Philosophy , October 1974, contains an article entitled ‘Aristotle's Four Becauses’, by Professor Max Hocutt, who contends that Aristotle's aitia means ‘a because’ or ‘an explanation’ rather than ‘a cause’ and should be translated accordingly. He argues that only Aristotle's efficient ‘cause’ is a cause in the English sense of the word, and that ‘Aristotle's theory of “causes” is simply an application of his theory of syllogistic to the analysis of scientific knowledge’ . Both contentions deserve a word.

§ 1. Of all the subjects which for well over two thousand years have remained the more or less constant topics of philosophical discussion, I can think of none which has not at some time by some philosopher been dismissed as a nonentity or an illusion. The history of philosophy seems to show that we cannot begin fairly to estimate the nature of any element in the universe until we have steadily contemplated a universe from which that element has been (...) hypothetically eliminated. (shrink)

For a century or so after his death Hegel's system excited, if not wider diversity of interpretation and more bitter controversy, then certainly more bewilderment, than had ever before befogged the battlefields of speculative thought. A few fervent disciples maintained that their master had achieved a system substantially if not in all detail final and complete, a philosophy destined to set at rest forever all serious philosophic doubt. Others agreed that this claim to finality was inherent in the system, but (...) mocked openly, proclaiming Hegel an arrogant megalomaniac. (shrink)

I Have often wished that someone would write a History of Oxford Honour Schools. But I want that work written for reasons which the title does not immediately suggest.

§ 22. Logic for Bradley, who follows the Kantian tradition, means primarily a theory of judgment. His definition of judgment is made so wide that it really covers inference as well. The “reference of an ideal content to reality,” as soon as that content is taken as complex and as not atomic, covers inference denned as ideal self-development of an object. Though the definition of judgment has a subjective flavour due to the way in which Bradley finds it necessary to (...) distinguish it from psychical fact, he does not mean to imply that it is any less objective than inference. We learn from the second edition of the Logic that judgment so far as it is mediated is inference, and that mere unmediated judgment is nothing. Judgment, he says, though distinct from inference in form, is everywhere inference really though not explicitly; and almost the first words of the Terminal Essay on Judgment are: “Whatever else and however much else an inference may be, an inference still is a judgment.”. (shrink)

§ 22. Logic for Bradley, who follows the Kantian tradition, means primarily a theory of judgment. His definition of judgment is made so wide that it really covers inference as well. The “reference of an ideal content to reality,” as soon as that content is taken as complex and as not atomic, covers inference denned as ideal self-development of an object. Though the definition of judgment has a subjective flavour due to the way in which Bradley finds it necessary to (...) distinguish it from psychical fact, he does not mean to imply that it is any less objective than inference. We learn from the second edition of the Logic that judgment so far as it is mediated is inference, and that mere unmediated judgment is nothing. Judgment, he says, though distinct from inference in form, is everywhere inference really though not explicitly; and almost the first words of the Terminal Essay on Judgment are: “Whatever else and however much else an inference may be, an inference still is a judgment.”. (shrink)

Is the State organic? Does it, or should it, in some way transcend the individual natures of its citizens, so as itself to be an individual more complete and of higher value than the singular individuals who compose it? Is it thus in some sense an organism, and are its citizens in some sense organs of it which gain for themselves a higher value and significance in subserving it?

§ 21. Until a few years ago the hope of the physicist seems on the whole to have been that he would eventually be able to exhibit a single interconnected system of perfectly deterministic causal laws. He took the relation of cause and effect in all change to be such that from a determinate antecedent state of that which changes there must necessarily follow a different subsequent state of it, and it was assumed by him that complete knowledge of the (...) antecedent state must enable exact prediction of the subsequent state. I do not think it matters here whether that which changes was taken as a limited subject of change or as the whole physical world. (shrink)

If you wish to aid the student whose German is weak to begin reading Hegel, you should compose him a literal crib of the type so helpful to the struggling schoolboy; but you should tell him that he must as soon as possible improve his German and throw away his crutch. If, on the other hand, you are fired by the very different ambition of translating Hegel’s thought truly for the intelligent reader who has no German, then you must write (...) fluent idiomatic English which recalls German forms of speech as little as possible. You may now and then in a footnote or a bracket confess to a liberty taken, but you must always be readable and bold. You must of course know your German, and your Hegelian German, very well, but you must not only prune otiose expletives but not shrink even from metamorphosis. Apart from rash Phaethons like Osmaston who knew little German and less philosophy, too many English translators of Hegel have tried to compromise between the high road and the low road; but partly because they have been baffled by an obscure text, partly because they have clung with misplaced fidelity to the German, they have commonly produced dreary versions which crawl cribwise on the ground. They have forgotten that ineptitudes can be nearly as misleading as errors and far more tedious. (shrink)

“Very few people”, writes Prof. J. N. Findlay of Hegel’s mature works, “have a paragraph by paragraph understanding of the whole text.” Having just re-read large parts of the text of the Science of Logic, I am in no mood to disagree, even though I had beside me A. V. Miller’s very helpful translation. My discouragement has not been lessened by finding once again that Hegel, “that hard dry man”, as Lord Haldane calls him, never fails to give the impression (...) that he himself at any rate knows precisely what he means. He never sugars. Is there anything a man can do, then, to make his way confidently through the selva oscura of Hegel’s categories? (shrink)

The Weltgeist is not in a hurry. It was Sir Henry Jones, I think, who in the heyday of British idealism remarked that we should be working for a long time in the shadow of Hegel. But then in two world wars Hegel’s countrymen showed themselves more foully barbarous than any human beings before them. Lord Vansittart in Black Record traced their sins back to the unflattering description of German tribes in Tacitus’ Germania. That was scarcely fair. No doubt the (...) history of Europe would have been happier had the Romans conquered and civilized Germany, but Black Record was wartime propaganda. The twice, if not thrice, repeated crime of Germany was not a persistence of original sin but a furiously accelerating tide of evil will which had hardly begun to flow seriously before 1870. By that time Hegel, who was nothing worse than a moderate conservative with a respect for Prussian efficiency and who saw most of his compatriots as rather sheepishly gemütlich, had been dead for forty odd years. But if Tacitus could be called on to testify against Germany it was not surprising that some of the world’s hatred should rub off and smear Hegel with blame for German brutishness. It must be admitted, too, that Germans, in whom the herd instinct is uniquely dominant, could easily blur the inner articulation of Hegel’s political theory and swamp the individual’s liberty in Staatspflicht - which is precisely what the German Hegelians did. (shrink)