19th Century British Philosophy

British idealism is usually regarded as having been, in the main, indifferent to the problems of the philosophy of history. The interest in the philosophy of history found in German, and later in Italian, idealism was allegedly not shared by the early generations of the British idealists. At best they are regarded as unwitting precursors of things to come, some of their reflections paving the way for subsequent advances in historical thinking. The British idealists, however, were not as economical with (...) their historical pronouncements as commonly believed. A more careful examination of their general writings and lesser known contributions reveals a more complex picture. One of stronger historical consciousness, knowledge of the philosophical developments in history, interest in its problems, and active involvement with historical scholarship. Further study will certainly illuminate the details of the entire character of British idealism with regard to its historical concerns. (shrink)

The present dissertation presents an examination of the Carrollian logic through the reconstruction of its syllogistic theory. Lewis Carroll was one of the main responsible for the dissemination of logic during the nineteenth century, but most of his logical writings remained unknown until a posthumous publication of 1977. The reconstruction of the Carrollian syllogistic theory was based on the comparison of the two books on author's logic, "The Game of Logic" and "Symbolic Logic". The analysis of the Carrollian syllogistics starts (...) from a study of the historical context of development of the logic and the developments of syllogistics previous to the contribution of the author. Situated in the historical period of algebraical logic, Carrollian syllogistics is characterized as a conservative extension of the Aristotelian syllogistics, the main innovation is the use of negative terms and the introduction of a diagrammatic method suitable for the representation of negative terms. The diagrammatic method of the Carrollian syllogistics presents advances in relation to the methods of Euler and Venn. The use of negative terms also requires a redefinition of the notion of syllogism, simplifying and expanding the amount of arguments amenable to logical treatment. Carroll does not use four, but only three categorical propositions in his syllogistic, with interpretation of existential presuppositions congruent with a syntactic-existential reading. Carrollian syllogistics uses some techniques found in the work of algebraists of logic and also made the same confusions between notions of "class" and "member" that were common in the period. Convinced of the social utility of logic and dedicated to popularize it, Carroll priorized a creation of new didactics for the teaching of logic in his works, where he can include his diagrammatic method of solving syllogisms. Carroll made only scant considerations of his conception of logic. Based on the small considerations found throughout the study and on the constant claim of the social utility of logic, it is suggested that Carroll is close to the so-called pragmatic position, which considers a logic as an instrument of regulation of discourse. (shrink)

William Whewell’s work on historical science has received some attention from historians and philosophers of science. Whewell’s own work on the history of German Gothic church architecture has been touched on within the context of the history of architecture. To a large extent these discussions have been conducted separately. I argue that Whewell intended his work on Gothic architecture as an attempt to (help) found a science of historical architecture, as an exemplar of historical science. I proceed by analyzing the (...) key features of Whewell’s philosophy of historical science. I then show how his architectural history exemplifies this philosophy. Finally, I show how Whewell’s philosophy of historical science matches some developments in a science (biological systematics) that, in the mid-to latenineteenth century, came to be reinterpreted as a historical science. I comment briefly on Whewell as a potential influence on nineteenth century biology and in particular on Darwin. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch William Whewell’s attempts to impose order on classificatory mineralogy, which was in Whewell’s day (1794e1866) a confused science of uncertain prospects. Whewell argued that progress was impeded by the crude reductionist assumption that all macroproperties of crystals could be straightforwardly explained by reference to the crystals’ chemical constituents. By comparison with biological classification, Whewell proposed methodological reforms that he claimed would lead to a natural classification of minerals, which in turn would support advances in causal (...) understanding of the properties of minerals. Whewell’s comparison to successful biological classification is particularly striking given that classificatory biologists did not share an understanding of the causal structure underlying the natural classification of life (the common descent with modification of all organisms). -/- Whewell’s key proposed methodological reform is consideration of multiple, distinct principles of classification. The most powerful evidence in support of a natural classificatory claim is the consilience of claims arrived at through distinct lines of reasoning, rooted in distinct conceptual approaches to the target objects. Mineralogists must consider not only elemental composition and chemical affinities, but also symmetry and polarity. Geometrical properties are central to what makes an individual mineral the type of mineral that it is. In Whewell’s view, function and organization jointly define life, and so are the keys to understanding what makes an organism the type of organism that it is. I explain the relationship between Whewell’s teleological account of life and his natural theology. I conclude with brief comments about the importance of Whewell’s classificatory theory for the further development of his philosophy of science and in particular his account of consilience. (shrink)

This dissertation attempts to make contributions to normative ethics and to the history of philosophy. First, it contributes to the defense of consequentialist ethics against objections grounded upon the value of loving relationships. Secondly, it provides the first systematic account of John M. E. McTaggart’s ethical theory and its relation to his philosophy of love. According to consequentialist ethics, it is always morally wrong to knowingly do what will make the world worse-off than it could have been. Many consequentialists also (...) recognize that love is one of the most important goods worth pursing for its own sake and so this implies a strong duty to promote love. Recently, however, philosophers have outlined what I call the “love-based objection.” It argues that consequentialism ought to be rejected on its own terms because a commitment to maximizing aggregate overall goodness precludes forming the kinds of commitments necessary for highly valuable loving relationships. Other philosophers, however, have argued that a particular kind of consequentialist theory that recognizes the intrinsic value of love and that restricts evaluations based on maximizing goodness to only the most fundamental realms of moral evaluation and guidance overcomes the love-based objection. While philosophers have indicated how to overcome the objection through sophisticated consequentialism, the task of constructing a plausible version of such a system is currently ongoing. This dissertation argues that, more than fifty years before this contemporary debate started, McTaggart outlined a version of consequentialism called “Ideal Utilitarianism” that can overcome recent love-based objections in the way suggested by Railton and Mason. McTaggart’s work in moral philosophy, therefore, has a previously unrecognized relevance to contemporary issues in normative ethics and so his contributions ought to be considered alongside other, currently more prominent, ethicists of his day such as Hastings Rashdall and G. E. Moore. (shrink)

The article presents Lord Acton’s notion of liberalism and citizenship. Liberalism, as ordinarily understood, treats the individual as the founding stone of civil society and the measure of political order – man and woman and their rights are supreme. In the past, this allowed liberalism to delegitimize society of estates and absolutism, yet it raised the insoluble dilemma of how to reconnect the self‑sufficient individual with the society and the state. Furthermore, social engineering employed in service of equality and individual (...) rights, made liberalism an abstract doctrine, hostile to any tradition and illiberal in its nature. Unlike this doctrinaire liberalism, Actonian liberalism is organic, thriving on national tradition and having only one arbitrary element – higher law that is the yardstick of good and evil. Organic liberalism knows not the contradiction between the individual and the polity. It balances the rights of the individual with the respect for the national tradition, and stresses individual and communal liberty as the ultimate aim of politics. Further, man and woman participate in a multitude of intermediate organizations in which they can truly exercise their citizenship. Organic liberalism, as Acton claims, is a constant element of Western Civilization, even if it achieves its maturity sometime in the seventeenth‑eighteenth century. It then become a characteristic feature of Anglo‑American liberalism. (shrink)

The turn of the last century saw an explosion of philosophical realisms, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Gary Hatfield helpfully asks whether we can impose order on this chaotic scene by portraying these diverse actors as responding to a common philosophical problem—the so-called problem of the external world, as articulated by William Hamilton. I argue that we should not place the American realism that grows out of James’s neutral monism in this problem space. James first (...) articulated his position in response to critical attacks on the methodology he had employed in his psychological research. The direct topic of these criticisms was James’s earlier claim that a scientific psychology must treat knowledge as an inexplicable theoretical primitive. If I am right, then we ought to hesitate about Hatfield’s suggestion that American realism operated inside the same problem space as the early realism of British figures like Russell and Moore. James’s neutral monism first emerged as a conception of knowledge by a psychologist, and it was designed to meet concerns about his scientific research that had been raised by other psychologists. (shrink)

William Whewell (1794–1866), polymathic Victorian scientist, philosopher, historian, and educator, was one of the great neologists of the nineteenth century. Although Whewell's name is little remembered today except by professional historians and philosophers of science, researchers in many scientific fields work each day in a world that Whewell named. "Miocene" and "Pliocene," "uniformitarian" and "catastrophist," "anode" and "cathode," even the word "scientist" itself—all of these were Whewell coinages. Whewell is particularly important to students of the historical sciences for another word (...) he coined, one that was unfortunately not as successful as many of his others because it is difficult to pronounce. This word, "palaetiology," was the name Whewell gave to the class of sciences that are concerned with historical causation: the class we might today refer to as historical sciences. Although the disciplines Whewell included under the heading of palaetiology might seem to cut across conventional academic boundaries of his day and ours—his exemplary palaetiological sciences were geology and comparative philology—all these fields may be examined together, Whewell argued, because of their common interest in reconstructing the past. ¶ This paper is an essay in the palaetiological sciences, dedicated to Whewell on the bicentennial of his birth, an essay that examines some of the principles, maxims, and rules of procedure that these sciences have all in common. Its first purpose is to demonstrate the continuing validity of Whewell's classification of these sciences through a study of historical representation in three different palaetiological fields: systematics, historical linguistics, and textual transmission. Its second purpose is to continue the development of an extended analogy between historical representation and cartographic representation that I began in an earlier paper (O'Hara, 1993, Systematic Biology), an analogy that makes especially clear the common representational practices that are found throughout palaetiology. (shrink)

This response addresses a series of themes from my writings on imagination, on art, and on ancient philosophy.

This article is an attempt to take an overview of the current position of utilitarian theory. It begins by providing a definition of utilitarianism as it is found in the works of Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick. These authors are all interpreted as intuitionists. It is claimed that the main rivals to utilitarianism are egoism on the one hand, and reflective non-egoistic pluralism, as found in the work of Ross, on the other. The significance of disagreement between proponents of these views (...) is explained, and modern attempts to ground utilitarianism are found lacking. The article ends with a plea for history. (shrink)

This volume presents and discusses the theory of rights of the British idealist political philosopher, Bernard Bosanquet. The political philosophy of the British idealists in general and of Bernard Bosanquet in particular, has been the subject of much misunderstanding and prejudice. Bosanquet's theory of rights proposes to provide a response to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and the natural rights-based political philosophy of Herbert. The question addressed in this book then, is whether Bosanquet's theory is a (...) plausible alternative to these 'individualist' views. The author believes that a complete statement of Bosanquet's theory of rights requires an elaboration of his "metaphysical theory of the nature of social reality"--his "social ontology."(publisher,edited). (shrink)

Bell's review of H.G. Callaway's new edition of William James' 1909 book, A Pluralistic Universe.

This paper examines Thomas Hill Green's changing attitude to the Reform Question between 1865 and 1876. sketches the Radical landscape against which Green advocated reform between 1866 and 1867, paying particular attention to the respective positions of Gladstone, J.S. Mill and Bright on the relationship between responsible citizenship and class membership. examines Green's theories of social balance and responsible citizenship at the time of his lectures on the English Civil War. argues that, contrary to the established scholarship, Green's Radicalism was (...) closer to Bright than to Gladstone and Mill during this period. counters Richter's claim that Green abandoned democracy following the 1874 General Election, while arguing that even sympathetic commentators misunderstand Green's attitude to the Reform Question immediately after this date. (shrink)