ALTHOUGH THE IDEA OF A VIOLATION OF NATURAL LAW IS NOT NECESSARILY INVOLVED IN THE IDEA OF THE MIRACULOUS, THERE IS "ONE KIND" OF MIRACLE WHICH SEEMS TO INVOLVE IT. HUME’S DISCUSSION OF THE EVIDENCE FOR MIRACLES RELATES TO THIS KIND AND IS INTERPRETABLE AS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS POSSIBILITY. ALSO THERE IS AN ARGUMENT THAT THE EXPRESSION "VIOLATION OF NATURAL LAW" SIGNIFIES A CONFUSION IN WHICH THE IDEAS OF NATURAL LAW AND LEGAL LAW COLLAPSE INTO EACH OTHER. NEITHER OF (...) THESE ARGUMENTS IS EFFICACIOUS. FURTHERMORE, THE CONTENTION THAT THERE CAN BE NO SUCH THING AS ESTABLISHING THE "ABSENCE" OF A NATURAL CAUSE IS OPEN TO OBJECTION. HOWEVER, TO BE CONCEIVED AS A VIOLATION OF NATURAL LAW, A MIRACLE MUST BE THOUGHT OF AS AN OCCURRENCE WHICH IS BOTH EMPIRICALLY CERTAIN AND CONCEPTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE--WHICH OUGHT TO MAKE THE NOTION RIDICULOUS. AND YET IT NEED NOT. (shrink)
Beginning with a group of essays on education, the author shows the constricting and limiting effects of empirical assumptions. In his essays on values, he makes it clear that the ethics of empiricism so pervade modern moral philosophy that it can find no place for the notion of absolute value.
The idea of absolute goodness and the idea of an absolute requitement tend nowadays to be viewed with suspicion in the world of English-speaking philosophy. The tendency is well rooted and has not just arisen by osmosis from the temper of the times. There are various lines of thought, all of them attractive, by which a recent or contemporary academic practitioner of the subject could have been induced into scepticism about an ethics of absolute conceptions.
The idea of absolute goodness and the idea of an absolute requitement tend nowadays to be viewed with suspicion in the world of English-speaking philosophy. The tendency is well rooted and has not just arisen by osmosis from the temper of the times. There are various lines of thought, all of them attractive, by which a recent or contemporary academic practitioner of the subject could have been induced into scepticism about an ethics of absolute conceptions.
It has come to be expected that collections issued by the Royal Institute of Philosophy will contain work that has quality or is otherwise interesting. This volume runs true to form and presents plenty of both. It gives the proceedings of the conference arranged by the Institute at Exeter in 1973, consisting of five symposia together with Chairman's remarks of about eight pages or so for each symposium, and in three cases postscripts by the first speaker. The contributors and topics (...) are: R. F. Dearden and Elizabeth Telfer on ‘Autonomy as an Educational Ideal’ with R. M. Hare as Chairman; R. K. Elliott and Glenn Langford on ‘Education and the Development of the Understanding’ with Paul Hirst as Chairman; David Cooper and Timothy O'Hagan on ‘Quality and Equality in Education’ with R. F. Atkinson as Chairman; Mary Warnock and Richard Norman on ‘The Neutral Teacher’ with Alan Montefiore as Chairman; Stuart Brown and A. Phillips Griffiths on ‘Academic Freedom’ with R. S. Peters as Chairman. (shrink)
Christopher Cherry's article in the January 1973 issue of this journal has on its first page the sentence ‘And when a philosopher writes that “no clear idea is available to us of what moral scepticism amounts to”, that moral scepticism would, if it were possible at all, have to be a “specially cooked-up affair” by contrast with other varieties of scepticism, it is hard not to accuse him of just such a vice.’ He means the vice of disingenuousness and the (...) person to whom he attributes it is me. I did not write what he says I wrote and neither of his quotations is accurate. On the next page Cherry claims again to be summarizing a view of mine when he says that ‘An “intellectual moral scepticism” would, if it were anything, have to be a peculiarly cooked-up affair, and so by implication different from other forms of intellectual philosophical scepticism. It is not a species of the same genus.’. (shrink)
A Fragment of ancient philosophy is like a code message which it is the task of the scholar to decipher. The cryptogram has come down to us, but not the key. In case this beginning should be thought obvious by anyone, let me say at once that I do not believe a word of it, though I believe that the attitude it epitomizes is by no means uncommon and is part of the explanation of a tendency to mishandle philosophical fragments. (...) The attitude is to be found, for example, in some things M. Untersteiner has said in his recently translated book on the Sophists1 about the meaning of the well-known statement of Protagoras. (shrink)
