Stories About People: July 2017

Universal Properties in Indian Philosophical Traditions

Universal Properties

Early Grammarians on Universals of Words and Meanings

In ancient India systematic metaphysics started with a linguistic turn. Ontological concepts and controversies arose in the context of musings on meanings of words and debates on declensions, unlike in ancient Greece, where metaphysics arose out of wondering about numbers, figures, and nature.

In Pañini’s grammar and his early commentaries (between the fourth and second centuries BCE) the three crucial technical terms for a universal—samanya, jati, and akrti—were already explicitly in use. Philosophers of language dabbled in metaphysics since Patañjali’s “Great Commentary” to Pañini’s grammar.

The device of adding a tva or ta (roughly equivalent to the English “ness”) to any nominal root x, yields, as meaning, the property of being x. From substance (dravya) one can thus mechanically abstract substanceness (dravya-tva), from real (sat) and reality (satta).

The word universal, used as a noun, has belonged to the vocabulary of English-writing philosophers since the sixteenth century, but the concept of universals, and the problems raised by it, has a far longer history.

Indeed, Plato may be taken to be the father of this perennial topic of philosophy, for it is in his dialogues that we find the first arguments for universals and the first discussion of the difficulties they raise.

Plato believed that the existence of universals was required not only ontologically, to explain the nature of the world that as sentient and reflective beings we experience, but also epistemologically, to explain the nature of our experience of it.

Utopias and Utopianism

The word utopia was invented by Thomas More, who published his famous Utopia (in Latin) in 1516. More coupled the Greek words ou (no, or not) and topos (place) to invent a name that has since passed into nearly universal currency. Further verbal play shows the close relation between utopia and eutopia, which means “the good [or happy] place.”

Through the succeeding centuries this double aspect has marked the core of utopian literature, which has employed the imaginary to project the ideal. (This is not to deny that More’s own attitude towards the ideal society he imagined may well have been ambivalent.)

The words utopia and utopian, however, have been put to many uses besides the one suggested by More’s book. Common to all uses is reference to either the imaginary or the ideal, or to both. But sometimes the words are used as terms of derision and sometimes with a vagueness that robs them of any genuine usefulness.

José Vasconcelos

José Vasconcelos, the Mexican politician and philosopher, was born in Oaxaca. Vasconcelos was active in the Mexican revolution, directed the reform of Mexican education as secretary of education in the early 1920s, ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1929, and subsequently was exiled for a time.

He was rector of the National University of Mexico, visiting professor at the University of Chicago, and director of the Biblioteca Nacional de México.

The sources of his philosophy were Pythagoras, Plotinus, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, A. N. Whitehead, and especially Henri Bergson. Of Latin American philosophers, Vasconcelos is the most original, venturesome, and impassioned.

Lorenzo Valla

Lorenzo Valla, the Italian humanist, is best known as the man who exposed the Donation of Constantine and thus undermined a leading argument for papal sovereignty in the secular realm. This fact and the reputation for hedonism derived from his youthful work De Voluptate (On pleasure) have conspired to invest Valla with an air of disrepute that he probably does not deserve.

In particular, this reputation does not do justice to Valla’s efforts on behalf of a return to the spirit of the Gospel or to his respect for Paul and the early Greek and Latin Church Fathers, in which he clearly anticipates later developments.

Nor does it recognize his passion for historical truth and for the defense of plain speaking against what he regarded as metaphysical obscurity and verbalizing. Valla was perhaps the most versatile of the humanists; he initiated a series of attacks upon Scholastic logic, theology, and law, in addition to his contributions to historical and textual criticism.

Luc de Clapiers Marquis de Vauvenargues

The French moralist and epigrammatist Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, was born at Aix-en-Provence. He early revealed a lofty character that despised egotism and pettiness.

Ambitious for glory, he became an army officer at the age of seventeen, despite a weak physique. He served throughout the Italian campaign of 1734. The later German campaign of 1741, especially the harsh retreat from Prague, ruined his health, forcing him to retire at the age of twenty-six.

His hope of a career in diplomacy was dashed by lack of fortune and protection. While vainly waiting at Aix for replies to his petitions for appointment to a post, he contracted a severe case of smallpox that left him disfigured and sickly.

Thorstein Bunde Veblen

Thorstein Bunde Veblen, the American economist and social theorist, is perhaps best known for his ironic style, a style that was at one with his life. Although he is still thought of abroad as the most influential American social scientist, among social scientists in America his influence has almost vanished.

He is virtually unknown to college students, even if a scattered lot of Veblen’s concepts—most obviously, “conspicuous consumption”—are unwittingly part of their speech and analyses.

Born on a Wisconsin farm, Veblen developed the most comprehensive and penetrating analysis of American industrial society in the early twentieth century. He emphasized qualitative relationships in the historical process, and his aim was an inclusive theory of social change.

Virtue Ethics

In 1930 C. D. Broad first proposed to divide ethical theories into two classes, teleological and deontological, thereby introducing a dichotomy that quickly became standard in ethics. Teleological theories were defined as ones that hold that the moral rightness of an action is always determined by its tendency to promote certain consequences deemed intrinsically good; deontological theories, as ones that deny this claim.

Broad’s dichotomy was widely accepted as being exhaustive, but in fact there are two fundamental classes of normative moral judgments that do not fit easily into it. First, it focuses on rightness or obligation, excluding moral judgments concerning what is admirable, good, excellent, or ideal. Second, it concerns only actions and their consequences, saying nothing about moral judgments concerning persons, character, and character traits.

The contemporary movement known as virtue ethics is usually said to have begun in 1958 with Elizabeth Anscombe’s advice to do ethics without the notion of a “moral ought.” Although her own critique of moral-obligation concepts (viz., that they have meaning only within religious frameworks that include the notion of a divine lawgiver) did not gain widespread acceptance among secular ethicists, her constructive proposal to look for moral norms not in duty concepts but within the virtues or traits of character that one needs to flourish as a human being quickly caught on.

Theory of the Visual Arts

There are competing views on what qualifies photographs, paintings, sculpture, and architecture as visual arts. This entry focuses on theories of vision and their implications for claims about each of these four art forms. There is also debate over whether it is desirable to identify these major categories of art in terms of particular sense modalities.

What is partly at issue is whether vision and visual experience are isolated from other sense modalities. The status of photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture as major art forms is by no means beyond challenge; they, along with their paradigm cases, exhibit considerable variation within and across cultures, and through time.

Photography

Photography, like vision, seems to have an especially intimate connection with the world by virtue of a causal or “mechanical” process that is describable in purely physical terms. Interestingly, this alleged mechanical connection has also been responsible for the lion’s share of skepticism about whether photography is indeed an art. The basic idea is that the appearance of a photograph is, like visual experience itself, dependent in a special way on the presence of the targeted object or scene.

Voluntarism

The term voluntarism (from the Latin voluntas, “will”) applies to any philosophical theory according to which the will is prior to or superior to the intellect or reason. More generally, voluntaristic theories interpret various aspects of experience and nature in the light of the concept of the will, or as it is called in certain older philosophies, passion, appetite, desire, or conatus. Such theories may be psychological, ethical, theological, or metaphysical.

Psychological Voluntarism

Voluntaristic theories of psychology represent men primarily as beings who will certain ends and whose reason and intelligence are subordinate to will. The outstanding classical representatives are Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Hobbes, for example, thought that all voluntary human behavior is response to desire or aversion, which he brought together under the name “endeavor”; he based his ethical and political theories chiefly on this claim.

Francisco de Vitoria

Francisco de Vitoria, the political and legal philosopher and theologian, was born in Vitoria, capital of the Basque province of Álava, Spain.

While still a boy, he joined the Dominican order in Burgos, and in 1509 or 1510 he was sent to the Collège Saint-Jacques in Paris, where he finished his courses in the humanities and went on to study philosophy and theology.

While a student of theology, he directed an edition of the Secunda Secundae (“Second Part of the Second Part” of the Summa) of St. Thomas Aquinas. The date of his ordination is unknown.

Gregory Vlastos

Gregory Vlastos led a revival of interest in ancient philosophy and was the first American scholar to deploy the methods of analytic philosophy in this area. Best known for his work on the philosophy of Socrates, he also published widely on Plato and on topics in pre-Socratic philosophy. Before turning to ancient philosophy, he published works in social and political theory, and his writings on justice continue to be influential.

He was born in the Greek community of Istanbul, raised as a Protestant, and educated at Roberts College (an American-sponsored institution of secondary and higher education in Istanbul). He took a bachelor of divinity degree in 1929 from the Chicago Theological Seminary and proceeded to Harvard University, where, after studying philosophy under Raphael Demos and Alfred North Whitehead, he was awarded his PhD in 1931.

In that year he took a position at the Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He served in the Canadian Air Force during World War II. In 1948, he joined the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell.

François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire encapsulates the spirit of the French Enlightenment in both his refusal to develop a philosophical system and his clear concern for social and political issues.

But he is also representative of the eighteenth century in his deep attachment to John Locke’s epistemological thought, his emphasis on the limited nature of human understanding, and his commitment to popularizing philosophy, especially by handling it through the medium of novels and tales in which irony often functions as an ad hominem argument.

It is thus that he fulfilled the role of philosopher and that his philosophy met the needs of his times, times characterized by a break with seventeenth-century dogmatism and an intensification of the critique of the political and religious spheres aiming to bring forth a morality on the human scale, centered on the values of tolerance and respect for others. Those values were soon to bear fruit in the doctrine of the Rights of Man.

Wang Bi

Third-century Chinese philosopher Wang Bi (226–249 CE) achieved fame as an interpreter of the Laozi and the Yijing (Classic of changes), whose radical reformulation of the concept of Dao as nonbeing (wu) helped spark a new current of thought called Xuanxue (Learning of the mysterious), sometimes translated as “neo-Daoism.”

To Wang, Confucius, Laozi, and the other sages of old had discerned the true meaning of Dao as the root of all beings. This was misunderstood, which necessitated a reinterpretation of the classical heritage.

Wang probed the basis of interpretation and argued that words do not fully express meaning. This was a major debate in early medieval Chinese philosophy. Against earlier commentators who reduced meaning to reference, Wang believed that words are necessary but insufficient for understanding and sought to uncover the fundamental ideas that unite the classics. Famously, Wang declared that words must be forgotten before meaning can be understood.