Cutie Stories: November 2012

Subjectivity

Subjectivity is, primarily, an aspect of consciousness. In a sense, conscious experience may be described as the way the world appears from a particular mental subject’s point of view. The idea that there is a distinction between appearance and reality seems to presuppose the distinction between subjective and objective points of view.

The two controversies

There are two principal controversies surrounding subjectivity: first, whether subjectivity, as it is manifested in consciousness, is an essential component of mentality; and second, whether subjectivity presents an obstacle to naturalistic theories of the mind.

THE FIRST CONTROVERSY. Most philosophers agree that intentionality—the ability to represent—is characteristic of mentality. However, there is strong disagreement over whether subjectivity is also necessary.

Substance and Attribute

The concepts of “substance and attribute” are the focus of a group of philosophical problems that have their origins in Greek philosophy and in particular the philosophy of Aristotle. The concepts are, of course, familiar to prephilosophical common sense.

Yet although we are acquainted with the distinction between things and their properties and are able to identify the same things among the changing appearances they manifest in time, these commonsense notions give rise to a group of philosophical problems when we come to scrutinize them.

Thus we may wonder what it is that remains the same when, for example, we say that the car has new tires and lights and does not run as smoothly as it used to, but is still the same car; or when we say that although we could hardly recognize him, this man is the same one we went to school with thirty years ago.

Suicide

What role may a person play in the end of his or her own life? Is suicide wrong, always wrong, profoundly morally wrong? Or is it almost always wrong, but excusable in a few cases? Or is it sometimes morally permissible? Is it not intrinsically wrong at all though perhaps often imprudent? Is it sick? Is it a matter of mental illness?

Is it a private or a social act? Is it something the family, community, or society could ever expect of a person? Or is it solely a personal matter, perhaps a matter of right, based in individual liberties, or even a fundamental human right?

What role a person may play in the end of his or her own life is the central ethical issue in suicide around which a set of related issues also form: What should the role of other persons be towards those intending suicide? What should the role of medical and psychiatric clinicians be toward a patient who intends suicide since it is they who are said to be charged with protecting human life?

Johann Georg Sulzer

Johann Georg Sulzer, the Swiss aesthetician, was born in Winterthur. After studying in Zürich under J. J. Bodmer, he became a tutor in a private home in Magdeburg in 1743. He then went to Berlin, where he became acquainted with Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Leonhard Euler.

In 1747 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium and in 1763 he moved to the new Ritterakademie. Illness forced him to resign in 1773, but in 1775 he was appointed director of the philosophical section of the Berlin Academy, to which he had been elected in 1750.

Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (General theory of the fine arts) was originally planned as a revision of Jacques Lacombe’s Dictionnaire portatif des beaux-arts (1752), but it developed into an original encyclopedia covering both general aesthetics and the theory and history of each of the arts and of literature.

William Graham Sumner

The American social philosopher, economist, and cultural anthropologist William Graham Sumner was graduated from Yale in 1863 and continued his studies at Geneva, Göttingen, and Oxford, with the aim of entering the Episcopal ministry. He did so in 1867, having returned to America the preceding year.

Increasingly, however, this calling conflicted with his wider interests, and when in 1872 he was offered the chair of political and social science at Yale University, he gladly accepted it.

He soon gained a considerable reputation as a teacher, publicist, and local politician, but his chief claim to renown derived from his studies in social development, culminating in his masterpiece, Folkways (1907).

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift, the British clergyman, moralist, satirist, poet, and political journalist, was born in Dublin, a few months after his father’s death. He was educated at Kilkenny Grammar School and received his MA speciali gratiâ from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1686 and MA from Hart Hall, Oxford, in 1692.

Periodically, from 1689 to 1699, he acted as secretary to Sir William Temple at Moore Park, Surrey. Ordained deacon and priest in the established church of Ireland, he was left by Temple’s death in 1699 to make a career for himself. As domestic chaplain to the earl of Berkeley, lord justice of Ireland, he returned to Dublin and was granted the DD degree in 1701 by Trinity College.

In 1704 there appeared anonymously (his customary mode of publishing) A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, brilliant satires upholding the ancients against the moderns; assaulting both Catholic and Puritan theologies while upholding the via media of the Anglican Church; and castigating the shallowness of contemporary scholarship and literature.

Supervenience

There is supervenience when and only when there cannot be a difference of some sort A (for example, mental) without a difference of some sort B (for example, physical). When there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference, then but only then A-respects supervene on B-respects.

Supervenience claims are thus modal claims. They are claims to the effect that necessarily, there is exact similarity in A-respects whenever there is exact similarity in B-respects.

So if, for example,mental properties supervene on physical properties, then, necessarily, individuals that are physically indiscernible (exactly alike with respect to every physical property) are mentally indiscernible (exactly alike with respect to every mental property).

Emanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg, the scientist, biblical scholar, and mystic, was a member of a famous Swedish family of clergymen and scholars; his father was a prominent bishop and a prolific writer.

Swedenborg studied the classics and Cartesian philosophy at Uppsala and became interested in mathematics and natural science. In 1710 he went abroad, spending most of the next five years in England, where he learned the Newtonian theories and developed a modern scientific outlook.

After his return to Sweden in 1715, Swedenborg was appointed an assessor in the College of Mines by Charles XII. He held this office until 1747, when he resigned in order to devote his time to the interpretation of the Scriptures.

Sympathy and Empathy

The notions of empathy and sympathy have a muddled history, and they are often used interchangeably. Recently, efforts at clarifying the difference have focused on empathy first and proceeded to characterize sympathy by contrast.

The contemporary philosophical conception of empathy has three aspects. If Sam empathizes with Maria’s anger, then: 1) Sam has a representation of Maria as angry; 2) Sam comes to have his empathic experience because of his representation of Maria as angry; 3) Sam’s experience involves experiencing a state that is similar to anger.

On most accounts, sympathy differs from empathy by being triggered solely by emotions that are linked with pain and involves—either as consequence or through sharing the other person’s pain—feeling sorry for the other person or wanting to alleviate the other person’s suffering. The phrases feeling with and feeling for, respectively, are often used to capture the difference between the two notions.

Syntax

“Syntax” is the theory of the construction of sentences out of words. In linguistics, syntax is distinguished from morphology, or the theory of the construction of words out of minimal units of significance, only some of which are words.

According to this division, it is a matter of morphology that the word solubility decomposes into “dissolve” + “able” + “ity”; but it is a matter of syntax to analyze the construction of the sentence, “That substance is able to dissolve.”

Although syntax is a traditional grammatical topic, it was only with the rise of formal methods growing out of the study of mathematical logic that the subject attained sufficient explicitness to be studied in depth, in works by Zelig Harris (1957) and Noam Chomsky (1957). Since then a flourishing field has been created; for it was rapidly discovered that the syntax of human languages was far more complex than at first appeared.

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian writer and philosopher. Romain Rolland, referring to the Orient and the Occident, said that Tagore contributed more than anyone else toward “the union of these two hemispheres of spirit.” Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan called Tagore “the greatest figure of the Indian renaissance.”

Tagore was born in Calcutta, studied in London, returned to India, and was married in 1883. He founded Visvabharati, a university at Santiniketan (near Bolpur), became India’s most popular poet, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, and was knighted in 1915.

He visited and lectured in Canada, the United States, South America, England and several countries of Europe, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Iran, Ceylon, China, and Japan. He was in personal contact with Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and other leading intellectual figures of his period.

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