Stories About People: December 2016

Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid was the founder of the Scottish "Common Sense" school of philosophy. A contemporary and critic of David Hume, he is best known for his staunch defense of common sense and trenchant opposition to the "way of ideas," the theory that the immediate objects of perception and other cognitive acts are always internal images or ideas, not external physical objects.

His views exerted a good deal of influence until the mid-nineteenth century or so, when they began to be eclipsed by absolute idealism, pragmatism, and other philosophical movements, but they have been the subject of renewed interest from the 1970s on.

After being educated at Marischal College in Aberdeen, Scotland, Reid served for fifteen years as a parish minister in nearby New Machar. In 1752 he was appointed professor at King's College in Aberdeen, where he taught mathematics, physics, and philosophy, among other subjects.

Max Stirner

Max Stirner was the nom de plume of the German individualist philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt. Born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Schmidt had a poor childhood. His academic career was long and fragmented. From 1826 to 1828 he studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he fell under the influence of G.W. F. Hegel.

After brief periods at the universities of Erlangen and Königsberg, he returned to Berlin in 1832 and with some difficulty gained a certificate to teach in Prussian Gymnasiums.

Several years of poverty and unemployment followed, until Schmidt found a position as teacher in a Berlin academy for young ladies run by a Madame Gropius. After this he lived something of a double life: The respectable teacher of young ladies had for another self the aspiring philosophical writer who assumed the name of Stirner.

Speciesism

“Speciesism” is the name of a form of bias or discrimination that is much discussed in the contemporary debates over the moral status of animals. It amounts to discriminating on the basis of species; that is, it takes the fact that, say, baboons and humans belong to different species as a reason in itself to draw moral differences between them and on several counts.

First, speciesism sometimes manifests itself in consideration of who or what may be members of the moral community, of who or what is morally considerable (see Clark, Frey, Regan, Singer). For example, it is sometimes said that creatures who have experiences or are sentient count morally; to go on to affirm that (some) animals have experiences and are sentient but to deny that they count morally solely because they are not of the right species is a form of speciesism.

If it really is the fact that creatures have experiences and are sentient that matters, then animals count; what has to be shown is why the fact that it is a baboon and not a human who has these characteristics matters morally.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith, one of the most influential political economists of Western society, first became known as a moral philosopher. Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.

His father died shortly before he was born, and his mother’s loss doubtless explains the lifelong attachment that flourished between her and her son. Smith entered the University of Glasgow in 1737, where he attended Francis Hutcheson’s lectures. In 1740 he entered Balliol College, Oxford, as a Snell exhibitioner.

He remained at Oxford for seven years and then returned to Kirkcaldy. In 1748 he moved to Edinburgh, where he became the friend of David Hume and Lord Kames (Henry Home). In 1751 he was elected professor of logic at the University of Glasgow, and in the next year he exchanged logic for the professorship in moral philosophy, an appointment that he held for the next ten years.

Valentinus and Valentinianism

Valentinus (mid-2nd century CE) was the founder of what came to be one of the most influential Gnostic sects of heretical Christianity. Little can be known with certainty about either his life or his teachings, apart from what has been preserved for us in the writings of the church fathers, much of which is reported only very sketchily, with a view toward refutation.

The discovery, in 1945, of important Coptic texts at Nag Hammadi has improved our understanding of his thought, but the texts discovered there (principally the so-called Evangelium Veritatis [Gospel of truth]) represent the thought of the various schools drawing inspiration from his teachings and cannot reasonably be attributed to Valentinus himself.

St. Irenaeus (Adversus Haereseis I) and others assert that he was a native of Egypt, where he is said to have studied under Theodas, alleged to have been a pupil of St. Paul, but reports of both the connection to Egypt and to St. Paul may be motivated by a desire to put him into a certain tradition, whether mystical or theological. St. Irenaeus also reports that he lived in Rome during three pontificates (Hyginus, 136–140; Pius, 140–155; Anicetus, 155–166), and Tertullian (Adversus Valentinianos) says that he was in communion until he was passed over for the episcopacy (possibly in favor of Pius, though this is not clear), whereupon he left the church.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus

Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the German philosopher and theologian, was born in Hamburg and studied theology at Jena. After serving as a lecturer in Wittenberg and as director of a high school in Wismar, he became a teacher of oriental languages at the Johannes-gymnasium in Hamburg. He began writing very late in life, when he was about sixty.

One of his most important works, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Apology for or Defense of the Rational Worshiper of God), was first published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing— posthumously and only in part—as fragments of an allegedly anonymous manuscript found in the Wolfenbüttel Library, where Lessing was librarian ("Wolfenbüttler Fragmente eines Ungenannten," in Beiträge zur Geschichte und Literatur, 1774–1777).

Reimarus was originally a Wolffian, and Wolffianism was a lasting foundation for his thought; but he developed individual doctrines in both philosophy and theology as one of the "popular philosophers." He stressed the moral aim of philosophy, that is, the happiness and moral perfectibility of man.

Ugliness

Aesthetics has often been described as the philosophical study of beauty and “ugliness.” It is important at the outset to see what is involved in this familiar definition, for it embodies a view of ugliness and of its role within aesthetic theory that has been the major source of contention in historical debates on the concept.

The first thing to note about this view is that it takes ugliness to be a category that properly falls within aesthetic theory. Ugliness designates aesthetic disvalue as beauty designates positive aesthetic value.

The two therefore constitute a value polarity analogous to right and wrong in ethics or to truth and falsehood in epistemology. Just as the field of ethics comprises responsible human actions of which some are evil and blameworthy, so, among perceptual objects, there are some that have negative aesthetic value.

Verifiability Principle

The doctrines associated with the slogan that meaning is the mode of verification continued to develop in the last four decades of the twentieth century. While the exact formulation of the principle was itself controversial, the essential idea was to link semantic and epistemic concerns by letting the meaning of an expression be its role within an empirical epistemology.

At the same time the fortunes of logical empiricism, the movement associated with verificationism, changed substantially as well. First, as philosophers who conspicuously did not identify themselves with logical empiricism moved to center stage, the movement as a separately identifiable phenomenon virtually ceased to exist.

This did not dispose of verificationism, however, for often the later philosophers’ views were strikingly similar to the logical empiricism that they supposedly replaced, just as the criticisms of logical empiricism were often pioneered by the logical empiricists themselves. The second major change in the fortunes of this view was the renewal of interest in the history of philosophy of science, especially in the histories of the logical empiricists themselves.