Aug 2017 Flashcards
Wollaston, William
1660–1724
English moral philosopher, whose The Religion of Nature Delimited (1722) was immensely popular in the first half of the eighteenth century. It propounded the theory that all vice is a species of lying, or in other words that the fault of a wrong action lies in its tendency to give rise to false belief. The theory had the misfortune to be discussed by Hume (Treatise, Bk III, 1, 1) who first admits that ‘a person, who thro’ a window sees any lewd behaviour of mine with my neighbour’s wife, may be so simple as to imagine she is certainly my own’ but goes on to point out that this is hardly my fault, and furthermore ‘if I had used the precaution of shutting the windows, while I indulg’d myself in those liberties with my neighbour’s wife, I should have been guilty of no immorality; and that because my action, being perfectly conceal’d, would have had no tendency to produce any false conclusion’.
Reichenbach, Hans
Philosopher of science and probability theorist. Born in Hamburg, Reichenbach worked in Berlin until 1933, when he left Germany first for Istanbul, and thence to the United States. Although not a member of the Vienna circle he sympathized with the empiricist ideals of logical positivism, but substituting relationships of probability between different strata of scientific theories, in place of the positivist ideal of reduction. Influential works included Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1928, trs. as The Philosophy of Space and Time, 1958), and Experience and Prediction (1938).
minimalism
A minimal theory of a term or concept rejects the idea that it is a substantial focus for theory. A minimal theory of truth, for example, holds that there is no general problem about what makes sentences or propositions true; a minimal theory of value holds that there is nothing useful to say in general about values and valuing. Minimalist approaches arise when the prospects for a substantial meta-theory about some term seem dim. They are thus consonant with suspicion of ‘first philosophy’, or the possibility of a standpoint over and above involvement in some aspect of our activities, from which those activities can be surveyed and described. Minimalism is frequently associated with the anti-theoretical aspects of the later work of Wittgenstein, and has also been charged with being a fig-leaf for philosophical bankruptcy or anorexia. See also disquotational theory of truth, irrealism, quietism, redundancy theory of truth.
God, attributes of
see divine attributes
cooperative principle
A convention suggested by Grice directing participants in conversation to pay heed to an accepted purpose or direction of the exchange. Contributions made without paying this attention are liable to be rejected for other reasons than straightforward falsity: something true but unhelpful or inappropriate may meet with puzzlement or rejection. We can thus never infer from the fact that it would be inappropriate to say something in some circumstance that what would be said, were we to say it, would be false. This inference was frequently made in ordinary language philosophy, it being argued, for example, that since we do not normally say ‘there seems to be a barn there’ when there is unmistakably a barn there, it is false that on such occasions there seems to be a barn there.
Agrippa of Nettesheim
Henricus Cornelius (1486–1535) Occultist, humanist, and heterodox writer who contributed to revival of scepticism, criticized the subjection of women and witch-crazes; and contributed to the legend of Dr Faustus.
self-respect
The capacity to bear one’s own self-scrutiny. The phrase is Hume’s, but self respect is a central concern for ethical theorists working in the Kantian tradition. Self-respect is a good, and is therefore to be distinguished from such neighbours as vanity. It is a platform from which to criticize institutions that undermine it or interrupt its full expression, by making it impossible for some members of a community fully to respect themselves. It is associated in the Kantian tradition with possessing equal rights with others, and with the capacity to see one’s actions and patterns of life as consistent with one’s own values.
Newton’s laws of motion
Newton’s laws of motion state:
(i) every body preserves its state of rest, or uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it;
(ii) the rate of change of linear momentum is proportional to the force applied, and takes place in the straight line in which that force acts;
(iii) to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
horns of dilemma
see dilemma (logic)
denying the consequent
To argue validly that, given that if p then q and given not-q, we can infer not-p. ‘If the leg is broken this will hurt; it does not hurt, so the leg is not broken.’
architectonic
Term associated with Kant, denoting the systematic structure or architecture of our knowledge. All our knowledge belongs to a possible system, and a goal of philosophy is to uncover the nature of the system, including the place in it that is occupied by philosophical reflection itself.
split-brain phenomena
The functioning of actual patients who have had the two hemispheres of the brain severed is well documented. The procedure is one of cutting the corpus callosum or ‘thick-skinned body’, a procedure known as cerebral commisurotomy. It was formerly used as a way of controlling various disorders including epilepsy, and has been one of the main techniques for studying the localization of function within the brain, showing for example the dominance of the left hemisphere in linguistic behaviour. Such studies also provide data on the many different layers of functioning (and many different ways it can go wrong) underlying the familiar unities of conscious experience.
Philosophical attention to these matters is apt to simplify, legitimately or not, in order to consider the possibility of two persons cohabiting in one body, or that of one person, whose functions are subserved by each of the different hemispheres, being relocated in two different bodies. The relationship between these thought-experiments and the actual facts is not close, for although the operation results in separate awareness in the right and left halves of the visual and auditory fields, away from experimental conditions subjects need to unify their experience, and except in cases of severe dysfunction do so as much as the rest of us do.
Pantheismusstreit
See Lessing, Mendelssohn.
infinity, axiom of
Axiom needed in Russell’s development of set theory to ensure that there are enough sets for the purposes of mathematics. In the theory of types, if there were only finitely many objects of the lowest type, then there would only be finite sets at any level. To avoid this Russell postulated that there are infinitely many individuals or objects of the lowest type, but the non-logical nature of this assumption was a grave obstacle to his logicist programme. In Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory the axiom asserts that there is a set of which the null set is a member, and such that if any set is a member, the union of it and its unit set is also a member: (∃S)(∅ ▯ S & (∀R)(R ▯ S) → R ∪ {R} ▯ S).
dynamic/energeia
The former refers to the powers inherent in things. In Aristotle it becomes a potential in contrast to energeia which is the actualization of the potential.
