Polemical writings about philosophers, of little use if directed against straw men as is likely if not based on historical understanding, must incorporate cultural history, which, in focussing on a philosophy's relationship to its age, justifies ignoring historical sequence so long as figures are placed in context. Philosophy does progressively clarify what certain recurrent types of problems involve. The historian-philosopher writing a history of problems must know intimately philosopher and period, and reveal assumptions and aspects of problems hidden to the (...) philosopher himself. Such a history does not merely report philosophy's results but alone elucidates its inner development. (shrink)

The ambiguity of the word ‘nature’ is so remarkable that I need not remark upon it. Except perhaps to emphasise that this ambiguity — scarcely less apparent, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, in its Greek near-equivalent physis — is by no means a merely accidental product of etymological confusions or conflations: it faithfully reflects the hesitancies, the doubts and the uncertainties, with which men have confronted the world around them. For my special purposes, it is enough to say, I (...) shall be using the word ‘nature’ in one of its narrower senses — so as to include only that which, setting aside the supernatural, is human neither in itself nor in its origins. This is the sense in which neither Sir Christopher Wren nor St Paul's Cathedral forms part of ‘nature’ and it may be hard to decide whether an oddly shaped flint or a landscape where the trees are evenly spaced is or is not ‘natural’. The question I am raising, then, is what our attitudes have been, and ought to be, to nature in this narrow sense of the word, in which it excludes both the human and the artificial. And more narrowly still, I shall be devoting most of my attention to our attitudes towards that part of nature which it lies within man's power to modify and, in particular, towards what Karl Barth calls ‘the strange life of beasts and plants which lies around us’, a life we can by our actions destroy. (shrink)

LOOKING through Bertrand Russell's minor writings in McMaster University's Russell Archives I came across this sentence: 'Fanaticism is primarily an intellectual defect...one to which philosophy supplies an intellectual antidote'. This fascinated me the more, as I had just written an ...

Here the author explains the different ways in which explanation is made. He start saying how we explain things that we don't understand in everyday life, were sometimes simple relates or ideas are enough (to explain complex things to a kid, for example), and for us, when we don't understand something, we organise our thinking in order to find a explanation which has to be intelligible, adequate and correct. In science, they are not always like that, and they start trying (...) to explain the unfamiliar things of the familiar, trying always to develop a theory of the most general kind, which will enable him to explain and predict. They are not looking for adequate, but for correct explanation, which in their case takes the form of a hipotesis. In history they behave just like in everyday life explanations, with little place for generalisations (just middle range), in intelligibility, adequacy, and correctness, because they can not venture in general theory. In conclusion, there is little to say about historical explanation which doesn't fit into everyday life explanation. (shrink)

Popper's use of the word "'historicism" is too encompassing. Does "historicism" refer to a theory of the social sciences, a way of doing them, or a "'well-considered and close-knit philosophy?" Here the term is taken to mean a theory about the aims of the social sciences. But even with reference to his other works, Popper's argument proves not to be against historicism as he defined it, but rather against one of the other varieties of Historismus. Nor does the doctrine involve (...) or entail much that Popper seems to think it does. Notwithstanding this critique, Popper has sketched a number of arguments which might be further developed into a refutation of 11 (evolutionary historicism.". (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is sometimes suggested that academics should subscribe to a special professional ethics. The question then arises under what circumstances a professional ethics is called for. The answer suggested is that this is when the members of a profession have peculiar moral privileges. In the academic's case, these relate to special forms of freedom which academics usually possess, in distinction from other workers. These generate special temptations which a professional ethics would particularly warn against.

The ambiguity of the word ‘nature’ is so remarkable that I need not remark upon it. Except perhaps to emphasise that this ambiguity — scarcely less apparent, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, in its Greek near-equivalent physis — is by no means a merely accidental product of etymological confusions or conflations: it faithfully reflects the hesitancies, the doubts and the uncertainties, with which men have confronted the world around them. For my special purposes, it is enough to say, I (...) shall be using the word ‘nature’ in one of its narrower senses — so as to include only that which, setting aside the supernatural, is human neither in itself nor in its origins. This is the sense in which neither Sir Christopher Wren nor St Paul's Cathedral forms part of ‘nature’ and it may be hard to decide whether an oddly shaped flint or a landscape where the trees are evenly spaced is or is not ‘natural’. The question I am raising, then, is what our attitudes have been, and ought to be, to nature in this narrow sense of the word, in which it excludes both the human and the artificial. And more narrowly still, I shall be devoting most of my attention to our attitudes towards that part of nature which it lies within man's power to modify and, in particular, towards what Karl Barth calls ‘the strange life of beasts and plants which lies around us’, a life we can by our actions destroy. (shrink)

In most colleges and universities nowadays we find a group of academics who are officially designated as together constituting a department of philosophy. They teach students who are officially designated as studying philosophy; they write books which are reviewed as being philosophy, which are listed under that head in publisher's catalogues, which are put into that category by librarians. Or they write for journals which are similarly categorized by librarians and which as often as not describe themselves, either in their (...) title or their sub-title, as being devoted to philosophical problems. (shrink)

In what it will be convenient to call “the Scandinavian school”; of jurisprudence, Hagerstrom is clearly the master. But his leadership is of a somewhat special kind. For all that he wrote a large book on Roman law, Hägerström was trained as, and continued to be, a philosopher, not a jurisprudentialist or a sociologist. His essays on law and morals are ancillary to his main purpose: to destroy transcendental metaphysics. The epigraphhe chose to head his contribution to Die Philosophic der (...) Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen was uncompromising: “Praeterea censeo metaphysicam esse delendam.” If, in his published work, he to so considerable a degree concentrated his attention on ethics and jurisprudence, that is because he took them to be a particularly rich source of metaphysical mystery-mongering. Through a study of men's moral and legal ideas, Hägerström thought he could bring out the sources, the defects—and even, in a way, the strength—of metaphysical thinking. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The What and the Why of History: Philosophical Essays By Leon J. Goldstein.

When the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary went to press in 1971, it still recognized only one sense of ‘environmentalism’ – as the name of a particular sociological theory holding that the differences between human cultures were to be wholly explained in terms of such factors as soil, climate and food supplies. As for the now cognate term ‘ecological’, that too had a purely scientific significance. The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel had coined the word ‘ecology’ in its German form (...) as early as 1870, to signify ‘the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and its inorganic environment’. It was soon extended beyond animals to the study, in these terms, both of plant life and of human societies. (shrink)

This paper is both a slice of history, a warning and a congratulation. The history is about how the Russell papers found their way to a steel-town in Canada and how it came about that they have gradually been published. The warning is that it is extremely difficult to conduct such an enterprise on a co-operative basis, which may help to explain why so many enterprises of this kind have issued in failure. The congratulations are for those who have edited (...) volumes of very different kinds, as a result of Russell's versatility, in a manner which throws new light on his intellectual history. All of this had to be described in a very schematic way. But it will, I hope, lead readers to the volumes themselves. Only there will they find the answer to the exercise I set towards the end of the article. (shrink)

This paper is both a slice of history, a warning and a congratulation. The history is about how the Russell papers found their way to a steel-town in Canada and how it came about that they have gradually been published. The warning is that it is extremely difficult to conduct such an enterprise on a co-operative basis, which may help to explain why so many enterprises of this kind have issued in failure. The congratulations are for those who have edited (...) volumes of very different kinds, as a result of Russell's versatility, in a manner which throws new light on his intellectual history. All of this had to be described in a very schematic way. But it will, I hope, lead readers to the volumes themselves. Only there will they find the answer to the exercise I set towards the end of the article. (shrink)

Every human being is born into a world of stories. Western society has tended to differentiate types of stories, distinguishing, for example, between history and fiction. Recently, the major intellectual task undertaken by many influential thinkers has been that of destroying these distinctions, and insisting on resemblances rather than differences. According to this train of thought, history is as much "imaginative literature" as is fictional writing. Argument in favor of this view is often begun by reducing the description of an (...) historian's data to "scattered events." But, being born into a world of stories, an historian actually works with events only in story-form. It is misleading to compare the concept "event," which belongs to the ontological mode, to "narrative," which belongs to the linguistic mode. "Event" is further ambiguous because "events" can be distinguished ontologically or evaluatively. Historians deal with "event-descriptions," not events, and these descriptions can be correct or incorrect. (shrink)

There was a time when ecological problems were of no interest to philosophy. Now, these issues have raised philosophical problems in several areas. In moral philosophy, one question is what moral obligations, if any, we have to future generations, and another is how far we have moral obligations relating to the treatment and the preservation of plants, animals and atmospheres. In political philosophy, the issue is the range of such concepts as rights and justice, and whether or not they are (...) limited to human relationships. As to the metaphysical question, we have to ask whether there is something about human beings which entitles us to consider them as being supernatural and whether we can think of Nature as an entity of which each human being constitutes a part. (shrink)