” a second self, Identicum. Grecian ‘tautotes.’ late L. identitās (Martianus
Capella, c425), peculiarly formed from ident(i)-, for L. idem ‘same’ + -tās,
-tātem: see -ty. Various suggestions have been offered as to the
formation. Need was evidently felt of a noun of condition or quality from
idem to express the notion of ‘sameness’, side by side with those of ‘likeness’
and ‘oneness’ expressed by similitās and ūnitās: hence the form of the
suffix. But idem had no combining stem. Some have thought that
ident(i)- was taken from the L. adv. "identidem" ‘over and over
again, repeatedly’, connexion with which appears to be suggested by Du Cange's
explanation of identitās as ‘quævis actio repetita’. Meyer-Lübke suggests
that in the formation there was present some association between idem and id
ens ‘that being’, whence "identitās" like "entitās." But
assimilation to "entitās" may have been merely to avoid the solecism
of *idemitās or *idemtās. sameness. However originated,
"ident(i)-" (either from adverb "identidem" or an
assimilation of "id ens," "id ens," that being, "id
entitas" "that entity") became the combining stem of idem, and
the series ūnitās, ūnicus, ūnificus, ūnificāre, was paralleled by identitās,
identicus, identificus, identificāre: see identic, identific, identify above.] to
OED 3rd: identity, n. Pronunciation: Brit./ʌɪˈdɛntᵻti/ , U.S.
/aɪˈdɛn(t)ədi/ Forms: 15 idemptitie, 15 ydemptyte, 15–16 identitie, 15–
identity, 16 idemptity. Etymology: < Middle French identité, ydemtité,
ydemptité, ydentité (French identité) quality or condition of being the same
(a1310; 1756 in sense ‘individuality, personality’, 1801 in sense ‘distinct
impression of a single person or thing presented to or perceived by others’)
and its etymon post-classical Latin identitat-, identitas quality of
being the same (4th cent.), condition or fact that a person or thing is itself
and not something else (8th cent. in a British source), fact of being the same
(from 12th cent. in British sources), continual sameness, lack of variety,
monotony (from 12th cent. in British sources; 14th cent. in a continental
source) < classical Latin idem same (see idem n.) + -tās (see -ty
suffix1) [sameness], after post-classical Latin essentitas ‘being’ (4th
cent.).The Latin word was formed to provide a translation equivalent for
ancient Greek ταὐτότης (tautotes) identity. identity: identity was a key
concept for Grice. Under identity, he views both identity simpliciter and
personal identity. Grice advocates psychological or soul criterianism.
Psychological or soul criterianism has been advocated, in one form or another,
by philosophers such as Locke, Butler, Duncan-Jones, Berkeley, Gallie, Grice,
Flew, Haugeland, Jones, Perry, Shoemaker and Parfit, and Quinton. What all
of these theories have in common is the idea that, even if it is the case that
some kind of physical states are necessary for being a person, it is the unity
of consciousness which is of decisive importance for personal identity over
time. In this sense, person is a term which picks out a psychological, or mental,
"thing". In claiming this, all Psychological Criterianists entail the
view that personal identity consists in the continuity of psychological
features. It is interesting that Flew has an earlier "Selves,"
earlier than his essay on Locke on personal identity. The first, for Mind,
criticising Jones, "The self in sensory cognition"; the second for
Philosophy. Surely under the tutelage of Grice. Cf. Jones, Selves: A reply to
Flew, Philosophy. The stronger thesis asserts that there is no
conceivable situation in which bodily identity would be necessary, some other
conditions being always both necessary and sufficient. Grice takes it that
Locke’s theory (II, 27) is an example of this latter type. To say
"Grice remembers that he heard a noise", without irony or
inverted commas, is to imply that Grice did hear a noise. In this respect
remember is like, know, a factive. It does not follow from this, nor is it
true, that each claim to remember, any more than each claim to know, is alethic
or veridical; or, not everything one seems to remember is something one really
remembers. So much is obvious, although Locke -- although admittedly
referring only to the memory of actions, section 13 -- is forced to invoke
the providence of God to deny the latter. These points have been emphasised by
Flew in his discussion of Locke’s views on personal identity. In formulating
Locke’ thesis, however, Flew makes a mistake; for he offers Lockes thesis in
the form if Grice can remember Hardies doing such-and-such, Grice and Hardie
are the same person. But this obviously will not do, even for Locke, for we
constantly say things like I remember my brother Derek joining the army without
implying that I and my brother are the same person. So if we are to formulate
such a criterion, it looks as though we have to say something like the
following. If Derek Grice remembers joining my, he is the person who did that
thing. But since remembers doing means remembers himself doing, this is
trivially tautologous, and moreover lends colour to Butlers famous objection
that memory, so far from constituting personal identity, presupposes
it. As Butler puts it, one should really think it self-evident that
consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot
constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can
constitute truth, which it presupposes. Butler then asserts that Locke’s
misstep stems from his methodology. This wonderful mistake may possibly have
arisen from hence; that to be endued with consciousness is inseparable from the
idea of a person, or intelligent being. For this might be expressed
inaccurately thus, that consciousness makes personality: and from hence it
might be concluded to make personal identity. One of the points that Locke
emphasizes—that persistence conditions are determined via defining kind
terms—is what, according to Butler, leads Locke astray. Butler
additionally makes the point that memory is not required for personal
persistence. But though present consciousness of what we at present do and feel
is necessary to our being the persons we now are; yet present consciousness of
past actions or feelings is not necessary to our being the same persons who
performed those actions, or had those feelings. This is a point that others
develop when they assert that Lockes view results in contradiction. Hence
the criterion should rather run as follows. If Derek Grice claims to remember
joining the army. We must then ask how such a criterion might be
used. Grices example is: I remember I smelled a smell. He needs two
experiences to use same. I heard a noise and I smelled a smell.The singular
defines the hearing of a noise is the object of some consciousness. The pair
defines, "The hearing of a noise and the smelling of a smell are objects
of the same -- cognate with self as in I hurt me self, -- consciousness. The
standard form of an identity question is Is this x the same x as that x
which E and in the simpler situation we are at least presented with just
the materials for constructing such a question; but in the more complicated
situation we are baffled even in asking the question, since both the
transformed persons are equally good candidates for being its Subjects, and the
question Are these two xs the same (x?) as the x which E is not a recognizable form
of identity question. Thus, it might be argued, the fact that we could not
speak of identity in the latter situation is no kind of proof that we could not
do so in the former. Certainly it is not a proof, as Strawson points out to
Grice. This is not to say that they are identical at all. The only case in
which identity and exact similarity could be distinguished, as we have just
seen, is that of the body, same body and exactly similar body really do mark a
difference. Thus one may claim that the omission of the body takes away all
content from the idea of personal identity, as Pears pointed out to
Grice. Leaving aside memory, which only partially applies to the case,
character and attainments are quite clearly general things. Joness character
is, in a sense, a particular; just because Jones’s character refers to the
instantiation of certain properties by a particular (and bodily) man, as
Strawson points out to Grice (Particular and general). If in ‘Negation and
privation,’ Grice tackles Aristotle, he now tackles Locke. Indeed, seeing that
Grice went years later to the topic as motivated by, of all people, Haugeland,
rather than perhaps the more academic milieu that Perry offers, Grice became
obsessed with Hume’s sceptical doubts! Hume writes in the Appendix that when he
turns his reflection on himself, Hume never can perceive this self without
some one or more perceptions. Nor can Hume ever perceive any
thing but the perceptions. It is the composition of these, therefore,
which forms the self, Hume thinks. Hume grants that one can conceive a thinking
being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose, says Hume, the mind to
be reduced even below the life of an oyster. Suppose the oyster to have only
one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider the oyster in that situation.
Does the oyster conceive any thing but merely that perception? Has the oyster
any notion of, to use Gallies pretentious Aristotelian jargon, self or
substance? If not, the addition of this or other perception can never give
the oyster that notion. The annihilation, which this or that philosopher,
including Grices first post-war tutee, Flew, supposes to follow upon
death, and which entirely destroys the oysters self, is nothing but
an extinction of all particular perceptions; love and
hatred, pain and pleasure, thought and sensation. These therefore
must be the same with self; since the one cannot survive the other.
Is self the same with substance? If it be, how can that question have
place, concerning the subsistence of self, under a change of
substance? If they be distinct, what is the difference betwixt them? For his
part, Hume claims, he has a notion of neither, when conceived distinct
from this or that particular perception. However extraordinary Hume’s
conclusion may seem, it need not surprise us. Most
philosophers, such as Locke, seems inclined to think, that personal
identity arises from consciousness. But consciousness is nothing but
a reflected thought or perception, Hume suggests. This is Grices quandary about
personal identity and its implicatura. Some philosophers have taken Grice as
trying to provide an exegesis of Locke. However, their approaches surely
differ. What works for Grice may not work for Locke. For Grice it is
analytically true that it is not the case that Person1 and
Person may have the same experience. Grice explicitly states that he
thinks that his logical-construction theory is a modification of Locke’s
theory. Grice does not seem terribly interested to find why it may not, even if
the York-based Locke Society might! Rather than introjecting into Lockes shoes,
Grices strategy seems to dismiss Locke, shoes and all. Specifically, it not
clear to Grice what Lockes answer in the Essay would be to Grices question
about this or that I utterance that he sets his analysis with. Admittedly,
Grice does quote, albeit briefly, directly from Lockes Essay. As far as any
intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same
consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any
present action, Locke claims, so far the being is the same personal self. Grice
tackles Lockes claim with four objections. These are important to consider
since Grice sees as improving on Locke. A first objection concerns
icircularity, with which Grice easily disposes by following Hume and appealing
to the experience of memory or introspection. A second objection is Reid’s
alleged counterexample about the long-term memory of the admiral who cannot
remember that he was flogged as a boy. Grice dismisses this as involving too
long-term of a memory. A third objection concerns Locke’s vagueness about the
aboutness of consciousness, a point made by Hume in the Appendix. A fourth
objection concerns again circularity, this time in Locke’s use of same in the
definiens ‒ cf. Wiggins, Sameness and substance. It’s extraordinary that
Wiggins is philosophising on anything Griceian. Grice is concerned with the implicaturum
involved in the use of the first person singular. I will be fighting soon.
Grice means in body and soul. The utterance also indicates that this is Grices
pre-war days at Oxford. No wonder his choice of an example. What else could he
have in his soul? The topic of personal identity, which label Hume and Austin
found pretentious, and preferred to talk about the illocutionary force of I,
has a special Oxonian pedigree, perhaps as motivated by Humes challenge, that
Grice has occasion to study and explore for his M. A. Lit. Hum. with Locke’s
Essay as mandatory reading. Locke, a philosopher with whom Oxford identifies
most, infamously defends this memory-based account of I. Up in Scotland, Reid
reads it and concocts this alleged counter-example. Hume, or Home, if you must,
enjoys it. In fact, while in the Mind essay he is not too specific about Hume,
Grice will, due mainly to his joint investigations with Haugeland, approach,
introjecting into the shoes of Hume ‒ who is idolised in The New World ‒ in
ways he does not introject into Lockes. But Grices quandary is Hume’s quandary,
too. In his own approach to I, the Cartesian ego, made transcendental and
apperceptive by Kant, Grice updates the time-honoured empiricist mnemonic
analysis by Locke. The first update is in style. Grice embraces, as he does
with negation, a logical construction, alla Russell, via Broad, of this or that
“I” (first-person) utterance, ending up with an analysis of a “someone,”
third-person, less informative, utterance. Grices immediate source is Gallie’s essay
on self and substance in Mind. Mind is still a review of psychology and
philosophy, so poor Grice has not much choice. In fact, Grice is being
heterodoxical or heretic enough to use Broad’s taxonomy, straight from the
other place of I utterances. The logical-construction theory is a third
proposal, next to the Bradleyian idealist pure-ego theory and the
misleading covert-description theory. Grice deals with the Reids alleged
counterexample of the brave officer. Suppose, Reid says, and Grice quotes
verbatim, a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school, for
robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first
campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life. Suppose also, which
must be admitted to be possible, that when he2 took the
standard, he2 was conscious of his having been flogged at
school, and that, when made a general, he3 was conscious of his2 taking
the standard, but had absolutely lost the consciousness of his1 flogging. These
things being supposed, it follows, from Lockes doctrine, that he1 who is
flogged at school is the same person as him2 who later takes
the standard, and that he2 who later takes the standard is the
same person as him3 who is still later made a general. When it
follows, if there be any truth in logic, that the general is the same person
with him1 who is flogged at school. But the general’s
consciousness does emphatically not reach so far back as his1 flogging.
Therefore, according to Locke’s doctrine, he3 is emphatically
not the same person as him1 who is flogged. Therefore, we can say about the
general that he3 is, and at the same time, that he3 is
not the same person as him1 who was flogged at
school. Grice, wholl later add a temporal suffix to =t yielding, by
transitivity. The flogged boy =t1 the brave officer. And the
brave officer =t2 the admiral. But the admiral ≠t3 the
flogged boy. In Mind, Grice tackles the basic analysans, and comes up with a
rather elaborate analysans for a simple I or Someone statement. Grice just
turns to a generic affirmative variant of the utterance he had used in
Negation. It is now someone, viz. I, who hears that the bell tolls. It is the
affirmative counterpart of the focus of his earlier essay on negation, I do not
hear that the bell tolls. Grice dismisses what, in the other place, was
referred to as privileged-access, and the indexicality of I, an approach that
will be made popular by Perry, who however reprints Grices essay in his
influential collection for the University of California Press. By allowing for
someone, viz. I, Grice seems to be relying on a piece of reasoning which hell later,
in his first Locke lecture, refer to as too good. I hear that the bell tolls;
therefore, someone hears that the bell tolls. Grice attempts to reduce this or
that I utterance (Someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls) is in terms of a
chain or sequence of mnemonic states. It poses a few quandaries itself. While
quoting from this or that recent philosopher such as Gallie and Broad, it is a
good thing that Grice has occasion to go back to, or revisit, Locke and contest
this or that infamous and alleged counterexample presented by Reid and Hume.
Grice adds a methodological note to his proposed logical-construction theory of
personal identity. There is some intricacy of his reductive analysis, indeed
logical construction, for an apparently simple and harmless utterance (cf. his
earlier essay on I do not hear that the bell tolls). But this intricacy does
not prove the analysis wrong. Only that Grice is too subtle. If the reductive
analysis of not is in terms of each state which I am experiencing is incompatible
with phi), that should not be a minus, or drawback, but a plus, and an
advantage in terms of philosophical progress. The same holds here in terms of
the concept of a temporary state. Much later, Grice reconsiders, or
revisits, indeed, Broads remark and re-titles his approach as the (or a)
logical-construction theory of personal identity. And, with Haugeland, Grice
re-considers Humes own vagaries, or quandary, with personal identity. Unlike
the more conservative Locke that Grice favours in the pages of Mind,
eliminationist Hume sees ‘I’ as a conceptual muddle, indeed a metaphysical
chimæra. Hume presses the point for an empiricist verificationist account of I.
For, as Russell would rhetorically ask, ‘What can be more direct that the
experience of myself?’ The Hume Society should take notice of Grices
simplification of Hume’s implicaturum on I, if The Locke Society won’t. As a
matter of fact, Grice calls one of his metaphysical construction routines the
Humeian projection, so it is not too adventurous to think that Grice considers
I as an intuitive concept that needs to be metaphysically re-constructed
and be given a legitimate Fregeian sense. Why that label for a construction
routine? Grice calls this metaphysical construction routine Humeian projection,
since the mind (or soul) as it were, spreads over its objects. But, by mind,
Hume does not necessarily mean the I. Cf. The minds I. Grice is especially
concerned with the poverty and weaknesses of Humes criticism to Lockes account
of personal identity. Grice opts to revisit the Lockeian memory-based of this
or that someone, viz. I utterance that Hume rather regards as vague, and
confusing. Unlike Humes, neither Lockes nor Grices reductive analysis of
personal identity is reductionist and eliminationist. The reductive-reductionist
distinction Grice draws in Retrospective epilogue as he responds to
Rountree-Jack on this or that alleged wrong on meaning that. It is only natural
that Grice would be sympathetic to Locke. Grice explores these issues with Haugeland
mainly at seminars. One may wonder why Grice spends so much time in a
philosopher such as Hume, with whom he agreed almost on nothing! The answer is
Humes influence in the Third World that forced Grice to focus on this or that
philosopher. Surely Locke is less popular in the New World than Hume is. One
supposes Grice is trying to save Hume at the implicaturum level, at least. The
phrase or term of art, logical construction is Russells and Broads, but Grice
loved it. Rational reconstruction is not too dissimilar. Grice prefers Russells
and Broads more conservative label. This is more than a terminological point.
If Hume is right and there is NO intuitive concept behind I, one cannot
strictly re-construct it, only construct it. Ultimately, Grice shows that, if
only at the implicaturum level, we are able to provide an analysandum for this
or that someone, viz. I utterance without using I, by implicating only
this or that mnemonic concept, which belongs, naturally, as his theory of
negation does, in a theory of philosophical psychology, and again a lower
branch of it, dealing with memory. The topic of personal identity unites
various interests of Grice. The first is identity “=” simpliciter. Instead of
talking of the meaning of I, as, say, Anscombe would, Grice sticks to the
traditional category, or keyword, for this, i. e. the theory-laden, personal
identity, or even personal sameness. Personal identity is a type of identity,
but personal adds something to it. Surely Hume was stretching person a bit when
using the example of a soul with a life lower than an oyster. Since Grice
follows Aristotles De Anima, he enjoys Hume’s choice, though. It may be argued
that personal adds Locke’s consciousness, and rational agency. Grice plays with
the body-soul distinction. I, viz someone or somebody, fell from the stairs,
perhaps differs from I will be fighting soon. This or that someone, viz. I
utterance may be purely bodily. Grice would think that the idea that his soul
fell from the stairs sounds, as it would to Berkeley, harsh. But then theres
this or that one may be mixed utterance. Someone, viz. I, plays cricket, where
surely your bodily mechanisms require some sort of control by the soul.
Finally, this or that may be purely souly ‒ the one Grice ends up analysing,
Someone, viz. I, hear that the bell tolls. At the time of his Mind essay, Grice
may have been unaware of the complications that the concept of a person may
bring as attached in adjective form to identity. Ayer did, and Strawson and
Wiggins will, and Grice learns much from Strawson. Since Parfit, this has
become a common-place topic for analysis at Oxford. A person as a complexum of
a body-soul spatio-temporal continuant substance. Ultimately, Grice finds a
theoretical counterpart here. A P may become a human, which Grice understands
physiologically. That is not enough. A P must aspire, via meteousis, to become
a person. Thus, person becomes a technical term in Grices grand metaphysical
scheme of things. Someone, viz. I, hear that the bell is tolls is analysed
as ≡df, or if and only if, a hearing that the bell tolls is a
part of a total temporary tn souly state S1 which is
one in a s. such that any state Sn, given this or that
condition, contains as a part a memory Mn of the
experience of hearing that the bell tolls, which is a component in some
pre-sequent t1n item, or contains an experience of hearing
that the bell tolls a memory M of which would, given this or that condition,
occur as a component in some sub-sequent t2>tn item,
there being no sub-set of items which is independent of the rest. Grice
simplifies the reductive analysans. Someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls
iff a hearing that the bell tolls is a component in an item of an interlocking
s. with emphasis on lock, s. of this or that memorable and memorative
total temporary tn state S1. Is Grice’s Personal
identity ever referred to in the Oxonian philosophical literature? Indeeed.
Parfit mentions, which makes it especially memorable and memorative. P. Edwards
includes a reference to Grices Mind essay in the entry for Personal identity,
as a reference to Grice et al on Met. , is referenced in Edwardss encyclopædia
entry for metaphysics. Grice does not attribute privileged access or
incorrigibility to I or the first person. He always hastens to add that I can
always be substituted, salva veritate (if baffling your addressee A) by someone
or other, if not some-body or other, a colloquialism Grice especially detested.
Grices agency-based approach requires that. I am rational provided thou art,
too. If, by explicitly saying he is a Lockeian, Grice surely does not wish us
to see him as trying to be original, or the first to consider this or that
problem about I; i.e. someone. Still, Grice is the philosopher who explores
most deeply the reductive analysis of I, i.e. someone. Grice needs the
reductive analysis because human agency (philosophically, rather than
psychologically interpreted) is key for his approach to things. By uttering The
bell tolls, U means that someone, viz. himself, hears that the bell tolls, or
even, by uttering I, hear, viz. someone hears, that the bell tolls, U means
that the experience of a hearing that the bell tolls is a component in a
total temporary state which is a member of a s. such that each member
would, given certain conditions, contain as an component one
memory of an experience which is a component in a pre-sequent member, or
contains as a component some experience a memory of which would,
given certain conditions, occur as a component in a post-sequent member;
there being no sub-set of members which is independent of the rest.
Thanks, the addressee might reply. I didnt know that! The reductive bit to
Grices analysis needs to be emphasised. For Grice, a person, and consequently,
a someone, viz. I utterance, is, simpliciter, a logical construction out of
this or that Humeian experience. Whereas in Russell, as Broad notes, a
logical construction of this or that philosophical concept, in this case
personal identity, or cf. Grices earlier reductive analysis of not, is thought
of as an improved, rationally reconstructed conception. Neither Russell nor
Broad need maintain that the logical construction preserves the original
meaning of the analysandum someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls, or I do
not hear that the bell tolls ‒ hence their paradox of reductionist analysis.
This change of Subjects does not apply to Grice. Grice emphatically intends to
be make explicit, if rationally reconstructed (if that is not an
improvement) through reductive (if not reductionist) analysis, the concept
Grice already claims to have. One particular development to consider is within
Grices play group, that of Quinton. Grice and Quinton seem to have been the
only two philosophers in Austins play group who showed any interest on someone,
viz. I. Or not. The fact that Quinton entitles his thing “The soul” did not
help. Note that Woozley was at the time editing Reid on “Identity,” Cf.
Duncan-Jones on mans mortality. Note that Quintons immediate trigger is
Shoemaker. Grice writes that he is not “merely a series of perceptions,” for he
is “conscious of a permanent self, an I who experiences these perceptions
and who is now identical with the I who experienced perceptions
yesterday.” So, leaving aside that he is using I with the third person verb,
but surely this is no use-mention fallacy, it is this puzzle that provoked his
thoughts on temporal-relative “=” later on. As Grice notes, Butler argued that
consciousness of experience can contribute to identity but not define it. Grice
will use Butler in his elaboration of conversational benevolence versus
conversational self-interest. Better than Quinton, it is better to consider
Flew in Philosophy, 96, on Locke and the problem of personal identity,
obviously suggested as a term paper by Grice! Wiggins cites Flew. Flew actually
notes that Berkeley saw Lockes problem earlier than Reid, which concerns the
transitiveness of =. Recall that Wigginss tutor at Oxford was a tutee by Grice,
Ackrill. identity,
the relation each thing bears just to itself. Formally, a % b Q EF(Fa P Fb);
informally, the identity of a and b implies and is implied by their sharing of
all their properties. Read from left to right, this biconditional asserts the
indiscernibility of identicals; from right to left, the identity of
indiscernibles. The indiscernibility of identicals is not to be confused with a
metalinguistic principle to the effect that if a and b are names of the same
object, then each may be substituted for the other in a sentence without change
of truth-value: that may be false, depending on the semantics of the language
under discussion. Similarly, the identity of indiscernibles is not the claim
that if a and b can be exchanged in all sentential contexts without affecting
truth-value, then they name the same object. For such intersubstitutability may
arise when the language in question simply lacks predicates that could
discriminate between the referents of a and b. In short, the identity of things
is not a relation among names. Identity proper is numerical identity, to be
distinguished from exact similarity (qualitative identity). Intuitively, two
exactly similar objects are “copies” of each other; still they are two, hence
not identical. One way to express this is via the notions of extrinsic and
intrinsic properties: exactly similar objects differ in respect of the former
only. But we can best explain ‘instrinsic property’ by saying that a thing’s
intrinsic properties are those it shares with its copies. These notions appear
virtually interdefinable. (Note that the concept of an extrinsic property must
be relativized to a class or kind of things. Not being in San Francisco is an
extrinsic property of persons but arguably an intrinsic property of cities.)
While qualitative identity is a familiar notion, its theoretical utility is
unclear. The absolute notion of qualitative identity should, however, be
distinguished from an unproblematic relative notion: if some list of salient
properties is fixed in a given context (say, in mechanics or normative ethics),
then the exactly similar things, relative to that context, are those that agree
on the properties listed. Both the identity of indiscernibles and (less
frequently) the indiscernibility of identicals are sometimes called Leibniz’s
law. Neither attribution is apt. Although Leibniz would have accepted the
former principle, his distinctive claim was the impossibility of exactly
similar objects: numerically distinct individuals cannot even share all
intrinsic properties. Moreover, this was not, for him, simply a law of identity
but rather an application of his principle of sufficient reason. And the
indiscernibility of identicals is part of a universal understanding of
identity. What distinguishes Leibniz is the prominence of identity statements
in his metaphysics and logical theory. Although identity remains a clear and
basic logical notion, identity questions about problematic kinds of objects
raise difficulties. One example is the identification of properties,
particularly in contexts involving reduction. Although we know what identity
is, the notion of a property is unclear enough to pose systematic obstacles to
the evaluation of theoretically significant identity statements involving
properties. Other difficulties involve personal identity or the possible
identification of numbers and sets in the foundations of mathematics. In these
cases, the identity questions simply inherit – and provide vivid ways of
formulating – the difficulties pertaining to such concepts as person, property,
or number; no rethinking of the identity concept itself is indicated. But
puzzles about the relation of an ordinary material body to its constituent
matter may suggest that the logician’s analysis of identity does not cleanly
capture our everyday notion(s). Consider a bronze statue. Although the statue
may seem to be nothing besides its matter, reflection on change over time
suggests a distinction. The statue may be melted down, hence destroyed, while
the bronze persists, perhaps simply as a mass or perhaps as a new statue formed
from the same bronze. Alternatively, the statue may persist even as some of its
bronze is dissolved in acid. So the statue seems to be one thing and the bronze
another. Yet what is the bronze besides a statue? Surely we do not have two
statues (or statuelike objects) in one place? Some authors feel that variants
of the identity relation may permit a perspicuous description of the relation
of statue and bronze: (1) tensed identity: Assume a class of timebound
properties – roughly, properties an object can have at a time regardless of
what properties it has at other times. (E.g., a statue’s shape, location, or
elegance.) Then a % t b provided a and b share all timebound properties at time
t. Thus, the statue and the bronze may be identical at time t 1 but not at t 2.
(2) relative identity: a and b may be identical relative to one concept (or
predicate) but not to another. Thus, the statue may be held to be the same lump
of matter as the bronze but not the same object of art. identity identity 415
4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 415 In each case, only detailed study will
show whether the variant notion can at once offer a natural description of
change and qualify as a viable identity concept. (Strong doubts arise about
(2).) But it seems likely that our everyday talk of identity has a richness and
ambiguity that escapes formal characterization.
identity, ‘is’ of. See IS. identity, psychophysical. See PHYSICALISM.
identity, theoretical. See PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. identity of indiscernibles, any
of a family of principles, important members of which include the following:
(1) If objects a and b have all properties in common, then a and b are
identical. (2) If objects a and b have all their qualitative properties in
common, then a and b are identical. (3) If objects a and b have all their
non-relational qualitative properties in common, then a and b are identical.
Two questions regarding these principles are raised: Which, if any, are true?
If any are true, are they necessarily true? Discussions of the identity of
indiscernibles typically restrict the scope of the principle to concrete
objects. Although the notions of qualitative and non-relational properties play
a prominent role in these discussions, they are notoriously difficult to
define. Intuitively, a qualitative property is one that can be instantiated by
more than one object and does not involve being related to another particular
object. It does not follow that all qualitative properties are non-relational,
since some relational properties, such as being on top of a brown desk, do not
involve being related to some particular object. (1) is generally regarded as
necessarily true but trivial, since if a and b have all properties in common
then a has the property of being identical with b and b has the property of
being identical with a. Hence, most discussions focus on (2) and (3). (3) is
generally regarded as, at best, a contingent truth since it appears possible to
conceive of two distinct red balls of the same size, shade of color, and
composition. Some have argued that elementary scientific particles, such as
electrons, are counterexamples to even the contingent truth of (3). (2) appears
defensible as a contingent truth since, in the actual world, objects such as
the red balls and the electrons differ in their relational qualitative
properties. It has been argued, however, that (2) is not a necessary truth
since it is possible to conceive of a world consisting of only the two red
balls. In such a world, any qualitative relational property possessed by one
ball is also possessed by the other. Defenders of the necessary truth of (2)
have argued that a careful examination of such counterexamples reveals hidden
qualitative properties that differentiate the objects. Grice learned about
idem, ipsum and simile via his High Church maternal grandfather. “What an iota
can do!” -- Refs.: The main references covering
identity simpliciter are in “Vacuous Names,” and his joint work on metaphysics
with G. Myro. The main references relating to the second group, of personal
identity, are his “Mind” essay, an essay on ‘the logical-construction theory of
personal identity,’ and a second set of essays on Hume’s quandary, The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
Griceian
ideology:
a term used by Ernest Gellner to refer to Grice’s Clifton/Corpus Christi
background. generally a disparaging term used to describe someone else’s
political views which one regards as unsound. This use derives from Marx’s
employment of the term to signify a false consciousness shared by the members
of a particular social class. For example, according to Marx, members of the
capitalist class share the ideology that the laws of the competitive market are
natural and impersonal, that workers in a competitive market are paid all that
they can be paid, and that the institutions of private property in the means of
production are natural and justified.
ideo-motor
action,
a theory of the will according to which “every representation of a movement
awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object” (William
James). Proposed by physiologist W. B. Carpenter, and taught by Lotze and
Renouvier, ideo-motor action was developed by James. He rejected the regnant
analysis of voluntary behavior, which held that will operates by reinstating
“feelings of innervation” (Wundt) in the efferent nerves. Deploying
introspection and physiology, James showed that feelings of innervation do not
exist. James advanced ideo-motor action as the psychological basis of volition:
actions tend to occur automatically when thought, unless inhibited by a
contrary idea. Will consists in fixing attention on a desired idea until it
dominates consciousness, the execution of movement following automatically.
James also rejected Bain’s associationist thesis that pleasure or pain is the
necessary spring of action, since according to ideo-motor theory thought of an
action by itself produces it. James’s analysis became dogma, but was
effectively attacked by psychologist E. L. Thorndike (1874– 1949), who proposed
in its place the behavioristic doctrine that ideas have no power to cause
behavior, and argued that belief in ideo-motor action amounted to belief in
sympathetic magic. Thus did will leave the vocabulary of psychology.
macaulay: Grice: “Unlike Whitehead, I care
for style; so when it comes to ‘if,’ we
have to please Macaulay – the verbs change, for each mode – and sub-mode!” --
Grice: A curious phenomenon comes to light. I
began by assuming (or stipulating) that the verbs 'judge' and 'will' (acceptance-verbs)
are to be 'completed' by radicals (phrastics). Yet when the machinery developed
above has been applied, we find that the verb 'accept' (or 'think') is to be
completed by something of the form 'Op + p', that is, by a sentence. Perhaps we
might tolerate this syntactical ambivalence; but if we cannot, the remedy is
not clear. It would, for example, not be satisfactory to suppose that 'that',
when placed before a sentence, acts as a 'radicalizer' (is a functor expressing
a function which takes that sentence on to its radical); for that way we should
lose the differentiations effected by varying mode-markers, and this would be
fatal to the scheme. This phenomenon certainly suggests that the attempt to
distinguish radicals from sentences may be misguided; that if radicals are to
be admitted at all, they should be identified with indicative sentences. The operator '⊢' would then be a
'semantically vanishing' operator. But this does not wholly satisfy me; for, if
'⊢'
is semantically vacuous, what happens to the subordinate distinction made by
'A' and 'B' markers, which seems genuine enough? We might find these markers
'hanging in the air', like two smiles left behind by the Cheshire Cat. Whatever
the outcome of this debate, however, I feel fairly confident that I could
accommodate the formulation of my discussion to it. Fuller Exposition of the
'Initial Idea' First, some preliminary points. To provide at least a modicum of
intelligibility for my discourse, I shall pronounce the judicative end p.72
operator '⊢'
as 'it is the case that', and the volitive operator '!' as 'let it be that';
and I shall pronounce the sequence 'φ, ψ' as 'given that φ, ψ'. These vocal
mannerisms will result in the production of some pretty barbarous 'English
sentences'; but we must remember that what I shall be trying to do, in uttering
such sentences, will be to represent supposedly underlying structure; if that
is one's aim, one can hardly expect that one's speech-forms will be such as to
excite the approval of, let us say, Jane Austen or Lord Macaulay. In any case,
less horrendous, though (for my purposes) less perspicuous, alternatives will,
I think, be available. Further, I am going to be almost exclusively concerned
with alethic and practical arguments, the proximate conclusions of which will
be, respectively, of the forms 'Acc (⊢ p)' and 'Acc (! p)'; for example, 'acceptable (it is the
case that it snows)' and 'acceptable (let it be that I go home)'. There will be
two possible ways of reading the latter sentence. We might regard 'acceptable'
as a sentential adverb (modifier) like 'demonstrably'; in that case to say or
think 'acceptable (let it be that I go home)' will be to say or think 'let it
be that I go home', together with the qualification that what I say or think is
acceptable; as one might say, 'acceptably, let it be that I go home'. To adopt
this reading would seem to commit us to the impossibility of incontinence; for
since 'accept that let it be that I go home' is to be my rewrite for 'Vaccept
(will) that I go home', anyone x who concluded, by practical argument, that
'acceptable let it be that x go home' would ipso facto will to go home.
Similarly (though less paradoxically) any one who concluded, by alethic
argument, 'acceptable it is the case that it snows', would ipso facto judge
that it snows. So an alternative reading 'it is acceptable that let it be that
I go home', which does not commit the speaker or thinker to 'let it be that I
go home', seems preferable. We can, of course, retain the distinct form
'acceptably, let it be that (it is the case that) p' for renderings of
'desirably' and 'probably'. Let us now tackle the judicative cases. I start
with the assumption that arguments of the form 'A, so probably B' are sometimes
(informally) valid; 'he has an exceptionally red face, so probably he has high
blood pressure' might be informally valid, whereas 'he has an exceptionally red
face, so probably he has musical talent' is unlikely to be allowed informal
validity. end p.73 We might re-express this assumption by saying that it is
sometimes the case that A informally yields-with-probability that B (where
'yields' is the converse of 'is inferable from'). If we wish to construct a
form of argument the acceptability of which does not depend on choice of
substituends for 'A' and 'B', we may, so to speak, allow into the
object-language forms of sentence which correspond to metastatements of the
form: 'A yields-with-probability that B'; we may allow ourselves, for example,
such a sentence as "it is probable, given that he has a very red face,
that he has high blood pressure". This will provide us with the
argument-patterns: “Probable, given A, that B A So, probably, B” or “Probable,
given A, that B A So probably that B” To take
the second pattern, the legitimacy of such an inferential transition will not
depend on the identity of 'A' or of 'B', though it will depend (as was stated
in the previous chapter) on a licence from a suitably formulated 'Principle of
Total Evidence'. The proposal which I am considering (in pursuit of the 'initial
idea') would (roughly) involve rewriting the second pattern of argument so that
it reads: It is acceptable, given that it is the case that A, that it is the
case that B. It is the case that A. To apply this schema to a particular case,
we generated the particular argument: It is acceptable, given that it is the
case that Snodgrass has a red face, that it is the case that Snodgrass has high
blood pressure. It is the case that Snodgrass has a red face. So, it is
acceptable that it is the case that Snodgrass has high blood pressure. end p.74
If we make the further assumption that the singular 'conditional' acceptability
statement which is the first premiss of the above argument may be (and perhaps
has to be) reached by an analogue of the rule of universal instantiation from a
general acceptability statement, we make room for such general acceptability
sentences as: It is acceptable, given that it is the case that x has a red
face, that it is the case that x has high blood pressure. which are of the form
"It is acceptable, given that it is the case that Fx, that it is the case
that Gx'; 'x' here is, you will note, an unbound variable; and the form might
also (loosely) be read (pronounced) as: "It is acceptable, given that it
is the case that one (something) is F, that it is the case that one (it) is
G." All of this is (I think) pretty platitudinous; which is just as well,
since it is to serve as a model for the treatment of practical argument. To
turn from the alethic to the practical dimension. Here (the proposal goes) we
may proceed, in a fashion almost exactly parallel to that adopted on the
alethic side, through the following sequence of stages: (1) Arguments (in
thought or speech) of the form: Let it be that A It is the case that B so, with
some degree of desirability, let it be that C are sometimes (and sometimes not)
informally valid (or acceptable). (2) Arguments of the form: It is desirable,
given that let it be that A and that it is the case that B, that let it be that
C Let it be that A It is the case that B so, it is desirable that let it be
that C should, therefore, be allowed to be formally acceptable, subject to
licence from a Principle of Total Evidence. (3) In accordance with our proposal
such arguments will be rewritten: end p.75 It is acceptable, given that let it
be A and that it is the case that B, that let it be that C Let it be that A It
is the case that B so, it is desirable that let it be that C (4) The first
premisses of such arguments may be (and perhaps have to be) reached by instantiation
from general acceptability statements of the form: "It is acceptable,
given that let one be E and that it is the case that one is F, that let it be
that one is G." We may note that sentences like "it is snowing"
can be trivially recast so as (in effect) to appear as third premisses in such
arguments (with 'open' counterparts inside the acceptability sentence; they can
be rewritten as, for example, "Snodgrass is such that it is
snowing"). We are now in possession of such exciting general acceptability
sentences as: "It is acceptable, given that let it be that one keeps dry
and that it is the case that one is such that it is raining, that let one take
with one one's umbrella." (5) A
special subclass of general acceptability sentences (and of practical arguments)
can be generated by 'trivializing' the predicate in the judicative premiss
(making it a 'universal predicate'). If, for example, I take 'x is F' to
represent 'x is identical with x' the judicative subclause may be omitted from
the general acceptability sentence, with a corresponding 'reduction' in the
shape of the related practical argument. We have therefore such argument
sequences as the following: (P i ) It is acceptable, given that let it be that
one survives, that let it be that one eats So (by U i ) It is acceptable, given
that let it be that Snodgrass survives, that let it be that Snodgrass eats (P 2
) Let it be that Snodgrass survives So (by Det) It is acceptable that let it be
that Snodgrass eats. We should also, at some point, consider further
transitions to: (a) Acceptably, let it be that Snodgrass eats, and to: (b) Let
it be that Snodgrass eats. end p.76 And we may also note that, as a more
colloquial substitute for "Let it be that one (Snodgrass) survives
(eats)" the form "one (Snodgrass) is to survive (eat)" is
available; we thus obtain prettier inhabitants of antecedent clauses, for
example, "given that Snodgrass is to survive". We must now pay some
attention to the varieties of acceptability statement to be found within each
of the alethic and practical dimensions; it will, of course, be essential to
the large-scale success of the proposal which I am exploring that one should be
able to show that for every such variant within one dimension there is a
corresponding variant within the other. Within the area of defeasible
generalizations, there is another variant which, in my view, extends across the
board in the way just indicated, namely, the unweighted acceptability
generalization (with associated singular conditionals), or, as I shall also
call it, the ceteris paribus generalization. Such generalization I take to be
of the form "It is acceptable (ceteris paribus), given that φX, that
ψX" and I think we find both practical and alethic examples of the form;
for example, "It is ceteris paribus acceptable, given that it is the case
that one likes a person, that it is the case that one wants his company",
which is not incompatible with "It is ceteris paribus acceptable, given
that it is the case that one likes a person and that one is feeling ill, that
one does not want his company". We also find "It is ceteris paribus
acceptable, given that let it be that one leaves the country and given that it
is the case that one is an alien, that let it be that one obtains a sailing
permit from Internal Revenue", which is compatible with "It is
ceteris paribus acceptable, given that let it be that one leaves the country
and given that it is the case that one is an alien and that one is a close
friend of the President, that let it be that one does not obtain a sailing
permit, and that one arranges to travel in Air Force I". I discussed this
kind of generalization, or 'law', briefly in "Method in Philosophical
Psychology"1 and shall not dilate on its features here. I will just remark
that it can be adapted to handle 'functional laws' (in the way suggested in
that address), and that end p.77 it is different from the closely related use
of universal generalizations in 'artificially closed systems', where some
relevant parameter is deliberately ignored, to be taken care of by an extension
to the system; for in that case, when the extension is made, the original law
has to be modified or corrected, whereas my ceteris paribus generalization can
survive in an extended system; and I regard this as a particular advantage to
philosophical psychology. In addition to these two defeasible types of
acceptability generalization (each with alethic and practical sub-types), we
have non-defeasible acceptability generalizations, with associated singular
conditionals, exemplifying what I might call 'unqualified', 'unreserved', or
'full' acceptability claims. To express these I shall employ the (constructed)
modal 'it is fully acceptable that . . .'; and again there will be occasion for
its use in the representation both of alethic and of practical discourse. We
have, in all, then, three varieties of acceptability statement (each with
alethic and practical sub-types), associated with the modals "It is fully
acceptable that . . . " (non-defeasible), 'it is ceteris paribus
acceptable that . . . ', and 'it is to such-and-such a degree acceptable that .
. . ', both of the latter pair being subject to defeasibility. (I should
re-emphasize that, on the practical side, I am so far concerned to represent
only statements which are analogous with Kant's Technical Imperatives ('Rules
of Skill').)
“if” – Grice: “Whitehead lists ‘and,’
‘or,’ and ‘if,’ but had he known some classical languages, he would have noted,
as J. C. Wilson does, that ‘if’ is totally subordinating, and thus totally
non-commutative!” -- German “ob,” Latin, “si,” Grecian, “ei” -- conditional, a
compound sentence, such as ‘if Abe calls, then Ben answers,’ in which one
sentence, the antecedent, is connected to a second, the consequent, by the
connective ‘if . . . then’. Propositions statements, etc. expressed by
conditionals are called conditional propositions statements, etc. and, by
ellipsis, simply conditionals. The ambiguity of the expression ‘if . . . then’
gives rise to a semantic classification of conditionals into material
conditionals, causal conditionals, counterfactual conditionals, and so on. In
traditional logic, conditionals are called hypotheticals, and in some areas of
mathematical logic conditionals are called implications. Faithful analysis of
the meanings of conditionals continues to be investigated and intensely
disputed. conditional proof. 1 The
argument form ‘B follows from A; therefore, if A then B’ and arguments of this
form. 2 The rule of inference that permits one to infer a conditional given a
derivation of its consequent from its antecedent. This is also known as the
rule of conditional proof or /- introduction. conditioning, a form of
associative learning that occurs when changes in thought or behavior are
produced by temporal relations among events. It is common to distinguish
between two types of conditioning; one, classical or Pavlovian, in which
behavior change results from events that occur before behavior; the other,
operant or instrumental, in which behavior change occurs because of events after
behavior. Roughly, classically and operantly conditioned behavior correspond to
the everyday, folk-psychological distinction between involuntary and voluntary
or goaldirected behavior. In classical conditioning, stimuli or events elicit a
response e.g., salivation; neutral stimuli e.g., a dinner bell gain control
over behavior when paired with stimuli that already elicit behavior e.g., the
appearance of dinner. The behavior is involuntary. In operant conditioning,
stimuli or events reinforce behavior after behavior occurs; neutral stimuli
gain power to reinforce by being paired with actual reinforcers. Here,
occasions in which behavior is reinforced serve as discriminative
stimuli-evoking behavior. Operant behavior is goal-directed, if not consciously
or deliberately, then through the bond between behavior and reinforcement.
Thus, the arrangement of condiments at dinner may serve as the discriminative
stimulus evoking the request “Please pass the salt,” whereas saying “Thank you”
may reinforce the behavior of passing the salt. It is not easy to integrate
conditioning phenomena into a unified theory of conditioning. Some theorists
contend that operant conditioning is really classical conditioning veiled by
subtle temporal relations among events. Other theorists contend that operant
conditioning requires mental representations of reinforcers and discriminative
stimuli. B. F. Skinner 4 90 argued in Walden Two 8 that astute, benevolent
behavioral engineers can and should use conditioning to create a social utopia.
conditio sine qua non Latin, ‘a
condition without which not’, a necessary condition; something without which
something else could not be or could not occur. For example, being a plane
figure is a conditio sine qua non for being a triangle. Sometimes the phrase is
used emphatically as a synonym for an unconditioned presupposition, be it for
an action to start or an argument to get going. I.Bo. Condorcet, Marquis de,
title of Marie-JeanAntoine-Nicolas de Caritat 174394, philosopher and political theorist who
contributed to the Encyclopedia and pioneered the mathematical analysis of
social institutions. Although prominent in the Revolutionary government, he was
denounced for his political views and died in prison. Condorcet discovered the
voting paradox, which shows that majoritarian voting can produce cyclical group
preferences. Suppose, for instance, that voters A, B, and C rank proposals x,
y, and z as follows: A: xyz, B: yzx, and C: zxy. Then in majoritarian voting x
beats y and y beats z, but z in turn beats x. So the resulting group
preferences are cyclical. The discovery of this problem helped initiate social
choice theory, which evaluates voting systems. Condorcet argued that any
satisfactory voting system must guarantee selection of a proposal that beats
all rivals in majoritarian competition. Such a proposal is called a Condorcet
winner. His jury theorem says that if voters register their opinions about some
matter, such as whether a defendant is guilty, and the probabilities that
individual voters are right are greater than ½, equal, and independent, then
the majority vote is more likely to be correct than any individual’s or
minority’s vote. Condorcet’s main works are Essai sur l’application de
l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix Essay
on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Decisions Reached by a
Majority of Votes, 1785; and a posthumous treatise on social issues, Esquisse
d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain Sketch for a Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795. “if” corresponding conditional of a given
argument, any conditional whose antecedent is a logical conjunction of all of
the premises of the argument and whose consequent is the conclusion. The two
conditionals, ‘if Abe is Ben and Ben is wise, then Abe is wise’ and ‘if Ben is
wise and Abe is Ben, then Abe is wise’, are the two corresponding conditionals
of the argument whose premises are ‘Abe is Ben’ and ‘Ben is wise’ and whose
conclusion is ‘Abe is wise’. For a one-premise argument, the corresponding
conditional is the conditional whose antecedent is the premise and whose
consequent is the conclusion. The limiting cases of the empty and infinite
premise sets are treated in different ways by different logicians; one simple
treatment considers such arguments as lacking corresponding conditionals. The
principle of corresponding conditionals is that in order for an argument to be
valid it is necessary and sufficient for all its corresponding conditionals to
be tautological. The commonly used expression ‘the corresponding conditional of
an argument’ is also used when two further stipulations are in force: first,
that an argument is construed as having an ordered sequence of premises rather
than an unordered set of premises; second, that conjunction is construed as a
polyadic operation that produces in a unique way a single premise from a
sequence of premises rather than as a dyadic operation that combines premises
two by two. Under these stipulations the principle of the corresponding
conditional is that in order for an argument to be valid it is necessary and
sufficient for its corresponding conditional to be valid. These principles are
closely related to modus ponens, to conditional proof, and to the so-called
deduction theorem. “if” counterfactuals,
also called contrary-to-fact conditionals, subjunctive conditionals that
presupcorner quotes counterfactuals pose the falsity of their antecedents, such
as ‘If Hitler had invaded England, G.y would have won’ and ‘If I were you, I’d
run’. Conditionals or hypothetical statements are compound statements of the
form ‘If p, then q’, or equivalently ‘q if p’. Component p is described as the
antecedent protasis and q as the consequent apodosis. A conditional like ‘If
Oswald did not kill Kennedy, then someone else did’ is called indicative,
because both the antecedent and consequent are in the indicative mood. One like
‘If Oswald had not killed Kennedy, then someone else would have’ is
subjunctive. Many subjunctive and all indicative conditionals are open,
presupposing nothing about the antecedent. Unlike ‘If Bob had won, he’d be
rich’, neither ‘If Bob should have won, he would be rich’ nor ‘If Bob won, he
is rich’ implies that Bob did not win. Counterfactuals presuppose, rather than
assert, the falsity of their antecedents. ‘If Reagan had been president, he
would have been famous’ seems inappropriate and out of place, but not false,
given that Reagan was president. The difference between counterfactual and open
subjunctives is less important logically than that between subjunctives and
indicatives. Whereas the indicative conditional about Kennedy is true, the
subjunctive is probably false. Replace ‘someone’ with ‘no one’ and the
truth-values reverse. The most interesting logical feature of counterfactuals
is that they are not truth-functional. A truth-functional compound is one whose
truth-value is completely determined in every possible case by the truth-values
of its components. For example, the falsity of ‘The President is a grandmother’
and ‘The President is childless’ logically entails the falsity of ‘The
President is a grandmother and childless’: all conjunctions with false
conjuncts are false. But whereas ‘If the President were a grandmother, the
President would be childless’ is false, other counterfactuals with equally
false components are true, such as ‘If the President were a grandmother, the
President would be a mother’. The truth-value of a counterfactual is determined
in part by the specific content of its components. This property is shared by
indicative and subjunctive conditionals generally, as can be seen by varying
the wording of the example. In marked contrast, the material conditional, p /
q, of modern logic, defined as meaning that either p is false or q is true, is
completely truth-functional. ‘The President is a grandmother / The President is
childless’ is just as true as ‘The President is a grandmother / The President
is a mother’. While stronger than the material conditional, the counterfactual
is weaker than the strict conditional, p U q, of modern modal logic, which says
that p / q is necessarily true. ‘If the switch had been flipped, the light
would be on’ may in fact be true even though it is possible for the switch to
have been flipped without the light’s being on because the bulb could have
burned out. The fact that counterfactuals are neither strict nor material
conditionals generated the problem of counterfactual conditionals raised by
Chisholm and Goodman: What are the truth conditions of a counterfactual, and
how are they determined by its components? According to the “metalinguistic”
approach, which resembles the deductive-nomological model of explanation, a
counterfactual is true when its antecedent conjoined with laws of nature and
statements of background conditions logically entails its consequent. On this
account, ‘If the switch had been flipped the light would be on’ is true because
the statement that the switch was flipped, plus the laws of electricity and
statements describing the condition and arrangement of the circuitry, entail
that the light is on. The main problem is to specify which facts are “fixed”
for any given counterfactual and context. The background conditions cannot
include the denials of the antecedent or the consequent, even though they are
true, nor anything else that would not be true if the antecedent were.
Counteridenticals, whose antecedents assert identities, highlight the
difficulty: the background for ‘If I were you, I’d run’ must include facts
about my character and your situation, but not vice versa. Counterlegals like
‘Newton’s laws would fail if planets had rectangular orbits’, whose antecedents
deny laws of nature, show that even the set of laws cannot be all-inclusive.
Another leading approach pioneered by Robert C. Stalnaker and David K. Lewis
extends the possible worlds semantics developed for modal logic, saying that a
counterfactual is true when its consequent is true in the nearest possible
world in which the antecedent is true. The counterfactual about the switch is true
on this account provided a world in which the switch was flipped and the light
is on is closer to the actual world than one in which the switch was flipped
but the light is not on. The main problem is to specify which world is nearest
for any given counterfactual and context. The difference between indicative and
subjunctive conditionals can be accounted for in terms of either a different
set of background conditions or a different measure of nearness.
counterfactuals counterfactuals
Counterfactuals turn up in a variety of philosophical contexts. To
distinguish laws like ‘All copper conducts’ from equally true generalizations
like ‘Everything in my pocket conducts’, some have observed that while anything
would conduct if it were copper, not everything would conduct if it were in my
pocket. And to have a disposition like solubility, it does not suffice to be
either dissolving or not in water: it must in addition be true that the object
would dissolve if it were in water. It has similarly been suggested that one
event is the cause of another only if the latter would not have occurred if the
former had not; that an action is free only if the agent could or would have
done otherwise if he had wanted to; that a person is in a particular mental
state only if he would behave in certain ways given certain stimuli; and that
an action is right only if a completely rational and fully informed agent would
choose it. “If the cat is on the mat, she is purring.” INDICATIVE PLUS
INDICATIVE – “Subjective ‘if’ is a different animal as Julius Caesar well
knew!” -- Refs: “If and Macaulay.”
iff: Grice: “a silly
abbreviation for ‘if and only if’” -- that is used as if it were a single
propositional operator (connective). Another synonym for ‘iff’ is ‘just in
case’. The justification for treating ‘iff’ as if it were a single
propositional connective is that ‘P if and only if Q’ is elliptical for ‘P if
Q, and P only if Q’, and this assertion is logically equivalent to ‘P biconditional
Q’.
Il’in, Ivan Aleksandrovich, philosopher
and conservative legal and political theorist. He authored an important
two-volume commentary on Hegel (1918), plus extensive writings in ethics,
political theory, aesthetics, and spirituality. Exiled in 1922, he was known
for his passionate opposition to Bolshevism, his extensive proposals for
rebuilding a radically reformed Russian state, church, and society in a
post-Communist future, and his devout Russian Orthodox spirituality. He is
widely regarded as a master of Russian language and a penetrating interpreter
of the history of Russian culture. His collected works are currently being
published in Moscow.
illatum, f. illātĭo (inl- ), ōnis, f. in-fero,
a logical inference, conclusion: “vel illativum rogamentum. quod ex acceptionibus colligitur et infertur,” App. Dogm. Plat. 3, pp. 34,
15. – infero: to conclude, infer, draw an inference, Cic. Inv. 1, 47, 87; Quint. 5, 11, 27. ILLATUM -- inference, the
process of drawing a conclusion from premises or assumptions, or, loosely, the
conclusion so drawn. An argument can be merely a number of statements of which
one is designated the conclusion and the rest are designated premises. Whether
the premises imply the conclusion is thus independent of anyone’s actual
beliefs in either of them. Belief, however, is essential to inference.
Inference occurs only if someone, owing to believing the premises, begins to
believe the conclusion or continues to believe the conclusion with greater
confidence than before. Because inference requires a subject who has beliefs,
some requirements of (an ideally) acceptable inference do not apply to abstract
arguments: one must believe the premises; one must believe that the premises
support the conclusion; neither of these beliefs induction, eliminative
inference 426 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 426 may be based on one’s
prior belief in the conclusion. W. E. Johnson called these the epistemic
conditions of inference. In a reductio ad absurdum argument that deduces a
self-contradiction from certain premises, not all steps of the argument will
correspond to steps of inference. No one deliberately infers a contradiction.
What one infers, in such an argument, is that certain premises are
inconsistent. Acceptable inferences can fall short of being ideally acceptable
according to the above requirements. Relevant beliefs are sometimes indefinite.
Infants and children infer despite having no grasp of the sophisticated notion
of support. One function of idealization is to set standards for that which
falls short. It is possible to judge how nearly inexplicit, automatic,
unreflective, lessthan-ideal inferences meet ideal requirements. In ordinary
speech, ‘infer’ often functions as a synonym of ‘imply’, as in ‘The new tax law
infers that we have to calculate the value of our shrubbery’. Careful
philosophical writing avoids this usage. Implication is, and inference is not,
a relation between statements. Valid deductive inference corresponds to a valid
deductive argument: it is logically impossible for all the premises to be true
when the conclusion is false. That is, the conjunction of all the premises and
the negation of the conclusion is inconsistent. Whenever a conjunction is
inconsistent, there is a valid argument for the negation of any conjunct from
the other conjuncts. (Relevance logic imposes restrictions on validity to avoid
this.) Whenever one argument is deductively valid, so is another argument that
goes in a different direction. (1) ‘Stacy left her slippers in the kitchen’
implies (2) ‘Stacy had some slippers’. Should one acquainted with Stacy and the
kitchen infer (2) from (1), or infer not-(1) from not-(2), or make neither
inference? Formal logic tells us about implication and deductive validity, but
it cannot tell us when or what to infer. Reasonable inference depends on
comparative degrees of reasonable belief. An inference in which every premise and
every step is beyond question is a demonstrative inference. (Similarly,
reasoning for which this condition holds is demonstrative reasoning.) Just as
what is beyond question can vary from one situation to another, so can what
counts as demonstrative. The term presumably derives from Aristotle’s Posterior
Analytics. Understanding Aristotle’s views on demonstration requires
understanding his general scheme for classifying inferences. Not all inferences
are deductive. In an inductive inference, one infers from an observed
combination of characteristics to some similar unobserved combination.
‘Reasoning’ like ‘painting’, and ‘frosting’, and many other words, has a
process–product ambiguity. Reasoning can be a process that occurs in time or it
can be a result or product. A letter to the editor can both contain reasoning
and be the result of reasoning. It is often unclear whether a word such as
‘statistical’ that modifies the words ‘inference’ or ‘reasoning’ applies
primarily to stages in the process or to the content of the product. One view,
attractive for its simplicity, is that the stages of the process of reasoning
correspond closely to the parts of the product. Examples that confirm this view
are scarce. Testing alternatives, discarding and reviving, revising and
transposing, and so on, are as common to the process of reasoning as to other
creative activities. A product seldom reflects the exact history of its
production. In An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, J. S. Mill
says that reasoning is a source from which we derive new truths (Chapter 14).
This is a useful saying so long as we remember that not all reasoning is
inference. -- inference to the best explanation, an inference by which one
concludes that something is the case on the grounds that this best explains
something else one believes to be the case. Paradigm examples of this kind of
inference are found in the natural sciences, where a hypothesis is accepted on
the grounds that it best explains relevant observations. For example, the
hypothesis that material substances have atomic structures best explains a
range of observations concerning how such substances interact. Inferences to
the best explanation occur in everyday life as well. Upon walking into your
house you observe that a lamp is lying broken on the floor, and on the basis of
this you infer that the cat has knocked it over. This is plausibly analyzed as
an inference to the best explanation; you believe that the cat has knocked over
the lamp because this is the best explanation for the lamp’s lying broken on
the floor. The nature of inference to the best explanation and the extent of
its use are both controversial. Positions that have been taken include: (a)
that it is a distinctive kind of inductive reasoning; (b) inference rule
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that all good inductive inferences involve inference to the best explanation;
and (c) that it is not a distinctive kind of inference at all, but is rather a
special case of enumerative induction. Another controversy concerns the
criteria for what makes an explanation best. Simplicity, cognitive fit, and
explanatory power have all been suggested as relevant merits, but none of these
notions is well understood. Finally, a skeptical problem arises: inference to
the best explanation is plausibly involved in both scientific and commonsense
knowledge, but it is not clear why the best explanation that occurs to a person
is likely to be true. -- inferential knowledge, a kind of “indirect” knowledge,
namely, knowledge based on or resulting from inference. Assuming that knowledge
is at least true, justified belief, inferential knowledge is constituted by a
belief that is justified because it is inferred from certain other beliefs. The
knowledge that 7 equals 7 seems non-inferential. We do not infer from anything
that 7 equals 7 – it is obvious and self-evident. The knowledge that 7 is the
cube root of 343, in contrast, seems inferential. We cannot know this without
inferring it from something else, such as the result obtained when multiplying
7 times 7 times 7. Two sorts of inferential relations may be distinguished. ‘I
inferred that someone died because the flag is at half-mast’ may be true
because yesterday I acquired the belief about the flag, which caused me to
acquire the further belief that someone died. ‘I inferentially believe that
someone died because the flag is at halfmast’ may be true now because I retain
the belief that someone died and it remains based on my belief about the flag.
My belief that someone died is thus either episodically or structurally
inferential. The episodic process is an occurrent, causal relation among belief
acquisitions. The structural basing relation may involve the retention of
beliefs, and need not be occurrent. (Some reserve ‘inference’ for the episodic
relation.) An inferential belief acquired on one basis may later be held on a
different basis, as when I forget I saw a flag at half-mast but continue to
believe someone died because of news reports. That “How do you know?” and
“Prove it!” always seem pertinent suggests that all knowledge is inferential, a
version of the coherence theory. The well-known regress argument seems to show,
however, that not all knowledge can be inferential, which is a version of
foundationalism. For if S knows something inferentially, S must infer it
correctly from premises S knows to be true. The question whether those premises
are also known inferentially begins either an infinite regress of inferences
(which is humanly impossible) or a circle of justification (which could not
constitute good reasoning). Which sources of knowledge are non-inferential
remains an issue even assuming foundationalism. When we see that an apple is
red, e.g., our knowledge is based in some manner on the way the apple looks.
“How do you know it is red?” can be answered: “By the way it looks.” This
answer seems correct, moreover, only if an inference from the way the apple
looks to its being red would be warranted. Nevertheless, perceptual beliefs are
formed so automatically that talk of inference seems inappropriate. In
addition, inference as a process whereby beliefs are acquired as a result of
holding other beliefs may be distinguished from inference as a state in which
one belief is sustained on the basis of others. Knowledge that is inferential
in one way need not be inferential in the other. When it came to rationality –
Grice was especially irritated by the adjective ‘theoretical’ as applied to
‘reason’. “Kant was cleverer when he used the metaphorical ‘pure’!” --
theoretical reason – Grice preferred ‘conversational reason.’ “There’s no need
to divide reason into pure and impure!’ -- in its traditional sense, a faculty
or capacity whose province is theoretical knowledge or inquiry; more broadly, the
faculty concerned with ascertaining truth of any kind also sometimes called
speculative reason. In Book 6 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle identifies
mathematics, physics, and theology as the subject matter of theoretical reason.
Theoretical reason is traditionally distinguished from practical reason, a
faculty exercised in determining guides to good conduct and in deliberating
about proper courses of action. Aristotle contrasts it, as well, with
productive reason, which is concerned with “making”: shipbuilding, sculpting,
healing, and the like. Kant distinguishes theoretical reason not only from
practical reason but also sometimes from the faculty of understanding, in which
the categories originate. Theoretical reason, possessed of its own a priori
concepts “ideas of reason”, regulates the activities of the understanding. It
presupposes a systematic unity in nature, sets the goal for scientific inquiry,
and determines the “criterion of empirical truth” Critique of Pure Reason.
Theoretical reason, on Kant’s conception, seeks an explanatory “completeness”
and an “unconditionedness” of being that transcend what is possible in
experience. Reason, as a faculty or capacity, may be regarded as a hybrid
composed of theoretical and practical reason broadly construed or as a unity
having both theoretical and practical functions. Some commentators take
Aristotle to embrace the former conception and Kant the latter. Reason is
contrasted sometimes with experience, sometimes with emotion and desire,
sometimes with faith. Its presence in human beings has often been regarded as
constituting the primary difference between human and non-human animals; and
reason is sometimes represented as a divine element in human nature. Socrates,
in Plato’s Philebus, portrays reason as “the king of heaven and earth.” Hobbes,
in his Leviathan, paints a more sobering picture, contending that reason, “when
we reckon it among the faculties of the mind, . . . is nothing but
reckoning that is, adding and subtracting of the consequences of general names agreed
upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts.”
illuminism: d’Alembert, Jean
Le Rond, philosopher, and Encyclopedist. According to Grimm, d’Alembert was the
prime luminary of the philosophic party. Cf. the French ideologues that influenced
Humboldt. An abandoned, illegitimate child, he nonetheless received an
outstanding education at the Jansenist Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris. He
read law for a while, tried medicine, and settled on mathematics. In 1743, he
published an acclaimed Treatise of Dynamics. Subsequently, he joined the Paris
Academy of Sciences and contributed decisive works on mathematics and physics.
In 1754, he was elected to the Academy,
of which he later became permanent secretary. In association with Diderot, he
launched the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote the epoch-making Discours
préliminaire 1751 and numerous entries on science. Unwilling to compromise with
the censorship, he resigned as coeditor in 1758. In the Discours préliminaire,
d’Alembert specified the divisions of the philosophical discourse on man:
pneumatology, logic, and ethics. Contrary to Christian philosophies, he limited
pneumatology to the investigation of the human soul. Prefiguring positivism,
his Essay on the Elements of Philosophy 1759 defines philosophy as a
comparative examination of physical phenomena. Influenced by Bacon, Locke, and
Newton, d’Alembert’s epistemology associates Cartesian psychology with the
sensory origin of ideas. Though assuming the universe to be rationally ordered,
he discarded metaphysical questions as inconclusive. The substance, or the
essence, of soul and matter, is unknowable. Agnosticism ineluctably arises from
his empirically based naturalism. D’Alembert is prominently featured in
D’Alembert’s Dream 1769, Diderot’s dialogical apology for materialism. Grice’s illuminism – “reason enlightens us”
Enlightenment, a late eighteenth-century international movement in thought,
with important social and political ramifications. The Enlightenment is at once
a style, an attitude, a temper critical,
secular, skeptical, empirical, and practical. It is also characterized by core
beliefs in human rationality, in what it took to be “nature,” and in the
“natural feelings” of mankind. Four of its most prominent exemplars are Hume,
Thomas Jefferson, Kant, and Voltaire. The Enlightenment belief in human
rationality had several aspects. 1 Human beings are free to the extent that
their actions are carried out for a reason. Actions prompted by traditional
authority, whether religious or political, are therefore not free; liberation
requires weakening if not also overthrow of this authority. 2 Human rationality
is universal, requiring only education for its development. In virtue of their
common rationality, all human beings have certain rights, among them the right
to choose and shape their individual destinies. 3 A final aspect of the belief
in human rationality was that the true forms of all things could be discovered,
whether of the universe Newton’s laws, of the mind associationist psychology,
of good government the U.S. Constitution, of a happy life which, like good
government, was “balanced”, or of beautiful architecture Palladio’s principles.
The Enlightenment was preeminently a “formalist” age, and prose, not poetry,
was its primary means of expression. The Enlightenment thought of itself as a
return to the classical ideas of the Grecians and more especially the Romans.
But in fact it provided one source of the revolutions that shook Europe and
America at the end of the eighteenth century, and it laid the intellectual
foundations for both the generally scientific worldview and the liberal
democratic society, which, despite the many attacks made on them, continue to
function as cultural ideals.
illusion: cf. veridical memories, who needs them? hallucination
is Grice’s topic.Malcolm argues in Dreaming and Skepticism and in his Dreaming
that the notion of a dream qua conscious experience that occurs at a definite
time and has definite duration during sleep, is unintelligible. This contradicts
the views of philosophers like Descartes (and indeed Moore!), who, Malcolm
holds, assume that a human being may have a conscious thought and a conscious
experience during sleep. Descartes claims that he had been deceived during
sleep. Malcolms point is that ordinary language contrasts consciousness and
sleep. The claim that one is conscious while one is sleep-walking is stretching
the use of the term. Malcolm rejects the alleged counter-examples based on
sleepwalking or sleep-talking, e.g. dreaming that one is climbing stairs while
one is actually doing so is not a counter-example because, in such a case, the
individual is not sound asleep after all. If a person is in any state of
consciousness, it logically follows that he is not sound asleep. The concept of
dreaming is based on our descriptions of dreams after we have awakened in
telling a dream. Thus, to have dreamt that one has a thought during sleep is
not to have a thought any more than to have dreamt that one has climbed Everest
is to have climbed Everest. Since one cannot have an experience during sleep,
one cannot have a mistaken experience during sleep, thereby undermining the
sort of scepticism based on the idea that our experience might be wrong because
we might be dreaming. Malcolm further argues that a report of a conscious state
during sleep is unverifiable. If Grice claims that he and Strawson saw a
big-foot in charge of the reserve desk at the Bodleian library, one can verify
that this took place by talking to Strawson and gathering forensic evidence
from the library. However, there is no way to verify Grices claim that he
dreamed that he and Strawson saw a big-foot working at the Bodleian. Grices
only basis for his claim that he dreamt this is that Grice says so after he
wakes up. How does one distinguish the case where Grice dreamed that he saw a
big-foot working at The Bodleian and the case in which he dreamed that he saw a
person in a big-foot suit working at the library but, after awakening,
mis-remembered that person in a big-foot suit as a big-foot proper? If Grice
should admit that he had earlier mis-reported his dream and that he had
actually dreamed he saw a person in a big-foot suit at The Bodleian, there is
no more independent verification for this new claim than there was for the
original one. Thus, there is, for Malcolm, no sense to the idea of
mis-remembering ones dreams. Malcolm here applies one of Witters ideas from his
private language argument. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem
right to me is right. And that only means that here we cannot talk about right.
For a similar reason, Malcolm challenges the idea that one can assign a
definite duration or time of occurrence to a dream. If Grice claims that he ran
the mile in 3.4 minutes, one could verify this in the usual ways. If, however,
Grice says he dreamt that he ran the mile in 3.4 minutes, how is one to measure
the duration of his dreamt run? If Grice says he was wearing a stopwatch in the
dream and clocked his run at 3.4 minutes, how can one know that the dreamt
stopwatch is not running at half speed (so that he really dreamt that he ran
the mile in 6.8 minutes)? Grice might argue that a dream report does not carry
such a conversational implicatura. But Malcolm would say that just admits the
point. The ordinary criteria one uses for determining temporal duration do not
apply to dreamt events. The problem in both these cases (Grice dreaming one saw
a bigfoot working at The Bodleian and dreaming that he ran the mile in 3.4
minutes) is that there is no way to verify the truth of these dreamt events —
no direct way to access that dreamt inner experience, that mysterious glow of
consciousness inside the mind of Grice lying comatose on the couch, in order to
determine the facts of the matter. This is because, for Malcolm, there are no
facts of the matter apart from the report by the dreamer of the dream upon
awakening. Malcolm claims that the empirical evidence does not enable one to
decide between the view that a dream experience occurs during sleep and the
view that they are generated upon the moment of waking up. Dennett agrees with
Malcolm that nothing supports the received view that a dream involves a
conscious experience while one is asleep but holds that such issues might be
settled empirically. Malcolm also argues against the attempt to provide a
physiological mark of the duration of a dream, for example, the view that the
dream lasted as long as the rapid eye movements. Malcolm replies that there can
only be as much precision in that common concept of dreaming as is provided by
the common criterion of dreaming. These scientific researchers are misled by
the assumption that the provision for the duration of a dream is already there,
only somewhat obscured and in need of being made more precise. However, Malcolm
claims, it is not already there (in the ordinary concept of dreaming). These
scientific views are making radical conceptual changes in the concept of
dreaming, not further explaining our ordinary concept of dreaming. Malcolm
admits, however, that it might be natural to adopt such scientific views about
REM sleep as a convention. Malcolm points out, however, that if REM sleep is
adopted as a criterion for the occurrence of a dream, people would have to
be informed upon waking up that they had dreamed or not. As Pears observes,
Malcolm does not mean to deny that people have dreams in favour of the view
that they only have waking dream-behaviour. Of course it is no misuse of
language to speak of remembering a dream. His point is that since the concept
of dreaming is so closely tied to our concept of waking report of a dreams, one
cannot form a coherent concept of this alleged inner (private) something that
occurs with a definite duration during sleep. Malcolm rejects a certain
philosophical conception of dreaming, not the ordinary concept of dreaming,
which, he holds, is neither a hidden private something nor mere outward
behaviour.The account of dreaming by Malcolm has come in for considerable
criticism. Some argue that Malcolms claim that occurrences in dreams cannot be
verified by others does not require the strict criteria that Malcolm proposes
but can be justified by appeal to the simplicity, plausibility, and predictive
adequacy of an explanatory system as a whole. Some argue that Malcolms account
of the sentence I am awake is inconsistent. A comprehensive programme in
considerable detail has been offered for an empirical scientific investigation
of dreaming of the sort that Malcolm rejects. Others have proposed various
counterexamples and counter arguments against dreaming by Malcolm. Grices
emphasis is in Malcolms easy way out with statements to the effect that implicatura
do or do not operate in dream reports. They do in mine! Grice considers, I may
be dreaming in the two essays opening the Part II: Explorations on semantics
and metaphysics in WOW. Cf. Urmson on ‘delusion’ in ‘Parentheticals’ as
‘conceptually impossible.’ Refs.: The main reference is Grice’s essay on
‘Dreaming,’ but there are scattered references in his treatment of Descartes,
and “The causal theory of perception” (henceforth, “Causal theory”), The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
imagination: referred to by
Grice in “Prolegomena” – the rabbit that looks like a duck -- the mental
faculty sometimes thought to encompass all acts of thinking about something
novel, contrary to fact, or not currently perceived; thus: “Imagine that
Lincoln had not been assassinated,” or “Use your imagination to create a new
design for roller skates.” ‘Imagination’ also denotes an important
perception-like aspect of some such thoughts, so that to imagine something is
to bring to mind what it would be like to perceive it. Philosophical theories
of imagination must explain its apparent intentionality: when we imagine, we
always imagine something. Imagination is always directed toward an object, even
though the object may not exist. Moreover, imagination, like perception, is
often seen as involving qualia, or special subjective properties that are
sometimes thought to discredit materialist, especially functionalist, theories
of mind. The intentionality of imagination and its perceptual character lead
some theories to equate imagination with “imaging”: being conscious of or
perceiving a mental image. However, because the ontological status of such
images and the nature of their properties are obscure, many philosophers have
rejected mental images in favor of an adverbial theory on which to imagine
something red is best analyzed as imagining “redly.” Such theories avoid the
difficulties associated with mental images, but must offer some other way to
account for the apparent intentionality of imagination as well as its
perceptual character. Imagination, in the hands of Husserl and Sartre, becomes
a particularly apt subject for phenomenology. It is also cited as a faculty
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separates human thought from any form of artificial intelligence. Finally,
imagination often figures prominently in debates about possibility, in that
what is imaginable is often taken to be coextensive with what is possible.
inmanens, a term most often
used in contrast to ‘transcendence’ to express the way in which God is thought
to be present in the world. The most extreme form of immanence is expressed in
pantheism, which identifies God’s substance either partly or wholly with the
world. In contrast to pantheism, Judaism and Christianity hold God to be a
totally separate substance from the world. In Christianity, the separateness of
God’s substance from that of the world is guaranteed by the doctrine of
creation ex nihilo. Aquinas held that God is in the world as an efficient cause
is present to that on which it acts. Thus, God is present in the world by
continuously acting on it to preserve it in existence. Perhaps the weakest
notion of immanence is expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury deism, in
which God initially creates the world and institutes its universal laws, but is
basically an absentee landlord, exercising no providential activity over its
continuing history.
immaterialism, Oneo of Grice’s
twelve labours is with Materialism. Immaterialism is the view that objects are
best characterized as mere collections of qualities: “a certain colour, taste,
smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted
one distinct thing, signified by the name apple” (Berkeley, Principles, 1). So
construed, immaterialism anticipates by some two hundred years a doctrine
defended in the early twentieth century by Russell. The negative side of the
doctrine comes in the denial of material substance or matter. Some philosophers
had held that ordinary objects are individual material substances in which
qualities inhere. The account is mistaken because, according to immaterialism,
there is no such thing as material substance, and so qualities do not inhere in
it. Immaterialism should not be confused with Berkeley’s idealism. The latter,
but not the former, implies that objects and their qualities exist if and only
if they are perceived.
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