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H.A. Prichard | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._A._Prichard | Harold Arthur Prichard (30 October 1871 – 29 December 1947) was an English philosopher. He was born in London in 1871, the eldest child of Walter Stennett Prichard (a solicitor) and his wife Lucy. Harold Prichard was a scholar of Clifton College from where he won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, to study mathematics. But after taking first-class honours in mathematical moderations (preliminary examinations) in 1891, he studied Greats (ancient history and philosophy) taking first-class honours in 1894. He also played tennis for Oxford against Cambridge. On leaving Oxford he spent a brief period working for a firm of solicitors in London, before returning to Oxford where he spent the rest of his life, first as Fellow of Hertford College (1895–98) and then of Trinity College (1898–1924). He took early retirement from Trinity in 1924 on grounds of ill health, but recovered and was elected White's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1928 and became a fellow of Corpus Christi College. He retired in 1937.
== Philosophical work ==
Prichard gave an influential defence of ethical intuitionism in his "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (1912), wherein he contended that moral philosophy rested chiefly on the desire to provide arguments, starting from non-normative premises, for the principles of obligation that we pre-philosophically accept, such as the principle that one ought to keep one's promises or that one ought not steal. This is a mistake, he argued, both because it is impossible to derive any statement about what one ought to do from statements not concerning obligation (even statements about what is good), and because there is no need to do so since common sense principles of moral obligation are self-evident. The essay laid a groundwork for ethical intuitionism and provided inspiration for some of the most influential moral philosophers, such as John Rawls.
=== Criticism of Utilitarianism ===
Prichard attacks Utilitarianism as not being capable of forming obligation. He states that one cannot justify an obligation by pointing to the consequences of the obligated action because pointing to the consequences only shows that the action is desirable or advisable, not that it is obligatory. In other words, he claims that, while Utilitarianism may encourage people to do actions which a moral person would do, it cannot create a moral obligation to do those actions.
=== Deriving moral obligation ===
H. A. Prichard is an ethical intuitionist, meaning he believed that it is through our moral intuitions that we come to know right and wrong. Further, while he believes that moral obligations are justified by reasons, he does not believe that the reasons are external to the obligation itself. For instance, if a person is asked why he ought not torture chipmunks, the only satisfying answer that could be given is that he ought not torture chipmunks.Prichard, along with other intuitionists, adopts a foundationalist approach to morality. Foundationalism is a theory of epistemology which states that there are certain fundamental principles which are the basis for all other knowledge. In the case of ethics, foundationalists hold that certain fundamental moral rules are their own justification. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong explains:
The deepest challenge in moral epistemology, as in general epistemology, is raised by a skeptical regress argument: Someone is justified in believing something only if the believer has a reason that is expressible in an inference with premises that the believer is already justified in believing. This requires a chain of inferences that must continue infinitely, close into a circle, or stop arbitrarily. Academic skeptics reject all three options and conclude that there is no way for anyone to be justified in believing anything. The same regress arises for moral beliefs . . . The simplest way to stop this regress is simply to stop. If a believer can work back to a premise that the believer is justified in believing without being able to infer that premise from anything else, then there is no new premise to justify, so the regress goes no further. That is how foundationalists stop the regress in general epistemology. Moral intuitionists apply foundationalism to moral beliefs as a way to stop the skeptical regress regarding moral beliefs.
Therefore, Prichard concludes that just as observation of other people necessitates that other people exist, the observation of a moral obligation necessitates that the obligation exists. Prichard finishes his essay by answering a few obvious problems. Most notably, he explains how people should guarantee the accuracy of their moral intuitions. Clearly, observations can be misleading. For instance, if someone sees a pencil in water, he may conclude that the object in the water is bent. However, when he pulls the pencil from the water, he sees that it is straight. The same can occur with moral intuition. If one begins to doubt one's intuition, one should try to imagine oneself in the moral dilemma related to the decision. If the intuition persists, then the intuition is accurate. Prichard further supports these claims by pointing out how it is illegitimate to doubt previously believed moral intuitions:
With these considerations in mind, consider the parallel which, as it seems to me, is presented though with certain differences by Moral Philosophy. The sense that we ought to do certain things arises in our unreflective consciousness, being an activity of moral thinking occasioned by the various situations in which we find ourselves. At this stage our attitude to these obligations is one of unquestioning confidence. But inevitably the appreciation of the degree to which the execution of these obligations is contrary to our interest raises the doubt whether after all these obligations are, really obligatory, i.e., whether our sense that we ought not to do certain things is not illusion. We then want to have it proved to us that we ought to do so, i.e., to be convinced of this by a process which, as an argument, is different in kind from our original and unreflective appreciation of it. This demand IS, as I have argued, illegitimate. Hence in the first place, if, as is almost universally the case, by Moral Philosophy is meant the knowledge which would satisfy this demand, there is no such knowledge, and all attempts to attain it are doomed to failure because they rest on a mistake, the mistake of supposing the possibility of proving what can only be apprehended directly by an act of moral thinking.
== Writings ==
Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1909)
"Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" Mind 21 (1912): 21–37. Reprinted in Moral Obligation.
Moral Obligation (London, 1949; 1968)
Knowledge and Perception, Essays and Lectures (London, 1950)
== Private life ==
Prichard married in 1899 to a lecturer Mabel Henrietta Ross who had been born in India in 1875. She helped form St Anne's College and lived until 1965.
== Notes ==
== References ==
Jim McAdam, "Introduction", Moral Writings by H.A. Prichard, (Volume 3 of British moral philosophers), Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-19-925019-7, pp.xiv–xv.
William J. O'Brien, "H.A. Prichard's Moral Epistemology" Doctoral Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1988.
H.H. Price, "Harold Arthur Prichard", Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXIII, 1947.
== External links ==
Reflections on Harold Prichard, paper about Prichard's theory of ethics.
Works by Harold Arthur Prichard at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about H. A. Prichard at Internet Archive |
Bertrand Russell | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell | Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy".Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I, but also saw the war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of World War II, he welcomed American global hegemony in favour of either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He would later criticise Stalinist totalitarianism, condemn the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War and become an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).
== Biography ==
=== Early life and background ===
Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom, on 18 May 1872, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley was a deist, and even asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather. Mill died the year after Russell's birth, but his writings had a great effect on Russell's life.
His paternal grandfather, Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878), had twice been prime minister in the 1840s and 1860s. A member of Parliament since the early 1810s, he met with Napoleon Bonaparte in Elba. The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty (see: Duke of Bedford). They established themselves as one of the leading Whig families and participated in every great political event from the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536–1540 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688–1689 and the Great Reform Act in 1832.Lady Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley. Russell often feared the ridicule of his maternal grandmother, one of the campaigners for education of women.
=== Childhood and adolescence ===
Russell had two siblings: brother Frank (nearly seven years older than Bertrand), and sister Rachel (four years older). In June 1874, Russell's mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel's death. In January 1876, his father died of bronchitis after a long period of depression. Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of staunchly Victorian paternal grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. His grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth.The Countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family and successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule), and her influence on Bertrand Russell's outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life. Her favourite Bible verse, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil", became his motto. The atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression and formality; Frank reacted to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his feelings.
Russell's adolescence was lonely and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests in "nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love".During these formative years he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Russell wrote: "I spent all my spare time reading him, and learning him by heart, knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy." Russell claimed that beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and, two years later, that there is no life after death. Finally, at the age of 18, after reading Mill's Autobiography, he abandoned the "First Cause" argument and became an atheist.He travelled to the continent in 1890 with an American friend, Edward FitzGerald, and with FitzGerald's family he visited the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and climbed the Eiffel Tower soon after it was completed.
=== University and first marriage ===
Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, and began his studies there in 1890, taking as coach Robert Rumsey Webb. He became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating as seventh Wrangler in the former in 1893 and becoming a Fellow in the latter in 1895.Russell was 17 years old in the summer of 1889 when he met the family of Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker five years older, who was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. He became a friend of the Pearsall Smith family. They knew him primarily as "Lord John's grandson" and enjoyed showing him off.He soon fell in love with the puritanical, high-minded Alys, and contrary to his grandmother's wishes, married her on 13 December 1894. Their marriage began to fall apart in 1901 when it occurred to Russell, while cycling, that he no longer loved her. She asked him if he loved her and he replied that he did not. Russell also disliked Alys's mother, finding her controlling and cruel. A lengthy period of separation began in 1911 with Russell's affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, and he and Alys finally divorced in 1921 to enable Russell to remarry.During his years of separation from Alys, Russell had passionate (and often simultaneous) affairs with a number of women, including Morrell and the actress Lady Constance Malleson. Some have suggested that at this point he had an affair with Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the English governess and writer, and first wife of T. S. Eliot.
=== Early career ===
Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy, a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest in political and social theory. In 1896 he taught German social democracy at the London School of Economics. He was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.He now started an intensive study of the foundations of mathematics at Trinity. In 1897, he wrote An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (submitted at the Fellowship Examination of Trinity College) which discussed the Cayley–Klein metrics used for non-Euclidean geometry. He attended the First International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in 1900 where he met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro Padoa. The Italians had responded to Georg Cantor, making a science of set theory; they gave Russell their literature including the Formulario mathematico. Russell was impressed by the precision of Peano's arguments at the Congress, read the literature upon returning to England, and came upon Russell's paradox. In 1903 he published The Principles of Mathematics, a work on foundations of mathematics. It advanced a thesis of logicism, that mathematics and logic are one and the same.At the age of 29, in February 1901, Russell underwent what he called a "sort of mystic illumination", after witnessing Whitehead's wife's acute suffering in an angina attack. "I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty... and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable", Russell would later recall. "At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person."In 1905, he wrote the essay "On Denoting", which was published in the philosophical journal Mind. Russell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1908. The three-volume Principia Mathematica, written with Whitehead, was published between 1910 and 1913. This, along with the earlier The Principles of Mathematics, soon made Russell world-famous in his field.
In 1910, he became a University of Cambridge lecturer at Trinity College, where he had studied. He was considered for a Fellowship, which would give him a vote in the college government and protect him from being fired for his opinions, but was passed over because he was "anti-clerical", essentially because he was agnostic. He was approached by the Austrian engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became his PhD student. Russell viewed Wittgenstein as a genius and a successor who would continue his work on logic. He spent hours dealing with Wittgenstein's various phobias and his frequent bouts of despair. This was often a drain on Russell's energy, but Russell continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development, including the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. Russell delivered his lectures on logical atomism, his version of these ideas, in 1918, before the end of World War I. Wittgenstein was, at that time, serving in the Austrian Army and subsequently spent nine months in an Italian prisoner of war camp at the end of the conflict.
=== First World War ===
During World War I, Russell was one of the few people to engage in active pacifist activities. In 1916, because of his lack of a Fellowship, he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. He later described this, in Free Thought and Official Propaganda, as an illegitimate means the state used to violate freedom of expression. Russell championed the case of Eric Chappelow, a poet jailed and abused as a conscientious objector. Russell played a significant part in the Leeds Convention in June 1917, a historic event which saw well over a thousand "anti-war socialists" gather; many being delegates from the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party, united in their pacifist beliefs and advocating a peace settlement. The international press reported that Russell appeared with a number of Labour Members of Parliament (MPs), including Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, as well as former Liberal MP and anti-conscription campaigner, Professor Arnold Lupton. After the event, Russell told Lady Ottoline Morrell that, "to my surprise, when I got up to speak, I was given the greatest ovation that was possible to give anybody".His conviction in 1916 resulted in Russell being fined £100 (equivalent to £6,000 in 2021), which he refused to pay in hope that he would be sent to prison, but his books were sold at auction to raise the money. The books were bought by friends; he later treasured his copy of the King James Bible that was stamped "Confiscated by Cambridge Police".
A later conviction for publicly lecturing against inviting the United States to enter the war on the United Kingdom's side resulted in six months' imprisonment in Brixton Prison (see Bertrand Russell's political views) in 1918. He later said of his imprisonment:
I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, "Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy"... and began the work for "The Analysis of Mind". I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence as was shown by their having been caught.
While he was reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians chapter about Gordon he laughed out loud in his cell prompting the warder to intervene and reminding him that "prison was a place of punishment".Russell was reinstated to Trinity in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944 until 1949.In 1924, Russell again gained press attention when attending a "banquet" in the House of Commons with well-known campaigners, including Arnold Lupton, who had been an MP and had also endured imprisonment for "passive resistance to military or naval service".
=== G. H. Hardy on the Trinity controversy ===
In 1941, G. H. Hardy wrote a 61-page pamphlet titled Bertrand Russell and Trinity – published later as a book by Cambridge University Press with a foreword by C. D. Broad—in which he gave an authoritative account of Russell's 1916 dismissal from Trinity College, explaining that a reconciliation between the college and Russell had later taken place and gave details about Russell's personal life. Hardy writes that Russell's dismissal had created a scandal since the vast majority of the Fellows of the College opposed the decision. The ensuing pressure from the Fellows induced the Council to reinstate Russell. In January 1920, it was announced that Russell had accepted the reinstatement offer from Trinity and would begin lecturing from October. In July 1920, Russell applied for a one year leave of absence; this was approved. He spent the year giving lectures in China and Japan. In January 1921, it was announced by Trinity that Russell had resigned and his resignation had been accepted. This resignation, Hardy explains, was completely voluntary and was not the result of another altercation.
The reason for the resignation, according to Hardy, was that Russell was going through a tumultuous time in his personal life with a divorce and subsequent remarriage. Russell contemplated asking Trinity for another one-year leave of absence but decided against it, since this would have been an "unusual application" and the situation had the potential to snowball into another controversy. Although Russell did the right thing, in Hardy's opinion, the reputation of the College suffered with Russell's resignation, since the 'world of learning' knew about Russell's altercation with Trinity but not that the rift had healed. In 1925, Russell was asked by the Council of Trinity College to give the Tarner Lectures on the Philosophy of the Sciences; these would later be the basis for one of Russell's best-received books according to Hardy: The Analysis of Matter, published in 1927. In the preface to the Trinity pamphlet, Hardy wrote:
I wish to make it plain that Russell himself is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for the writing of the pamphlet.... I wrote it without his knowledge and, when I sent him the typescript and asked for his permission to print it, I suggested that, unless it contained misstatement of fact, he should make no comment on it. He agreed to this... no word has been changed as the result of any suggestion from him.
=== Between the wars ===
In August 1920, Russell travelled to Soviet Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He wrote a four-part series of articles, titled "Soviet Russia—1920", for the magazine The Nation. He met Vladimir Lenin and had an hour-long conversation with him. In his autobiography, he mentions that he found Lenin disappointing, sensing an "impish cruelty" in him and comparing him to "an opinionated professor". He cruised down the Volga on a steamship. His experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the revolution. He subsequently wrote a book, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, about his experiences on this trip, taken with a group of 24 others from the UK, all of whom came home thinking well of the Soviet regime, despite Russell's attempts to change their minds. For example, he told them that he had heard shots fired in the middle of the night and was sure that these were clandestine executions, but the others maintained that it was only cars backfiring.
Russell's lover Dora Black, a British author, feminist and socialist campaigner, visited Soviet Russia independently at the same time; in contrast to his reaction, she was enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution.The following year, Russell, accompanied by Dora, visited Peking (as Beijing was then known outside of China) to lecture on philosophy for a year. He went with optimism and hope, seeing China as then being on a new path. Other scholars present in China at the time included John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel-laureate poet. Before leaving China, Russell became gravely ill with pneumonia, and incorrect reports of his death were published in the Japanese press. When the couple visited Japan on their return journey, Dora took on the role of spurning the local press by handing out notices reading "Mr. Bertrand Russell, having died according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to Japanese journalists". Apparently they found this harsh and reacted resentfully.Dora was six months pregnant when the couple returned to England on 26 August 1921. Russell arranged a hasty divorce from Alys, marrying Dora six days after the divorce was finalised, on 27 September 1921. Russell's children with Dora were John Conrad Russell, 4th Earl Russell, born on 16 November 1921, and Katharine Jane Russell (now Lady Katharine Tait), born on 29 December 1923. Russell supported his family during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics, and education to the layman.
From 1922 to 1927 the Russells divided their time between London and Cornwall, spending summers in Porthcurno. In the 1922 and 1923 general elections Russell stood as a Labour Party candidate in the Chelsea constituency, but only on the basis that he knew he was extremely unlikely to be elected in such a safe Conservative seat, and he was unsuccessful on both occasions.
After the birth of his two children, he became interested in education, especially early childhood education. He was not satisfied with the old traditional education and thought that progressive education also had some flaws; as a result, together with Dora, Russell founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927. The school was run from a succession of different locations, including its original premises at the Russells' residence, Telegraph House, near Harting, West Sussex. During this time, he published "On Education, Especially in Early Childhood". On 8 July 1930 Dora gave birth to her third child Harriet Ruth. After he left the school in 1932, Dora continued it until 1943.In 1927 Russell met Barry Fox (later Barry Stevens), who became a well-known Gestalt therapist and writer in later years. They developed an intensive relationship, and in Fox's words: "... for three years we were very close." Fox sent her daughter Judith to Beacon Hill School. From 1927 to 1932 Russell wrote 34 letters to Fox. Upon the death of his elder brother Frank, in 1931, Russell became the 3rd Earl Russell.
Russell's marriage to Dora grew increasingly tenuous, and it reached a breaking point over her having two children with an American journalist, Griffin Barry. They separated in 1932 and finally divorced. On 18 January 1936, Russell married his third wife, an Oxford undergraduate named Patricia ("Peter") Spence, who had been his children's governess since 1930. Russell and Peter had one son, Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, 5th Earl Russell, who became a prominent historian and one of the leading figures in the Liberal Democrat party.Russell returned in 1937 to the London School of Economics to lecture on the science of power. During the 1930s, Russell became a friend and collaborator of V. K. Krishna Menon, then President of the India League, the foremost lobby in the United Kingdom for Indian independence. Russell chaired the India League from 1932 to 1939.
=== Second World War ===
Russell's political views changed over time, mostly about war. He opposed rearmament against Nazi Germany. In 1937, he wrote in a personal letter: "If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander and chief to dine with the prime minister." In 1940, he changed his appeasement view that avoiding a full-scale world war was more important than defeating Hitler. He concluded that Adolf Hitler taking over all of Europe would be a permanent threat to democracy. In 1943, he adopted a stance toward large-scale warfare called "relative political pacifism": "War was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils."Before World War II, Russell taught at the University of Chicago, later moving on to Los Angeles to lecture at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1940, but after a public outcry the appointment was annulled by a court judgment that pronounced him "morally unfit" to teach at the college because of his opinions, especially those relating to sexual morality, detailed in Marriage and Morals (1929). The matter was however taken to the New York Supreme Court by Jean Kay who was afraid that her daughter would be harmed by the appointment, though her daughter was not a student at CCNY. Many intellectuals, led by John Dewey, protested at his treatment. Albert Einstein's oft-quoted aphorism that "great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" originated in his open letter, dated 19 March 1940, to Morris Raphael Cohen, a professor emeritus at CCNY, supporting Russell's appointment. Dewey and Horace M. Kallen edited a collection of articles on the CCNY affair in The Bertrand Russell Case. Russell soon joined the Barnes Foundation, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of philosophy; these lectures formed the basis of A History of Western Philosophy. His relationship with the eccentric Albert C. Barnes soon soured, and he returned to the UK in 1944 to rejoin the faculty of Trinity College.
=== Later life ===
Russell participated in many broadcasts over the BBC, particularly The Brains Trust and for the Third Programme, on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this time Russell was world-famous outside academic circles, frequently the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles, and was called upon to offer opinions on a wide variety of subjects, even mundane ones. En route to one of his lectures in Trondheim, Russell was one of 24 survivors (among a total of 43 passengers) of an aeroplane crash in Hommelvik in October 1948. He said he owed his life to smoking since the people who drowned were in the non-smoking part of the plane. A History of Western Philosophy (1945) became a best-seller and provided Russell with a steady income for the remainder of his life.
In 1942, Russell argued in favour of a moderate socialism, capable of overcoming its metaphysical principles. In an inquiry on dialectical materialism, launched by the Austrian artist and philosopher Wolfgang Paalen in his journal DYN, Russell said: "I think the metaphysics of both Hegel and Marx plain nonsense—Marx's claim to be 'science' is no more justified than Mary Baker Eddy's. This does not mean that I am opposed to socialism."In 1943, Russell expressed support for Zionism: "I have come gradually to see that, in a dangerous and largely hostile world, it is essential to Jews to have some country which is theirs, some region where they are not suspected aliens, some state which embodies what is distinctive in their culture".In a speech in 1948, Russell said that if the USSR's aggression continued, it would be morally worse to go to war after the USSR possessed an atomic bomb than before it possessed one, because if the USSR had no bomb the West's victory would come more swiftly and with fewer casualties than if there were atomic bombs on both sides. At that time, only the United States possessed an atomic bomb, and the USSR was pursuing an extremely aggressive policy towards the countries in Eastern Europe which were being absorbed into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. Many understood Russell's comments to mean that Russell approved of a first strike in a war with the USSR, including Nigel Lawson, who was present when Russell spoke of such matters. Others, including Griffin, who obtained a transcript of the speech, have argued that he was merely explaining the usefulness of America's atomic arsenal in deterring the USSR from continuing its domination of Eastern Europe.Just after the atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russell wrote letters, and published articles in newspapers from 1945 to 1948, stating clearly that it was morally justified and better to go to war against the USSR using atomic bombs while the United States possessed them and before the USSR did. In September 1949, one week after the USSR tested its first A-bomb, but before this became known, Russell wrote that USSR would be unable to develop nuclear weapons because following Stalin's purges only science based on Marxist principles would be practised in the Soviet Union. After it became known that the USSR had carried out its nuclear bomb tests, Russell declared his position advocating the total abolition of atomic weapons.In 1948, Russell was invited by the BBC to deliver the inaugural Reith Lectures—what was to become an annual series of lectures, still broadcast by the BBC. His series of six broadcasts, titled Authority and the Individual, explored themes such as the role of individual initiative in the development of a community and the role of state control in a progressive society. Russell continued to write about philosophy. He wrote a foreword to Words and Things by Ernest Gellner, which was highly critical of the later thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and of ordinary language philosophy. Gilbert Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journal Mind, which caused Russell to respond via The Times. The result was a month-long correspondence in The Times between the supporters and detractors of ordinary language philosophy, which was only ended when the paper published an editorial critical of both sides but agreeing with the opponents of ordinary language philosophy.In the King's Birthday Honours of 9 June 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he was given the Order of Merit, George VI was affable but slightly embarrassed at decorating a former jailbird, saying, "You have sometimes behaved in a manner that would not do if generally adopted". Russell merely smiled, but afterwards claimed that the reply "That's right, just like your brother" immediately came to mind.
In 1950, Russell attended the inaugural conference for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded anti-communist organisation committed to the deployment of culture as a weapon during the Cold War. Russell was one of the best-known patrons of the Congress, until he resigned in 1956.In 1952, Russell was divorced by Spence, with whom he had been very unhappy. Conrad, Russell's son by Spence, did not see his father between the time of the divorce and 1968 (at which time his decision to meet his father caused a permanent breach with his mother). Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, soon after the divorce, on 15 December 1952. They had known each other since 1925, and Edith had taught English at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, sharing a house for 20 years with Russell's old friend Lucy Donnelly. Edith remained with him until his death, and, by all accounts, their marriage was a happy, close, and loving one. Russell's eldest son John suffered from serious mental illness, which was the source of ongoing disputes between Russell and his former wife Dora.In September 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison for a "breach of the peace" after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. The magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to "good behaviour", to which Russell replied: "No, I won't."In 1962 Russell played a public role in the Cuban Missile Crisis: in an exchange of telegrams with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev assured him that the Soviet government would not be reckless. Russell sent this telegram to President Kennedy:
YOUR ACTION DESPERATE. THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL. NO CONCEIVABLE JUSTIFICATION. CIVILIZED MAN CONDEMNS IT. WE WILL NOT HAVE MASS MURDER. ULTIMATUM MEANS WAR... END THIS MADNESS.
According to historian Peter Knight, after JFK's assassination, Russell, "prompted by the emerging work of the lawyer Mark Lane in the US ... rallied support from other noteworthy and left-leaning compatriots to form a Who Killed Kennedy Committee in June 1964, members of which included Michael Foot MP, Caroline Benn, the publisher Victor Gollancz, the writers John Arden and J. B. Priestley, and the Oxford history professor Hugh Trevor-Roper." Russell published a highly critical article weeks before the Warren Commission Report was published, setting forth 16 Questions on the Assassination and equating the Oswald case with the Dreyfus affair of late 19th-century France, in which the state convicted an innocent man. Russell also criticised the American press for failing to heed any voices critical of the official version.
=== Political causes ===
Bertrand Russell was opposed to war from a young age; his opposition to World War I being used as grounds for his dismissal from Trinity College at Cambridge. This incident fused two of his most controversial causes, as he had failed to be granted Fellow status which would have protected him from firing, because he was not willing to either pretend to be a devout Christian, or at least avoid admitting he was agnostic.
He later described the resolution of these issues as essential to freedom of thought and expression, citing the incident in Free Thought and Official Propaganda, where he explained that the expression of any idea, even the most obviously "bad", must be protected not only from direct State intervention, but also economic leveraging and other means of being silenced:
The opinions which are still persecuted strike the majority as so monstrous and immoral that the general principle of toleration cannot be held to apply to them. But this is exactly the same view as that which made possible the tortures of the Inquisition.
Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in political causes primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposing the Vietnam War. The 1955 Russell–Einstein Manifesto was a document calling for nuclear disarmament and was signed by eleven of the most prominent nuclear physicists and intellectuals of the time. In 1966–1967, Russell worked with Jean-Paul Sartre and many other intellectual figures to form the Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal to investigate the conduct of the United States in Vietnam. He wrote a great many letters to world leaders during this period.
Early in his life Russell supported eugenicist policies. He proposed in 1894 that the state issue certificates of health to prospective parents and withhold public benefits from those considered unfit. In 1929 he wrote that people deemed "mentally defective" and "feebleminded" should be sexually sterilised because they "are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule, wholly useless to the community." Russell was also an advocate of population control:The nations which at present increase rapidly should be encouraged to adopt the methods by which, in the West, the increase of population has been checked. Educational propaganda, with government help, could achieve this result in a generation. There are, however, two powerful forces opposed to such a policy: one is religion, the other is nationalism. I think it is the duty of all to proclaim that opposition to the spread of birth is appalling depth of misery and degradation, and that within another fifty years or so. I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer. War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the whole world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.
On 20 November 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union was justified. Russell argued that war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, so it would be a humanitarian gesture to get it over with quickly and have the United States in the dominant position. Currently, Russell argued, humanity could survive such a war, whereas a full nuclear war after both sides had manufactured large stockpiles of more destructive weapons was likely to result in the extinction of the human race. Russell later relented from this stance, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear powers.
In 1956, immediately before and during the Suez Crisis, Russell expressed his opposition to European imperialism in the Middle East. He viewed the crisis as another reminder of the pressing need for a more effective mechanism for international governance, and to restrict national sovereignty to places such as the Suez Canal area "where general interest is involved". At the same time the Suez Crisis was taking place, the world was also captivated by the Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent crushing of the revolt by intervening Soviet forces. Russell attracted criticism for speaking out fervently against the Suez war while ignoring Soviet repression in Hungary, to which he responded that he did not criticise the Soviets "because there was no need. Most of the so-called Western World was fulminating". Although he later feigned a lack of concern, at the time he was disgusted by the brutal Soviet response, and on 16 November 1956, he expressed approval for a declaration of support for Hungarian scholars which Michael Polanyi had cabled to the Soviet embassy in London twelve days previously, shortly after Soviet troops had entered Budapest.In November 1957 Russell wrote an article addressing US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, urging a summit to consider "the conditions of co-existence". Khrushchev responded that peace could be served by such a meeting. In January 1958 Russell elaborated his views in The Observer, proposing a cessation of all nuclear weapons production, with the UK taking the first step by unilaterally suspending its own nuclear-weapons program if necessary, and with Germany "freed from all alien armed forces and pledged to neutrality in any conflict between East and West". US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles replied for Eisenhower. The exchange of letters was published as The Vital Letters of Russell, Khrushchev, and Dulles.Russell was asked by The New Republic, a liberal American magazine, to elaborate his views on world peace. He urged that all nuclear weapons testing and flights by planes armed with nuclear weapons be halted immediately, and negotiations be opened for the destruction of all hydrogen bombs, with the number of conventional nuclear devices limited to ensure a balance of power. He proposed that Germany be reunified and accept the Oder-Neisse line as its border, and that a neutral zone be established in Central Europe, consisting at the minimum of Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, with each of these countries being free of foreign troops and influence, and prohibited from forming alliances with countries outside the zone. In the Middle East, Russell suggested that the West avoid opposing Arab nationalism, and proposed the creation of a United Nations peacekeeping force to guard Israel's frontiers to ensure that Israel was prevented from committing aggression and protected from it. He also suggested Western recognition of the People's Republic of China, and that it be admitted to the UN with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.He was in contact with Lionel Rogosin while the latter was filming his anti-war film Good Times, Wonderful Times in the 1960s. He became a hero to many of the youthful members of the New Left. In early 1963, Russell became increasingly vocal in his disapproval of the Vietnam War, and felt that the US government's policies there were near-genocidal. In 1963 he became the inaugural recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, an award for writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society. In 1964 he was one of eleven world figures who issued an appeal to Israel and the Arab countries to accept an arms embargo and international supervision of nuclear plants and rocket weaponry. In October 1965 he tore up his Labour Party card because he suspected Harold Wilson's Labour government was going to send troops to support the United States in Vietnam.
=== Final years, death and legacy ===
In June 1955, Russell had leased Plas Penrhyn in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales and on 5 July of the following year it became his and Edith's principal residence.
Russell published his three-volume autobiography in 1967, 1968, and 1969. He made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war Hindi film Aman, by Mohan Kumar, which was released in India in 1967. This was Russell's only appearance in a feature film.On 23 November 1969, he wrote to The Times newspaper saying that the preparation for show trials in Czechoslovakia was "highly alarming". The same month, he appealed to Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations to support an international war crimes commission to investigate alleged torture and genocide by the United States in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The following month, he protested to Alexei Kosygin over the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union of Writers.
On 31 January 1970, Russell issued a statement condemning "Israel's aggression in the Middle East", and in particular, Israeli bombing raids being carried out deep in Egyptian territory as part of the War of Attrition, which he compared to German bombing raids in the Battle of Britain and the US bombing of Vietnam. He called for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-Six-Day War borders. This was Russell's final political statement or act. It was read out at the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo on 3 February 1970, the day after his death.Russell died of influenza, just after 8 pm on 2 February 1970 at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth, aged 97. His body was cremated in Colwyn Bay on 5 February 1970 with five people present. In accordance with his will, there was no religious ceremony but one minute's silence; his ashes were later scattered over the Welsh mountains. Although he was born in Monmouthshire, and died in Penrhyndeudraeth in Wales, Russell identified as English. Later in 1970, on 23 October, his will was published showing he had left an estate valued at £69,423 (equivalent to £1.1 million in 2021). In 1980, a memorial to Russell was commissioned by a committee including the philosopher A. J. Ayer. It consists of a bust of Russell in Red Lion Square in London sculpted by Marcelle Quinton.Lady Katharine Jane Tait, Russell's daughter, founded the Bertrand Russell Society in 1974 to preserve and understand his work. It publishes the Bertrand Russell Society Bulletin, holds meetings and awards prizes for scholarship, including the Bertrand Russell Society Award. She also authored several essays about her father; as well as a book, My Father, Bertrand Russell, which was published in 1975. All members receive Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies.
For the sesquicentennial of his birth, in May 2022, McMaster University's Bertrand Russell Archive, the university's largest and most heavily used research collection, organised both a physical and virtual exhibition on Russell's anti-nuclear stance in the post-war era, Scientists for Peace: the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the Pugwash Conference, which included the earliest version of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation held a commemoration at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London, on 18 May, the anniversary of his birth. For its part, on the same day, La Estrella de Panamá published a biographical sketch by Francisco Díaz Montilla, who commented that "[if he] had to characterize Russell's work in one sentence [he] would say: criticism and rejection of dogmatism."Bangladesh's first leader, Mujibur Rahman, named his youngest son Sheikh Russel in honour of Bertrand Russell.
==== Marriages and issue ====
Russell first married Alys Whitall Smith (died 1951) in 1894. The marriage was dissolved in 1921 with no issue. His second marriage was to Dora Winifred Black MBE (died 1986), daughter of Sir Frederick Black, in 1921. This was dissolved in 1935, having produced two children:
John Conrad Russell, 4th Earl Russell (1921–1987)
Lady Katharine Jane Russell (1923–2021), who married Rev. Charles Tait in 1948 and had issueRussell's third marriage was to Patricia Helen Spence (died 2004) in 1936, with the marriage producing one child:
Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, 5th Earl Russell (1937–2004)Russell's third marriage ended in divorce in 1952. He married Edith Finch in the same year. Finch survived Russell, dying in 1978.
=== Titles and honours from birth ===
Russell held throughout his life the following styles and honours:
from birth until 1908: The Honourable Bertrand Arthur William Russell
from 1908 until 1931: The Honourable Bertrand Arthur William Russell, FRS
from 1931 until 1949: The Right Honourable The Earl Russell, FRS
from 1949 until death: The Right Honourable The Earl Russell, OM, FRS
== Views ==
=== Philosophy ===
Russell is generally credited with being one of the founders of analytic philosophy. He was deeply impressed by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and wrote on every major area of philosophy except aesthetics. He was particularly prolific in the fields of metaphysics, logic and the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, ethics and epistemology. When Brand Blanshard asked Russell why he did not write on aesthetics, Russell replied that he did not know anything about it, though he hastened to add "but that is not a very good excuse, for my friends tell me it has not deterred me from writing on other subjects".On ethics, Russell wrote that he was a utilitarian in his youth, yet he later distanced himself from this view.For the advancement of science and protection of liberty of expression, Russell advocated The Will to Doubt, the recognition that all human knowledge is at most a best guess, that one should always remember:
None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge.
Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men's attitude is tentative and full of doubt.
=== Religion ===
Russell described himself in 1947 as an agnostic or an atheist: he found it difficult to determine which term to adopt, saying:Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line. For most of his adult life, Russell maintained religion to be little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects, largely harmful to people. He believed that religion and the religious outlook serve to impede knowledge and foster fear and dependency, and to be responsible for much of our world's wars, oppression, and misery. He was a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association and President of Cardiff Humanists until his death.
=== Society ===
Political and social activism occupied much of Russell's time for most of his life. Russell remained politically active almost to the end of his life, writing to and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. He was a prominent campaigner against Western intervention into the Vietnam War in the 1960s, writing essays, books, attending demonstrations, and even organising Russell Tribunal in 1966 alongside other prominent philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which fed into his 1967 book War Crimes in Vietnam.Russell argued for a "scientific society", where war would be abolished, population growth would be limited, and prosperity would be shared. He suggested the establishment of a "single supreme world government" able to enforce peace, claiming that "the only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation". He was one of the signatories of the Agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt a Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Russell also expressed support for guild socialism, and commented positively on several socialist thinkers and activists. According to Jean Bricmont and Normand Baillargeon, "Russell was both a liberal and a socialist, a combination that was perfectly comprehensible in his time, but which has become almost unthinkable today. He was a liberal in that he opposed concentrations of power in all its manifestations, military, governmental, or religious, as well as the superstitious or nationalist ideas that usually serve as its justification. But he was also a socialist, even as an extension of his liberalism, because he was equally opposed to the concentrations of power stemming from the private ownership of the major means of production, which therefore needed to be put under social control (which does not mean state control)."Russell was an active supporter of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, being one of the signatories of A. E. Dyson's 1958 letter to The Times calling for a change in the law regarding male homosexual practices, which were partly legalised in 1967, when Russell was still alive.He expressed sympathy and support for the Palestinian people and was strongly critical of Israel's actions. He wrote in 1960 that, "I think it was a mistake to establish a Jewish State in Palestine, but it would be a still greater mistake to try to get rid of it now that it exists." In his final written document, read aloud in Cairo three days after his death on January 31, 1970, he condemned Israel as an aggressive imperialist power, which "wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression." In regards to the Palestinian people and refugees, he wrote that, "No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East."Russell advocated – and was one of the first people in the UK to suggest – a universal basic income. In his 1918 book Roads to Freedom, Russell wrote that "Anarchism has the advantage as regards liberty, Socialism as regards the inducement to work. Can we not find a method of combining these two advantages? It seems to me that we can. [...] Stated in more familiar terms, the plan we are advocating amounts essentially to this: that a certain small income, sufficient for necessaries, should be secured to all, whether they work or not, and that a larger income – as much larger as might be warranted by the total amount of commodities produced – should be given to those who are willing to engage in some work which the community recognizes as useful...When education is finished, no one should be compelled to work, and those who choose not to work should receive a bare livelihood and be left completely free."In "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday" ("Postscript" in his Autobiography), Russell wrote: "I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken".
=== Freedom of opinion and expression ===
Russell was a champion of freedom of opinion and an opponent of both censorship and indoctrination. In 1928, he wrote: "The fundamental argument for freedom of opinion is the doubtfulness of all our belief... when the State intervenes to ensure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favour of that doctrine ... It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to make a living". In 1957, he wrote: "'Free thought' means thinking freely ... to be worthy of the name freethinker he must be free of two things: the force of tradition and the tyranny of his own passions."
=== Education ===
Russell has presented ideas on the possible means of control of education in case of scientific dictatorship governments, of the kind of this excerpt taken from chapter II "General Effects of Scientific Technique" of "The Impact of Science on society".
This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician's paradise. The social effects of scientific technique have already been many and important, and are likely to be even more noteworthy in the future. Some of these effects depend upon the political and economic character of the country concerned; others are inevitable, whatever this character may be.
He pushed his visionary scenarios even further into details, in the chapter III "Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy" of the same book, stating as an example In future such failures are not likely to occur where there is dictatorship. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.
== Selected works ==
Below are selected Russell's works in English, sorted by year of first publication:
1896. German Social Democracy. London: Longmans, Green
1897. An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1900. A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1903. The Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge University Press
1903. A Free man's worship, and other essays.
1905. On Denoting, Mind, Vol. 14. ISSN 0026-4423. Basil Blackwell
1910. Philosophical Essays. London: Longmans, Green
1910–1913. Principia Mathematica. (with Alfred North Whitehead). 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1912. The Problems of Philosophy. London: Williams and Norgate
1914. Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing.
1916. Principles of Social Reconstruction. London, George Allen and Unwin
1916. Why Men Fight. New York: The Century Co
1916. The Policy of the Entente, 1904–1914 : a reply to Professor Gilbert Murray. Manchester: The National Labour Press
1916. Justice in War-time. Chicago: Open Court
1917. Political Ideals. New York: The Century Co.
1918. Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin
1918. Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. London: George Allen & Unwin
1919. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin. (ISBN 0-415-09604-9 for Routledge paperback)
1920. The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. London: George Allen & Unwin
1921. The Analysis of Mind. London: George Allen & Unwin
1922. The Problem of China. London: George Allen & Unwin
1922. Free Thought and Official Propaganda, delivered at South Place Institute
1923. The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, in collaboration with Dora Russell. London: George Allen & Unwin
1923. The ABC of Atoms, London: Kegan Paul. Trench, Trubner
1924. Icarus; or, The Future of Science. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
1925. The ABC of Relativity. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner (revised and edited by Felix Pirani)
1925. What I Believe. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
1926. On Education, Especially in Early Childhood. London: George Allen & Unwin
1927. The Analysis of Matter. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
1927. An Outline of Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin
1927. Why I Am Not a Christian. London: Watts
1927. Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell. New York: Modern Library
1928. Sceptical Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin
1929. Marriage and Morals. London: George Allen & Unwin
1930. The Conquest of Happiness. London: George Allen & Unwin
1931. The Scientific Outlook, London: George Allen & Unwin
1932. Education and the Social Order, London: George Allen & Unwin
1934. Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914. London: George Allen & Unwin
1935. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin
1935. Religion and Science. London: Thornton Butterworth
1936. Which Way to Peace?. London: Jonathan Cape
1937. The Amberley Papers: The Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley, with Patricia Russell, 2 vols., London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press; reprinted (1966) as The Amberley Papers. Bertrand Russell's Family Background, 2 vols., London: George Allen & Unwin
1938. Power: A New Social Analysis. London: George Allen & Unwin
1940. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
1945. The Bomb and Civilisation. Published in the Glasgow Forward on 18 August 1945
1945. A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day New York: Simon and Schuster
1948. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. London: George Allen & Unwin
1949. Authority and the Individual. London: George Allen & Unwin
1950. Unpopular Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin
1951. New Hopes for a Changing World. London: George Allen & Unwin
1952. The Impact of Science on Society. London: George Allen & Unwin
1953. Satan in the Suburbs and Other Stories. London: George Allen & Unwin
1954. Human Society in Ethics and Politics. London: George Allen & Unwin
1954. Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories. London: George Allen & Unwin
1956. Portraits from Memory and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin
1956. Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, edited by Robert C. Marsh. London: George Allen & Unwin
1957. Why I Am Not A Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, edited by Paul Edwards. London: George Allen & Unwin
1958. Understanding History and Other Essays. New York: Philosophical Library
1958. The Will to Doubt. New York: Philosophical Library
1959. Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare. London: George Allen & Unwin
1959. My Philosophical Development. London: George Allen & Unwin
1959. Wisdom of the West: A Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in Its Social and Political Setting, edited by Paul Foulkes. London: Macdonald
1960. Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company
1961. The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, edited by R. E. Egner and L. E. Denonn. London: George Allen & Unwin
1961. Fact and Fiction. London: George Allen & Unwin
1961. Has Man a Future? London: George Allen & Unwin
1963. Essays in Skepticism. New York: Philosophical Library
1963. Unarmed Victory. London: George Allen & Unwin
1965. Legitimacy Versus Industrialism, 1814–1848. London: George Allen & Unwin (first published as Parts I and II of Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914, 1934)
1965. On the Philosophy of Science, edited by Charles A. Fritz, Jr. Indianapolis: The Bobbs–Merrill Company
1966. The ABC of Relativity. London: George Allen & Unwin
1967. Russell's Peace Appeals, edited by Tsutomu Makino and Kazuteru Hitaka. Japan: Eichosha's New Current Books
1967. War Crimes in Vietnam. London: George Allen & Unwin
1951–1969. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols., London: George Allen & Unwin. Vol. 2, 1956
1969. Dear Bertrand Russell... A Selection of his Correspondence with the General Public 1950–1968, edited by Barry Feinberg and Ronald Kasrils. London: George Allen and UnwinRussell was the author of more than sixty books and over two thousand articles. Additionally, he wrote many pamphlets, introductions, and letters to the editor. One pamphlet titled, I Appeal unto Caesar': The Case of the Conscientious Objectors, ghostwritten for Margaret Hobhouse, the mother of imprisoned peace activist Stephen Hobhouse, allegedly helped secure the release from prison of hundreds of conscientious objectors.His works can be found in anthologies and collections, including The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, which McMaster University began publishing in 1983. By March 2017 this collection of his shorter and previously unpublished works included 18 volumes, and several more are in progress. A bibliography in three additional volumes catalogues his publications. The Russell Archives held by McMaster's William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections possess over 40,000 of his letters.
== See also ==
== Notes ==
== References ==
=== Citations ===
=== Sources ===
Primary sources
1900, Sur la logique des relations avec des applications à la théorie des séries, Rivista di matematica 7: 115–148.
1901, On the Notion of Order, Mind (n.s.) 10: 35–51.
1902, (with Alfred North Whitehead), On Cardinal Numbers, American Journal of Mathematics 24: 367–384.
1948, BBC Reith Lectures: Authority and the Individual A series of six radio lectures broadcast on the BBC Home Service in December 1948.Secondary sources
John Newsome Crossley. A Note on Cantor's Theorem and Russell's Paradox, Australian Journal of Philosophy 51, 1973, 70–71.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Alan Ryan. Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
== Further reading ==
Books about Russell's philosophyAlfred Julius Ayer. Russell, London: Fontana, 1972. ISBN 0-00-632965-9. A lucid summary exposition of Russell's thought.
Elizabeth Ramsden Eames. Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969. OCLC 488496910. A clear description of Russell's philosophical development.
Celia Green. The Lost Cause: Causation and the Mind-Body Problem, Oxford: Oxford Forum, 2003. ISBN 0-9536772-1-4 Contains a sympathetic analysis of Russell's views on causality.
A. C. Grayling. Russell: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Nicholas Griffin. Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
A. D. Irvine, ed. Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, 4 volumes, London: Routledge, 1999. Consists of essays on Russell's work by many distinguished philosophers.
Michael K. Potter. Bertrand Russell's Ethics, Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2006. A clear and accessible explanation of Russell's moral philosophy.
P. A. Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University, 1944.
John Slater. Bertrand Russell, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994.Biographical booksA. J. Ayer. Bertrand Russell, New York: Viking Press, 1972, reprint ed. London: University of Chicago Press, 1988, ISBN 0-226-03343-0
Andrew Brink. Bertrand Russell: A Psychobiography of a Moralist, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1989, ISBN 0-391-03600-9
Ronald W. Clark. The Life of Bertrand Russell, London: Jonathan Cape, 1975, ISBN 0-394-49059-2
Ronald W. Clark. Bertrand Russell and His World, London: Thames & Hudson, 1981, ISBN 0-500-13070-1
Rupert Crawshay-Williams. Russell Remembered, London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Written by a close friend of Russell's
John Lewis. Bertrand Russell: Philosopher and Humanist, London: Lawerence & Wishart, 1968
Ray Monk. Bertrand Russell: Mathematics: Dreams and Nightmares, London: Phoenix, 1997, ISBN 0-7538-0190-6
Ray Monk. Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1920 Vol. I, New York: Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0-09-973131-2
Ray Monk. Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness, 1921–1970 Vol. II, New York: Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0-09-927275-X
Caroline Moorehead. Bertrand Russell: A Life, New York: Viking, 1993, ISBN 0-670-85008-X
George Santayana. "Bertrand Russell", in Selected Writings of George Santayana, Norman Henfrey (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I, 1968, pp. 326–329
Peter Stone et al. Bertrand Russell's Life and Legacy. Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2017.
Katharine Tait. My Father Bertrand Russell, New York: Thoemmes Press, 1975
Alan Wood. Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Sceptic, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957.
== External links ==
"Bertrand Russell's Ethics". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
"Bertrand Russell's Logic". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
"Bertrand Russell's Metaphysics". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Works by Bertrand Russell at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Bertrand Russell at Internet Archive
Works by Bertrand Russell at Open Library
Works by Bertrand Russell at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Bertrand Russell – media on YouTube
The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University
The Bertrand Russell Society
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Bertrand Russell", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
BBC Face to Face interview with Bertrand Russell and John Freeman, broadcast 4 March 1959
Bertrand Russell on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1950 "What Desires Are Politically Important?"
Interview with Ray Monk at Today, 18 May 2022 (from 2:58:35) |
A.O. Lovejoy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Oncken_Lovejoy | Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (October 10, 1873 – December 30, 1962) was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being (1936), on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.
== Life ==
Lovejoy was born in Berlin, Germany, while his father was doing medical research there. Eighteen months later, his mother, a daughter of Johann Gerhard Oncken, committed suicide, whereupon his father gave up medicine and became a clergyman. Lovejoy studied philosophy, first at the University of California at Berkeley, then at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce. He did not earn a Ph.D. In 1901, he resigned from his first job, at Stanford University, to protest the dismissal of a colleague who had offended a trustee. The President of Harvard then vetoed hiring Lovejoy on the grounds that he was a known troublemaker. Over the subsequent decade, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia University, and the University of Missouri. He never married.As a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1938, Lovejoy founded and long presided over that university's History of Ideas Club, where many prominent and budding intellectual and social historians, as well as literary critics, gathered. In 1940 he co-founded the Journal of the History of Ideas with Philip P. Wiener. Lovejoy insisted that the history of ideas should focus on "unit ideas," single concepts (namely simple concepts sharing an abstract name with other concepts that were to be conceptually distinguished).
Lovejoy was active in the public arena. He helped found the American Association of University Professors and the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. However, he qualified his belief in civil liberties to exclude what he considered threats to a free system. Thus, at the height of the McCarthy Era (in the February 14, 1952, edition of the Journal of Philosophy) Lovejoy stated that, since it was a "matter of empirical fact" that membership in the Communist Party contributed "to the triumph of a world-wide organization" which was opposed to "freedom of inquiry, of opinion and of teaching," membership in the party constituted grounds for dismissal from academic positions. He also published numerous opinion pieces in the Baltimore press. He died in Baltimore on December 30, 1962.
== Philosophy ==
In the domain of epistemology, Lovejoy is remembered for an influential critique of the pragmatic movement, especially in the essay "The Thirteen Pragmatisms", written in 1908.Abstract nouns like 'pragmatism' 'idealism', 'rationalism' and the like were, in Lovejoy's view, constituted by distinct, analytically separate ideas, which the historian of the genealogy of ideas had to thresh out, and show how the basic unit ideas combine and recombine with each other over time. The idea has, according to Simo Knuuttila, exercised a greater attraction on literary critics than on philosophers. Lovejoy was also an opponent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. In 1930, he published a paper criticizing Einstein's relativistic concept of simultaneity as arbitrary.
== Legacy ==
William F. Bynum, looking back at Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being after 40 years, describes it as "a familiar feature of the intellectual landscape", indicating its great influence and "brisk" ongoing sales. Bynum argues that much more research is needed into how the concept of the great chain of being was replaced, but he agrees that Lovejoy was right that the crucial period was the end of the 18th century when "the Enlightenment's chain of being was dismantled".
== Works ==
Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, (1935). (with George Boas). Johns Hopkins U. Press. 1997 edition: ISBN 0-8018-5611-6
The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936). Harvard University Press. Reprinted by Harper & Row, ISBN 0-674-36150-4, 2005 paperback: ISBN 0-674-36153-9.
Essays in the History of Ideas (1948). Johns Hopkins U. Press.
The Revolt Against Dualism (1960). Open Court Publishing. ISBN 0-87548-107-8
The Reason, the Understanding, and Time (1961). Johns Hopkins U. Press. ISBN 0-8018-0393-4
Reflections on Human Nature (1961). Johns Hopkins U. Press. ISBN 0-8018-0395-0
The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays (1963). Johns Hopkins U. Press. ISBN 0-8018-0396-9
=== Articles ===
"The Entangling Alliance of Religion and History," The Hibbert Journal, Vol. V, October 1906/ July 1907.
"The Desires of the Self-Conscious," The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 4, No. 2, Jan. 17, 1907.
"The Place of Linnaeus in the History of Science," The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXI, 1907.
"The Origins of Ethical Inwardness in Jewish Thought," The American Journal of Theology, Vol. XI, 1907.
"Kant and the English Platonists." In Essays, Philosophical and Psychological, Longmans, Green & Co., 1908.
"Pragmatism and Theology," The American Journal of Theology, Vol. XII, 1908.
"The Theory of a Pre-Christian Cult of Jesus," The Monist, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, October 1908.
"The Thirteen Pragmatisms," The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. V, January/December, 1908.
"The Argument for Organic Evolution Before the 'Origin of Species'," Part II, Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXV, July/December, 1909.
"Schopenhauer as an Evolutionist," The Monist, Vol. XXI, 1911.
"Kant and Evolution," Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXVII, 1910; Part II, Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXVIII, 1911.
"The Problem of Time in Recent French Philosophy," Part II, Part III, The Philosophical Review, Vol. XXI, 1912.
"Relativity, Reality, and Contradiction", The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1914.
"Pragmatism Versus the Pragmatist." In: Essays in Critical Realism. London: Macmillan & Co., 1920.
"Professional Ethics and Social Progress," The North American Review, March 1924.
"The Dialectical Argument Against Absolute Simultaneity", The Journal of Philosophy, 1930.
"Plans for the Future," Free World, November 1943.
=== Miscellany ===
"Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr Von," A Cyclopedia of Education, ed. by Paul Monroe, The Macmillan Company, 1911.
"The Unity of Science," The University of Missouri Bulletin: Science Series, Vol. I, N°. 1, January 1912.
Bergson & Romantic Evolutionism; Two Lectures Delivered Before the Union, September 5 & 12, 1913, University of California Press, 1914.
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Campbell, James, "Arthur Lovejoy and the Progress of Philosophy,", in: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 39, No. 4, Fall, 2003.
Diggins, John P., "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual History,", in: Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 67, Number 1, January 2006.
Duffin, Kathleen E. "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Emergence of Novelty," in: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 41, No. 2, Apr./Jun., 1980.
Feuer, Lewis S., "The Philosophical Method of Arthur O. Lovejoy: Critical Realism and Psychoanalytical Realism," in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 23, No. 4, Jun., 1963.
Feuer, Lewis S. "Arthur O. Lovejoy," in: The American Scholar, Vol. 46, No. 3, Summer 1977.
Mandelbaum, Maurice. "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Theory of Historiography," in: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, No. 4, Oct., 1948.
Moran, Seán Farrell, "A.O. Lovejoy", in: Kelly Boyd, ed., The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Routledge, 1999.
Randall, Jr., John Herman, "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the History of Ideas," in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research"', Vol. 23, No. 4, Jun., 1963.
Wilson, Daniel J., Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility, University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
== External links ==
Works by Arthur O. Lovejoy at JSTOR.
Dictionary of the History of Ideas article on the Great Chain of Being.
Lovejoy Papers at Johns Hopkins University. Includes a short biography.
Dale Keiger, Tussling with the Idea Man
"The Chinese Origin of Romanticism", in: Essays in the History of Ideas, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948.
Works by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) |
Nikolai Berdyaev | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Berdyaev | Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (; Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев; 18 March [O.S. 6 March] 1874 – 24 March 1948) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person. Alternative historical spellings of his surname in English include "Berdiaev" and "Berdiaeff", and of his given name "Nicolas" and "Nicholas". Russian paleontologist and Christian apologist Alexander V. Khramov (Borissiak Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ph.D. from Moscow University) attributes his ideas about an atemporal human fall to Berdyaev and Evgenii Nikolaevitch Troubetzkoy.
== Biography ==
Nikolai Berdyaev was born near Kiev in 1874 to an aristocratic military family. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Berdyaev, came from a long line of Russian nobility. Almost all of Alexander Mikhailovich's ancestors served as high-ranking military officers, but he resigned from the army quite early and became active in the social life of the aristocracy. Nikolai's mother, Alina Sergeevna Berdyaeva, was half-French and came from the top levels of both French and Russian nobility. He also had Polish and Tatar origins.
Berdyaev decided on an intellectual career and entered the Kiev University in 1894. It was a time of revolutionary fervor among the students and the intelligentsia. He became a Marxist for a period and was arrested in a student demonstration and expelled from the university. His involvement in illegal activities led in 1897 to three years of internal exile to Vologda in northern Russia.: 28 A fiery 1913 article, entitled "Quenchers of the Spirit", criticising the rough purging of Imiaslavie Russian monks on Mount Athos by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church using tsarist troops, caused him to be charged with the crime of blasphemy, the punishment for which was exile to Siberia for life. The World War and the Bolshevik Revolution prevented the matter coming to trial.Berdyaev's disaffection culminated, in 1919, with the foundation of his own private academy, the "Free Academy of Spiritual Culture". It was primarily a forum for him to lecture on the hot topics of the day and to present them from a Christian point of view. He also presented his opinions in public lectures, and every Tuesday, the academy hosted a meeting at his home because official Soviet anti-religious activity was intense at the time and the official policy of the Bolshevik government, with its Soviet anti-religious legislation, strongly promoted state atheism.In 1920, Berdiaev became professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow. In the same year, he was accused of participating in a conspiracy against the government; he was arrested and jailed. The feared head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, came in person to interrogate him,: 130 and he gave his interrogator a solid dressing down on the problems with Bolshevism.: 32 Novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago recounts the incident as follows:
[Berdyaev] was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there.... But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed. Now there is a man who had a "point of view"!
After being expelled from Russia, Berdyaev and other émigrés went to Berlin, where he founded an academy of philosophy and religion, but economic and political conditions in the Weimar Republic caused him and his wife to move to Paris in 1923. He transferred his academy there, and taught, lectured and wrote, working for an exchange of ideas with the French and European intellectual community, and participated in a number of international conferences.
== Philosophical work ==
According to Marko Markovic, Berdyaev "was an ardent man, rebellious to all authority, an independent and "negative" spirit. He could assert himself only in negation and could not hear any assertion without immediately negating it, to such an extent that he would even be able to contradict himself and to attack people who shared his own prior opinions". According to Marina Makienko, Anna Panamaryova, and Andrey Gurban, Berdyaev's works are "emotional, controversial, bombastic, affective and dogmatic".: 20 They summarise that, according to Berdyaev, "man unites two worlds – the world of the divine and the natural world. ... Through the freedom and creativity the two natures must unite... To overcome the dualism of existence is possible only through creativity.: 20 David Bonner Richardson described Berdyaev's philosophy as Christian existentialism and personalism. Other authors, such as political theologian Tsoncho Tsonchev, interpret Berdyaev as "communitarian personalist" and Slavophile. According to Tsonchev, Berdyaev's philosophical thought rests on four "pillars": freedom, creativity, person, and communion.One of the central themes of Berdyaev's work was philosophy of love.: 11 At first he systematically developed his theory of love in a special article published in the journal Pereval (Russian: Перевал) in 1907. Then he gave gender issues a notable place in his book The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916). According to him, 1) erotic energy is an eternal source of creativity, 2) eroticism is linked to beauty, and eros means search for the beautiful.: 11 He also published works about Russian history and the Russian national character. In particular, he wrote about Russian nationalism:
The Russian people did not achieve their ancient dream of Moscow, the Third Rome. The ecclesiastical schism of the seventeenth century revealed that the muscovite tsardom is not the third Rome. The messianic idea of the Russian people assumed either an apocalyptic form or a revolutionary; and then there occurred an amazing event in the destiny of the Russian people. Instead of the Third Rome in Russia, the Third International was achieved, and many of the features of the Third Rome pass over to the Third International. The Third International is also a Holy Empire, and it also is founded on an Orthodox faith. The Third International is not international, but a Russian national idea.
Berdyaev espoused Christian anarchism.
== Theology and relations with Russian Orthodox Church ==
Berdyaev was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church,: pp. 111–112 : p. 8 and believed Orthodoxy was the religious tradition closest to early Christianity.: at unk. Nicholas Berdyaev was an Orthodox Christian, however, it must be said that he was an independent and somewhat a "liberal" kind. Berdyaev also criticized the Russian Orthodox Church and described his views as anticlerical. Yet he considered himself closer to Orthodoxy than either Catholicism or Protestantism. According to him, "I can not call myself a typical Orthodox of any kind; but Orthodoxy was near to me (and I hope I am nearer to Orthodoxy) than either Catholicism or Protestantism. I never severed my link with the Orthodox Church, although confessional self-satisfaction and exclusiveness are alien to me."Berdyaev is frequently presented as one of the important Russian Orthodox thinkers of the 20th century. However, neopatristic scholars such as Florovsky have questioned whether his philosophy is essentially Orthodox in character, and emphasize his western influences. But Florovsky was savaged in a 1937 Journal Put' article by Berdyaev. Paul Valliere has pointed out the sociological factors and global trends which have shaped the Neopatristic movement, and questions their claim that Berdyaev and Vladimir Solovyov are somehow less authentically Orthodox.Berdyaev affirmed universal salvation, as did several other important Orthodox theologians of the 20th century. Along with Sergei Bulgakov, he was instrumental in bringing renewed attention to the Orthodox doctrine of apokatastasis, which had largely been neglected since it was expounded by Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century, although he rejected Origen's articulation of this doctrine.The aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, along with Soviet interference, caused the Russian Orthodox émigré diaspora to splinter into three Russian Church jurisdictions: the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (separated from Moscow Patriarchate until 2007), the parishes under Metropolitan Eulogius (Georgiyevsky) that went under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, and parishes that remained under the Moscow Patriarchate. Berdyaev was among those that chose to remain under the omophorion of the Moscow Patriarchate. He is mentioned by name on the Korsun/Chersonese Diocesan history as among those noted figures who supported the Moscow Patriarchate West-European Eparchy (in France now Korsun eparchy).Currently, the house in Clamart in which Berdyaev lived, now comprises a small "Berdiaev-museum" and attached Chapel in name of the Holy Spirit, under the omophorion of the Moscow Patriarchate. On 24 March 2018, the 70th anniversary of Berdyaev's death, the priest of the Chapel served panikhida-memorial prayer at the Diocesan cathedral for eternal memory of Berdyaev, and later that day the Diocesan bishop Nestor (Sirotenko) presided over prayer at the grave of Berdyaev.
== Works ==
In 1901 Berdyaev opened his literary career so to speak by work on Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. In it, he analyzed a movement then beginning in Imperial Russia that "at the beginning of the twentieth-century Russian Marxism split up; the more cultured Russian Marxists went through a spiritual crisis and became founders of an idealist and religious movement, while the majority began to prepare the advent of Communism". He wrote "over twenty books and dozens of articles."The first date is of the Russian edition, the second date is of the first English edition
Subjectivism and Individualism in Societal Philosophy (1901)
The New Religious Consciousness and Society (1907) (Russian: Новое религиозное сознание и общественность, romanized: Novoe religioznoe coznanie i obschestvennost, includes chapter VI "The Metaphysics of Sex and Love")
Sub specie aeternitatis: Articles Philosophic, Social and Literary (1900-1906) (1907; 2019) ISBN 9780999197929 ISBN 9780999197936
Vekhi - Landmarks (1909; 1994) ISBN 9781563243912
The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia (1910; 2014) ISBN 978-0-9963992-1-0
The Philosophy of Freedom (1911; 2020) ISBN 9780999197943 ISBN 9780999197950
Aleksei Stepanovich Khomyakov (1912; 2017) ISBN 9780996399258 ISBN 9780999197912
"Quenchers of the Spirit" (1913; 1999)
The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916; 1955) ISBN 978-15973126-2-2
The Crisis of Art (1918; 2018) ISBN 9780996399296 ISBN 9780999197905
The Fate of Russia (1918; 2016) ISBN 9780996399241
Dostoevsky: An Interpretation (1921; 1934) ISBN 978-15973126-1-5
Oswald Spengler and the Decline of Europe (1922)
The Meaning of History (1923; 1936) ISBN 978-14128049-7-4
The Philosophy of Inequality (1923; 2015) ISBN 978-0-9963992-0-3
The End of Our Time [a.k.a. The New Middle Ages] (1924; 1933) ISBN 978-15973126-5-3
Leontiev (1926; 1940)
Freedom and the Spirit (1927–8; 1935) ISBN 978-15973126-0-8
The Russian Revolution (1931; anthology)
The Destiny of Man (1931; translated by Natalie Duddington 1937) ISBN 978-15973125-6-1
Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard N. A. Beryaev 1936
Christianity and Class War (1931; 1933)
The Fate of Man in the Modern World (1934; 1935)
Solitude and Society (1934; 1938) ISBN 978-15973125-5-4
The Bourgeois Mind (1934; anthology)
The Origin of Russian Communism (1937; 1955)
Christianity and Anti-semitism (1938; 1952)
Slavery and Freedom (1939) ISBN 978-15973126-6-0
The Russian Idea (1946; 1947)
Spirit and Reality (1946; 1957) ISBN 978-15973125-4-7
The Beginning and the End (1947; 1952) ISBN 978-15973126-4-6
Towards a New Epoch" (1949; anthology)
Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (1949; 1950) alternate title: Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Autobiography ISBN 978-15973125-8-5
The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (1949; 1952)
Divine and the Human (1949; 1952) ISBN 978-15973125-9-2
"The Truth of Orthodoxy", Vestnik of the Russian West European Patriarchal Exarchate, translated by A.S. III, Paris, 1952, retrieved 27 September 2017
Truth and Revelation (n.p.; 1953)
Astride the Abyss of War and Revolutions: Articles 1914-1922 (n.p.; 2017) ISBN 9780996399272 ISBN 9780996399289Sources'"Bibliographie des Oeuvres de Nicolas Berdiaev" établie par Tamara Klépinine' published by the Institut d'études Slaves, Paris 1978
Berdyaev Bibliography on www.cherbucto.net
By-Berdyaev Online Articles Index
== See also ==
== References ==
== Sources ==
"Berdyaev, Orthodox religious philosopher, dies in Paris". The Living Church. Vol. 116. Morehouse-Gorham Company. 1948. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
Blowers, Paul M. (2008). "Apokatastasis". In Benedetto, R.; Duke, J.O. (eds.). The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: The early, medieval, and Reformation eras. New Westminster Dictionary Series. Westminster John Knox Press. pp. 36–37. ISBN 978-0-664-22416-5.
Clarke, Oliver Fielding (1950). Introduction to Berdyaev. Bles.
Cunningham, M.B.; Theokritoff, E. (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology. Cambridge Companions to Religion. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521864848.
Deak, Esteban (1977). Apokatastasis: The Problem Of Universal Salvation In Twentieth Century Theology (Thesis). Toronto, Canada: University of St. Michael's College. ISBN 9780315454330.
Florovsky, George (1950). "Book review: Introduction to Berdyaev By Clarke. Nicolas Berdyaev: Captive of freedom by Spinka". Church History. 19 (4): 305–306. doi:10.2307/3161171. JSTOR 3161171. S2CID 162966900.
Kirwan, Michael; Hidden, Sheelah Treflé (2016). Mimesis and Atonement: René Girard and the Doctrine of Salvation. Violence, Desire, and the Sacred. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5013-2544-1.
Donald A. Lowrie. Rebellious Prophet: A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1960.
Noble, Ivana (2015). "Three Orthodox visions of ecumenism: Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Lossky". Communio Viatorum. 57 (2): 113–140. ISSN 0010-3713.
M. A. Vallon. An apostle of freedom: Life and teachings of Nicolas Berdyaev. Philosophical Library, New York, 1960.
Lesley Chamberlain. Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. St. Martin's Press, New York, 2007.
Marko Marković, La Philosophie de l'inégalité et les idées politiques de Nicolas Berdiaev (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1978).
Valliere, Paul (2006). "Introduction to the Modern Orthodox Tradition". In Witte, John Jr.; Alexander, Frank S. (eds.). The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 503–532.
Witte, John; Alexander, Frank S. (2007). The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-14265-6.
== Further reading ==
Lossky, N.O. (1951). "Н.А. Бердяев" [N. Berdyaev]. История российской Философии [History of Russian Philosophy]. New York: International Universities Press Inc. ISBN 978-0-8236-8074-0.
Nucho, Fuad (1967). Berdyaev's Philosophy: The existential paradox of freedom and necessity (1st ed.). London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Atterbury, Lyn (October 1978). "Nicholas Berdyaev, Orthodox nonconformist". Third Way. Toward a Biblical World View: 13–15. Retrieved 2013-01-30.
Griffith, Jeremy (2013). Freedom Book 1. Vol. Part 4:7: Nikolai Berdyaev’s admission of the involvement of our moral instincts and corrupting intellect in producing the upset state of the human condition and attempt to explain how those elements produced that upset psychosis. WTM Publishing & Communications. ISBN 978-1-74129-011-0. Retrieved 2013-03-28.
Men', Fr. Aleksandr (2015). Russian Religious Philosophy: 1989-1990 Lectures [Русская религиозная философия: Лекции]. frsj Publications. ISBN 9780996399227.
Sergeev, Mikhail (1994). "Post-Modern Themes in the Philosophy of Nicholas Berdyaev". Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe. 14 (5). Retrieved 27 September 2017.
== External links ==
Works by or about Nikolai Berdyaev at Internet Archive
Works by Nikolai Berdyaev at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Berdyaev Online Library and Index
Dirk H. Kelder's collection of Berdyaev essays and quotes
Philosopher of Freedom Archived 2020-02-20 at the Wayback Machine
ISFP Gallery of Russian Thinkers: Nikolay Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdiaev and Spiritual Freedom
Fr. Aleksandr Men' Lecture on N. A. Berdyaev
Odinblago.ru: Бердяев Николай Александрович (Russian)
Korsun/Chersonese Eparchy (Russian and French language) |
Ernst Cassirer | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Cassirer | Ernst Alfred Cassirer ( kah-SEER-ər, kə-, German: [ˈɛʁnst kaˈsiːʁɐ]; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.
After Cohen's death in 1918, Cassirer developed a theory of symbolism and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. Cassirer was one of the leading 20th-century advocates of philosophical idealism. His most famous work is the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929).
Though his work received a mixed reception shortly after his death, more recent scholarship has remarked upon Cassirer's role as a strident defender of the moral idealism of the Enlightenment era and the cause of liberal democracy at a time when the rise of fascism had made such advocacy unfashionable. Within the international Jewish community, Cassirer's work has additionally been seen as part of a long tradition of thought on ethical philosophy.
== Biography ==
Born in Breslau in Silesia (modern-day southwest Poland), into a Jewish family, Cassirer studied literature and philosophy at the University of Marburg (where he completed his doctoral work in 1899 with a dissertation on René Descartes's analysis of mathematical and natural scientific knowledge entitled Descartes' Kritik der mathematischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis [Descartes' Critique of Mathematical and Scientific Knowledge]) and at the University of Berlin (where he completed his habilitation in 1906 with the dissertation Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit: Erster Band [The Problem of Knowledge in Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age: Volume I]).Politically, Cassirer supported the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP). After working for many years as a Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Cassirer was elected in 1919 to the philosophy chair at the newly founded University of Hamburg, where he lectured until 1933, supervising amongst others the doctoral theses of Joachim Ritter and Leo Strauss.
On 30 January 1933, the Nazi Regime came to power. Cassirer left Germany on 12 March 1933 - one week after the first Reichstagswahl under that Regime - because he was Jewish.After leaving Germany he taught for a couple of years at the University of Oxford, before becoming a professor at Gothenburg University. When Cassirer considered Sweden too unsafe, he applied for a post at Harvard University, but was rejected because thirty years earlier he had rejected a job offer from them. In 1941 he became a visiting professor at Yale University, then moved to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945.
Cassirer died of a heart attack in April 1945 in New York City. The young rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who was a student of Cassirer's at Columbia University, conducted the funeral service. His grave is located in Westwood, New Jersey, on the Cedar Park Beth-El Cemeteries in the graves of the Congregation Habonim. His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.
Other members of his prominent family included the neurologist Richard Cassirer, the publisher and gallery owner Bruno Cassirer and the art dealer and editor Paul Cassirer.
== Influences ==
Donald Phillip Verene, who published some of Cassirer's papers kept at Yale University, gave this overview of his ideas:
"Cassirer as a thinker became an embodiment of Kantian principles, but also of much more, of an overall movement of spirit stretching from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and on to Herder’s conception of history, Goethe’s poetry, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s study of the Kavi language, Schelling’s Philosophie Der Mythologie, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Vischer’s conception of the aesthetic symbol, among many others. Cassirer’s own position is born through a mastery of the whole development of this world of the humanistic understanding, which included the rise of the scientific world view — a mastery evident both in his historical works and in his systematic philosophy."
== Work ==
=== History of science ===
Cassirer's first major published writings were a history of modern thought from the Renaissance to Kant. In accordance with his Marburg neo-Kantianism he concentrated upon epistemology. His reading of the scientific revolution, in books such as The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1927), as a "Platonic" application of mathematics to nature, influenced historians such as E. A. Burtt, E. J. Dijksterhuis, and Alexandre Koyré.
=== Philosophy of science ===
In Substance and Function (1910), he writes about late nineteenth-century developments in physics including relativity theory and the foundations of mathematics. In Einstein's Theory of Relativity (1921) he defended the claim that modern physics supports a neo-Kantian conception of knowledge. He also wrote a book about Quantum mechanics called Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (1936).
=== Philosophy of symbolic forms ===
At Hamburg Cassirer discovered the Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg. Warburg was an art historian who was particularly interested in ritual and myth as sources of surviving forms of emotional expression. In Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) Cassirer argues that man (as he put it in his more popular 1944 book Essay on Man) is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, humans create a universe of symbolic meanings. Cassirer is particularly interested in natural language and myth. He argues that science and mathematics developed from natural language, and religion and art from myth.
=== The Cassirer–Heidegger debate ===
In 1929 Cassirer took part in a historically significant encounter with Martin Heidegger in Davos during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs (the Cassirer–Heidegger debate). Cassirer argues that while Kant's Critique of Pure Reason emphasizes human temporality and finitude, he also sought to situate human cognition within a broader conception of humanity. Cassirer challenges Heidegger's relativism by invoking the universal validity of truths discovered by the exact and moral sciences.
=== Philosophy of the Enlightenment ===
Cassirer believed that reason's self-realization leads to human liberation. Mazlish (2000), however, notes that Cassirer in his The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) focuses exclusively on ideas, ignoring the political and social context in which they were produced.
=== The Logic of the Cultural Sciences ===
In The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) Cassirer argues that objective and universal validity can be achieved not only in the sciences, but also in practical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic phenomena. Although inter-subjective objective validity in the natural sciences derives from universal laws of nature, Cassirer asserts that an analogous type of inter-subjective objective validity takes place in the cultural sciences.
=== The Myth of the State ===
Cassirer's last work, The Myth of the State (1946), was published posthumously; at one level it is an attempt to understand the intellectual origins of Nazi Germany. Cassirer sees Nazi Germany as a society in which the dangerous power of myth is not checked or subdued by superior forces. The book discusses the opposition of logos and mythos in Greek thought, Plato's Republic, the medieval theory of the state, Machiavelli, Thomas Carlyle's writings on hero worship, the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau, and Hegel. Cassirer claimed that in 20th-century politics there was a return, with the passive acquiescence of Martin Heidegger, to the irrationality of myth, and in particular to a belief that there is such a thing as destiny. Of this passive acquiescence, Cassirer says that in departing from Husserl's belief in an objective, logical basis for philosophy, Heidegger attenuated the ability of philosophy to oppose the resurgence of myth in German politics of the 1930s.
== Partial bibliography ==
Leibniz' System in seinem wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902)
The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel [Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit] (1906–1920), English translation 1950 (online edition)
"Kant und die moderne Mathematik." Kant-Studien (1907)
Substance and Function [Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff] (1910) and Einstein's Theory of Relativity [Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie ] (1921), English translation 1923 (online edition)
Freedom and Form [Freiheit und Form] (1916)
Kant's Life and Thought [Kants Leben und Lehre] (1918), English translation 1981
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms [Philosophie der symbolischen Formen] (1923–29), English translation 1953–1957
Volume One: Language [Erster Teil: Die Sprache] (1923), English translation 1955
Volume Two: Mythical Thought [Zweiter Teil: Das mythische Denken] (1925), English translation 1955
Volume Three: The Phenomenology of Knowledge [Dritter Teil: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis] (1929), English translation 1957
Language and Myth [Sprache und Mythos] (1925), English translation 1946 by Susanne K. Langer
The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy [Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance] (1927), English translation 1963 by Mario Domandi
"Erkenntnistheorie nebst den Grenzfragen der Logik und Denkpsychologie." Jahrbücher der Philosophie 3, 31-92 (1927)
Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung (1929)
"Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kantinterpretation." Kant-Studien 26, 1-16 (1931)
Philosophy of the Enlightenment [Die Philosophie der Aufklärung] (1932), English translation 1951
Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: Historical and Systematic Studies of the Problem of Causality [Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik] (1936), English translation 1956
The Logic of the Cultural Sciences [Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften] (1942), English translation 2000 by Steve G. Lofts (previously translated in 1961 as The Logic of the Humanities)
An Essay on Man (written and published in English) (1944) (books.google.com)
The Myth of the State (written and published in English) (posthumous) (1946) (books.google.com)
Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, ed. by Donald Phillip Verene (March 11, 1981)
Ernst Cassirer: Gesammelte Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. Electronic Edition. (2016) – The electronic version of the definitive edition of Cassirer's works, published in print by Felix Meiner Verlag, and electronically in the Past Masters series.
The Warburg Years (1919-1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology. Translated and with an Introduction by S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Aubenque, Pierre, et al. "Philosophie und Politik: Die Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidgger in der Retrospektive." Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 2: 290-312
Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (2008) (excerpt and text search)
Burtt, Edwin Arthur. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, London: Paul Trencher (2000)
Eilenberger, Wolfram. Time of the Magicians: The invention of modern thought, 1919–29, Allen Lane (2020)
Folkvord Ingvild & Hoel Aud Sissel (eds.), Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology: Contemporary Readings, (2012), Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan (ISBN 978-0-230-36547-6).
Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000) (excerpt and text search)
Gordon, Peter Eli. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010)
Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (Yale University Press 1987)
Lassègue, Jean. Cassirer’s Transformation: From a Transcendental to a Semiotic Philosophy of Forms. Springer, 2020. (Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics book series. volume 55) Online ISBN 978-3-030-42905-8
Lipton, David R. Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914-1933 (1978)
Lofts. Steve G. Ernst Cassirer: A "Repetition" of Modernity (2000) SUNY Press, ISBN 978-0-791-44495-5: at Google Books
Magerski, Christine. "Reaching Beyond the Supra-Historical Sphere: from Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to Bourdieu's Sociology of Symbolic Forms." ´´Pierre Bourdieu and the Field of Cultural Production.´´ Ed. J. Browitt. University of Delaware Press (2004): 21-29.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.). The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1949) archive.org
Schultz, William. Cassirer & Langer on Myth (2nd ed. 2000) (excerpt and text search)
Skidelsky, Edward. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton University Press, 2008), 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13134-4.
Hardy, Anton G. "Symbol Philosophy and the Opening into Consciousness and Creativity" (2014)
== External links ==
Friedman, Michael. "Ernst Cassirer". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
History of the Cassirer Family
Ernst Cassirer in family context
Centre for Intercultural Studies
Works by Ernst Cassirer at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Ernst Cassirer at Internet Archive
Newspaper clippings about Ernst Cassirer in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
Ernst Cassirer Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University.
Ernst Cassirer Papers - Addition. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. |
Max Scheler | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Scheler | Max Ferdinand Scheler (German: [ˈʃeːlɐ]; 22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Given that school's utopian ambitions of re-founding all of human knowledge, Scheler was nicknamed the "Adam of the philosophical paradise" by José Ortega y Gasset.
After Scheler's death in 1928, Martin Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as "the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such."Scheler was an important influence on the theology of Pope John Paul II, who wrote his 1954 doctoral thesis on "An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler", and later wrote many articles on Scheler's philosophy. Thanks to John Paul II as well as to Scheler's influence on his student Edith Stein, Scheler has exercised a notable influence on Catholic thought to this day.
== Life and career ==
=== Childhood ===
Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, on 22 August 1874, to a well-respected orthodox Jewish family. He had "a rather typical late nineteenth century upbringing in a Jewish household bent on assimilation and agnosticism." As an adolescent he turned to Catholicism, and Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine and Pascal would significantly influence his philosophical positions.
=== Student years ===
Scheler began his university studies as a medical student at the University of Munich; he then transferred to the University of Berlin where he abandoned medicine in favor of philosophy and sociology, studying under Wilhelm Dilthey, Carl Stumpf and Georg Simmel. He moved to the University of Jena in 1896 where he studied under Rudolf Eucken, at that time a very popular philosopher who went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908. (Eucken corresponded with William James, a noted proponent of philosophical pragmatism, and throughout his life, Scheler entertained a strong interest in pragmatism.) It was at Jena that Scheler completed his doctorate and his habilitation and began his professional life as a teacher. His doctoral thesis, completed in 1897, was entitled Beiträge zur Feststellung der Beziehungen zwischen den logischen und ethischen Prinzipien (Contribution to establishing the relationships between logical and ethical principles). In 1898 he made a trip to Heidelberg and met Max Weber, who also had a significant impact on his thought. He earned his habilitation in 1899 with a thesis entitled Die transzendentale und die psychologische Methode (The transcendental and the psychological method) directed by Eucken. He became a lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Jena in 1901.
=== First period (Jena, Munich, Gottingen and World War I) ===
Scheler taught at Jena from 1901 until 1906, then returned to the University of Munich where he taught from 1907 to 1910. At this time his study of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology deepened. Scheler had first met Husserl at Halle in 1901. At Munich, Husserl's own teacher Franz Brentano was still lecturing, and Scheler joined the Phenomenological Circle in Munich, centred around M. Beck, Th. Conrad, J. Daubert, M. Geiger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Theodor Lipps, and Alexander Pfänder. Scheler was never a direct student of Husserl's, and in fact, their relationship was somewhat strained. In later years Scheler was rather critical of Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900/01) and Ideas I (1913), and he also was to harbor reservations about Being and Time by Martin Heidegger.
At Munich Scheler was caught up in the conflict between the predominantly Catholic university and the local Socialist media, which led to the loss of his Munich teaching position in 1910. He then briefly lectured at the Philosophical Society of Göttingen, where he made and renewed acquaintances with Theodore Conrad, Hedwig Conrad-Martius (an ontologist and Conrad's wife), Moritz Geiger, Jean Hering, Roman Ingarden, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Husserl, Alexandre Koyré, and Adolf Reinach. Edith Stein was one of his students, impressed by him "way beyond philosophy". In 1911, he moved to Berlin as an unattached writer and grew close to Walther Rathenau and Werner Sombart.
When his first marriage, to Amalie von Dewitz, ended in divorce, Scheler married Märit Furtwängler in 1912, who was the sister of the noted conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Scheler's son by his first wife, Wolf Scheler, became troublesome after the divorce, often stealing from his father, and in 1923, after Wolf had tried to force him to pay for a prostitute, Scheler sent him to his former student Kurt Schneider, a psychiatrist, for diagnosis. Schneider diagnosed Wolf as not being mentally ill, but a psychopath, using two diagnostic categories (Gemütlos and Haltlos) essentially equivalent to today's "antisocial personality disorder".Along with other Munich phenomenologists such as Reinach, Pfänder and Geiger, Scheler co-founded in 1912 the famous Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, with Husserl as main editor. Scheler's first major work, published in 1913, was strongly influenced by phenomenology: Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (English translation: The Nature of Sympathy, 1954).
During World War I (1914–1918), Scheler was initially drafted, but later discharged because of astigmia of the eyes. He was passionately devoted to the defence of both the war and Germany's cause during the conflict.
=== Second period (Cologne) ===
In 1919 Scheler became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne. He stayed there until 1928.
After 1921 he disassociated himself in public from Catholic teaching and even from the Judeo-Christian God, committing himself to pantheism and philosophical anthropology.His thinking increasingly took on a political character, and he became the only scholar of rank in the Weimar Republic to warn in public speeches against the dangers both of National Socialism and Communism. He met the Russian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev in Berlin in 1923. In 1927 he delivered talks in Berlin on 'Politics and Morals' and 'The Idea of Eternal Peace and Pacifism'. He argued that capitalism is not so much an economic system as a calculating, globally growing 'mind-set'. While economic capitalism may have had some roots in ascetic Calvinism (as argued by Max Weber), its mind-set, however, has its origin in modern, subconscious angst as expressed in increasing needs for financial and other securities, for protection and personal safeguards as well as for rational manageability of all things, which ultimately subordinates the value of the individual person. Scheler called instead for a new era of culture and values, which he called 'The World-Era of Adjustment'.
Scheler also advocated an international university to be set up in Switzerland and was at that time supportive of programs such as 'continuing education' and of what he seems to have been the first to call a 'United States of Europe'. He deplored the gap existing in Germany between power and mind, a gap which he regarded as the very source of an impending dictatorship and the greatest obstacle to the establishment of German democracy. Five years after his death, the Nazi dictatorship (1933–1945) suppressed Scheler's work.
Towards the end of his life many invitations were extended to him from China, India, Japan, and Russia. On the advice of his physician, he cancelled reservations on the Star Line to the United States.
In 1927 at a conference in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, arranged by the new-age philosopher Hermann Keyserling, Scheler delivered a lengthy lecture entitled 'Man's Particular Place' (Die Sonderstellung des Menschen), published later in much abbreviated form as Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos [literally: 'Man's Position in the Cosmos']. His well-known oratorical style and delivery captivated his audience for about four hours.
Early in 1928, he accepted a new position at the University of Frankfurt. There he looked forward to conversing with Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, Rudolph Otto and Richard Wilhelm, all of whom are occasionally referred to in his writings.
Scheler had developed the habit of smoking between sixty and eighty cigarettes a day which contributed to a series of heart attacks throughout 1928, forcing him to cancel any travel plans. On May 19, 1928, he died in a Frankfurt hospital due to complications from a severe heart attack. His plans to publish a major work in Anthropology in 1929 were curtailed by his premature death.
== Philosophical contributions ==
=== Love and the "phenomenological attitude" ===
When the editors of Geisteswissenschaften invited Scheler (about 1913/14) to write on the then developing philosophical method of phenomenology, Scheler indicated that the phenomenological movement was not defined by universally accepted theses but by a "common bearing and attitude toward philosophical problems." Scheler disagrees with Husserl that phenomenology is a method of strict phenomenological reduction, but rather "an attitude of spiritual seeing...something which otherwise remains hidden...." Calling phenomenology a method fails to take seriously the phenomenological domain of original experience: the givenness of phenomenological facts (essences or values as a priori) "before they have been fixed by logic," and prior to assuming a set of criteria or symbols, as is the case in the natural and human sciences as well as other (modern) philosophies which tailor their methods to those of the sciences.
Rather, that which is given in phenomenology "is given only in the seeing and experiencing act itself." The essences are never given to an 'outside' observer without direct contact with a specific domain of experience. Phenomenology is an engagement of phenomena, while simultaneously a waiting for its self-givenness; it is not a methodical procedure of observation as if its object is stationary. Thus, the particular attitude (Geisteshaltung, lit. "disposition of the spirit" or "spiritual posture") of the philosopher is crucial for the disclosure, or seeing, of phenomenological facts. This attitude is fundamentally a moral one, where the strength of philosophical inquiry rests upon the basis of love. Scheler describes the essence of philosophical thinking as "a love-determined movement of the inmost personal self of a finite being toward participation in the essential reality of all possibles."The movement and act of love is important for philosophy for two reasons: (1) If philosophy, as Scheler describes it, hearkening back to the Platonic tradition, is a participation in a "primal essence of all essences" (Urwesen), it follows that for this participation to be achieved one must incorporate within oneself the content or essential characteristic of the primal essence. For Scheler, such a primal essence is most characterized according to love, thus the way to achieve the most direct and intimate participation is precisely to share in the movement of love. It is important to mention, however, that this primal essence is not an objectifiable entity whose possible correlate is knowledge; thus, even if philosophy is always concerned with knowing, as Scheler would concur, nevertheless, reason itself is not the proper participative faculty by which the greatest level of knowing is achieved. Only when reason and logic have behind them the movement of love and the proper moral preconditions can one achieve philosophical knowledge. (2) Love is likewise important insofar as its essence is the condition for the possibility of the givenness of value-objects and especially the givenness of an object in terms of its highest possible value. Love is the movement which "brings about the continuous emergence of ever-higher value in the object--just as if it was streaming out from the object of its own accord, without any sort of exertion...on the part of the lover. ...true love opens our spiritual eyes to ever-higher values in the object loved." Hatred, on the other hand, is the closing off of oneself or closing one's eyes to the world of values. It is in the latter context that value-inversions or devaluations become prevalent, and are sometimes solidified as proper in societies. Furthermore, by calling love a movement, Scheler hopes to dispel the interpretation that love and hate are only reactions to felt values rather than the very ground for the possibility of value-givenness (or value-concealment). Scheler writes, "Love and hate are acts in which the value-realm accessible to the feelings of a being...is either extended or narrowed." Love and hate are to be distinguished from sensible and even psychical feelings; they are, instead, characterized by an intentional function (one always loves or hates something) and therefore must belong to the same anthropological sphere as theoretical consciousness and the acts of willing and thinking. Scheler, therefore calls love and hate, "spiritual feelings," and are the basis for an "emotive a priori" insofar as values, through love, are given in the same manner as are essences, through cognition. In short, love is a value-cognition, and insofar as it is determinative of the way in which a philosopher approaches the world, it is also indicative of a phenomenological attitude.
=== Material value-ethics ===
A fundamental aspect of Scheler's phenomenology is the extension of the realm of the a priori to include not only formal propositions, but material ones as well. Kant's identification of the a priori with the formal was a "fundamental error" which is the basis of his ethical formalism. Furthermore, Kant erroneously identified the realm of the non-formal (material) with sensible or empirical content. The heart of Scheler's criticism of Kant is within his theory of values. Values are given a priori, and are "feelable" phenomena. The intentional feeling of love discloses values insofar as love opens a person evermore to beings-of-value (Wertsein).
Additionally, values are not formal realities; they do not exist somewhere apart from the world and their bearers, and they only exist with a value-bearer, as a value-being. They are, therefore, part of the realm of a material a priori. Nevertheless, values can vary with respect to their bearers without there ever occurring an alteration in the object as bearer. E.g., the value of a specific work of art or specific religious articles may vary according to differences of culture and religion. However, this variation of values with respect to their bearers by no means amounts to the relativity of values as such, but only with respect to the particular value-bearer. As such, the values of culture are always spiritual irrespective of the objects that may bear this value, and values of the holy still remain the highest values regardless of their bearers. According to Scheler, the disclosure of the value-being of an object precedes representation. The axiological reality of values is given prior to knowing, but, upon being felt through value-feeling, can be known (as to their essential interconnections).
Values and their corresponding disvalues are ranked according to their essential interconnections as follows:
Religiously-relevant values (holy/unholy)
Spiritual values (beauty/ugliness, knowledge/ignorance, right/wrong)
Vital values (health/unhealthiness, strength/weakness)
Sensible values (agreeable/disagreeable, comfort/discomfort)Further essential interconnections apply with respect to a value's (disvalue's) existence or non-existence:
The existence of a positive value is itself a positive value.
The existence of a negative value (disvalue) is itself a negative value.
The non-existence of a positive value is itself a negative value.
The non-existence of a negative value is itself a positive value.And with respect to values of good and evil:
Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a positive value in the sphere of willing.
Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a negative value in the sphere of willing.
Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a higher value in the sphere of willing.
Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a lower value [at the expense of a higher one] in the sphere of willing.Goodness, however, is not simply "attached" to an act of willing, but originates ultimately within the disposition (Gesinnung) or "basic moral tenor" of the acting person. Accordingly:
The criterion of 'good' consists in the agreement of a value intended, in the realization, with the value preferred, or in its disagreement with the value rejected.
The criterion of 'evil' consists in the disagreement of a value intended, in the realization, with the value preferred, or in its agreement with the value rejected.Scheler argued that most of the older ethical systems (Kantian formalism, theonomic ethics, nietzscheanism, hedonism, consequentialism, and platonism, for example) fall into axiological error by emphasizing one value-rank to the exclusion of the others. A novel aspect of Scheler's ethics is the importance of the "kairos" or call of the hour. Moral rules cannot guide the person to make ethical choices in difficult, existential life-choices. For Scheler, the very capacity to obey rules is rooted in the basic moral tenor of the person.
A disorder "of the heart" occurs whenever a person prefers a value of a lower rank to a higher rank, or a disvalue to a value.
The term Wertsein or value-being is used by Scheler in many contexts, but his untimely death prevented him from working out an axiological ontology. Another unique and controversial element of Scheler's axiology is the notion of the emotive a priori: values can only be felt, just as color can only be seen. Reason cannot think values; the mind can only
order categories of value after lived experience has happened. For Scheler, the person is the locus of value-experience, a timeless act-being that acts into time. Scheler's appropriation of a value-based metaphysics renders his phenomenology quite different from the phenomenology of consciousness (Husserl, Sartre) or the existential analysis of the being-in-the-world of Dasein (Heidegger). Scheler's concept of the "lived body" was appropriated in the early work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Max Scheler extended the phenomenological method to include a reduction of the scientific method too, thus questioning the idea of Husserl that phenomenological philosophy should be pursued as a rigorous science. Natural and scientific attitudes (Einstellung) are both phenomenologically counterpositive and hence must be sublated in the advancement of the real phenomenological reduction which, in the eyes of Scheler, has more the shapes of an allround ascesis (Askese) rather than a mere logical procedure of suspending the existential judgments. The Wesenschau, according to Scheler, is an act of breaking down the Sosein limits of Sein A into the essential-ontological domain of Sein B, in short, an ontological participation of Sosenheiten, seeing the things as such (cf. the Buddhist concept of tathata, and the Christian theological quidditas).
=== Man and History (1924) ===
Scheler planned to publish his major work in Anthropology in 1929, but the completion of such a project was curtailed by his premature death in 1928. Some fragments of such work have been published in Nachlass. In 1924, Man and History (Mensch und Geschichte), Scheler gave some preliminary statements on the range and goal of philosophical anthropology.In this book, Scheler argues for a tabula rasa of all the inherited prejudices from the three main traditions that have formulated an idea of man: religion, philosophy and science. Scheler argues that it is not enough just to reject such traditions, as did Nietzsche with the Judeo-Christian religion by saying that "God is dead"; these traditions have impregnated all parts of our culture, and therefore still determine a great deal of the way of thinking even of those that don't believe in the Christian God. To really get freedom from such traditions it is necessary to study and deconstruct them (Husserl's term Abbau).
Scheler says that philosophical anthropology must address the totality of man, while it must be informed by the specialized sciences like biology, psychology, sociology, etc.
== Works ==
Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass, 1913
Der Genius des Kriegs und der Deutsche Krieg, 1915
Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913 - 1916
Krieg und Aufbau, 1916
Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, 1917
Vom Umsturz der Werte, 1919
Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus, 1921
Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 1921
Probleme der Religion. Zur religiösen Erneuerung, 1921
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 1923 (neu aufgelegt als Titel von 1913: Zur Phänomenologie ...)
Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre, 3 Bände, 1923/1924
Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, 1926
Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Ausgleichs, 1927
Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928
Philosophische Weltanschauung, 1929
Logik I. (Fragment, Korrekturbögen). Amsterdam 1975
=== English translations ===
The Nature of Sympathy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954.
Philosophical Perspectives. translated by Oscar Haac. Boston: Beacon Press. 1958.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 144 pages. (German title: Philosophische Weltanschauung.)On the Eternal in Man. translated by Bernard Noble. London: SCM Press. 1960.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 480 pages.Ressentiment. edited by Lewis A. Coser, translated by William W. Holdheim. New York: Schocken. 1972.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 201 pages. ISBN 0-8052-0370-2.Selected Philosophical Essays. translated by David R. Lachterman. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 1973. ISBN 9780810103795.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 359 pages. ISBN 0-8101-0379-6.Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A new attempt toward the foundation of an ethical personalism. translated by Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 1973.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 620 pages. ISBN 0-8101-0415-6. (Original German edition: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913–16.)
Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. translated by Manfred S. Frings. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1980.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 239 pages. ISBN 0-7100-0302-1.Person and Self-value: three essays. edited and partially translated by Manfred S. Frings. Boston: Nijhoff. 1987.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 201 pages. ISBN 90-247-3380-4.On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing. Selected Writings. edited and partially translated by Harold J. Bershady. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 267 pages. ISBN 0-226-73671-7.The Human Place in the Cosmos. translated by Manfred Frings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 2009.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) 79 pages. ISBN 978-0-8101-2529-2.
== See also ==
Axiological ethics
Ressentiment (Scheler)
Mimpathy
== References ==
== Sources ==
Barber, Michael (1993). Guardian of Dialogue: Max Scheler's Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Philosophy of Love. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 205 pages. ISBN 0-8387-5228-4.Blosser, Philip (1995). Scheler's Critique of Kant's Ethics. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. ISBN 9780821411087. 221 pages. ISBN 0-8214-1108-X.Deeken, Alfons (1974). Process and Permanence in Ethics: Max Scheler's Moral Philosophy. New York: Paulist Press. 282 pages. ISBN 0-8091-1800-9.Frings, Manfred S. (1965). Max Scheler: A concise introduction to the world of a great thinker. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. 223 pages.Frings, Manfred S. (1969). Person und Dasein: Zur Frage der Ontologie des Wertseins. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. 118 pages.Frings, Manfred S., ed. (1974). Max Scheler (1874-1928): centennial essays. The Hague: Nijhoff. 176 pages.Frings, Manfred (1997). The Mind of Max Scheler: The first comprehensive guide based on the complete works. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press. 324 pages. ISBN 0-87462-613-7. 2nd ed., 2001.Frings, Manfred (2003). Life-Time. Springer. 260 pages. ISBN 1-4020-1333-7. 2nd ed., 2001.Kelly, Eugene (1977). Max Scheler. Chicago: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 9780805777079. 203 pages. ISBN 0-8057-7707-5.Kelly, Eugene (1997). Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler. Boston: Kluwer. 247 pages. ISBN 0-7923-4492-8.Nota, John H., S.J. (1983). Max Scheler: The Man and His Work. translated by Theodore Plantinga and John H. Nota. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. 213 pages. ISBN 0-8199-0852-5. (Original Dutch title: Max Scheler: De man en zijn werk)Ranly, Ernest W. (1966). Scheler's Phenomenology of Community. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 130 pages.Schneck, Stephen F. (1987). Person and Polis: Max Scheler's Personalism and Political Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press. 188 pages. ISBN 0-88706-340-3.Spader, Peter (2002). Scheler's Ethical Personalism: Its logic, Development, and Promise. New York: Fordham University Press. 327 pages. ISBN 0-8232-2178-4.
== External links ==
Max-Scheler-Gesellschaft (Max Scheler Society) - German-language website
Works by Max Scheler at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Max Scheler at Internet Archive
Nature, Vol. 63. March 7, 1901, Book review of: Die Transcendentale Und Die Psychologische Methode, Method in Philosophy, Dr. Max F. Scheler, 1900
The Monist, Vol 12, 1902 Book review of: Die Transcendentale Und Die Psychologische Methode, by Dr. Max F. Scheler 1900 in English
Prof. Frings' Max Scheler Website (www.maxscheler.com)
Photos of Max Scheler at web site of Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology
A Filosofia de Max Scheler (Portuguese-language website)
Deutsches Leben der Gegenwart at Project Gutenberg (German)
Newspaper clippings about Max Scheler in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW |
Giovanni Gentile | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile | Giovanni Gentile (Italian: [dʒoˈvanni dʒenˈtiːle]; 30 May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italian philosopher, educator, and politician. Described by himself and by Benito Mussolini as the "philosopher of Fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for Italian Fascism, and ghostwrote part of "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932) with Mussolini. He was involved in the resurgence of Hegelian idealism in Italian philosophy and also devised his own system of thought, which he called "actual idealism" or "actualism", which has been described as "the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition".
== Biography ==
=== Early life and career ===
Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Italy. He was inspired by Risorgimento-era Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, "self-construction", but also strongly influenced and mentored by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought – namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte, with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre (Epistemology), a theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista. In religion he presented himself as a Catholic (of sorts), and emphasised actual idealism's Christian heritage; Antonio G. Pesce insists that 'there is in fact no doubt that Gentile was a Catholic', but he occasionally identified himself as an atheist, albeit one who was still culturally a Catholic.He won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities.
In 1898 he graduated in Letters and Philosophy with a dissertation titled Rosmini e Gioberti, that he realized
under the supervision of Donato Jaja, a disciple of Bertrando Spaventa.During his academic career, Gentile served in a number of positions, including as:
Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Palermo (27 March 1910);
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa (9 August 1914);
Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Rome (11 November 1917), and later as Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (1926);
Commissioner of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1928–32), and later as its Director (1932–43); and
Vice President of Bocconi University in Milan (1934–44).
=== Involvement with Fascism ===
In 1922, Gentile was named Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini. In this capacity he instituted the "Riforma Gentile" – a reformation of the secondary school system that had a long-lasting impact on Italian education. His philosophical works included The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (1916) and Logic as Theory of Knowledge (1917), with which he defined actual idealism, a unified metaphysical system reinforcing his sentiments that philosophy isolated from life, and life isolated from philosophy, are but two identical modes of backward cultural bankruptcy. For Gentile, this theory indicated how philosophy could directly influence, mould, and penetrate life; or, how philosophy could govern life.
In 1925, Gentile headed two constitutional reform commissions that helped establish the corporate state of Fascism. He would go on to serve as president of the Fascist state's Grand Council of Public Education (1926–28), and even gained membership on the powerful Fascist Grand Council (1925–29).
Gentile's philosophical system – the foundation of all Fascist philosophy – viewed thought as all-embracing: no-one could actually leave his or her sphere of thought, nor exceed his or her thought. Reality was unthinkable, except in relation to the activity by means of which it becomes thinkable, positing that as a unity — held in the active subject and the discrete abstract phenomena that reality comprehends – wherein each phenomenon, when truly realised, was centered within that unity; therefore, it was innately spiritual, transcendent, and immanent, to all possible things in contact with the unity. Gentile used that philosophic frame to systematize every item of interest that now was subject to the rule of absolute self-identification – thus rendering as correct every consequence of the hypothesis. The resultant philosophy can be interpreted as an idealist foundation for Legal Naturalism.
Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as "the philosopher of Fascism"; moreover, he was the ghostwriter of the first part of the essay "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), attributed to Mussolini. It was first published in 1932, in the Italian Encyclopedia, wherein he described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism, Philosopher Kings, the abolition of the parliamentary system, and autarky. He also wrote the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals which was signed by a number of writers and intellectuals, including Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giuseppe Ungaretti.
Gentile became a member of the Fascist Grand Council in 1925, and remained loyal to Mussolini even after the fall of the Fascist government in 1943. He supported Mussolini's establishment of the "Republic of Salò", a puppet state of Nazi Germany, despite having criticized its anti-Jewish laws, and accepted an appointment in its government. Gentile was the last president of the Royal Academy of Italy (1943–1944).
=== Assassination ===
On March 30, 1944, Gentile received death threats blaming him for the execution of the Martyrs of Campo di Marte by Republic of Salò troops and accusing him of promoting fascism. Only two weeks later on April 15, 1944, Bruno Fanciullacci and Antonio Ignesti, both of whom belonged to the communist partisan organization Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), approached Gentile in his parked car, hiding pistols behind a book. When Gentile lowered the car window to speak to them, he was immediately hit with several bullets to the chest and heart, killing him. Fanciullacci would be killed several months later as he tried to escape capture.Gentile's assassination divided the anti-fascist front. It was disapproved of by the Tuscan branch of the CLN with the sole exception of the Italian Communist Party, which approved the assassination and claimed responsibility for it.
Gentile was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.
== Philosophy ==
Benedetto Croce wrote that Gentile "...holds the honor of having been the most rigorous neo-Hegelian in the entire history of Western philosophy and the dishonor of having been the official philosopher of Fascism in Italy." His philosophical basis for fascism was rooted in his understanding of ontology and epistemology, in which he found vindication for the rejection of individualism, and acceptance of collectivism, with the state as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty outside of which individuality had no meaning (and which in turn helped justify the totalitarian dimension of fascism).The conceptual relationship between Gentile's actual idealism and his conception of fascism is not self-evident. The supposed relationship does not appear to be based on logical deducibility. That is, actual idealism does not entail a fascist ideology in any rigorous sense. Gentile enjoyed fruitful intellectual relations with Croce from 1899 – and particularly during their joint editorship of La Critica from 1903 to 1922 – but broke philosophically and politically from Croce in the early 1920s over Gentile's embrace of fascism. (Croce assesses their philosophical disagreement in Una discussione tra filosofi amici in Conversazioni Critiche, II.)
Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds weren't to be considered as existing independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad interpretations were currently false as imposed by all former kinds of government, including capitalism and communism; and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of corporatism, a fascist state, could defeat these problems which are made from reifying as an external reality that which is in fact, to Gentile, only a reality in thinking. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see the conditional subject as abstract and the object as concrete, Gentile postulated (after Hegel) the opposite, that the subject is concrete and the object a mere abstraction (or rather, that what was conventionally dubbed "subject" is in fact only conditional object, and that the true subject is the act of being or essence of the object).
Gentile was, because of his actualist system, a notable philosophical presence across Europe during his time. At its base, Gentile's brand of idealism asserted the primacy of the "pure act" of thinking. This act is foundational to all human experience – it creates the phenomenal world – and involves a process of "reflective awareness" (in Italian, "l'atto del pensiero, pensiero pensante") that is constitutive of the Absolute and revealed in education. Gentile's emphasis on seeing Mind as the Absolute signaled his "revival of the idealist doctrine of the autonomy of the mind." It also connected his philosophical work to his vocation as a teacher. In actual idealism, then, pedagogy is transcendental and provides the process by which the Absolute is revealed. His idea of a transcending truth above positivism garnered particular attention by emphasizing that all modes of sensation only take the form of ideas within one's mind; in other words, they are mental constructs. To Gentile, for example, even the correlation of the function and location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body was merely a consistent creation of the mind, and not of the brain (itself a creation of the mind). Observations like this have led some commentators to view Gentile's philosophy as a kind of "absolute solipsism," expressing the idea "that only the spirit or mind is real".Actual idealism also touches on ideas of concern to theology. An example of actual idealism in theology is the idea that although man may have invented the concept of God, it does not make God any less real in any possible sense, so long as God is not presupposed to exist as abstraction, and except in case qualities about what existence actually entails (i.e. being invented apart from the thinking that makes it) are presupposed. Benedetto Croce objected that Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer's will.Therefore, Gentile proposed a form of what he called "absolute Immanentism" in which the divine was the present conception of reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing and dynamic process. Many times accused of solipsism, Gentile maintained his philosophy to be a Humanism that sensed the possibility of nothing beyond what was colligate in perception; the self's human thinking, in order to communicate as immanence is to be human like oneself, made a cohesive empathy of the self-same, without an external division, and therefore not modeled as objects to one's own thinking. Whereas solipsism would feel trapped in realization of its solitude, actualism rejects such a privation and is an expression of the only freedom which is possible within objective contingencies, where the transcendental Self does not even exist as an object, and the dialectical co-substantiation of others necessary to understand the empirical self are felt as true others when found to be the unrelativistic subjectivity of that whole self and essentially unified with the spirit of such higher self in actu, where others can be truly known, rather than thought as windowless monads.
=== Phases of his thought ===
A number of developments in Gentile's thought and career helped to define his philosophy, including:
the definition of Actual Idealism in his work Theory of the Pure Act (1903);
his support for the invasion of Libya (1911) and the entry of Italy into World War I (1915);
his dispute with Benedetto Croce over the historic inevitability of Fascism;
his role as minister of education (1922–24);
his belief that Fascism could be made subservient to his philosophical thought, along with his gathering of influence through the work of students like Armando Carlini (leader of the so-called "right Gentilians") and Ugo Spirito (who applied Gentile's philosophy to social problems and helped codify Fascist political theory); and
his work on the Enciclopedia Italiana (1925–43; first edition finished in 1936).
=== Gentile's definition of and vision for Fascism ===
Gentile considered Fascism the fulfillment of the Risorgimento ideals, particularly those represented by Giuseppe Mazzini and the Historical Right party.Gentile sought to make his philosophy the basis for Fascism. However, with Gentile and with Fascism, the "problem of the party" existed by virtue of the fact that the Fascist "party", as such, arose organically rather than from a tract or pre-established socio-political doctrine. This complicated the matter for Gentile as it left no consensus to any way of thinking among Fascists, but ironically this aspect was to Gentile's view of how a state or party doctrine should live out its existence: with natural organic growth and dialectical opposition intact. The fact that Mussolini gave credence to Gentile's view points via Gentile's authorship helped with an official consideration, even though the "problem of the party" continued to exist for Mussolini as well.
Gentile placed himself within the Hegelian tradition, but also sought to distance himself from those views he considered erroneous. He criticized Hegel's dialectic (of Idea-Nature-Spirit), and instead proposed that everything is Spirit, with the dialectic residing in the pure act of thinking. Gentile believed Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making. To the neo-Hegelian Gentile, Marx had made the dialectic into an external object, and therefore had abstracted it by making it part of a material process of historical development. The dialectic to Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking. It was, to Gentile, concrete subject and not abstract object. This Gentile expounded by how humans think in forms wherein one side of a dual opposite could not be thought of without its complement.
"Upward" wouldn't be known without "downward" and "heat" couldn't be known without "cold", while each are opposites they are co-dependent for either one's realization: these were creations that existed as dialectic only in human thinking and couldn't be confirmed outside of which, and especially could not be said to exist in a condition external to human thought like independent matter and a world outside of personal subjectivity or as an empirical reality when not conceived in unity and from the standpoint of the human mind.
To Gentile, Marx's externalizing of the dialectic was essentially a fetishistic mysticism. Though when viewed externally thus, it followed that Marx could then make claims to the effect of what state or condition the dialectic objectively existed in history, a posteriori of where any individual's opinion was while comporting oneself to the totalized whole of society. i.e. people themselves could by such a view be ideologically 'backwards' and left behind from the current state of the dialectic and not themselves be part of what is actively creating the dialectic as-it-is.
Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no 'positive' independently existing dialectical object. Rather, the dialectic was natural to the state, as-it-is. Meaning that the interests composing the state are composing the dialectic by their living organic process of holding oppositional views within that state, and unified therein. It being the mean condition of those interests as ever they exist. Even criminality is unified as a necessarily dialectic to be subsumed into the state and a creation and natural outlet of the dialectic of the positive state as ever it is.
This view (influenced by the Hegelian theory of the state) justified the corporative system, where in the individualized and particular interests of all divergent groups were to be personably incorporated into the state ("Stato etico") each to be considered a bureaucratic branch of the state itself and given official leverage. Gentile, rather than believing the private to be swallowed synthetically within the public as Marx would have it in his objective dialectic, believed that public and private were a priori identified with each other in an active and subjective dialectic: one could not be subsumed fully into the other as they already are beforehand the same. In such a manner each is the other after their own fashion and from their respective, relative, and reciprocal, position. Yet both constitute the state itself and neither are free from it, nothing ever being truly free from it, the state (as in Hegel) existing as an eternal condition and not an objective, abstract collection of atomistic values and facts of the particulars about what is positively governing the people at any given time.
== Works ==
=== Collected works ===
==== Systematic works ====
==== Historical works ====
==== Various works ====
==== Letter collections ====
== Notes ==
== References ==
A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001.
== Further reading ==
=== English ===
Brown, Merle E. (1966). Neo-idealistic Aesthetics: Croce-Gentile-Collingwood, Wayne State University Press.
Brown, Merle E., "Respice Finem: The Literary Criticism of Giovanni Gentile," in Italica, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring, 1970).
Crespi, Angelo (1926). Contemporary Thought of Italy, Williams and Norgate, Limited.
De Ruggiero, Guido, "G. Gentile: Absolute Idealism." in Modern Philosophy, Part IV, Chap. III, (George Allen & Unwin, 1921).
Evans, Valmai Burwood, "The Ethics of Giovanni Gentile," in International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jan. 1929).
Evans, Valmai Burwood, "Education in the Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile," in International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jan. 1933).
Gregor, James A., "Giovanni Gentile and the Philosophy of the Young Karl Marx," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 24, No. 2 (April–June 1963).
Gregor, James A. (2004). Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works by Giovanni Gentile. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers
Gregor, James A. (2009). Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought, Princeton University Press.
Gullace, Giovanni, "The Dante Studies of Giovanni Gentile," Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, No. 90 (1972).
Harris, H. S. (1966). The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, U. of Illinois Press.
Holmes, Roger W. (1937). The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile The Macmillan Company.
Horowitz, Irving Louis, "On the Social Theories of Giovanni Gentile," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Dec. 1962).
Lion, Aline (1932). The Idealistic Conception of Religion; Vico, Hegel, Gentile, Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Lyttleton, Adrian, ed. (1973). Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile, Harper & Row.
Minio-Paluello, L. (1946). Education in Fascist Italy, Oxford University Press.
Moss, M. E. (2004). Mussolini's Fascist Philosopher: Giovanni Gentile Reconsidered, Lang.
Roberts, David D. (2007). Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, University of Toronto Press.
Romanell, Patrick (1937). The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, Columbia University.
Romanell, Patrick (1946). Croce versus Gentile, S. F. Vanni.
Runes, Dagobert D., ed. (1955). Treasury of Philosophy, Philosophical Library, New York.
Santillana, George de, "The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile," in Isis, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Nov. 1938).
Smith, J.A. "The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 20, (1919–1920).
Smith, William A. (1970). Giovanni Gentile on the Existence of God, Beatrice-Naewolaerts.
Spirito, Ugo, "The Religious Feeling of Giovanni Gentile," in East and West, Vol. 5, No. 2 (July 1954).
Thompson, Merritt Moore (1934). The Educational Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, University of Southern California.
Turi, Gabrielle, "Giovanni Gentile: Oblivion, Remembrance, and Criticism," in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 1998).
=== In Italian ===
Giovanni Gentile (Augusto Del Noce, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990)
Giovanni Gentile filosofo europeo (Salvatore Natoli, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989)
Giovanni Gentile (Antimo Negri, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975)
Faremo una grande università: Girolamo Palazzina-Giovanni Gentile; Un epistolario (1930–1938), a cura di Marzio Achille Romano (Milano: Edizioni Giuridiche Economiche Aziendali dell'Università Bocconi e Giuffré editori S.p.A., 1999)
Parlato, Giuseppe. "Giovanni Gentile: From the Risorgimento to Fascism." Trans. Stefano Maranzana. Telos 133 (Winter 2005): pp. 75–94.
Antonio Cammarana, Proposizioni sulla filosofia di Giovanni Gentile, prefazione del Sen. Armando Plebe, Roma, Gruppo parliamentare MSI-DN, Senato della Repubblica, 1975, 157 Pagine, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze BN 758951.
Antonio Cammarana, Teorica della reazione dialettica : filosofia del postcomunismo, Roma, Gruppo parliamentare MSI-DN, Senato della Repubblica, 1976, 109 Pagine, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze BN 775492.
== External links ==
Castelvetrano website
Works by Giovanni Gentile at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Giovanni Gentile at Internet Archive
Newspaper clippings about Giovanni Gentile in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
Media talks by Diego Fusaro captioned in English:
Diego Fusaro: Giovanni Gentile's Philosophy of Pure Act
Diego Fusaro: The Idealism of Karl Marx, according to Giovanni Gentile
Diego Fusaro: The Act of Giovanni Gentile & Antonio Gramsci's Praxis
Emanuele Severino & Diego Fusaro: Action & Becoming. About Giovanni Gentile & Antonio Gramsci
Diego Fusaro: Giovanni Gentile's Philosophy. An Introduction
Diego Fusaro: Idealism & Practice; Fichte, Marx & Gentile
Diego Fusaro: We Must Think Outside The Box (Gramsci, Pound, Gentile) |
Ralph Barton Perry | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Barton_Perry | Ralph Barton Perry (July 3, 1876 – January 22, 1957) was an American philosopher. He was a strident moral idealist who stated in 1909 that, to him, idealism meant "to interpret life consistently with ethical, scientific, and metaphysical truth." Perry's viewpoints on religion stressed the notion that religious thinking possessed legitimacy should it exist within a framework accepting of human reason and social progress.
== Biography ==
Ralph Barton Perry was born in Poultney, Vermont on July 3, 1876. He was educated at Princeton (B.A., 1896) and at Harvard (M.A., 1897; Ph.D., 1899), where, after teaching philosophy for three years at Williams and Smith colleges, he was instructor (1902–05), assistant professor (1905–13), full professor (1913–30) and Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy (1930–46). He was president of the American Philosophical Association's eastern division in 1920–21. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1928 and the American Philosophical Society in 1939.A pupil of William James, whose Essays in Radical Empiricism he edited (1912), Perry became one of the leaders of the New Realism movement. Perry argued for a naturalistic theory of value and a New Realist theory of perception and knowledge. He wrote a celebrated biography of William James, which won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and proceeded to a revision of his critical approach to natural knowledge. An active member among a group of American New Realist philosophers, he elaborated around 1910 the program of new realism. However, he soon dissented from moral and spiritual ontology, and turned to a philosophy of disillusionment. Perry was an advocate of a militant democracy: in his words "total but not totalitarian". Puritanism and Democracy (1944) is a famous wartime attempt to reconcile two fundamental concepts in the origins of modern America. Between 1946 and 1948, he delivered in Glasgow his Gifford Lectures, titled Realms of Value.
He married Rachel Berenson on August 15, 1905, and they lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their son was Edward Barton Perry born at their home 5 Avon Street in Cambridge, September 27, 1906. In 1932, Edward married Harriet Armington Seelye (born Worcester, Massachusetts, May 28, 1909), daughter of physician and surgeon Dr. Walker Clarke Seelye of Worcester and Annie Ide Barrows Seelye, formerly of Providence, Rhode Island.
In 1919, he gave the commencement address for the first graduating class of Connecticut College, which had opened its doors in 1915.
Perry died at his home in Cambridge on January 22, 1957, and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
== Bibliography ==
The Approach to Philosophy, (1905), New York, Chicago and Boston: Charles Scribner's Sons
The Moral Economy, (1909), New York: Charles Scribner's Son
Present Philosophical Tendencies: A Critical Survey of Naturalism, Idealism, Pragmatism, and Realism, together with a Synopsis of the Philosophy of William James, (1912), New York:Longmans, Green & Co.
Holt, EB; Marvin, WT; Montague, WP; Perry, RB; Pitkin, WB; Spaulding, EG, The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy, (1912), New York: The Macmillan Company
The Free Man and the Soldier, (1916), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical Background of the World War, (1918), New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James, (1920), Longmans, Green & Co.
The Plattsburg movement: A Chapter of America's Participation in the World War (1921), New York: E.P. Dutton & company
A Modernist View of National Ideals (1926) Berkeley: University of California Press, Howison Lectures in Philosophy, 1925
General Theory of Value (1926)
Philosophy of the Recent Past: An Outline of European and American Philosophy Since 1860, (1926), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
The Hope for Immortality (1935)
The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (1935)
Plea for an Age Movement (1942) New York: The Vanguard Press [Talk at 1941 Princeton and Harvard Reunions]
Puritanism and Democracy, (1944)
Characteristically American: Five Lectures Delivered on the William W. Cook Foundation at the University of Michigan, November–December 1948, (1949), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949
Realms of Value, (1954), Harvard University Press [Based on Gifford Lectures]
The Humanity of Man, (1956), New York: George Braziller
"A Definition of morality". In P. W. Taylor (Ed.), Problems of moral philosophy: an introduction to ethics (pp. 13–24). Belmont, CA: Dickenson, 1967
== See also ==
American philosophy
List of American philosophers
== References ==
== External links ==
Biography, at the Gifford Lectures site
Works by Ralph Barton Perry at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Ralph Barton Perry at Internet Archive
Works by Ralph Barton Perry at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Some works by and about Perry, in the Mead Project website
"PROF. ROYCE'S REFUTATION OF REALISM AND PLURALISM", The Monist 12 (1901-2): 446–458.
Review: The Refutation of Idealism, Reviews, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. I, No. 3 (Feb. 4, 1904), 76–77.
THE EGO-CENTRIC PREDICAMENT, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 7 (1910): 5-14
Editor’s Preface, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) by William James
Lectures on the Harvard Classics. The Harvard Classics, Volume LI (1914):
Philosophy: I. General Introduction
Philosophy: III. The Rise of Modern Philosophy
Philosophy: IV. Introduction to Kant
Religion: I. General Introduction
Non-Resistance and the Present War--A Reply to Mr. Russell, International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 25 No. 3 (April, 1915). 307–316. |
W.D. Ross | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Ross | Sir William David Ross (15 April 1877 – 5 May 1971), known as David Ross but usually cited as W. D. Ross, was a Scottish Aristotelian philosopher, translator, WWI veteran, civil servant, and university administrator. His best-known work is The Right and the Good (1930), in which he developed a pluralist, deontological form of intuitionist ethics in response to G. E. Moore's consequentialist form of intuitionism. Ross also critically edited and translated a number of Aristotle's works, such as his 12-volume translation of Aristotle together with John Alexander Smith, and wrote on other Greek philosophy.
== Life ==
William David Ross was born in Thurso, Caithness in the north of Scotland the son of John Ross (1835-1905).He spent most of his first six years as a child in southern India. He was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and the University of Edinburgh. In 1895, he gained a first class MA honours degree in classics. He completed his studies at Balliol College, Oxford, with a First in Classical Moderations in 1898 and a First in Literae Humaniores ('Greats', a combination of philosophy and ancient history) in 1900. He was made a Fellow of Merton College in 1900, a position he held until 1945; he was elected to a tutorial fellowship at Oriel College in October 1902.With the outbreak of World War I, Ross joined the army in 1915 with a commission on the special list. He held a series of positions involved with the supply of munitions. At the time of the armistice he held the rank of major and was Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Munitions. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 in recognition of his wartime service. For his post-war services to various public bodies he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1938.Ross was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy (1923–1928), Provost of Oriel College, Oxford (1929–1947), Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1941 to 1944 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1944–1947). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1939 to 1940. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and was its President from 1936–to 1940. Of the many governmental committees on which he served one was the Civil Service Tribunal, of which he was chairman. One of his two colleagues was Leonard Woolf, who thought that the whole system of fixing governmental remuneration should be on the same basis as the US model, dividing the civil service into a relatively small number of pay grades. Ross did not agree with this radical proposal. In 1947 he was appointed chairman of the first Royal Commission on the Press, United Kingdom, elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin, and elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.
He died in Oxford on 5 May 1971. He is memorialised on his parents' grave in the Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh.
== Family ==
His younger brother was Rev Donald George Ross (1879-1943).
He married Edith Ogden in 1906 and they had four daughters, Margaret (who married Robin Harrison), Eleanor, Rosalind (who married John Miller Martin), and Katharine. Edith died in 1953.
He was a cousin of Berriedale Keith.
== Ross's ethical theory ==
W. D. Ross was a moral realist, a non-naturalist, and an intuitionist. He argued that there are moral truths. He wrote:
The moral order...is just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe (and...of any possible universe in which there are moral agents at all) as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.
Thus, according to Ross, the claim that something is good is true if that thing really is good. Ross also agreed with G.E. Moore's claim that any attempt to define ethical statements solely in terms of statements about the natural world commits the naturalistic fallacy. Furthermore, the terms "right" and "good" are indefinable. This means not only that they cannot be defined in terms of natural properties but also that it is not possible to define one in terms of the other.
Ross rejected Moore's consequentialist ethics. According to consequentialist theories, what people ought to do is determined only by whether their actions will bring about the best. By contrast, Ross argues that maximising the good is only one of several prima facie duties (prima facie obligations) which play a role in determining what a person ought to do in any given case.
=== Duties ===
In The Right and the Good, Ross lists seven prima facie duties, without claiming his list to be all-inclusive: fidelity; reparation; gratitude; justice; beneficence; non-maleficence; and self-improvement. In any given situation, any number of these prima facie duties may apply. In the case of ethical dilemmas, they may even contradict one another. Someone could have a prima facie duty of reparation, say, a duty to help people who helped you move house, move house themselves, and a prima facie duty of fidelity, such as taking your children on a promised trip to the park, and these could conflict. Nonetheless, there can never be a true ethical dilemma, Ross would argue, because one of the prima facie duties in a given situation is always the weightiest, and over-rules all the others. This is thus the absolute obligation or absolute duty, the action that the person ought to perform.It is frequently argued, however, that Ross should have used the term "pro tanto" rather than "prima facie". Shelly Kagan, for example, wrote:
It may be helpful to note explicitly that in distinguishing between pro tanto and prima facie reasons I depart from the unfortunate terminology proposed by Ross, which has invited confusion and misunderstanding. I take it that – despite his misleading label – it is actually pro tanto reasons that Ross has in mind in his discussion of what he calls prima facie duties.
Explaining the difference between pro tanto and prima facie, Kagan wrote: "A pro tanto reason has genuine weight, but nonetheless may be outweighed by other considerations. Thus, calling a reason a pro tanto reason is to be distinguished from calling it a prima facie reason, which I take to involve an epistemological qualification: a prima facie reason appears to be a reason, but may actually not be a reason at all."
=== Values and intuition ===
According to Ross, self-evident intuition shows that there are four kinds of things that are intrinsically good: pleasure, knowledge, virtue and justice. "Virtue" refers to actions or dispositions to act from the appropriate motives, for example, from the desire to do one's duty. "Justice", on the other hand, is about happiness in proportion to merit. As such, pleasure, knowledge and virtue all concern states of mind, in contrast to justice, which concerns a relation between two states of mind. These values come in degrees and are comparable with each other. Ross holds that virtue has the highest value while pleasure has the lowest value. He goes so far as to suggest that "no amount of pleasure is equal to any amount of virtue, that in fact virtue belongs to a higher order of value".: 150 Values can also be compared within each category, for example, well-grounded knowledge of general principle is more valuable than weakly grounded knowledge of isolated matters of fact.: 146–7 According to Ross's intuitionism, we can know moral truths through intuition, for example, that it is wrong to lie or that knowledge is intrinsically good. Intuitions involve a direct apprehension that is not mediated by inferences or deductions: they are self-evident and therefore not in need of any additional proof. This ability is not inborn but has to be developed on the way to reaching mental maturity.: 29 But in its fully developed form, we can know moral truths just as well as we can know mathematical truths like the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.: 30 This self-evident knowledge is limited to general principles: we can come to know the prima facie duties this way but not our absolute duty in a particular situation: what we should do all things considered.: 19–20, 30 All we can do is consult perception to determine which prima facie duty has the highest normative weight in this particular case, even though this usually does not amount to knowledge proper due to the complexity involved in most specific cases.
=== Criticism and influence ===
A frequent criticism of Ross's ethics is that it is unsystematic and often fails to provide clear-cut ethical answers. Another is that "moral intuitions" are not a reliable basis for ethics, because they are fallible, can vary widely from individual to individual, and are often rooted in our evolutionary past in ways that should make us suspicious of their capacity to track moral truth. Additionally there is no consideration of the consequence of the action undertaken, as with all deontological approaches.Ross's deontological pluralism was a true innovation and provided a plausible alternative to Kantian deontology. His ethical intuitionism found few followers among his contemporaries but has seen a revival by the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Among the philosophers influenced by The Right and the Good are Philip Stratton-Lake, Robert Audi, Michael Huemer, and C.D. Broad.
== Selected works ==
1908: Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1923: Aristotle
1924: Aristotle's Metaphysics
1927: 'The Basis of Objective Judgments in Ethics'. International Journal of Ethics, 37:113–127.
1930: The Right and the Good
1936: Aristotle's Physics
1939: Foundations of Ethics
1949: Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics
1951: Plato's Theory of Ideas
1954: Kant’s Ethical Theory: A Commentary on the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
== References ==
== Further reading ==
G. N. Clark, ‘Sir David Ross’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 57 (1971), 525–43
Phillips, David. Rossian Ethics: W.D. Ross and Contemporary Moral Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Stout, A. K. 1967. 'Ross, William David'. In P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan: 216–217.
Stratton-Lake, Philip. 2002. 'Introduction'. In Ross, W. D. 1930. The Right and the Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Timmons, Mark. 2003. 'Moral Writings and The Right and the Good'. [Book Review] Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
== External links ==
Skelton, Anthony. "William David Ross". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
"William David Ross" by David L. Simpson in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012
William David Ross a biography and online lectures at the Gifford Lectures website
Cooley, Ken. Sir David Ross's Pluralistic Theory of Duty (The Beginnings) |
Ludwig von Mises | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises | "Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (German: [ˈluːtvɪç fɔn ˈmiːzəs]; 29 September 1881 – 10 O(...TRUNCATED) |
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