George Berkeley: Idealist and Consistent Empiricist

George Berkeley quotes

Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

George Berkeley

George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) was the oldest son of an English settler in Ireland. At age fifteen he entered Trinity College, Dublin. He completed his master's degree in 1707. In 1709 he was ordained deacon in the Anglican Church. From 1735 until his death Berkeley was Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland.

Berkeley had established himself as a great thinker by his early twenties. All the philosophical works which made him famous were published between 1709 and 1713. These works are An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). These three books contain the essential elements of Berkeley's immaterialism, a view which he held with minor modification to the end of his life.

In 1728 Berkeley married the daughter of the chief justice of Ireland and departed for America with three companions.

At the time of Berkeley's visit to New England there was no Anglican bishop in the colonies, and Berkeley was the highest ranking Anglican clergyman to venture to the British colonies. Berkeley was also the first philosopher of any note to visit America. As such, he had considerable influence on the philosophical life of the colonies. The first serious criticism of Berkeley's immaterialism came from the Connecticut clergyman and philosopher, Samuel Johnson, who met Berkeley in Newport and corresponded with him for many years. Johnson eventually became a convert to immaterialism, and later became the first president of Columbia University in New York. Johnson also wrote the first American philosophy textbook, Elementa Philosophica, which was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1752, It was dedicated to George Berkeley.

During most of his time in America, Berkeley devoted himself to study, preached occasionally, and wrote his Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher. His hope to plant a college in the Colonies never came to fruition. Although Berkeley's plans to convert the savages and increase Christian learning in the colonies had failed, he maintained a lively interest in education in America. On his departure he left his farm, house, and library to Yale. On several occasions, he donated books to both Yale and Harvard. Berkeley in California is named for him.

Berkeley’s central principle of his philosophy is that ideas do not exist outside of a mind perceiving them. This also is an intuitive kind of truth: when I say that an object exists, I mean that I can feel it, that I can see it, or that it is perceived by another mind. As a result, for Berkeley it is impossible to conceive of an absolute and independent reality; esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”). The “esse” or being of the object is in its “percipi” or being perceived. Therefore we can only speak of things to the extent that they are in direct relationship with our mind.

Related reading:  Berkeley's Life and Works

Getting Acquainted with Aristotle

Alice C. Linsley

Aristotle was influenced by the thought of Plato, probably the greatest philosopher of ancient Greece. Plato borrowed ideas from the ancient Egyptians and Kushites. He studied in Egypt for 13 years. Nevertheless, Plato put his own touch on the ideas. Likewise, Aristotle borrowed and adapted ideas from Plato. Aristotle also questioned Plato's thought and it was in his questioning of Plato that we find many of Aristotle's most interesting ideas.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was brought up at the Court of Macedonia. He became a student at Plato's Academy in Athens at age seventeen. At the time that Aristotle joined the Academy it had been operating for twenty years. Aristotle became a teacher at the Academy and remained there for twenty years. Diogenes Laertius, writing in the second century AD, says that Aristotle taught rhetoric and dialectic.

All Aristotle's writings of this time strongly support Plato's views, but he later took issue with Plato on the questions of censorship and the nature of happiness. He developed political ideas quite distinct from Plato who had said the kings should be philosophers. In On Kingship Aristotle wrote that it is, "... not merely unnecessary for a king to be a philosopher, but even a disadvantage. Rather a king should take the advice of true philosophers. Then he would fill his reign with good deeds, not with good words."

Aristotle, like Plato, believed in the existence of the soul. At the beginning of De Anima II.1, he says that there are three sorts of substance:

1. Matter (potentiality)

2. Form (actuality)

3. The compound of matter and form

Aristotle was interested in compounds that are alive. These are animated, that is, "de anima."  Living things have this vital spark or what is often called the "soul." The soul is what makes alive. Since form is what makes matter a “this,” the soul is the form of a living thing. The soul is that in virtue of which a living entity is the kind of living thing that it is. The soul is the essence of the entity.

Aristotle considered three ways of cognition or knowing: the first based on existence (matter) as a human being. The second based on form as when we recognize structure (form) such as grammar. The last way of cognition is based on action (actuality); that is, attending to something, involvement with something. This is consistent with his belief that a good king is not a philosopher alone, but also a doer of good deeds.

He makes a distinction between potential and actual. As humans we have potential to achieve happiness (the Good for Aristotle), but unless we recognize form/structures and act virtuously, we cannot achieve the highest cognitive being. We must aspire to more than mere existence. Perhaps Borges has this in mind when he said, "My father was very intelligent, and like all intelligent men, very kind."--Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)


Quotes:

It is clear, then, that wisdom is knowledge having to do with certain principles and causes. But now, since it is this knowledge that we are seeking, we must consider the following point: of what kind of principles and of what kind of causes is wisdom the knowledge? (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 340BC)

Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points (concepts and truth) and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.

The first philosophy (Metaphysics) is universal and is exclusively concerned with primary substance. ... And here we will have the science to study that which is just as that which is, both in its essence and in the properties which, just as a thing that is, it has.

The entire preoccupation of the physicist is with things that contain within themselves a principle of movement and rest. And to seek for this is to seek for the second kind of principle, that from which comes the beginning of the change.

There must then be a principle of such a kind that its substance is activity.

... it is impossible that the primary existent, being eternal, should be destroyed.

... that among entities there must be some cause which moves and combines things.

..about its coming into being and its doings and about all its alterations we think that we have knowledge when we know the source of its movement. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 340 BC)


Related reading:  Aristotle's Understanding of the Chief Good; Plato's Debt to Ancient Egypt; Ethics and Ancient Cosmology; What Makes a Good Society?

Anscombe on Justice, Sex and War

Alice C. Linsley



Elizabeth Anscombe (G.E.M. Anscombe)


G. E. M. Anscombe (1919 – 5 January 2001 ) was born Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. She was an Irish-born British analytic philosopher. She was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein while at Cambridge. She became an authority on his work, and after his death in 1951 became one of his literary executors. Among her early contributions to philosophy were publications of Wittgenstein's unpublished writings, including An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus and hisPhilosophical Investigations.

She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. Her monograph Intention (1957) is generally recognized as her greatest and most influential work. It refocused attention on the role of reasons and human reasoning in decision making, choices and actions. A year later, her paper "Modern Moral Philosophy" offered a critique of dominant academic approaches to philosophical ethics that stimulated renewed interest among philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre in the ancient idea of "virtue."

In 1970, Anscombe was appointed to the professorial chair in Cambridge that had been held by Wittgenstein.

Anscombe was a devout Roman Catholic who denounced the use of unnatural methods of birth control. She and her philosopher husband Peter Geach had seven children. Her devotion to the Church and her Christian faith were profound. She wrote a remarkable pamphlet for use in teaching children the meaning of the Eucharist.

Anscombe assumes that the world is a place where the reasoning individual can be assured that concepts of justice, good, and moral obligation have meaning. She counters Heidegger’s “nothing” with a binary opposite – something, and this something potentially relieves anxiety. The logic of her argument is that when we feel the anxiety of injustice (which is negating) we should perform justice. Justice then is not a state of affairs, but a practical virtue of a good person. It is perhaps the derived virtue of being made in the image of a Good God.

In this view of justice, Anscombe replies also to Leibniz’ criticism of traditional conceptions of God as good. Leibniz wrote: “It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things, as do numbers and proportions (Reflections of The Common Concept of Justice). Anscombe’s argument is that humanity’s anxiety about death and negating injustice can only be there because humanity knows the Good. Her argument is the reverse of Heraclitus’ (540-480 BC) who said “If it were not for injustice, men would not know justice.” Essentially, Anscombe is saying that the rational study of Man as subject leads logically to the conclusion that were it not for justice, humans would not know injustice.


Anscombe quotes:

"Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life." (From here: Those who try to make room for sex as mere…)

"God gave us our physical appetite, and its arousal without our calculation is part of the working of our sort of life."

"Principles that are mistakenly high and strict are a trap; they may easily lead in the end directly or indirectly to the justification of monstrous things. Thus if the evangelical counsel about poverty were turned into a precept forbidding property owning, people would pay lip service to it as the ideal, while in practice they went in for swindling. “Absolute honesty!” it would be said: “I can respect that – but of course that means having no property; and while I respect those who follow that course, I have to compromise with the sordid world myself.” If then one must “compromise with evil” by owning property and engaging in trade then the amount of swindling one does will depend on convenience. This imaginary case is paralleled by what is so commonly said: absolute pacifism is an ideal; unable to follow that, and committed to “compromise with evil,” one must go whole hog and wage war a outrance….

[P]acifism teaches people to make no distinction between the shedding of innocent blood and the shedding of any human blood. And in this way pacifism has corrupted enormous numbers of people who will not act according to its tenets. They become convinced that a number of things are wicked which are not; hence, seeing no way of avoiding “wickedness,” they set no limits to it. How endlessly pacifists argue that all war must be a outrance! that those who wage war must go as far as technological advance permits in the destruction of the enemy’s people. As if the Napoleonic wars were perforce fuller of massacres than the French war of Henry V of England. It is not true: the reverse took place… Pacifism and the respect for pacifism is not the only thing that has led to a universal forgetfulness of the law against killing the innocent; but it has had a great share in it."
(War and Murder)


Related reading: Elizabeth Anscombe

G. K. Chesterton on Nietzsche

"Other vague modern people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame, and , what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being 'high.' It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a weathercock. 'Tommy was a good boy' is a pure philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. 'Tommy lived the higher life' is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, 'beyond good and evil,' because he had not the courage to say, 'more good than good and evil,' or, 'more evil than good and evil.' Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, 'the purer man,' or 'the happier man,' or 'the sadder man,' for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says 'the upper man.' or 'over man,' a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce."-- excerpt from The Eternal Revolution, Chapter 7 of Orthodoxy

Elizabeth Anscombe (1919 – 2001)

Alice C. Linsley

Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) was one of the 20th century's most remarkable philosophers. She studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein and upon his death in 1951 became one of his literary executors. She translated Wittgenstein's unpublished writings, preparing them for publication after his death and she wrote An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

Anscombe as a
young woman

In 1970, Anscombe was appointed to the chair in Cambridge that had been held by Wittgenstein. Despite her concern to preserve the writings of her former teacher, Anscombe was not a Wittgenstein disciple. Her great intelligence and originality led her in different directions and to different conclusions.

In 1958, Anscombe produced a paper titled “Modern Moral Philosophy” in which she offered a critique of prevailing academic approaches to ethics. In this paper, she pointed out that while Aristotle had much to say about virtue and vices, he did not think of morality as heirs of the Judeo-Christian tradition do. Our conception of morality comes from centuries of Christianity, as it emerges from the Jewish Apostles and their biblical reflections on the Torah. The Judeo-Christian conception of moral obligation is based on codified law. From the first century A.D., Greek-speaking converts to Christianity sought to conform to virtues and avoid vices because these were viewed as a requirement of divine law.

Anscombe’s work restored interest among philosophers in the Aristotelian idea of virtue. Her paper on modern moral philosophy advanced “virtue ethics” in the 20th century. Her influence is seen in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue (1985) and Onora O'Neill’s book Towards Justice and Virtue (1996).

It was in the area of moral philosophy that Anscombe countered Heidegger’s bleak existentialism. She argued that since 20th century western society is no longer Christian, the terms “good” and “evil” or “right” and “wrong” are no longer useful. These terms are only meaningful as they are attached to the Judeo-Christian concept of a law-giving Creator God. Anscombe believed that in the post-Christian world most philosophers become consequentialists, judging rightness by the consequences. She held that consquentialism is incompatible with the Judeo-Christian ethic, since the latter insists that there are some actions that are always forbidden regardless of the consequences. She then proposed a way forward. She recommended discarding the notions of duty and of moral right and wrong in favor of justice and injustice.

Let us consider Anscombe’s argument. First, she assumes that the world is a place where the reasoning individual can be assured that concepts of justice, good, and moral obligation have meaning. This suggests that Heidegger’s “nothing” which causes us anxiety has a binary opposite – something – and this something potentially relieves anxiety. The logic of her argument is that when we feel the anxiety of injustice (which is negating) we should perform justice. Justice then is not a state of affairs, but a practical virtue of a good person. It is perhaps the derived virtue of being made in the image of a Good God.

In this view of justice, Anscombe replies also to Leibniz’ criticism of traditional conceptions of God as good. Leibniz wrote: “It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things, as do numbers and proportions (Reflections of The Common Concept of Justice). Anscombe’s argument is that humanity’s an; xiety about death and negating injustice can only be there because humanity knows the Good. Her argument is the reverse of Heraclitus’ (540-480 BC) who said “If it were not for injustice, men would not know justice.” Essentially, Anscombe is saying that the rational study of Man as subject leads logically to the conclusion that were it not for justice, humans would not know injustice.

Related reading:  Elizabeth Anscombe on Justice; Princeton Students Form Anscombe Society; Virtue Ethics

Physics and Belief in God

Lord Kelvin was a Belfast-born British mathematical physicist and engineer. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)

"In Renan’s ‘Peuple d’Israel’ I read: “Birth sickness, death, madness, catalepsy, sleep, dreams, all made an immense impression and, even nowadays, only a few have the gift of seeing clearly that these phenomena have causes within our constitution.”

On the contrary there is absolutely no reason to wonder at these things, because they are such everyday occurrences. If primitive men can’t help but wonder at them, how much more so dogs and monkeys. Or is it being assumed that men, as it were, suddenly woke up and, noticing for the first time these things that had always been there, were understandably amazed? — Well, as a matter of fact we might assume something like this; though not that they become aware of these things for the first time but that they do suddenly start to wonder at them. But this again has nothing to do with their being primitive. Unless it is called primitive not to wonder at things, in which case the people of today are really the primitive ones, and Renan himself too if he supposes that scientific explanation could intensify wonderment.

As though lightning were more commonplace or less astounding today that 2000 years ago.

Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him off to sleep again.

In other words it’s just false to say: Of course, these primitive peoples couldn’t help wondering at everything. Though perhaps it is true that these peoples did wonder at all the things around them. — To suppose they couldn’t help wondering at them is a primitive superstition…"--Ludwig Wittgenstein from notes collected in Culture and Value (1930).


Alice C. Linsley

Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British philosopher, was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. His work contributed to various movements in analytic and linguistic philosophy. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge with Bertrand Russell. As colleagues, Russell and Wittgenstein developed their view called “logical atomism.”

Wittgenstein

Russell inspired Wittgenstein to consider the nature of thought itself. Russell was famous for statements like these:

“Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible. Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.”

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

Wittgenstein argued that language is composed of complex propositions that can be analyzed into less complex propositions until one arrives at simple or elementary propositions. Correspondingly, the world is composed of complex facts that can be analyzed into less complex facts until one arrives at simple or “atomic” facts. The world is the totality of these facts. So a chair is wood (or metal) and nails (or brackets) and fabric components as well as something upon which we sit. In Wittgenstein's view this mental picture (chair) which we suppose gives us a true account of an object actually “stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is” (PI:305). The picture of one thing, that is in fact many things, leads us to the childish belief that there is a correspondence between the word and the nature of the thing. According to Wittgenstein’s picture theory, meaning requires that there be “atomic” facts. This means that meaning is arrived at through analysis of only propositions that picture facts, or propositions of science. By this reasoning, metaphysical and ethical statements are not meaningful assertions. Words such as good, evil and beauty don’t represent simple propositions, so a statement such as “Murder is evil” is impossible to verify factually.

Wittgenstein’s most famous work is Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921), a volume of only 75 pages, but which he believed provided the “final solution” to philosophical problems. In the Tractatus, he held that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts”and philosophy is “not a body of propositions, but to make propositions clear.”

Logical positivists were greatly influenced by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. They soundly rejected all truth claims that could not be reduced to atomic facts and pushed ethics aside, viewing it largely as a waste of intellectual energy. Logical Positivism was a highly academic approach that had little appeal to the average person who struggled with day to day matters of moral choice. It also didn’t represent the religious sentiments of Wittgenstein, who called Kierkegaard “a saint.”

In the lesson on Kierkegaard, we found that he believed that knowledge is miraculous or supernaturally provided. He would have agreed with the Socratic-Platonic view that there is no learning, since one can’t learn what one already knows intuitively or a priori. Drawing of John Climacus’ understanding of spiritual enlightenment, Kierkegaard further argued that learning involves a mysterious change that takes place in the learner at a specific moment of his existence - a moment of enlightenment. In this moment, the learner is absolutely certain that he/she has grasped eternal knowledge. He maintains that this is miraculous because it only can be initiated by God, who is beyond time and space, through a series of events in time and space This learning or enlightenment is highly individual and subjective, and it is unique for every learner. Such knowledge produces an existential change though this change may be very difficult to explain or even to articulate, given the limitations of human language.

Kierkegaard died 34 years before Wittgenstein was born and though Wittgenstein was familiar with Kierkegaard's writings, the two philosophers approached the question of knowledge differently. For Wittgenstein language can only approximate reality. It can never be other than a picture of reality. In other words, a statement or expression describes an experience by creating a structure isomorphic with the structure of that experience.

In the Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein moves in a different direction from his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. In Tractatus, he argued that philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts”and is “not a body of propositions, but to make propositions clear.” Language is useful but approximates reality. In Philosophical Investigations, he insisted that "philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Here language gets in the way. These writings divide Wittgenstein’s work into two distinct phases. The two are not oppositional, however. Wittgenstein never set aside his picture theory of a thought as a logical picture of facts. In the Tractatus, he develops his thought about the logic of propositions, whereas in the Philosophical Investigations he is concerned about other forms of language.

According to Wittgenstein’s picture theory, meaning requires that there be “atomic” facts. This means that meaning is arrived at through analysis of only propositions that picture facts, or propositions of science. By this reasoning, metaphysical and ethical statements are not meaningful assertions. Words such as good, evil and beauty don’t represent simple propositions, so a statement such as “Murder is evil” is impossible to verify factually. Logical positivists were greatly influenced by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. They soundly rejected all truth claims that could not be reduced to atomic facts and pushed ethics aside, viewing it largely as a waste of intellectual energy.

Although only a few explicit references to Kierkegaard exist in Wittgenstein’s works, it is clear that Wittgenstein shared Kierkegaard’s religious inclinations. In conversation with his friend Maurice O'Connor Drury, Wittgenstein made the following remark: “Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbor may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work.”

A much as he may have wanted to be remembered for giving glory to God, Wittgenstein’s religious thought had little influence on 20th century ethics. His Tractatus on the other hand, influenced the development of Logical Positivism with its strong element of atheism, and works published after his death influenced German Idealism. Rarely is Wittgenstein's thought considered alongside that of Søren Kierkegaard, though clearly Kierkegaard was a significant source of inspiration for him. The philosopher who best understood this was Wittgenstein's student, friend, and translator Elizabeth Anscombe, who we will consider in the next lesson.

Related reading: Søren Kierkegaard; Elizabeth Anscombe on Justice