Speranza
KEYWORDS:
reducibility
explanation
Popper's anti-reductionism
etc.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Whence and wither: where Oakeshott is coming from, and where Grice is going to -- MICHAEL JOSEPH OAKESHOTT -- HERBERT PAUL GRICE -- Oakeshott joined the Army in 1941, Grice, perhaps more aristocratically, joined the Navy.
Speranza
Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law.
OAKESHOTT is widely regarded as one of the most important conservative thinkers of the 20th century,[1] although he has sometimes been characterized as a liberal thinker.[2]
George Bernard Shaw was a friend. Michael Oakeshott attended St. George's School, Harpenden from 1912 to 1920.
He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster Cecil Grant later became a friend.
In 1920, Oakeshott went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to read History, where he obtained an MA and subsequently became a Fellow.
While at Cambridge, he admired the British idealist philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke.
The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.[citation needed]
He was on active service in Europe with the intelligence unit Phantom, which had SAS connections, but he was never in the front line.
---- THE OXONIAN CONVERSION:
In 1947, he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford.
After only a year, he secured an appointment as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), succeeding Harold Laski.
He was deeply unsympathetic to the student action at LSE that occurred in the late 1960s, on the grounds that it disrupted the aims of the university.
Oakeshott retired from LSE in 1969.
Oakeshott refused an offer of Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher.[4]
He noted that the book owed much to Hegel and Bradley;[5] commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of thinkers such as Collingwood[6] and Simmel.
The book argued that our experience is usually modal, in the sense that we always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or theoretical.
There are various theoretical approaches you can take to understanding the world:
natural science and history for example are separate modes of experience.
It was a mistake, he declared, to treat history as if it ought to be practised on the model of the natural sciences.
------
Philosophy, however, is not a modal interest.
---
At this stage of his career, he saw philosophy as the world seen sub specie aeternitatis, literally, 'under the aspect of eternity', free from presuppositions, whereas science and history and the practical mode relied on certain assumptions.
Later (there is some disagreement about exactly when), Oakeshott adopted a pluralistic view of the various modes of experience, with philosophy just one 'voice' amongst others, though it retained its self-scrutinizing character.
The dominating principles of scientific and historical thought were quantity (the world sub specie quantitatis) and being in the past (the world sub specie praeteritorum), respectively.
Oakeshott distinguished the academic perspective on the past from the practical, in which the past is seen in terms of its relevance to our present and future.
His insistence on the autonomy of history places him close to R. G. Collingwood, who also argued for the autonomy of historical knowledge.
The practical world-view (the world sub specie voluntatis) presupposed the ideas of will and of value in terms of which practical action in the arenas of politics, economics, and ethics made sense.
Because all action is conditioned by presuppositions, Oakeshott was inclined to see any attempt to change the world as reliant upon a scale of values which themselves presuppose a context of experience. Even the conservative disposition to maintain the status quo relies upon managing inevitable change, he would later elaborate in his essay 'On Being Conservative'.
During this period, Oakeshott published what became his best known work during his lifetime, the collection entitled Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962).
Some of the polemics against the direction post-World War II Britain was taking, in particular the acceptance of socialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a conservative, seeking to uphold the importance of tradition, and sceptical about rationalism and fixed ideologies. Bernard Crick described him as a 'lonely nihilist'.[8]
Oakeshott's opposition to what he saw as Utopian political projects is summed up in his use of the image (possibly borrowed from the Marquess of Halifax, a 17th-century English author whom he admired) of a ship of state which has "neither starting-place nor appointed destination...[and where] the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel".[9]
He was a critic of the Cambridge historian E. H. Carr, historian of Soviet Russia, claiming that Carr had an uncritical attitude towards the Bolshevik regime, taking some of its propaganda at face value.[10]
In his essay On Being Conservative (1956),[11] he explained what he regarded as the conservative disposition. According to Oakeshott, "To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."
Oakeshott's political philosophy, as advanced in On Human Conduct (1975), is removed from party politics of any persuasion. It was divided into three parts.
The first part develops a theory of human action as the exercise of intelligent agency in activities such as wanting and choosing, the second discusses the formal conditions of association appropriate to such intelligent agents, described as 'civil' or legal association, and the third examines how far this understanding of human association has affected politics and political ideas in post-Renaissance European history.
Oakeshott suggested that there had been two major schools of political thought. In the first, which he called 'enterprise' association, the state was understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects in which they were forced to participate. 'Civil' association however was primarily a legal relationship, in which laws imposed obligatory conditions of action but did not require choosing one action rather than another.
In his posthumously-published The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, Oakeshott describes the 'enterprise' and the 'civil' association in different terms. An 'enterprise' association is seen as based in a fundamental faith in the ability of the human to ascertain and grasp some universal "good" (i.e. the Politics of Faith), and the 'civil' association is seen as based in a fundamental scepticism about the human ability to either ascertain or achieve this universal "good" (i.e. the Politics of Scepticism). Oakeshott saw power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because a) it allowed people to believe that they could achieve something great (e.g. something universally good), and b) it allowed them to implement the policies necessary to achieve this goal. The Politics of Scepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening rather than enabling ambiguously good events.
Oakeshott used the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint law involves.
For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing 'murderously'. Or, a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I have to drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasted with the rules of enterprise association in which those actions required by the directing purpose were made compulsory for all.
The complex and often technical style of On Human Conduct found few readers. Its initial reception was mostly one of bafflement, and Oakeshott, who rarely replied to his critics, replied in the journal Political Theory to some of the contributions made at a symposium on the book with sarcasm.[12]
In the mid-1960s, Oakeshott declared an admiration for Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the pioneers of hermeneutics. On History can be interpreted as an essentially neo-Kantian enterprise of working out the conditions of the possibility of historical knowledge, work that Dilthey had begun.
The first three essays set out the distinction between the present of historical experience and the present of practical experience, as well as the concepts of historical situation, historical event, and what is meant by change in history. On History includes an essay on jurisprudence ('The Rule of Law') and a pessimistic re-telling in the modern setting of the story of 'The Tower of Babel', in which modern Western societies fall victim to their own materialism and greed. It is no surprise[citation needed], given this dislike of much contemporary society, that in his retirement Oakeshott retreated to live quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers in Dorset. He lived long enough to see growing recognition, although he has become far more widely written about since his death.
Just before he died, Oakeshott gave his blessing to two edited collections of his works, The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989), a collection of his essays on education, and a second, revised and expanded edition of Rationalism in Politics itself (1991). Posthumous collections of his writings include Morality and Politics in Modern Europe (1993), a lecture series he gave at Harvard in 1958, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (1993), essays mostly from his early and middle periods, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996), a manuscript from the 1950s contemporary with much of the material in Rationalism in Politics but written in a more considered tone.
The bulk of his papers are now in the Oakeshott archive at the London School of Economics. Further volumes of posthumous writings are in preparation, as is a biography, and the first decade of the 21st century has seen the publication of a series of monographs devoted to his work.
 | |
| Born | Michael Joseph Oakeshott 11 December 1901 Chelsfield, Bromley, England |
|---|---|
| Died | 19 December 1990 (aged 89) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | |
| Main interests | |
Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law.
OAKESHOTT is widely regarded as one of the most important conservative thinkers of the 20th century,[1] although he has sometimes been characterized as a liberal thinker.[2]
His father, Joseph Oakeshott, was a civil servant and a leading member of the Fabian Society.
George Bernard Shaw was a friend. Michael Oakeshott attended St. George's School, Harpenden from 1912 to 1920.
He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster Cecil Grant later became a friend.
In 1920, Oakeshott went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to read History, where he obtained an MA and subsequently became a Fellow.
While at Cambridge, he admired the British idealist philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke.
The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.[citation needed]
Oakeshott was dismayed by the descent into political extremism that took place in Europe in the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of National Socialism and Marxism.[3]
Although his 1939 essay 'The Claim of Politics' defended the right of individuals not to become directly involved, in 1941, Oakeshott joined the British Army in its fight against Nazi Germany.
He was on active service in Europe with the intelligence unit Phantom, which had SAS connections, but he was never in the front line.
In 1945, Oakeshott was demobilized and returned to Cambridge for two years.
---- THE OXONIAN CONVERSION:
In 1947, he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford.
After only a year, he secured an appointment as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), succeeding Harold Laski.
He was deeply unsympathetic to the student action at LSE that occurred in the late 1960s, on the grounds that it disrupted the aims of the university.
Oakeshott retired from LSE in 1969.
Oakeshott refused an offer of Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher.[4]
Oakeshott's early work, some of which has been published posthumously as What is History? And Other Essays (2004) and The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence (2007), shows that he was more interested in the philosophical problems that arose from his historical studies than he was in the history, even though he was employed as a historian.
Philosophy and modes of experience
Oakeshott published his first book - Experience and its Modes - in 1933.He noted that the book owed much to Hegel and Bradley;[5] commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of thinkers such as Collingwood[6] and Simmel.
The book argued that our experience is usually modal, in the sense that we always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or theoretical.
There are various theoretical approaches you can take to understanding the world:
natural science and history for example are separate modes of experience.
It was a mistake, he declared, to treat history as if it ought to be practised on the model of the natural sciences.
------
Philosophy, however, is not a modal interest.
---
At this stage of his career, he saw philosophy as the world seen sub specie aeternitatis, literally, 'under the aspect of eternity', free from presuppositions, whereas science and history and the practical mode relied on certain assumptions.
Later (there is some disagreement about exactly when), Oakeshott adopted a pluralistic view of the various modes of experience, with philosophy just one 'voice' amongst others, though it retained its self-scrutinizing character.
The dominating principles of scientific and historical thought were quantity (the world sub specie quantitatis) and being in the past (the world sub specie praeteritorum), respectively.
Oakeshott distinguished the academic perspective on the past from the practical, in which the past is seen in terms of its relevance to our present and future.
His insistence on the autonomy of history places him close to R. G. Collingwood, who also argued for the autonomy of historical knowledge.
The practical world-view (the world sub specie voluntatis) presupposed the ideas of will and of value in terms of which practical action in the arenas of politics, economics, and ethics made sense.
Because all action is conditioned by presuppositions, Oakeshott was inclined to see any attempt to change the world as reliant upon a scale of values which themselves presuppose a context of experience. Even the conservative disposition to maintain the status quo relies upon managing inevitable change, he would later elaborate in his essay 'On Being Conservative'.
| Part of a series on |
| Conservatism |
|---|
 |
During this period, Oakeshott published what became his best known work during his lifetime, the collection entitled Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962).
Some of the polemics against the direction post-World War II Britain was taking, in particular the acceptance of socialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a conservative, seeking to uphold the importance of tradition, and sceptical about rationalism and fixed ideologies. Bernard Crick described him as a 'lonely nihilist'.[8]
Oakeshott's opposition to what he saw as Utopian political projects is summed up in his use of the image (possibly borrowed from the Marquess of Halifax, a 17th-century English author whom he admired) of a ship of state which has "neither starting-place nor appointed destination...[and where] the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel".[9]
He was a critic of the Cambridge historian E. H. Carr, historian of Soviet Russia, claiming that Carr had an uncritical attitude towards the Bolshevik regime, taking some of its propaganda at face value.[10]
[edit] Towards On Human Conduct
 | This article is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. (January 2008) |
Oakeshott's political philosophy, as advanced in On Human Conduct (1975), is removed from party politics of any persuasion. It was divided into three parts.
The first part develops a theory of human action as the exercise of intelligent agency in activities such as wanting and choosing, the second discusses the formal conditions of association appropriate to such intelligent agents, described as 'civil' or legal association, and the third examines how far this understanding of human association has affected politics and political ideas in post-Renaissance European history.
Oakeshott suggested that there had been two major schools of political thought. In the first, which he called 'enterprise' association, the state was understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects in which they were forced to participate. 'Civil' association however was primarily a legal relationship, in which laws imposed obligatory conditions of action but did not require choosing one action rather than another.
In his posthumously-published The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, Oakeshott describes the 'enterprise' and the 'civil' association in different terms. An 'enterprise' association is seen as based in a fundamental faith in the ability of the human to ascertain and grasp some universal "good" (i.e. the Politics of Faith), and the 'civil' association is seen as based in a fundamental scepticism about the human ability to either ascertain or achieve this universal "good" (i.e. the Politics of Scepticism). Oakeshott saw power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because a) it allowed people to believe that they could achieve something great (e.g. something universally good), and b) it allowed them to implement the policies necessary to achieve this goal. The Politics of Scepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening rather than enabling ambiguously good events.
Oakeshott used the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint law involves.
For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing 'murderously'. Or, a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I have to drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasted with the rules of enterprise association in which those actions required by the directing purpose were made compulsory for all.
The complex and often technical style of On Human Conduct found few readers. Its initial reception was mostly one of bafflement, and Oakeshott, who rarely replied to his critics, replied in the journal Political Theory to some of the contributions made at a symposium on the book with sarcasm.[12]
The final work Oakeshott published in his own lifetime, On History (1983) returned to the idea that history is a distinct mode of experience, but built on the theory of action developed for On Human Conduct. Much of On History had in fact been written at the same time, in the early 1970s.
In the mid-1960s, Oakeshott declared an admiration for Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the pioneers of hermeneutics. On History can be interpreted as an essentially neo-Kantian enterprise of working out the conditions of the possibility of historical knowledge, work that Dilthey had begun.
The first three essays set out the distinction between the present of historical experience and the present of practical experience, as well as the concepts of historical situation, historical event, and what is meant by change in history. On History includes an essay on jurisprudence ('The Rule of Law') and a pessimistic re-telling in the modern setting of the story of 'The Tower of Babel', in which modern Western societies fall victim to their own materialism and greed. It is no surprise[citation needed], given this dislike of much contemporary society, that in his retirement Oakeshott retreated to live quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers in Dorset. He lived long enough to see growing recognition, although he has become far more widely written about since his death.
Oakeshott's other works included a reader on The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe consisting of selected texts illustrating the main doctrines of liberalism, national socialism, fascism, communism, and Roman Catholicism (1939). He was editor of an edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1946), for which he provided an introduction recognized as a significant contribution to the literature by later scholars such as Quentin Skinner. Several of his essays on Hobbes were published in 1975 as Hobbes on Civil Association. He wrote, with his Cambridge colleague Guy Griffith, A Guide to the Classics, or How to Pick The Derby Winner (1936), a guide to the principles of successful betting on horse-racing; this was his only non-academic work. He was the author of well over 150 essays and reviews, most of which have yet to be republished.
Just before he died, Oakeshott gave his blessing to two edited collections of his works, The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989), a collection of his essays on education, and a second, revised and expanded edition of Rationalism in Politics itself (1991). Posthumous collections of his writings include Morality and Politics in Modern Europe (1993), a lecture series he gave at Harvard in 1958, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (1993), essays mostly from his early and middle periods, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996), a manuscript from the 1950s contemporary with much of the material in Rationalism in Politics but written in a more considered tone.
The bulk of his papers are now in the Oakeshott archive at the London School of Economics. Further volumes of posthumous writings are in preparation, as is a biography, and the first decade of the 21st century has seen the publication of a series of monographs devoted to his work.
- 1933. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge University Press
- 1936. A Guide to the Classics, or, How to Pick the Derby. With G.T. Griffith. London: Faber and Faber
- 1939. The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- 1941. The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- 1942. The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe with five additional prefaces by F.A. Ogg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- 1947. A New Guide to the Derby: How to Pick the Winner. With G.T. Griffith. London: Faber and Faber
- 1955. La Idea de Gobierno en la Europa Moderna. Madrid: Ateneo
- 1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen (Expanded edition - 1991, by Liberty Fund)
- 1966. Rationalismus in der Politik. (trans. K. Streifthau) Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhard
- 1975. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Oxford University Press
- 1975. Hobbes on Civil Association. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
- 1983. On History and Other Essays. Basil Blackwell
- 1985. La Condotta Umana. Bologna: Società Editrice il Mulino
- 1989. The Voice of Liberal Learning. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
[edit] Posthumous
- 1991. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Press
- 1993. Morality and Politics in Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press
- 1993. Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life. New Haven: Yale University Press
- 1996. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism. New Haven: Yale University Press
- 2000. Zuversicht und Skepsis: Zwei Prinzipien neuzeitlicher Politik. (trans. C. Goldmann). Berlin: Fest
- 2004. What Is History? And Other Essays. Thorverton: Imprint Academic
- 2006. Lectures in the History of Political Thought. Thorverton: Imprint Academic
- 2007. The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926-51. Thorverton: Imprint Academic
- 2008. The Vocabulary of a Modern European State: Essays and Reviews 1952-88. Thorverton: Imprint Academic
- 2010. Early Political Writings 1925-30. Thorverton: Imprint Academic
[edit] Secondary sources
Recent works on Oakeshott include:- Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (Penn State, 2001, ISBN 0-271-02156-X)
- Efraim Podoksik, In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott (Imprint Academic, 2003, ISBN 0-907845-66-5)
- Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction (Yale, 2004, ISBN 0-300-10404-9)
- Corey Abel & Timothy Fuller, eds. The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott (Imprint Academic, 2005, ISBN 1-84540-009-7)
- Elizabeth Campbell Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (University of Missouri Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8262-1640-3)
- Till Kinzel, Michael Oakeshott. Philosoph der Politik (Perspektiven, 9) (Antaios, 2007, ISBN 978-3-935063-09-8)
- Andrew Sullivan, Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott (Imprint Academic, 2007)
- Corey Abel, ed, The meanings of Michael Oakeshott's Conservatism (Imprint Academic, 2010, ISBN 978184502181)
- Efraim Podoksik, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming - July 2012)
- Paul Franco & Leslie Marsh, eds, A Companion to Michael Oakeshott (Penn State University Press, forthcoming - October 2012)
[edit] References
- ^ Fuller, T. (1991) 'The Work of Michael Oakeshott', Political Theory, Vol. 19 No. 3.
- ^ Coats, W.J. Jr. (1985) 'Michael Oakeshott as Liberal Theorist', Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 18, pp. 773-87.
- ^ See M. Oakeshott, Review of H. Levy and others, Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, in Cambridge Review, 56 (1934-5), pp. 108-9
- ^ [1]
- ^ Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, p. 6
- ^ Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, pp. 45-46
- ^ Efraim Podoksik, ‘Ethics and the Conduct of Life in the old Georg Simmel and the young Michael Oakeshott’, Simmel Studies 17(2), 2007, pp. 197-221
- ^ Bernard Crick, ‘The World of Michael Oakeshott: Or the Lonely Nihilist’, Encounter, 20 (June 1963), pp. 65-74
- ^ Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in Politics. London: Methuen, 1962: p. 127; [2]
- ^ M. Oakeshott, Review of E. H. Carr, The New Society, in Times Literary Supplement (12 October 1951)
- ^ Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen,1962), pp. 168-196
- ^ M. Oakeshott, ‘On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics’, Political Theory, 4 (1976), pp. 353-67.
[edit] External links
- Michael Oakeshott Association
- The Michael Oakeshott Bibliography
- Michael Oakeshott, "Rationalism in Politics". Cambridge Journal, Volume I, 1947 (broken link - go through your State or Provincial library's subscription service)
- Catalogue of the Oakeshott papers at the Archives Division of the London School of Economics.
|
Grice and Oakeshott -- Modes of Griceian Experience -- and the HARMONIOUS philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends: H. P. G. R. I. C. E. -- that Oakeshott lacked.
Speranza
Kenneth B. McIntyre wrote on Oakeshott.
Speranza wrote on Grice.
Kenneth B. McIntyre wrote on Oakeshott.
Speranza wrote on Grice.
An obscure college professor once wrote that the reception of English philosopher Michael Oakeshott by Americans resembled the sound of one hand clapping.
Although interest in Oakeshott’s work among U.S. academic historians and political theorists has increased exponentially since his death in 1990, his influence on public intellectuals and policy makers here has remained negligible—with the notable exception of Andrew Sullivan, who, like Oakeshott, happens to be British.
This lack of influence among the movers and shakers of American political life should not be surprising, given Oakeshott’s insistence on the irrelevance of political philosophy to practical politics.
As he once wrote, reputable political behaviour is not dependent upon sound or even coherent philosophy.
Such behaviour is instead related to the concrete practical knowledge of an actual political tradition and what such a tradition intimates.
Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.
Further, Oakeshott’s critique of ideological or rationalistic politics makes him an unlikely source of inspiration to a people whose entire political tradition has been informed by that style of political discourse.
The rationalistic or ideological style manifests itself in the abstract and often vacuous pronouncements about foundational principles that animate American political life.
As Oakeshott observed in a review of a book by Walter Lippman, when Mr. Lippmann says that the founders of our free institutions were adherents of the philosophy of natural law, and that the free political institutions of the Western world were conceived and established by men who held certain abstract beliefs, he speaks with the shortened perspective of an American way of thinking in which a manner of conducting affairs is inconceivable without an architect and without a premeditated dedication to a proposition.’
But the fact is that nobody ever founded these institutions.
They are the product of innumerable human choices, over long stretches of time, but not of any human design.
Such a long view is not likely to be welcome in a country that has from the beginning considered itself a novus ordo seclorum.
With these considerations in mind, it was with a great deal of excitement that weread Gene Callahan’s new book, Oakeshott on Rome and America, which is a well-written examination of Oakeshott’s own work, but also a novel application of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalist or ideological politics to American constitutional history.
Callahan argues quite convincingly that Oakeshott’s analysis of the errors of modern rationalism is both acute and accurate and that the American constitutional tradition has been informed by a highly rationalistic rhetorical style from the beginning.
So what is rationalism, in the Oakeshottian sense of the term?
First, RATIONALISM involves the claim that the only adequate type of knowledge is that which can be reduced to a series of rules, principles, or methods—and thus it is also a claim that “knowing how” to do something is nothing more than “knowing that” the rules are such and such.
Second, because of this denigration of practical knowledge, it is a claim that rational action can only take place following the creation of a theoretical model.
As Oakeshott once observed, modern rationalism is literally preposterous because theoretical reflection can only occur after a practice already has made itself distinct and more or less concrete.
Finally, as Callahan points out, since rationalism is a mistaken description of human knowledge and its relation to human activity, it is also an impossible way of acting, politically or in any other sphere. Human action, including political action, is inherently an engagement of practical reason working within a particular tradition or and attempting to follow through on some of the inchoate suggestions that the vagueness of the practice offers.
The opposite of rationalism for Oakeshott is not irrationalism but authentic practical reasonableness.
Thus, and contrary to many of his reading-impaired critics, his critique of rationalism is not a critique of reason but a defense of it against a false modern conception of it.
To use one of Oakeshott’s favorite examples, if one has no knowledge of cookery, a cookbook is useless. If, on the other hand, one is an experienced chef, a cookbook is superfluous.
The cookbook is relevant only in a situation where either the great majority of cooks are relatively inexperienced and there is a dearth of connoisseurs or in a situation in which the traditions of cookery are in a state of confusion and a reminder is needed of some of the tradition’s neglected resources.
Oakeshott used the term “ideology” to describe the attempted application of this rationalistic style to political activity. The rationalist’s or ideologist’s desire is to solve permanently the problems of political life and leave everything else to administration. Yet politics isn’t concerned with the search for truth. Instead, as Oakeshott noted, “it is concerned with the cultivation of what from time to time are accepted as the peaceable decencies of conduct among men who do not suffer from the Puritan-Jacobin illusion that in practical affairs there is an attainable condition of things called ‘truth’ or ‘perfection.’”
Thus the alternative to ideology is not nescience. As Callahan writes, it is instead a politics the remains grounded in the concrete circumstances and earlier experiences of the participants in a polity, and resists the temptation to reject the ambiguities and uncertainties of the practical world by embracing some theoretical abstraction of political life that boasts it can provide definitive resolutions, incontrovertibly justified through their deduction from first principles, to any and all political issues.
The relevance of ideology to political experience is the same as the relevance of the cookbook to cookery. If there is little or no experience of, for example, liberal democratic institutions in a particular political community, a written constitution supposedly instantiating such principles will be useless; while, where there is extensive experience of and commitment to liberal democracy, a written constitution will be redundant.
A written constitution might serve as a reminder of the “admitted goods” of a political community, but it won’t serve as a replacement for the actual conduct of politics within that community. If, over the course of time, the admitted goods change, then the constitution in the widest sense will change as well, whether there is any amendment to a written document or not. As Callahan notes, “a written constitution can offer, at best, a subsidiary support for the maintenance of some particular, desired manner of ordering a nation’s political life, the continuation of which depends primarily on the importance that citizenry assigns to preserving that form of government.”
We can see in Callahan’s account further reasons for the neglect of Oakeshott’s work by contemporary policy-mongers.
Obviously, if Oakeshott is wrong about rationalism, then they are sensible to ignore him.
But if he is right about the deficiencies of the ideological style, then they are unlikely even to understand him. The rationalist, when he fails, is like an American trying to speak to a foreigner who knows no English; the American thus continues by merely repeating himself in a much louder voice. If the rationalist’s project doesn’t work at first, his answer is to repeat it in a more expensive and expansive fashion.
Callahan offers an Oakeshottian explanation of the radical discontinuity between American constitutional fundamentalism and actual U.S. political practice. His book goes beyond an examination of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism and investigates the relevance of that critique for contemporary American politics. He asks, first, “has the American political tradition been characterized by rationalistic discourse?” and second, “has the American constitution, which is an example of the rationalist disposition at work, been especially effective at limiting government?”
In answering these questions, Callahan undermines one of the central myths of American political culture (as well as movement conservatism): that the Founders created a nearly perfect Constitution which, if followed to the letter, would provide remedies to all of our political problems. The mythical element here is of a prelapsarian purity in which a flawless document appears like Athena emerging from the forehead of Zeus. However, as the myth continues, a subsequent fall from grace and straying from the original constitution has led us into the sinful land of relativism and the “living Constitution.” We can only be rescued from the slough of despond by returning to the oracular pronouncements of the original document.
The question of the ideological or rationalistic character of the Founders is rather easily answered by briefly perusing the justifications advanced by those who rebelled against British rule and by their political descendants. Here is just a brief sample. Alexander Hamilton claimed that “the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” (Does Hamilton believe that, in the entire history of mankind, he and his fellows are the first rational human beings?) His colleague in the ratification debates, John Jay, argued that “the Americans are the first people whom Heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live. All other constitutions have derived their existence from violence or accidental circumstances.” (Was Jay suggesting that the American Revolution was nonviolent?) And even that changeling John C. Calhoun pronounced that “we have a government of a new order, perfectly distinct from all which has ever preceded it. A government founded on the rights of man, resting not on authority, not on prejudice, not on superstition, but reason… . All civilized governments must in the course of time conform to its principles.” (This was before he discovered his real allegiance was with South Carolina.)
Examples could fill multiple volumes, but these should suffice to suggest that, at the very least, the tradition of American political rhetoric has been rationalist or ideological in the Oakeshottian sense from the beginning of the Republic. Oakeshott himself certainly thought so, and noted, “it was in a flight of fancy that the Federalist writer urged his contemporaries to bend themselves to the completion of their political task so that succeeding generations might be undistracted in their devotion to the arts of civilized living.” In other words, the Founders meant what they did, rather than merely what they said.
In suggesting that, Oakeshott neglected the exemplary rationalist of the early American Republic, but fortunately Callahan does not. Thomas Jefferson is exhibit A in Callahan’s case that, despite the rhetoric, American political practice has not really been so rationalistic after all because, as previously noted, rationalist human action is an impossibility. Jefferson, who claimed that each generation should wipe the slate clean and start again, and who also claimed an absolute allegiance to the letter of the Constitution, was notable throughout most of his presidency for disregarding it. Jefferson quite obviously ignored his own strictures on constitutional literalism when making the Louisiana Purchase and when engaged in his vengeful pursuit of Aaron Burr. The former was the decision of a pragmatic and forward-looking politician, while the latter was a manifestation of Jefferson’s personal vindictiveness. Further, the bombastic character of Jefferson’s public pronouncements on the natural equality and freedom of men rested quite uneasily with his rather traditional treatment of those men and women whom he owned. Jefferson as practical politician and traditionalist planter trumped Jefferson the ideologist every time.
Callahan offers many more examples of the discontinuity between American ideology and American practice, but he focuses on the rationalistic character of constitutionalism in contrast to the pragmatic character of American political life. He offers a conspicuous example in the election of 1800, which he describes as “a notable instance of the inability of rationalist planners to devise a scheme that could foresee the multitudinous contingencies thrown up by actual political practice.” Despite the almost infinite wisdom of the writers of the Constitution, they somehow did not foresee the emergence of the single most important force in U.S. electoral history: political parties. In the presidential election of 1800 there were significant problems with the balloting which should have voided Georgia’s ballot and thrown the election to the House of Representatives. But Jefferson (an interested party, perhaps) was the vice president and thus in charge of the decision, and predictably accepted the Georgia ballot. There was also no distinction made on the original Electoral College ballot between president and vice president, and there was no contingency described in the Constitution if the House could not come to a final decision.
Decisions were ultimately made, of course, and Jefferson took office, but none of it had anything to do with the original intent of the Founders. As Callahan soberly concludes, “the failure to follow the letter of the Constitution … is something that began almost as soon as the U.S. Constitution was adopted, and is not (primarily) a symptom of bad faith but, rather, an inevitable consequence of the fact that no such rationalist design can ever dictate subsequent practice in the way that it is meant to do.”
So what are the implications of Callahan’s assertions?
We think there are two distinct sets of conclusions to take away from the book. First, the academic conclusion would be that a new approach to American political history and political thought is necessary. The first order of business will be to devise a more adequate periodization in which it is acknowledged that today’s U.S. constitutional arrangement has about as much to do with that of either 1785 or 1805 as the contemporary British constitutional arrangement has to do with its 18th-century “mixed constitution” ancestor. There have been at least four distinctive American republics, if not more, though, unlike the French, we don’t normally rip up our document and start over when we change constitutions.
Academic historians of American political thought should eschew hagiography and pay attention to what the participants actually say, why they say it, and how far what they say differs from the actual political and social reality of their time. Leave the hagiography to the journalists and focus on the historical meaning of various utterances and actions and the connection between such meanings and the self-conceptions (largely mythical) of Americans contemporary to the subjects of study.
Second, since the traditional discourse of American politics has been predominantly rationalist, there is little hope of an immediate cure. To paraphrase R.G. Collingwood, a person may think that he is a duck; that will not make him one, but it will affect his conduct, and for the worse. American politicians and those who serve them think that they’re ducks, and although they aren’t, they are likely to continue to quack ideologically. Thus it is doubtful that a non-ideological politics, which emphasizes both the limitations and the necessity of political activity—the need for real consensus, the need to address actual not “potential” problems, etc.—could succeed in the United States.
To look to Oakeshott’s work for a practical solution, however, is a mistake since he has no doctrine to sell in the market of ideologies, given that his alternative to rationalistic politics is a traditionalist pursuit of intimations. Indeed, as Oakeshott observed, “it is always depressing for a patient to be told that his disease is almost as old as himself and that consequently there is no quick cure for it, but… this is usually the case.”
Although interest in Oakeshott’s work among U.S. academic historians and political theorists has increased exponentially since his death in 1990, his influence on public intellectuals and policy makers here has remained negligible—with the notable exception of Andrew Sullivan, who, like Oakeshott, happens to be British.
This lack of influence among the movers and shakers of American political life should not be surprising, given Oakeshott’s insistence on the irrelevance of political philosophy to practical politics.
As he once wrote, reputable political behaviour is not dependent upon sound or even coherent philosophy.
Such behaviour is instead related to the concrete practical knowledge of an actual political tradition and what such a tradition intimates.
Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.
Further, Oakeshott’s critique of ideological or rationalistic politics makes him an unlikely source of inspiration to a people whose entire political tradition has been informed by that style of political discourse.
The rationalistic or ideological style manifests itself in the abstract and often vacuous pronouncements about foundational principles that animate American political life.
As Oakeshott observed in a review of a book by Walter Lippman, when Mr. Lippmann says that the founders of our free institutions were adherents of the philosophy of natural law, and that the free political institutions of the Western world were conceived and established by men who held certain abstract beliefs, he speaks with the shortened perspective of an American way of thinking in which a manner of conducting affairs is inconceivable without an architect and without a premeditated dedication to a proposition.’
But the fact is that nobody ever founded these institutions.
They are the product of innumerable human choices, over long stretches of time, but not of any human design.
Such a long view is not likely to be welcome in a country that has from the beginning considered itself a novus ordo seclorum.
With these considerations in mind, it was with a great deal of excitement that weread Gene Callahan’s new book, Oakeshott on Rome and America, which is a well-written examination of Oakeshott’s own work, but also a novel application of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalist or ideological politics to American constitutional history.
Callahan argues quite convincingly that Oakeshott’s analysis of the errors of modern rationalism is both acute and accurate and that the American constitutional tradition has been informed by a highly rationalistic rhetorical style from the beginning.
So what is rationalism, in the Oakeshottian sense of the term?
First, RATIONALISM involves the claim that the only adequate type of knowledge is that which can be reduced to a series of rules, principles, or methods—and thus it is also a claim that “knowing how” to do something is nothing more than “knowing that” the rules are such and such.
Second, because of this denigration of practical knowledge, it is a claim that rational action can only take place following the creation of a theoretical model.
As Oakeshott once observed, modern rationalism is literally preposterous because theoretical reflection can only occur after a practice already has made itself distinct and more or less concrete.
Finally, as Callahan points out, since rationalism is a mistaken description of human knowledge and its relation to human activity, it is also an impossible way of acting, politically or in any other sphere. Human action, including political action, is inherently an engagement of practical reason working within a particular tradition or and attempting to follow through on some of the inchoate suggestions that the vagueness of the practice offers.
The opposite of rationalism for Oakeshott is not irrationalism but authentic practical reasonableness.
Thus, and contrary to many of his reading-impaired critics, his critique of rationalism is not a critique of reason but a defense of it against a false modern conception of it.
To use one of Oakeshott’s favorite examples, if one has no knowledge of cookery, a cookbook is useless. If, on the other hand, one is an experienced chef, a cookbook is superfluous.
The cookbook is relevant only in a situation where either the great majority of cooks are relatively inexperienced and there is a dearth of connoisseurs or in a situation in which the traditions of cookery are in a state of confusion and a reminder is needed of some of the tradition’s neglected resources.
Oakeshott used the term “ideology” to describe the attempted application of this rationalistic style to political activity. The rationalist’s or ideologist’s desire is to solve permanently the problems of political life and leave everything else to administration. Yet politics isn’t concerned with the search for truth. Instead, as Oakeshott noted, “it is concerned with the cultivation of what from time to time are accepted as the peaceable decencies of conduct among men who do not suffer from the Puritan-Jacobin illusion that in practical affairs there is an attainable condition of things called ‘truth’ or ‘perfection.’”
Thus the alternative to ideology is not nescience. As Callahan writes, it is instead a politics the remains grounded in the concrete circumstances and earlier experiences of the participants in a polity, and resists the temptation to reject the ambiguities and uncertainties of the practical world by embracing some theoretical abstraction of political life that boasts it can provide definitive resolutions, incontrovertibly justified through their deduction from first principles, to any and all political issues.
The relevance of ideology to political experience is the same as the relevance of the cookbook to cookery. If there is little or no experience of, for example, liberal democratic institutions in a particular political community, a written constitution supposedly instantiating such principles will be useless; while, where there is extensive experience of and commitment to liberal democracy, a written constitution will be redundant.
A written constitution might serve as a reminder of the “admitted goods” of a political community, but it won’t serve as a replacement for the actual conduct of politics within that community. If, over the course of time, the admitted goods change, then the constitution in the widest sense will change as well, whether there is any amendment to a written document or not. As Callahan notes, “a written constitution can offer, at best, a subsidiary support for the maintenance of some particular, desired manner of ordering a nation’s political life, the continuation of which depends primarily on the importance that citizenry assigns to preserving that form of government.”
We can see in Callahan’s account further reasons for the neglect of Oakeshott’s work by contemporary policy-mongers.
Obviously, if Oakeshott is wrong about rationalism, then they are sensible to ignore him.
But if he is right about the deficiencies of the ideological style, then they are unlikely even to understand him. The rationalist, when he fails, is like an American trying to speak to a foreigner who knows no English; the American thus continues by merely repeating himself in a much louder voice. If the rationalist’s project doesn’t work at first, his answer is to repeat it in a more expensive and expansive fashion.
Callahan offers an Oakeshottian explanation of the radical discontinuity between American constitutional fundamentalism and actual U.S. political practice. His book goes beyond an examination of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism and investigates the relevance of that critique for contemporary American politics. He asks, first, “has the American political tradition been characterized by rationalistic discourse?” and second, “has the American constitution, which is an example of the rationalist disposition at work, been especially effective at limiting government?”
In answering these questions, Callahan undermines one of the central myths of American political culture (as well as movement conservatism): that the Founders created a nearly perfect Constitution which, if followed to the letter, would provide remedies to all of our political problems. The mythical element here is of a prelapsarian purity in which a flawless document appears like Athena emerging from the forehead of Zeus. However, as the myth continues, a subsequent fall from grace and straying from the original constitution has led us into the sinful land of relativism and the “living Constitution.” We can only be rescued from the slough of despond by returning to the oracular pronouncements of the original document.
The question of the ideological or rationalistic character of the Founders is rather easily answered by briefly perusing the justifications advanced by those who rebelled against British rule and by their political descendants. Here is just a brief sample. Alexander Hamilton claimed that “the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” (Does Hamilton believe that, in the entire history of mankind, he and his fellows are the first rational human beings?) His colleague in the ratification debates, John Jay, argued that “the Americans are the first people whom Heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live. All other constitutions have derived their existence from violence or accidental circumstances.” (Was Jay suggesting that the American Revolution was nonviolent?) And even that changeling John C. Calhoun pronounced that “we have a government of a new order, perfectly distinct from all which has ever preceded it. A government founded on the rights of man, resting not on authority, not on prejudice, not on superstition, but reason… . All civilized governments must in the course of time conform to its principles.” (This was before he discovered his real allegiance was with South Carolina.)
Examples could fill multiple volumes, but these should suffice to suggest that, at the very least, the tradition of American political rhetoric has been rationalist or ideological in the Oakeshottian sense from the beginning of the Republic. Oakeshott himself certainly thought so, and noted, “it was in a flight of fancy that the Federalist writer urged his contemporaries to bend themselves to the completion of their political task so that succeeding generations might be undistracted in their devotion to the arts of civilized living.” In other words, the Founders meant what they did, rather than merely what they said.
In suggesting that, Oakeshott neglected the exemplary rationalist of the early American Republic, but fortunately Callahan does not. Thomas Jefferson is exhibit A in Callahan’s case that, despite the rhetoric, American political practice has not really been so rationalistic after all because, as previously noted, rationalist human action is an impossibility. Jefferson, who claimed that each generation should wipe the slate clean and start again, and who also claimed an absolute allegiance to the letter of the Constitution, was notable throughout most of his presidency for disregarding it. Jefferson quite obviously ignored his own strictures on constitutional literalism when making the Louisiana Purchase and when engaged in his vengeful pursuit of Aaron Burr. The former was the decision of a pragmatic and forward-looking politician, while the latter was a manifestation of Jefferson’s personal vindictiveness. Further, the bombastic character of Jefferson’s public pronouncements on the natural equality and freedom of men rested quite uneasily with his rather traditional treatment of those men and women whom he owned. Jefferson as practical politician and traditionalist planter trumped Jefferson the ideologist every time.
Callahan offers many more examples of the discontinuity between American ideology and American practice, but he focuses on the rationalistic character of constitutionalism in contrast to the pragmatic character of American political life. He offers a conspicuous example in the election of 1800, which he describes as “a notable instance of the inability of rationalist planners to devise a scheme that could foresee the multitudinous contingencies thrown up by actual political practice.” Despite the almost infinite wisdom of the writers of the Constitution, they somehow did not foresee the emergence of the single most important force in U.S. electoral history: political parties. In the presidential election of 1800 there were significant problems with the balloting which should have voided Georgia’s ballot and thrown the election to the House of Representatives. But Jefferson (an interested party, perhaps) was the vice president and thus in charge of the decision, and predictably accepted the Georgia ballot. There was also no distinction made on the original Electoral College ballot between president and vice president, and there was no contingency described in the Constitution if the House could not come to a final decision.
Decisions were ultimately made, of course, and Jefferson took office, but none of it had anything to do with the original intent of the Founders. As Callahan soberly concludes, “the failure to follow the letter of the Constitution … is something that began almost as soon as the U.S. Constitution was adopted, and is not (primarily) a symptom of bad faith but, rather, an inevitable consequence of the fact that no such rationalist design can ever dictate subsequent practice in the way that it is meant to do.”
So what are the implications of Callahan’s assertions?
We think there are two distinct sets of conclusions to take away from the book. First, the academic conclusion would be that a new approach to American political history and political thought is necessary. The first order of business will be to devise a more adequate periodization in which it is acknowledged that today’s U.S. constitutional arrangement has about as much to do with that of either 1785 or 1805 as the contemporary British constitutional arrangement has to do with its 18th-century “mixed constitution” ancestor. There have been at least four distinctive American republics, if not more, though, unlike the French, we don’t normally rip up our document and start over when we change constitutions.
Academic historians of American political thought should eschew hagiography and pay attention to what the participants actually say, why they say it, and how far what they say differs from the actual political and social reality of their time. Leave the hagiography to the journalists and focus on the historical meaning of various utterances and actions and the connection between such meanings and the self-conceptions (largely mythical) of Americans contemporary to the subjects of study.
Second, since the traditional discourse of American politics has been predominantly rationalist, there is little hope of an immediate cure. To paraphrase R.G. Collingwood, a person may think that he is a duck; that will not make him one, but it will affect his conduct, and for the worse. American politicians and those who serve them think that they’re ducks, and although they aren’t, they are likely to continue to quack ideologically. Thus it is doubtful that a non-ideological politics, which emphasizes both the limitations and the necessity of political activity—the need for real consensus, the need to address actual not “potential” problems, etc.—could succeed in the United States.
To look to Oakeshott’s work for a practical solution, however, is a mistake since he has no doctrine to sell in the market of ideologies, given that his alternative to rationalistic politics is a traditionalist pursuit of intimations. Indeed, as Oakeshott observed, “it is always depressing for a patient to be told that his disease is almost as old as himself and that consequently there is no quick cure for it, but… this is usually the case.”
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Grice's Armchair
Speranza
Horwich:
"the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth"
Horwich:
"the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth"
Was Grice Right?
Speranza
Speranza
Speranza
Was Wittgenstein Right?
asks PAUL HORWICH. I thought of titling this, 'Was Horwich right?", but preferred it to make it more relevant to our Club. Horwich writes;
"The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them."
The idea of problem is problematic.
"The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them — a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others."
"Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not many professional philosophers."
"Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value."
"But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy."
Contrast with the ever popularity of Grice within departments of philosophy.
"Namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être."
"Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking."
"This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on — and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?"
"If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress — by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues. Therefore traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to a painstaking identification of its tempting but misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate. But in that case, he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble)” — and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”"
"Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy — perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject — it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless? Thus, even Bertrand Russell, his early teacher and enthusiastic supporter, was eventually led to complain peevishly that Wittgenstein seems to have “grown tired of serious thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.”"
"But what is that notorious doctrine, and can it be defended? We might boil it down to four related claims."
"The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic."
"Its primary goals, which are to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover profound explanations, and to correct naïve opinions, are taken from the sciences. And this is undoubtedly the case."
"The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth — is in tension with those goals. "
"That’s because our concepts exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes. As a consequence the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate, and differ dramatically from one concept to another. Moreover, it is not possible (as it is within empirical domains) to accommodate superficial complexity by means of simple principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic) level.
"The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy — an immediate consequence of the first two — is that traditional philosophy is necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed."
"Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must avoid theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead."
"Consider, for instance, the paradigmatically philosophical question: “What is truth?”. This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand, it demands an answer of the form, “Truth is such–and-such,” but on the other hand, despite hundreds of years of looking, no acceptable answer of that kind has ever been found. We’ve tried truth as “correspondence with the facts,” as “provability,” as “practical utility,” and as “stable consensus”; but all turned out to be defective in one way or another — either circular or subject to counterexamples. Reactions to this impasse have included a variety of theoretical proposals. Some philosophers have been led to deny that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some have maintained (insisting on one of the above definitions) that although truth exists, it lacks certain features that are ordinarily attributed to it — for example, that the truth may sometimes be impossible to discover. Some have inferred that truth is intrinsically paradoxical and essentially incomprehensible. And others persist in the attempt to devise a definition that will fit all the intuitive data."
"But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these strategies rides roughshod over our fundamental convictions about truth, and the fourth is highly unlikely to succeed. Instead we should begin, he thinks, by recognizing (as mentioned above) that our various concepts play very different roles in our cognitive economy and (correspondingly) are governed by defining principles of very different kinds. Therefore, it was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property as well.
Wittgenstein’s conceptual pluralism positions us to recognize that notion’s idiosyncratic function, and to infer that truth itself will not be reducible to anything more basic. More specifically, we can see that the concept’s function in our cognitive economy is merely to serve as a device of generalization. It enables us to say such things as “Einstein’s last words were true,” and not be stuck with “If Einstein’s last words were that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and if his last words were that nuclear weapons should be banned, then nuclear weapons should be banned; … and so on,” which has the disadvantage of being infinitely long! Similarly we can use it to say: “We should want our beliefs to be true” (instead of struggling with “We should want that if we believe that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and that if we believe … etc.”). We can see, also, that this sort of utility depends upon nothing more than the fact that the attribution of truth to a statement is obviously equivalent to the statement itself — for example, “It’s true that E=mc2” is equivalent to “E=mc2”. Thus possession of the concept of truth appears to consist in an appreciation of that triviality, rather than a mastery of any explicit definition. The traditional search for such an account (or for some other form of reductive analysis) was a wild-goose chase, a pseudo-problem. Truth emerges as exceptionally unprofound and as exceptionally unmysterious."
"This example illustrates the key components of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and suggests how to flesh them out a little further. Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts —true, good, object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not only irrational, but unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality is scientism."
As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:
The idea of problem is problematic.
"The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them — a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others."
"Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not many professional philosophers."
"Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value."
"But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy."
Contrast with the ever popularity of Grice within departments of philosophy.
"Namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être."
"Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking."
"This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on — and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?"
"If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress — by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues. Therefore traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to a painstaking identification of its tempting but misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate. But in that case, he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble)” — and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”"
"Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy — perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject — it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless? Thus, even Bertrand Russell, his early teacher and enthusiastic supporter, was eventually led to complain peevishly that Wittgenstein seems to have “grown tired of serious thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.”"
"But what is that notorious doctrine, and can it be defended? We might boil it down to four related claims."
"The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic."
"Its primary goals, which are to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover profound explanations, and to correct naïve opinions, are taken from the sciences. And this is undoubtedly the case."
"The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth — is in tension with those goals. "
"That’s because our concepts exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes. As a consequence the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate, and differ dramatically from one concept to another. Moreover, it is not possible (as it is within empirical domains) to accommodate superficial complexity by means of simple principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic) level.
"The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy — an immediate consequence of the first two — is that traditional philosophy is necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed."
"Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must avoid theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead."
"Consider, for instance, the paradigmatically philosophical question: “What is truth?”. This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand, it demands an answer of the form, “Truth is such–and-such,” but on the other hand, despite hundreds of years of looking, no acceptable answer of that kind has ever been found. We’ve tried truth as “correspondence with the facts,” as “provability,” as “practical utility,” and as “stable consensus”; but all turned out to be defective in one way or another — either circular or subject to counterexamples. Reactions to this impasse have included a variety of theoretical proposals. Some philosophers have been led to deny that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some have maintained (insisting on one of the above definitions) that although truth exists, it lacks certain features that are ordinarily attributed to it — for example, that the truth may sometimes be impossible to discover. Some have inferred that truth is intrinsically paradoxical and essentially incomprehensible. And others persist in the attempt to devise a definition that will fit all the intuitive data."
"But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these strategies rides roughshod over our fundamental convictions about truth, and the fourth is highly unlikely to succeed. Instead we should begin, he thinks, by recognizing (as mentioned above) that our various concepts play very different roles in our cognitive economy and (correspondingly) are governed by defining principles of very different kinds. Therefore, it was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property as well.
Wittgenstein’s conceptual pluralism positions us to recognize that notion’s idiosyncratic function, and to infer that truth itself will not be reducible to anything more basic. More specifically, we can see that the concept’s function in our cognitive economy is merely to serve as a device of generalization. It enables us to say such things as “Einstein’s last words were true,” and not be stuck with “If Einstein’s last words were that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and if his last words were that nuclear weapons should be banned, then nuclear weapons should be banned; … and so on,” which has the disadvantage of being infinitely long! Similarly we can use it to say: “We should want our beliefs to be true” (instead of struggling with “We should want that if we believe that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and that if we believe … etc.”). We can see, also, that this sort of utility depends upon nothing more than the fact that the attribution of truth to a statement is obviously equivalent to the statement itself — for example, “It’s true that E=mc2” is equivalent to “E=mc2”. Thus possession of the concept of truth appears to consist in an appreciation of that triviality, rather than a mastery of any explicit definition. The traditional search for such an account (or for some other form of reductive analysis) was a wild-goose chase, a pseudo-problem. Truth emerges as exceptionally unprofound and as exceptionally unmysterious."
"This example illustrates the key components of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and suggests how to flesh them out a little further. Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts —true, good, object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not only irrational, but unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality is scientism."
As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:
Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive."These radical ideas are not obviously correct, and may on close scrutiny turn out to be wrong. But they deserve to receive that scrutiny — to be taken much more seriously than they are. Yes, most of us have been interested in philosophy only because of its promise to deliver precisely the sort of theoretical insights that Wittgenstein argues are illusory. But such hopes are no defense against his critique. Besides, if he turns out to be right, satisfaction enough may surely be found in what we still can get — clarity, demystification and truth."
Friday, February 22, 2013
Herbert Paul Grice and Ronald Myles Dworkin
Speranza
Ronald Myles Dworkin, FBA (December 11, 1931 - February 14, 2013)[1] was an American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law.
He was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, and had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford.
An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact."
According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century.
His theory of law as integrity, in which judges interpret the law in terms of consistent and communal moral principles, especially justice and fairness, is among the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law.
Dworkin advocated a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution, and an interpretivist approach to law and morality.
He was a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues, particularly those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States, often in the pages of The New York Review of Books.
He studied at Harvard University and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a student of Sir Rupert Cross.
After completing his final year's exams at Oxford, the examiners were so impressed with his script that the Chair of Jurisprudence (then H. L. A. Hart) was summoned to read it.
Dworkin then attended Harvard Law School and subsequently clerked for Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Judge Hand would later call Dworkin the finest clerk he ever employed, and Dworkin would recall Judge Hand as an enormously influential mentor.
After working at Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent law firm in New York City, Dworkin became a Professor of Law at Yale University, where he became the holder of the Wesley N. Hohfeld Chair of Jurisprudence.
---- THE OXFORD YEARS
In 1969, Dworkin was appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, a position in which he succeeded H. L. A. Hart, and elected Fellow of University College, Oxford.
After retiring from Oxford, Dworkin became the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, where he subsequently became the Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence.
He was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and professor of Philosophy at New York University (NYU),[6] where he taught since the late 1970s.
He co-taught a colloquium in legal, political, and social philosophy with Thomas Nagel.
Dworkin had regularly contributed, for several decades, to The New York Review of Books.
He delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the Storrs Lectures at Yale, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, and the Scribner Lectures at Princeton.
In June 2011, he joined the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.
Dworkin died of leukemia in London on February 14, 2013 at age 81.[8]
Dworkin is most famous for his critique of Hart's legal positivism.
He sets forth the fullest statement of his critique in his book Law's Empire.
Dworkin's theory is 'interpretive'.
The law is whatever follows from a constructive interpretation of the institutional history of the legal system.
Dworkin argues that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one's principles are skewed enough. To discover and apply these principles, courts interpret the legal data (legislation, cases etc.) with a view to articulating an interpretation that best explains and justifies past legal practice. All interpretation must follow, Dworkin argues, from the notion of "law as integrity" to make sense.
Out of the idea that law is 'interpretive' in this way, Dworkin argues that in every situation where people's legal rights are controversial, the best interpretation involves the right answer thesis. Dworkin opposes the notion that judges have a discretion in such difficult cases.
Dworkin's model of legal principles is also connected with Hart's notion of the Rule of Recognition.
Dworkin rejects Hart's conception of a master rule in every legal system that identifies valid laws, on the basis that this would entail that the process of identifying law must be uncontroversial, whereas (Dworkin argues) people have legal rights even in cases where the correct legal outcome is open to reasonable dispute.
While Dworkin moves away from positivism's separation of law and morality, his concept suggests that the two are related in an epistemic rather than ontological sense as posited by traditional natural law.
This metaphor of Judge Hercules, an ideal judge, immensely wise and with full knowledge of legal sources. Hercules (the name comes from a classical mythological hero) would also have plenty of time to decide. Acting on the premise that the law is a seamless web, Hercules is required to construct the theory that best fits and justifies the law as a whole (law as integrity) in order to decide any particular case. Hercules, Dworkin argues, would always come to the one right answer.
Dworkin does not deny that competent lawyers often disagree on what is the solution to a given case. On the contrary, he claims that they are disagreeing about the right answer to the case, the answer Hercules would give.
Dworkin's critics argue not only that law proper (that is, the legal sources in a positivist sense) is full of gaps and inconsistencies, but also that other legal standards (including principles) may be insufficient to solve a hard case. Some of them are incommensurable. In any of these situations, even Hercules would be in a dilemma and none of the possible answers would be the right one.
Dworkin's metaphor of judge Hercules bears some resemblance to Rawls' veil of ignorance and Habermas' ideal speech situation, in that they all suggest idealized methods of arriving at somehow valid normative propositions. The key difference with respect to the former is that Rawls' veil of ignorance translates almost seamlessly from the purely ideal to the practical. In relation to politics in a democratic society, for example, it is a way of saying that those in power should treat the political opposition consistently with how they would like to be treated when in opposition, because their present position offers no guarantee as to what their position will be in the political landscape of the future (i.e. they will inevitably form the opposition at some point). Dworkin's Judge Hercules, on the other hand, is a purely idealized construct, that is if such a figure existed, he would arrive at a right answer in every moral dilemma. For a critique along these lines see Lorenzo Zucca's Constitutional Dilemmas.[10]
Dworkin's right answer thesis turns on the success of his attack on the sceptical argument that right answers in legal-moral dilemmas cannot be determined. Dworkin's anti-sceptical argument is essentially that the properties of the sceptic's claim are analogous to those of substantive moral claims, that is, in asserting that the truth or falsity of "legal-moral" dilemmas cannot be determined, the sceptic makes not a metaphysical claim about the way things are, but a moral claim to the effect that it is, in the face of epistemic uncertainty, unjust to determine legal-moral issues to the detriment of any given individual.
In the essay "Do Values Conflict? A Hedgehog's Approach" (Arizona Law Review, Vol 43:2), Dworkin contends that the values of liberty and equality do not necessarily conflict. He criticizes Isaiah Berlin's conception of liberty as "flat" and proposes a new, "dynamic" conception of liberty, suggesting that one cannot say that one's liberty is infringed when one is prevented from committing murder. Thus, liberty cannot be said to have been infringed when no wrong has been done. Put in this way, liberty is only liberty to do whatever we wish so long as we do not infringe upon the rights of others.
The negative conception of liberty (represented by Isaiah Berlin) is however not satisfactory to Dworkin since it merely concerns itself with political processes (e.g. laws forbidding murder, limiting car usage etc.). In Dworkin's view liberty must be understood as entailing certain considerations of equality, since it is not possible to exercise one's freedom without a considerable amount of resources (e.g. participating in the democratic process by voting is not possible without having the food, health, time or knowledge to do so). Liberty is therefore not only a question of process, but must also contain elements of substance.
One further criticism that can be leveled from the Berlinian enterprise is that the so-called "flat" conception of liberty does not entail the liberty to murder - rather, murder (when it does occur) is only a consequence of natural liberty. When one is prevented from murdering, one's liberty is not infringed merely because one is prevented from murdering, but because (more fundamentally) one is prevented from acting at all, by being restrained, handcuffed, put into prison, etc. The fact that one is thereby prevented from murdering is, again, merely a consequence of one's liberty being infringed. Thus Dworkin's argument can be recast as a deep-level consequentialist one.
The New York University Annual Survey of American Law honored Dworkin with its 2006 dedication.
In August 2011, the University of Buenos Aires awarded Dworkin an honorary doctorate.
The resolution noted that he "has tirelessly defended the rule of law, democracy and human rights."
0n November 14, 2012, he received the Balzan Prize for Jurisprudence in Quirinale Palace, Rome, from the President of Italian Republic. The Balzan Prize was awarded "for his fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence, characterized by outstanding originality and clarity of thought in a continuing and fruitful interaction with ethical and political theories and with legal practices".
 Ronald Myles Dworkin at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2008. | |
| Born | Ronald Myles Dworkin December 11, 1931 Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. |
|---|---|
| Died | February 14, 2013 (aged 81)[1] London, England |
| Era | 20th/21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Jurisprudence, political philosophy |
| Notable ideas | law as integrity, fit and justification in law, right answer thesis, legal interpretivism, rights as trumps |
He was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, and had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford.
An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact."
According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century.
His theory of law as integrity, in which judges interpret the law in terms of consistent and communal moral principles, especially justice and fairness, is among the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law.
Dworkin advocated a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution, and an interpretivist approach to law and morality.
He was a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues, particularly those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States, often in the pages of The New York Review of Books.
Dworkin was born in 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States, the son of Madeline (Talamo) and David Dworkin.[5]
He studied at Harvard University and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a student of Sir Rupert Cross.
After completing his final year's exams at Oxford, the examiners were so impressed with his script that the Chair of Jurisprudence (then H. L. A. Hart) was summoned to read it.
Dworkin then attended Harvard Law School and subsequently clerked for Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Judge Hand would later call Dworkin the finest clerk he ever employed, and Dworkin would recall Judge Hand as an enormously influential mentor.
After working at Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent law firm in New York City, Dworkin became a Professor of Law at Yale University, where he became the holder of the Wesley N. Hohfeld Chair of Jurisprudence.
---- THE OXFORD YEARS
In 1969, Dworkin was appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, a position in which he succeeded H. L. A. Hart, and elected Fellow of University College, Oxford.
After retiring from Oxford, Dworkin became the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, where he subsequently became the Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence.
He was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and professor of Philosophy at New York University (NYU),[6] where he taught since the late 1970s.
He co-taught a colloquium in legal, political, and social philosophy with Thomas Nagel.
Dworkin had regularly contributed, for several decades, to The New York Review of Books.
He delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the Storrs Lectures at Yale, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, and the Scribner Lectures at Princeton.
In June 2011, he joined the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.
Dworkin died of leukemia in London on February 14, 2013 at age 81.[8]
[edit] Law as rule and principle
Positivism's most significant critic rejects the theory on every conceivable level. He denies that there can be any general theory of the existence and content of law; he denies that local theories of particular legal systems can identify law without recourse to its merits, and he rejects the whole institutional focus of positivism. A theory of law is for Dworkin a theory of how cases ought to be decided and it begins, not with an account of political organization, but with an abstract ideal regulating the conditions under which governments may use coercive force over their subjects.[9]
He sets forth the fullest statement of his critique in his book Law's Empire.
Dworkin's theory is 'interpretive'.
The law is whatever follows from a constructive interpretation of the institutional history of the legal system.
Dworkin argues that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one's principles are skewed enough. To discover and apply these principles, courts interpret the legal data (legislation, cases etc.) with a view to articulating an interpretation that best explains and justifies past legal practice. All interpretation must follow, Dworkin argues, from the notion of "law as integrity" to make sense.
Out of the idea that law is 'interpretive' in this way, Dworkin argues that in every situation where people's legal rights are controversial, the best interpretation involves the right answer thesis. Dworkin opposes the notion that judges have a discretion in such difficult cases.
Dworkin's model of legal principles is also connected with Hart's notion of the Rule of Recognition.
Dworkin rejects Hart's conception of a master rule in every legal system that identifies valid laws, on the basis that this would entail that the process of identifying law must be uncontroversial, whereas (Dworkin argues) people have legal rights even in cases where the correct legal outcome is open to reasonable dispute.
While Dworkin moves away from positivism's separation of law and morality, his concept suggests that the two are related in an epistemic rather than ontological sense as posited by traditional natural law.
Suppose the legislature has passed a statute stipulating that "sacrilegious contracts shall henceforth be invalid." The community is divided as to whether a contract signed on Sunday is, for that reason alone, sacrilegious. It is known that very few of the legislators had that question in mind when they voted, and that they are now equally divided on the question of whether it should be so interpreted. Tom and Tim have signed a contract on Sunday, and Tom now sues Tim to enforce the terms of the contract, whose validity Tim contests. Shall we say that the judge must look for the right answer to the question of whether Tom's contract is valid, even though the community is deeply divided about what the right answer is? Or is it more realistic to say that there simply is no right answer to the question? (Dworkin, 1985, p. 119)One of Dworkin's most interesting and controversial theses states that the law as properly interpreted will give an answer. This is not to say that everyone will have the same answer (a consensus of what is "right"), or if it did, the answer would not be justified exactly in the same way for every person; rather it means that there will be a necessary answer for each individual if he applies himself correctly to the legal question. For the correct method is that encapsulated by the metaphor of Hercules J.
This metaphor of Judge Hercules, an ideal judge, immensely wise and with full knowledge of legal sources. Hercules (the name comes from a classical mythological hero) would also have plenty of time to decide. Acting on the premise that the law is a seamless web, Hercules is required to construct the theory that best fits and justifies the law as a whole (law as integrity) in order to decide any particular case. Hercules, Dworkin argues, would always come to the one right answer.
Dworkin does not deny that competent lawyers often disagree on what is the solution to a given case. On the contrary, he claims that they are disagreeing about the right answer to the case, the answer Hercules would give.
Dworkin's critics argue not only that law proper (that is, the legal sources in a positivist sense) is full of gaps and inconsistencies, but also that other legal standards (including principles) may be insufficient to solve a hard case. Some of them are incommensurable. In any of these situations, even Hercules would be in a dilemma and none of the possible answers would be the right one.
Dworkin defends his position saying that non-Herculean judges, much like everyday people, find their way and choose between options and values that were supposed to be incommensurable. Dworkin also argues that it is always possible to find out other rules or principles to solve the conflict between those we had in mind. The same counter-argument, however, regarding principles and moral standards that are incommensurable, would seem to apply to any further principles or rules we may discover in the process. In other words, the claim that there may always be more principles or rules to be taken into account proves nothing about the nature of those further principles, or about Dworkin's claim that the exercise, in the hands of the omnipotent Judge Hercules, will eventually come to a stop (when we have reached the right answer). In fact, the opposite conclusion could just as well be drawn from Dworkin's claim - that the exercise in question, under the guidance of such an omnipotent figure, would extend into infinity. Thus while a "right" answer may be available at any given stage, no final right answer would ever be arrived at by Hercules. Or, there is nothing to suggest one way or the other.
Dworkin's metaphor of judge Hercules bears some resemblance to Rawls' veil of ignorance and Habermas' ideal speech situation, in that they all suggest idealized methods of arriving at somehow valid normative propositions. The key difference with respect to the former is that Rawls' veil of ignorance translates almost seamlessly from the purely ideal to the practical. In relation to politics in a democratic society, for example, it is a way of saying that those in power should treat the political opposition consistently with how they would like to be treated when in opposition, because their present position offers no guarantee as to what their position will be in the political landscape of the future (i.e. they will inevitably form the opposition at some point). Dworkin's Judge Hercules, on the other hand, is a purely idealized construct, that is if such a figure existed, he would arrive at a right answer in every moral dilemma. For a critique along these lines see Lorenzo Zucca's Constitutional Dilemmas.[10]
Dworkin's right answer thesis turns on the success of his attack on the sceptical argument that right answers in legal-moral dilemmas cannot be determined. Dworkin's anti-sceptical argument is essentially that the properties of the sceptic's claim are analogous to those of substantive moral claims, that is, in asserting that the truth or falsity of "legal-moral" dilemmas cannot be determined, the sceptic makes not a metaphysical claim about the way things are, but a moral claim to the effect that it is, in the face of epistemic uncertainty, unjust to determine legal-moral issues to the detriment of any given individual.
Dworkin has also made important contributions to what is sometimes called the equality of what debate. In a famous pair of articles and his book Sovereign Virtue he advocates a theory he calls 'equality of resources'. This theory combines two key ideas. Broadly speaking, the first is that human beings are responsible for the life choices they make. The second is that natural endowments of intelligence and talent are morally arbitrary and ought not to affect the distribution of resources in society. Like the rest of Dworkin's work, his theory of equality is underpinned by the core principle that every person is entitled to equal concern and respect in the design of the structure of society. Dworkin's theory of equality is one variety of so-called luck egalitarianism.
The negative conception of liberty (represented by Isaiah Berlin) is however not satisfactory to Dworkin since it merely concerns itself with political processes (e.g. laws forbidding murder, limiting car usage etc.). In Dworkin's view liberty must be understood as entailing certain considerations of equality, since it is not possible to exercise one's freedom without a considerable amount of resources (e.g. participating in the democratic process by voting is not possible without having the food, health, time or knowledge to do so). Liberty is therefore not only a question of process, but must also contain elements of substance.
One further criticism that can be leveled from the Berlinian enterprise is that the so-called "flat" conception of liberty does not entail the liberty to murder - rather, murder (when it does occur) is only a consequence of natural liberty. When one is prevented from murdering, one's liberty is not infringed merely because one is prevented from murdering, but because (more fundamentally) one is prevented from acting at all, by being restrained, handcuffed, put into prison, etc. The fact that one is thereby prevented from murdering is, again, merely a consequence of one's liberty being infringed. Thus Dworkin's argument can be recast as a deep-level consequentialist one.
[
Dworkin is noted for his avid participation in public debates over law and issues of fundamental rights. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.In September 2007, Dworkin was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize. The award citation of the Holberg Prize Academic Committee recognized that Dworkin has "elaborated a liberal egalitarian theory" and stressed Dworkin's effort to develop "an original and highly influential legal theory grounding law in morality, characterized by a unique ability to tie together abstract philosophical ideas and arguments with concrete everyday concerns in law, morals, and politics".[11]
The New York University Annual Survey of American Law honored Dworkin with its 2006 dedication.
In August 2011, the University of Buenos Aires awarded Dworkin an honorary doctorate.
The resolution noted that he "has tirelessly defended the rule of law, democracy and human rights."
0n November 14, 2012, he received the Balzan Prize for Jurisprudence in Quirinale Palace, Rome, from the President of Italian Republic. The Balzan Prize was awarded "for his fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence, characterized by outstanding originality and clarity of thought in a continuing and fruitful interaction with ethical and political theories and with legal practices".
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Books by Ronald Dworkin
Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.- The Philosophy of Law (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. by G. J. Warnock). Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
- A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
- Law's Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
- Philosophical Issues in Senile Dementia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987.
- A Bill of Rights for Britain. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
- Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
- Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
- Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
- A Badly Flawed Election: Debating Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court, and American Democracy. Ed. New York: New Press, 2002.
- From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of Janos Kis. Ed. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004.
- Justice in Robes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
- Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
- The Supreme Court Phalanx: The Court's New Right-Wing Bloc. New York: New York Review Books, 2008.
- Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
- Religion Without God. Forthcoming
Secondary literature on Dworkin
- Allard, Julie. Dworkin et Kant: Réflexions sur le judgement. Bruxelles: Editions de l'ULB, 2001.
- Brown, Alexander. Ronald Dworkin's Theory of Equality: Domestic and Global Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
- Burke, John J.A. The Political Foundation of Law: The Need for Theory with Practical Value. San Francisco: Austin & Winfield, 1992.
- Burley, Justine, ed. Dworkin and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
- Cohen, Marshall, ed. Ronald Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence. London: Duckworth, 1984.
- Gaffney, Paul. Ronald Dworkin on Law as Integrity: Rights as Principles of Adjudication. Lewiston, New York: Mellen University Press, 1996.
- Guest, Stephen. Ronald Dworkin (Jurists: Profiles in Legal Theory). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.
- Hershovitz, Scott, ed. Exploring Law's Empire: The Jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Hunt, Alan, ed. Reading Dworkin Critically. New York: Berg, 1992.
- Ripstein, Arthur, ed. Ronald Dworkin (Contemporary Philosophers in Focus). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Wesche, Stefen and Zanetti, Véronique, eds. Dworkin: Un débat. Paris: Ousia, 2000.
[edit] See also
- American philosophy
- Contributions to liberal theory
- Egalitarianism
- Legal indeterminacy
- Judicial activism
- Legal formalism
- Legal positivism
- List of American philosophers
- Equality
[edit] References
- ^ a b The Associated Press. "LONDON: US legal scholar Ronald Dworkin dies in UK aged 81 - World Wires". MiamiHerald.com. http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/14/3233930/us-legal-scholar-ronald-dworkin.html. Retrieved 2013-02-14.
- ^ "Ronald Dworkin". New York Review of Books. Nybooks.com. Accessed 29 September 2009.
- ^ Shapiro, Fred R. (2000). "The Most-Cited Legal Scholars". Journal of Legal Studies 29 (1): 409–426. doi:10.1086/468080.
- ^ Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution. Ronald Dworkin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1996. Via Google Books.
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/14/ronald-dworkin
- ^ "Ronald M. Dworkin - NYU School of Law - Overview". Its.law.nyu.edu. http://its.law.nyu.edu/faculty/profiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=cv.main&personID=19891. Retrieved 2013-02-14.
- ^ "The professoriate", New College of the Humanities, accessed June 8, 2011.
- ^ "Ronald Dworkin, Legal Scholar, Dies at 81". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/02/14/world/europe/ap-eu-britain-obit-dworkin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0. Retrieved 14 February 2013.
- ^ "Legal Positivism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. 2003-01-03. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-positivism/. Retrieved 2013-02-14.
- ^ "Oxford University Press: Constitutional Dilemmas: Lorenzo Zucca". Oup.com. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Law/ConstitutionalLaw/?view=usa&ci=9780199204977. Retrieved 2013-02-14.
- ^ Holberg Prize Academic Committee; Holberg International Memorial Prize 2007: Ronald Dworkin
[edit] External links
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ronald Dworkin |
 | Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ronald Dworkin |
- NYU Law Faculty profile
- UCL Faculty of Laws profile
- Ronald Dworkin obituary by The Guardian
- New York Review of Books archive
- "Ronald Dworkin - Mr Justice", The Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 2007
- "Interpretation and Coherence in Legal Reasoning" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- "Interpretivist Theories of Law" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Charles Blattberg's critique of Dworkin and John Rawls for failing to take politics seriously enough.
- Ronald Dworkin at the Internet Movie Database
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