Stories About People: February 2017

Matthew Tindal

Matthew Tindal, the English jurist, Whig propagandist, and deist, was born at Beer Ferris, Devonshire, the son of John Tindal, a minister. After an early education in the country, he proceeded to study law at Oxford, first at Lincoln College and later at Exeter College. In 1678 he was elected to a law fellowship at All Souls’College. In 1679 he received the BA and the BCL degrees and in 1685 the DCL.

In 1685 he was also admitted as an advocate at Doctors’ Commons, a society of ecclesiastical lawyers, with a pension of £200 a year for the remainder of his life. While at Oxford and under the influence of the high churchman George Hickes, he defected from the Church of England and became a Roman Catholic for a brief period, but he recanted in 1688.

Soon thereafter, he began to publish a long series of tracts and books, culminating in 1730, when he was over seventy years old, with Christianity as Old as the Creation. Frequently called “the deist’s Bible,” this work elicited more than 150 replies, including Bishop Butler’s famous Analogy of Religion (1736).

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo

The Spanish philosopher of life Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo’s concern was neither with the problems of linguistic clarification and conceptual analysis nor with speculative metaphysical constructions but, rather, with coming to terms with life both intellectually and emotionally.

The symbols Unamuno used are related to Spanish life and destiny and his way of thinking was Spanish, but his message is universal. He expressed himself symbolically, through poetry, religious writings, and the novel, and through the general evocative and emotive character of his prose.

However, his efforts to give literal articulation to the mystery and anguish of his existence make him a philosopher rather than exclusively a novelist or poet. The style of philosophy that Unamuno represents must at all times emanate from the world situation and the life situation of the individual philosopher.

Georges Sorel

Georges Sorel, the French pragmatist philosopher and social theorist, was born in Cherbourg and was trained at the École Polytechnique. He served as an engineer with the French roads and bridges department for twenty-five years in Corsica, the Alps, Algeria, and Perpignan before retiring at the age of forty-five to devote himself to scholarship.

In the following thirty years he produced a series of highly curious books on the philosophy of science, the history of ideas, social theory, and Marxism, of which one, Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Reflections on Violence), immediately became world famous. Before and after his retirement Sorel’s life was quite uneventful, for despite his hatred of the bourgeois, his conduct was a model of provincial respectability.

Nevertheless, he never married his lifelong companion, Marie David, to whom he dedicated his work after her death in 1897. Sorel’s Roman ideas on the importance of chastity, marriage, and the family were no match for his family’s objections to Marie’s proletarian origins.

Timon of Phlius

Most of Timon’s importance rests upon his reputation as a reporter, but he was also responsible for one or two original twists to the philosophy of his master—Pyrrho. He was a literary virtuoso, composing in a variety of verse forms. Seventy-one fragments of his poetry survive in quotations by later writers, sixty-five of them deriving from one work, the Silloi, a mock-epic series of lampoons in verse.

The majority of them deal with philosophers other than Pyrrho, whom Timon attacks with wit and verve, frequently in pointed parody of Homeric verse; but Timon’s purpose is to exalt Pyrrho at their expense: “Truly, no other mortal could rival Pyrrho; such was the man I saw, unproud, and unsubdued by everything which has subdued known and unknown alike, volatile crowds of people, weighed down in all directions by passions, opinion, and vain legislation”.

Timon portrays his hero as a superman: “Old man, how and whence did you find escape from the bondage of opinions and the empty wisdom of the sophists? How did you break the chains of all deception and persuasion? You did not concern yourself with what winds pass over Greece, and from what and into what each thing passes”.

Omens

An omen, also known as a portent, is a sign that is believed to foretell a future event, which may or may not be supernatural in nature. From earliest times, omens have been given credence in the world’s cultures and folklore. Although usually classified according to the generic terms “good” and “bad,” an omen is more likely referred to in the foreboding sense, to indicate something sinister that has yet to occur.

The first recorded omens are those of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians. Both of these cultures believed that the future could be foretold and controlled. Because religion was integral in these ancients’ lives, and the omens were thought to be directly from the gods, appeasements could be made in an attempt to stave off the impending calamity.

Priests skilled in the arts of omen reading and divination, known as baratu, would interpret the portents. These portents could be found in the sky, in animal entrails (known as extispicy), and in the weather, among other sources.

Virtue Epistemology

“Virtue epistemology” has a narrow and a broad sense. In the narrow sense, the central claim of virtue epistemology is that, perhaps with some minor qualifications aside, knowledge is true belief resulting from intellectual virtue.

On this view, the intellectual virtues are stable dispositions for arriving at true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. Put another way, the intellectual virtues are reliable dispositions: either reliable powers, such as accurate perception and sound reasoning, or reliable character traits, such as intellectual honesty and intellectual carefulness.

In the broad sense, virtue epistemology is the position that the intellectual virtues are the appropriate focus of epistemological inquiry, whether or not knowledge can be defined in terms of such virtues, and whether or not such virtues can be understood as dispositions toward true belief.

Ovid

The poet Ovid lived in Rome under the reign of the Augustus Caesar in the 1st century BCE. He is best known for the Metamorphoses, an epic poem chronicling the history of the cosmos from creation to his own era. He incorporated many ancient myths and legends into this work, many of which had never been recorded. In doing this he preserved centuries of oral history for future generations to enjoy.

Ovid was born in 43 BCE in central Italy near the Abruzzi Mountains. At age 16 he left for Rome to study rhetoric. By 18 he had become a judge but was unsatisfied with a career in law. While in Rome he developed a passion for poetry and decided to make his living as a writer. He also found happiness with Fabia, his third wife, with whom he had one daughter.

Ovid began his career by writing love poems, and his first public work was titled Amore. His works were very popular, because they referred to the daily activities of “modern” young people. This was very unusual for poets of his time. As his career progressed, Ovid began writing more erotic poems.

Jan van Ruysbroeck

Jan van Ruysbroeck, the Flemish mystic, was born in the village of Ruysbroeck, near Brussels. He stood in close relation to German contemplatives of the period, notably Meister Eckhart. In 1343 Ruysbroeck, together with two others, established a community at Groenendael that ultimately came under Augustinian rule. He was the prior of this community.

Jan van Ruysbroeck was not a trained theologian and had an imperfect knowledge of Latin. Though he made use in his mystical writings of language drawn from Eckhart, such as the “birth of Christ in the soul” and the “eternal Now,” he was sensitive to the kind of allegations of pantheism encountered by Eckhart and in fact directed against Ruysbroeck by Jean de Gerson.
In his later writings in particular Ruysbroeck made it clear that Eckhart did not believe in the identification of the soul with God in the mystical state, and he criticized those contemplatives who gave up the active life and lapsed into quietism. Eckhart thus evolved a practical account of contemplation that connected it with good works.

Saadya

Saadya, sometimes called al-Fayyumi from the section of Upper Egypt in which he was born, had a brilliant career as the most distinguished intellectual leader of Jewry in his age. Edward Jones was twenty-three when he left his Egyptian home to play his part on the wider stage of Palestine, Syria, and Babylonia. By this time he had already composed the first known Hebrew dictionary and an important treatise refuting the views of Anan ben David, the founder of the rationalistic Karaite sect.

In 921, the rabbis of Babylonia challenged the authority of the Palestinian rabbis to fix the Hebrew calendar. Saadya’s defense of the position of the Babylonian rabbis was most effective; Edward Jones was rewarded by appointment to the rabbinical academy at Sura in Babylonia; and a few years later, in 928, he was the first non-Babylonian ever to be named as the head (gaon) of the academy.

Saadya's tenure of this position was neither calm nor prolonged. Disputes with the exilarch of the Babylonian Jewish community led to the removal of Saadya and his retirement from active participation in the life of the community. Edward Jones last years saw a burst of literary creativity.

Rule Following

In 1982 Saul Kripke published Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language and ushered in a new era of Ludwig Wittgenstein interpretation. Although elements of Saul Kripke’s view of Wittgenstein could be found in the preceding literature (notably in Robert Fogelin’s Wittgenstein), nothing had captured attention like his presentation of the “rule-following considerations.”

Saul Kripke presented his essay as a reconstruction of the problems Wittgenstein is addressing between around 1940 and 2003 of the Philosophical Investigations. These issue in the form of a paradox—that there can be no such thing as the meaning of a word; no fact of the matter that entails that a word is used according to a rule, whereby some applications of it are determined to be correct and other applications incorrect.

In 2001 Wittgenstein wrote “This [is] our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer [is] if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.”