Stories About People: April 2017

Vagueness

A term is vague if, and only if, it is capable of having borderline cases. All borderline cases are inquiry-resistant: Senator Hillary Clinton is a borderline case of “chubby” because, given her constitution, no amount of conceptual or empirical investigation can settle the question of whether or not she is chubby.

Notice that this is not vagueness in the sense of being underspecific. If her spokesperson states that the senator weighs between 100 and 200 pounds, reporters will complain that the assertion is too obvious to be informative—not that the matter is indeterminate.

Typically, borderline cases lie between clear negative cases and clear positives. Moreover, the transition from clear to borderline cases will itself be unclear. If one thousand women queue in order of weight, there is no definite point at which the definitely non-chubby end and the borderline chubby begin. In addition to this second order vagueness: There is third order vagueness: There is no definite point at which the definitely definite cases end and the indefinitely definite ones begin.

Alan M Turing

Alan Mathison Turing was born June 23, 1912, in London and died June 7, 1954, at his home near Manchester. He suffered the conventional schooling of the English upper-middle class, but defeated convention by becoming a shy, eccentric but athletic Cambridge mathematician. The Second World War transformed Turing’s life by giving him a crucial role in breaking German ciphers, with particular responsibility for the Atlantic war.

Thereafter Turing led the design of electronic computers and the program of artificial intelligence. In 1950 he began another career as a mathematical biologist, but was assailed by prosecution for homosexuality. His last two years, though overshadowed by punishment and security risk status, saw vigorous and defiant work until his death by cyanide poisoning.

Turing’s paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence appeared in 1950. This, his only contribution to a philosophical journal, was to become one of the most cited. He considered the question “can a machine think” and gave an argument that broke with all previous speculation about homunculi and robots, and from all earlier discussion of mind, matter, freewill, and determinism. It was based on his own elucidation of mathematical computability, as achieved in 1936. It also reflected his unique experience with practical computation.

Unconscious

Under the impact of new developments in science, ideas in all fields are undergoing rapid change. This is especially true of the twentieth-century conception of the unconscious, the term being used here in a general sense for all those mental processes of which the individual is not aware while they occur in him.

The present interest in the unconscious is a result of the advance of science and psychology since the mid-1800s, and to understand this interest requires some knowledge of the history of ideas.

But the timing of this outburst of interest, its intensity (which is greatest in the English-speaking countries and least in Russia and China), and the particular conception of the unconscious that is now dominant are mainly due to one man, Sigmund Freud. His high degree of success in creating widespread appreciation of the power of the unconscious makes the improvement of his conception of it a matter of great importance.

The Sublime

This title already raises the conundrum that “the sublime” has regularly, although in different ways, posed. The substantivized form of the adjective suggests something one could point to where sublimity resides. The sublime might even be misconstrued (as it was by Edmund Burke) as a property of certain objects.

But the sublime refers to no thing; it is instead an effect produced by the limits of our capacities for perception and representation. As such the sublime has played a vital role in the history of aesthetic theory as well as in postmodernist debates about representation and the limits of knowledge.

The sublime was first theorized by the pseudonymous Longinus in On the Sublime, written in the first century CE. Longinus conceives sublimity as a quality of elevated prose of great rhetorical power. Not until the seventeenth century does the sublime become associated with natural phenomena, and then with the incomprehensible excesses of natural force.

Ernst Julius Wilhelm Schuppe

Ernst Julius Wilhelm Schuppe, the German philosopher, was born in Brieg, Silesia.He studied at the universities of Breslau, Bonn, and Berlin, and he took his doctorate at Berlin in 1860. He taught at grammar schools in Silesia and then held a chair of philosophy at the University of Greifswald from 1873 to 1910.

Epistemology

In his main work, Erkenntnistheoretische Logik (Bonn, 1878), largely anticipated by his earlier book Das menschliche Denken (Berlin, 1870) and summarized in his later Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie und Logik (Berlin, 1894; 2nd ed., Berlin, 1910), Schuppe was concerned with the epistemological bases of knowledge generally and of logic in particular.

Schuppe held that a theory of knowledge should avoid hypotheses such as the transcendent reality postulated by realists and metaphysicians, but that it should equally avoid one-sided objective or subjective foundations of knowledge, whether materialist, positivist, or idealist.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin, the English critic of art and society, was born in London, the son of a wine merchant. John Ruskin began writing while at Oxford University and in 1843 published, in London, the first volume of Modern Painters, four more volumes of which were published during the next sixteen years.

In 1849 he published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and between 1851 and 1853 The Stones of Venice (3 vols.). The major part of his work as a young man was criticism of art and architecture, and his subsequent ethical and social writing grew from this root.

The beginnings of this important extension of his range can be seen in the famous chapter “The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice; the important connection established there, between art and “the right kind of labour,” is developed in The Political Economy of Art (printed as A Joy for Ever, 1857), Unto This Last (1862), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Munera Pulveris (1863 and 1872).

Jacques Rohault

Jacques Rohault was a mechanistic Cartesian experimental physicist. He was born in Amiens, France, and earned his MA in Paris in 1641. There, he became Claude Clerselier's Cartesian disciple and son-in-law. He was Pierre-Sylvain Régis's teacher and converted him to Cartesianism.

In the 1650s Rohault was a private tutor in Paris, and his "Cartesian Wednesday" evening lectures, complete with laboratory table demonstrations, were attended by many members of the noble class, women as well as men, and did a great deal toward popularizing Cartesianism.

His Traite de physique (Paris, 1671) was a standard text for nearly fifty years. John Clarke and Samuel Clarke, rather than writing a Newtonian physics, translated Rohault's work into Latin (1697) and English (1723) and added Newtonian footnotes to correct Rohault's Cartesian mistakes.

Bernardino Varisco

Bernardino Varisco, the Italian metaphysician, was born at Chiari (Brescia). It was only in the later part of his long life that he developed his philosophy, for he began as a teacher of science and his early outlook was characterized by empiricism and positivism.

These views found expression in Scienza e opinioni (1901). Thereafter he became interested in the problem of reconciling the scientific and religious ways of understanding the world and moved into metaphysics.

In 1906 he was appointed professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Rome, where he remained until his retirement in 1925. His metaphysic was a philosophy of spirit in the manner of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Rudolf Hermann Lotze and won him a considerable reputation in Italy and elsewhere.

Max Scheler

A pioneering German phenomenologist, ethicist, and social philosopher, Max Scheler was born in Munich in 1874. His father was Lutheran, his mother was Jewish; Scheler himself, ever independent, embraced Catholicism. After studying with Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, he earned his doctorate in 1897 under Rudolf Eucken in Jena, where he taught until 1906. From 1907 he taught in Munich, where he met Franz Brentano and several disciples of Edmund Husserl, the father of the phenomenological movement.

He soon became acquainted with a growing circle of phenomenologists from Munich and Göttingen, including Moritz Geiger (1880–1937), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977), Alexander Pfänder, Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), Edith Stein, and others. But as early as 1901, when he first met Husserl, Scheler had already taken an independent phenomenological direction of his own.

In 1910 Scheler lost his post in Munich after a divorce alienated him from the Catholic university administration. In 1912, he married Märit Furtwängler, sister of the noted conductor. From 1910 to 1919, he freelanced as an independent scholar, publishing a prolific number of works, particularly on ethics, but also on political issues of the day, including war, capitalism, feminism, the psychology of resentment, and various social issues. He served on diplomatic missions to Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Rights

Although ancient ethics used the concepts of property and justice, each of which presupposes something similar to the concept of a right, the concept of a right in the modern sense developed only later. The first philosopher to define a moral right was most likely William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347), who noted that jus sometimes refers to the power to conform to right reason.

Thus, he integrated the legal concept of dominium or property into the moral theory that the law of nature determines right action. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) adopted the resulting theory of natural rights—rights conferred by the law of nature—and made it the basis for his theory of international law.

Hobbes and Locke used their conceptions of natural rights to explain the grounds and limits of political obligation. Hobbes (1588–1679) conceives of a right as a liberty of action that is the absence of any contrary obligation.

Traditionalism

“Traditionalism” was a philosophy of history and a political program developed by the Counterrevolutionists in France. It was ultramontane in politics and antiindividualistic in epistemology and ethics.

It was the common belief of both those who favored the French Revolution and those who opposed it that the revolution was prepared by the philosophes. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were invoked by both parties as having been either the initiators of much-needed reforms or the corrupters of youth. The intellectual differences among the philosophes were minimized.

The Revolutionary Party believed that Voltaire and Rousseau were the leaders of two schools of thought, both of which removed the seat of authority from the group—society or the nation or the church—to the individual, and that the two schools disagreed only on the question of whether authority was vested in the reason or in feeling (sentiment). The Voltairians were said to be individualistic rationalists; the Rousseauists individualistic sentimentalists.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Arnold Joseph Toynbee was in the twentieth century the foremost contemporary representative of what is sometimes termed “speculative philosophy of history.” In some respects he occupied a position analogous to that of Henry Thomas Buckle in the nineteenth century.

Like Buckle, he sought to discover laws determining the growth and evolution of civilization and to do so within the context of a wide comparative survey of different historical societies; like Buckle again, the results of his investigation became a storm center of controversy and criticism.

To support his hypotheses, Toynbee, however, was able to draw on a vast fund of material of a kind unavailable to his Victorian predecessor, and the imposing examples and illustrations in which his work abounds make Buckle’s much-vaunted erudition look strangely threadbare. As a consequence, Toynbee’s historical theory is worked out in far greater detail; in fact, it represents a highly articulated and complex structure with many ramifications and appendages.

George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for his political satires Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The two novels criticize totalitarianism and social injustice.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the most popular and widely quoted novels of the 20th century. It describes a bleak picture of a future world ruled by totalitarian regimes. Individual freedom and privacy are suppressed in the tightly controlled society described by Orwell.

“Big brother is watching” is one of the many famous lines that have been frequently quoted from the book. The Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union was the reallife archetype for Orwell’s idea.

Gian Domenico Romagnosi

Gian Domenico Romagnosi was born in Salsomaggiore, near Parma, and studied at the Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza. Through the teaching of Giovanni Antonio Comi, a follower of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff, Romagnosi became acquainted with the doctrines of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and with the writings of Charles Bonnet, which had a decisive influence on him.

After his graduation in 1786, he conceived his bestknown work, Genesi del diritto penale (Genesis of Penal Law; completed in 1789 and published in Pavia in 1791), in which he claimed that the fundamental right to punish belongs to society. Society alone, and not the individual, can mete out "that amount of evil that is necessary to preserve the well-being of our fellow men" and can oppose the "criminal impulse" with a "moral counterimpulse." Named mayor of Trent in Napoleon Bonaparte.

During this time he published, among other works, his Cosa è l'eguaglianza (What Is Equality?; Trent, 1792) and Cosa è libertà (What Is Freedom?; Trent, 1793). 1791, Romagnosi remained in that office for ten years, during the period of the French Revolution and the rise of