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Moore begins here by attributing to Bradley a quasi-empiricist view of meaning as abstracted from the total content of judgement. This is a mistake, but what is important is what follows: Indeed true propositions do not represent or correspond to a fact or real state of affairs; instead they just are facts. As Moore came to see ten years later, this radical metaphysics of true propositions is too simple. But in the present context what is striking about it is the way in which by itself it hovers between idealism and realism.
If propositions are thought of as contents of judgment, then to hold that reality just comprises true propositions is to take an idealist stance. What makes the position realist in Moore's hands is his uncompromising realism concerning propositions and concepts: The basic theme of this paper is the extension to sense-experience of the strong distinction between the mind and its objects which we have encountered in connection with meaning.
His argument here is in part phenomenological: As he was soon to realise, more needs to be said to handle cases in which something which is not in fact blue looks blue. The final aspect of Moore's critical response to idealism concerns his rejection of the monism which was characteristic of British idealism. This thesis is especially characteristic of Bradley's idealism, according to which the Absolute is the one real thing.
In his early writings and in Principia Ethica Moore engages in a good deal of polemical criticism of this thesis, but it is hard to find any arguments against it, as opposed to a robust affirmation of a realist pluralism. Moore's argument against the thesis that all relations are internal starts from the claim that the burden of proof lies on its supporters since it conflicts with our common sense conviction that things are not essentially inter-related in such a way that a change to one thing in one respect necessitates changes to everything else. Simplifying a bit, and using Moore's concept of entailment see below , his argument runs as follows:.
Moore observes, however, that the step from 1 to 2 is invalid; it confuses the necessity of a connection with the necessity of the consequent. In ordinary language this distinction is not clearly marked, although it is easy to draw it with a suitable formal language. Moore's argument here is a sophisticated piece of informal modal logic; but whether it really gets to the heart of the motivation for Bradley's Absolute idealism can be doubted.
My own view is that Bradley's dialectic rests on a different thesis about the inadequacy of thought as a representation of reality, and thus that one has to dig rather deeper into Bradley's idealist metaphysics both to extract the grounds for his monism and to exhibit what is wrong with it. The main achievement of Moore's early period is his book Principia Ethica. Moore had the text of these lectures typed up with a view to publishing them; but as his thoughts progressed he reworked his text and Principia Ethica is the result of this reworking the lectures have recently been published as The Elements of Ethics.
Most of the first three chapters come from the lectures; whereas the last three chapters are largely new material. As against all such claims Moore insists that goodness is indefinable, or unanalysable, and thus that ethics is an autonomous science, irreducible to natural science or, indeed, to metaphysics. The merits of this argument are questionable; in many cases we can sensibly doubt the truth of a definition, especially where the definition makes use of discoveries that have not been part of our ordinary understanding, as is normally the case with definitions in the natural sciences.
But there is, I think, a way of modifying Moore's argument which takes it around this objection, namely by taking it to rest on the epistemological thesis that ethical questions cannot be answered without the explicit involvement of ethical beliefs. The reason that this thesis is inimical to naturalistic definitions of ethical values is that an important role of definitions in the natural sciences and elsewhere is that they enable one to answer questions in new ways that would not otherwise be possible: This defence of Moore's argument does not address a different concern, namely that the argument applies only to versions of ethical naturalism which involve a definition of ethical value, and thus that naturalist positions which maintain that ethical value is an irreducible natural property are not touched by the argument.
Moore's argument against positions of this kind rests on the claim that the ethical value of a situation is not a feature of it which is independent of its other properties; on the contrary it depends on its other properties. Moore took it that supervenience was not an inherently reductive relationship, and thus that it was consistent for him to hold that goodness is not a natural property even though it supervenes upon natural properties; but, he assumed, if one takes the view that goodness is itself a natural property, the fact that it supervenes upon other natural properties makes it impossible to avoid a reductive thesis.
So the supervenience of intrinsic value removes the option of a non-reductive naturalism without contradicting his version of ethical non-naturalism. Subsequent discussion has shown that the relationship between supervenience and reduction is a complicated matter, and though I think that Moore's position is defensible this is not the place to take the issue further.
Instead I want to turn to the concept of intrinsic value which is central to Moore's theory. Despite this distinction it remains the case that intrinsic value is the fundamental type of ethical value, since instrumental value is definable in terms of the intrinsic value of a situation's consequences. This is not a conception which is familiar to us, but Moore illustrates the point by the following case: As before intrinsic value remains the fundamental conception of value, since a situation's value as a part is defined in terms of the overall intrinsic value of a complex situation to which it makes a contribution beyond its own intrinsic value.
Nonetheless this point implies that a thing's intrinsic value is not simply its value irrespective of its consequences; it is also its value irrespective of its context. There are two connected problems here: The problem here is not that Moore's principle is incorrect, but rather that it seems irrational since it puts a block on moral reasoning. The second problem concerns the thesis that intrinsic value is the same in all contexts. For this just seems wrong, in that the value of, say, friendship differs from one context to another.
Although, as Moore rightly says, friendship is normally one of the most valuable things there is, it has no value at all where claims of justice are at stake, as in a court of law. Another area where Moore's ethical theory is problematic is his account of ethical knowledge.
Because of his hostility to ethical naturalism Moore denies that ethical knowledge is a matter of empirical enquiry. But, as we have seen, he is equally hostile to Kant's rationalist thesis that fundamental ethical truths are truths of reason. Instead he holds that ethical knowledge rests on a capacity for an intuitive grasp of fundamental ethical truths for which we can give no reason since there is no reason to be given. The trouble with this is that if we can say nothing to support a claim to such knowledge, those who disagree with it can only register their disagreement and pass on; hence ethical debate is liable to turn into the expression of conflicting judgements which admit of no resolution.
In the light of this, it is not surprising that Moore's ethical theory was regarded as undermining the cognitive status of morality, and thus that it led directly to the development of ethical non-cognitivism by those who were influenced by Moore, such as A. Yet there was another side to Moore's discussion of ethical issues, in which he found himself arguing against the hedonist thesis that pleasure is the only thing with positive intrinsic value, despite the fact that officially he held that no such arguments could be given.
Because this indirect method is not integrated into his official method of ethical inquiry, he says little about its presuppositions. This emphasis reflects the fact that this aspect of Moore's ethical theory has been most influential; but it is also worth mentioning briefly some points from his moral theory. Moore presents a straightforward consequentialist account of the relationship between the right and the good: In practice, because it is so difficult for us to determine by ourselves what is the best outcome, he allows that we probably do best if we follow established rules; thus Moore ends up recommending a conservative form of rule consequentialism, for which he was criticised by Keynes and Russell.
Later critics such as W. Moore's choice of values is striking: The individualism of the resulting morality is enhanced by the fact that Moore maintains that these intrinsic values are incommensurable, and thus that the assessment of priorities among them is inescapably a matter of individual judgment. Although Moore was neither a mathematician nor a logical theorist he was one of the first people to grasp that Russell's new logical theory was an essential tool for philosophy and offered important new insights.
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As we saw above, in his early work Moore had been emphatic that propositions are altogether independent of thought and had even proposed that facts are just true propositions. So he now rejected the view that facts are just true propositions. On his new view, facts are, as before, constituted by objects and their properties; but what about propositions? According to Moore, philosophers talk legitimately of propositions in order to identify the aspects of thought and language which are crucial to questions of truth and inference, and in doing so it may appear that they regard propositions as genuine entities.
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But, Moore now holds, this implication is unwarranted: Moore does not allude here explicitly to Russell's theory of incomplete symbols and logical fictions, but it is clear that this is the kind of position he has in mind. The new logic enables one to preserve realist appearances without accepting realist metaphysics. Yet Moore was not an uncritical follower of Russell. While recognising that entailment is closely connected to logical necessity he came to think that entailment is not just a matter of the necessity of the truth-functional conditional, thereby setting off a debate about this relationship which continues to this day.
Again, Moore was critical of Russell's treatment of existence, in particular his denial that it makes sense to treat existence as a first-order predicate of particular objects for Russell, existence has to be expressed by the existential quantifier and is therefore a second-order predicate of predicates.
Moore's uses of Russell's logic take place in the broader context of his use of analysis as a method of philosophy. Although Moore always denied that philosophy is just analysis, there is no denying that it plays a central role in his philosophy and it is therefore important to determine what motivates this role. This question is especially pressing in Moore's case because he rejected the main analytical programmes of twentieth century philosophy — both Wittgenstein's logical atomism and the logical empiricism of the members of the Vienna circle and their followers such as A.
In the first case, Moore rejected Wittgenstein's thesis that whatever exists exists necessarily; as with the idealist thesis that all relations are internal, Moore held that our common sense conviction that some of the things which exist might not have done so creates a strong presumption against any philosopher who maintains the opposite, and that the logical atomist position does not provide convincing reasons why this presumption should be overturned. In addition Moore held that it is just not true that all necessity is logical necessity, as Wittgenstein maintained; in his early writings, despite his hostility to Kant, he had explicitly defended the conception of necessary synthetic truths and he did not change his mind on this point.
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But Moore also recognised that his early criticisms of William James' pragmatism can be applied to the logical empiricist position. In connection with James, Moore had observed that where a proposition concerns the past, it may well be that we are in a situation in which a proposition and its negation are both unverifiable because there is now no evidence either way on the matter.
But, he argued, it does not follow that we cannot now affirm that either the proposition or its negation is true, thanks to the Law of Excluded Middle; in which case it cannot be that truth is verifiability — contrary both to James' pragmatism and to logical empiricism. Yet why then did Moore think that the analysis of propositions was so important?
In addition, when explaining the importance of philosophical analysis, he emphasized the importance of getting clear what is at issue in some debate; but an issue which he himself was not clear about was that of the implications of an analysis. In his early writings he took the view that in so far as the analysis of a proposition clarifies it, it also clarifies its ontological implications; thus he then held it to be an objection to a phenomenalist analysis of propositions about material objects that the analysis calls into question the existence of such objects.
But he later took the opposite point of view, maintaining that a phenomenalist analysis just provides an account of what their existence amounts to. This remark, I think, reflects the true importance of philosophical analysis for Moore: Once the concept of a sense-datum has been introduced in this way, it is easy to see that false appearances can be handled by distinguishing between the properties of sense-data we apprehend and the properties of the physical objects which give rise to these sense-data. But what is the relationship between sense-data and physical objects?
Moore took it that there are three serious candidates to be considered: The indirect realist position is that to which he was initially drawn; but he could see that it leaves our beliefs about the physical world exposed to skeptical doubt, since it implies that the observations which constitute evidence for these beliefs concern only the properties of non-physical sense-data, and there is no obvious way for us to obtain further evidence to support a hypothesis about the properties of the physical world and its relationship to our sense-data.
This argument is reminiscent of Berkeley's critique of Locke, and Moore therefore considered carefully Berkeley's phenomenalist alternative. This may be felt to be too intuitive, like Dr. Johnson's famous objection to Berkeley; but Moore could also see that there were substantive objections to the phenomenalist position, such as the fact that our normal ways of identifying and anticipating significant uniformities among our sense-data draw on our beliefs about our location in physical space and the state of our physical sense-organs, neither of which are available to the consistent phenomenalist.
So far Moore's dialectic is familiar. What is unfamiliar is his direct realist position, according to which sense-data are physical.
George Edward Moore
This position avoids the problems so far encountered, but in order to accommodate false appearances Moore has to allow that sense-data may lack the properties which we apprehend them as having. It may be felt that in so far as sense-data are objects at all, this is inevitable; but Moore now needs to provide an account of the apparent properties of sense-data and it is not clear how he can do this without going back on the initial motivation for the sense-datum theory by construing these apparent properties as properties of our experiences.
But what in fact turns Moore against this direct realist position is the difficulty he thinks it leads to concerning the treatment of hallucinations. In such cases, Moore holds, any sense-data we apprehend are not parts of a physical object; so direct realism cannot apply to them, and yet there is no reason to hold that they are intrinsically different from the sense-data which we apprehend in normal experience.
Moore wrote more extensively about perception than about any other topic. In these writings he moves between the three alternatives set out here without coming to any firm conclusion. From the outside, it seems clear that what was leading him astray was the sense-datum hypothesis itself and his reflections on perception can be regarded as an extended reductio ad absurdum of this hypothesis. It was only towards the end of his career that he encountered in Ducasse's adverbial theory a serious alternative to the sense-datum hypothesis. But the adverbial theory provides no easy way of avoiding the difficulties Moore confronted: Moore rightly objected to Ducasse that it is not at all clear how the structure of a sensory field can be construed in adverbial terms.
Yet there were other alternatives: From the fact that I know something and yet cannot prove it, it does not follow that I merely accept it on faith, that I do not really know it. More importantly, a rich and complex tradition of sceptical epistemology, which has lain at the heart of philosophy for 2, years, has been ignored, by-passed and rejected.
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Moore refuses to engage either with the intuitions that have driven the special doubts of philosophers, or with their arguments. He seems determined not to try to imagine what it was that led philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and of more direct concern to Moore, McTaggart and Bradley, to adopt the views they did, despite these views being contrary to the Common Sense in the defence of which Moore was so robust.
There is, first of all, something a bit odd about someone setting out in wartime on a journey whose aim is to transport his own bare hands so that they might be used in a demonstration of the existence of an external world. It seems a bit like lifting a grain of sand to demonstrate the existence of the beach one is standing on. Attendance at the lecture itself demonstrated an existential presupposition of the conclusion the lecturer was pretending to be arriving at although he was actually setting out from it. Moore was pushing against an open door, appealing to the very assumptions that were necessary for his audience to come to hear him speak.
He need not have raised his hands at all: Or exchanged glances with them. That it fails as a proof is obvious, but it fails even to be a failed proof — as becomes evident when the lecture is experienced as a paper. Or perhaps a recipe for a proof you might like to try with a few friends in the comfort of your own home. But logic is about the relationship between statements , and cannot demonstrate the existence of singular real entities, never mind critiques that might be used to prove the existence of a world with extra-mental contents.
The point-missing may have been quite sincere: This is a worrying boast in a Professor of Philosophy. The sceptical arguments have been immensely fertile, and our failure either to answer them or to believe them has been an important driver of human self-consciousness, beginning with Parmenides.
They have been a powerful means by which we have managed to get a hold on the glass surface of the obvious that philosophy tries to think through and past. Moore was exhibiting a failure to take seriously the mysterious relationship between the mind and what the mind is aware of, or thinks it is aware of. He was behaving as we all do when the hurry and worry of life prevents us from pausing to wonder. The god of metaphysics, however, was not mocked. Moore himself spent decades struggling unsuccessfully with what it was we did indeed experience when we encountered external objects, and with the vexed relationship between sense data — the contents immediately given in perception — and the objects whose existence he had purported to demonstrate.
His various unsatisfactory solutions illustrate F. Raymond Tallis is a physician, philosopher, poet and novelist. His most recent books are The Kingdom of Infinite Space: