Cutie Stories: March 2013

Space in Physical Theories

Space in Physical Theories

Space here means the space of the science of mechanics, which encompasses planetary and celestial (i.e., “outer”) space, but is presupposed by the motion—spatial change—of any bodies whatsoever, from the tiniest particles through human-sized bodies to the whole universe. The investigation of space has been perhaps the most fruitful interaction between physics and philosophy.

Physics endows space with specific properties playing a crucial role in determining the motions of bodies, but, despite being omnipresent, space (prerelativistically) is frustratingly inert—not having even the indirect causal effects of subatomic particles, say. Thus physics ascribes substantive properties to space on the basis of indirect evidence, allowing metaphysical bias to influence understanding, and calling (in part) for philosophical clarification.

One of the main strands of this clarification involves the “absolute-relative” debate. In fact a number of (interconnected) debates go under this title, of which two are focused on in the historical development of mechanics: Of all the motions a body has (relative to different frames of reference), which if any are privileged or “absolute”?

Sovereignty

Analysis of “sovereignty” brings one into contact with nearly all the major problems in political philosophy. At least seven related concepts may be distinguished:

(1) A person or an institution may be said to be sovereign if he or it exercises authority (as a matter of right) over every other person or institution in the legal system, there being no authority competent to override him or it. For some writers, though not for all, this concept also implies unlimited legal competence; for, it is said, an authority competent to determine the limits of its own competence must be omnicompetent.

(2) Difficulties arising from the first concept have led some writers to ascribe sovereignty to a constitution or basic norm from which all other rules of a system derive validity. (3) Sovereignty is sometimes ascribed to a person, or a body or a class of persons, said to exercise supreme power in a state, as distinct from authority, in the sense that their wills can usually be expected to prevail against any likely opposition.

Sound

“Sound” according to Aristotle’s De Anima (418a12) and George Berkeley’s First Dialogue, is the special, or proper, object of hearing. G. J. Warnock, in his Berkeley, interprets this as meaning that sound is the “tautological accusative” of hearing: Sounds can only be heard and must be heard if anything is heard.

Hearing receives attention in philosophy mainly for its differences from seeing. Two respects in which listening and hearing differ from looking and seeing are (1) that there is nothing analogous, in seeing, to hearing the sound of something, and (2) that, in telling where something is, there is nothing analogous, in listening, to our having to look in the right direction.

Warnock’s explanation of the first of these differences is that we establish the presence and existence of an object by sight and touch, and then proceed to distinguish the object thus established from its smell and taste and the noises it makes.

Special Sciences

Special Sciences

The special sciences are generally taken to include all the sciences above physics, including biochemistry, genetics and the various biological sciences, the brain sciences, cognitive science, psychology, and economics, amongst many others. Because of their growing success over the last century, the special sciences, and their results, play an increasingly central role in philosophy.

This is true of issues in the philosophy of mind and psychology, such as the mind-body problem or the nature of emotion, but also in central debates in ethics concerning a person’s moral psychology and its implications, in metaphysics, for instance in discussions of personal identity and the possibility of freewill, and in epistemology, through the manifold issues affected by the nature of human cognitive capabilities.

Consequently, debates over the nature, and status, of special sciences are understandably vigorous, though unfortunately they are also especially challenging because of the wide range of issues they incorporate, the often technical formulations of positions, and the implicit nature of many of their commitments. Given these difficulties, one must, first, illuminate the key questions about special sciences and then, second, provide a road map to the major positions and ongoing areas of dispute.

Spinozism

The term Spinozism has almost invariably been used, by both defenders and detractors, to refer to doctrines held or allegedly held by Benedict de Spinoza. Unlike “Platonism,” for example, it has not generally been used to refer to a developing doctrine arising out of Spinoza’s philosophy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the term was frequently used to disparage various types of atheistic doctrines that were held to be attributable to Spinoza.

For almost a century after his death, his work was neglected by philosophers, execrated by orthodox theologians of diverse denominations, and slighted even by freethinkers. It is not always possible, however, to distinguish between those genuinely opposed to Spinoza’s alleged atheism and those who really espoused atheism while pretending to disparage it.

Bayle and the “Philosophes”

Spinoza’s early reputation rested almost entirely on the long article in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1697), for some time the only readily accessible account of Spinoza’s system. Bayle, like many others, admired Spinoza’s life but abhorred his doctrine.

Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler

The German writer Oswald Spengler was born at Blankenburg, Germany. Spengler is known almost entirely for his contribution to philosophy of history. After studying at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle—chiefly natural science and mathematics, although he also read widely in history, literature, and philosophy—Spengler obtained a doctorate in 1904, with a thesis on Heraclitus, and embarked upon a career as a high school teacher.

In 1911 he abandoned teaching to take up the penurious life of a private scholar in Munich, where the first volume of his only considerable work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), gradually took shape. This volume was published in 1918 at the moment of his country’s defeat in World War I. Its pessimistic conclusions so exactly suited the prevailing mood that its author rocketed to instant but short-lived fame.

An ardent nationalist, Spengler has sometimes been accused, especially because of his reactionary and quite undistinguished political writings after 1923, of having helped to prepare the way intellectually for fascism.

Afrikan Alexandrovich Spir

Afrikan Alexandrovich Spir, the Russian metaphysician was born in Elizavetgrad (present-day Kirovohrad) in the Ukraine, the son of a Russian doctor and a mother of Greek descent. Spir became interested in philosophy when, at the age of sixteen, he read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a work that was to have a profound influence on him.

He received no formal education in philosophy, however, and consequently never gained entry into philosophical circles, either in his native country or in Germany, where he settled in 1867. Spir attended a naval cadet school.

He received both the Order of St. George and the Order of St. Andrew for his services as a naval officer. Before leaving Russia, he freed all his serfs and gave them land and lodging. He also gave away most of his money and lived on the income from the remainder.

Walter Terence Stace

Walter Terence Stace, the Anglo American empiricist philosopher, was born in London. He was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1908 and from 1910 to 1932 served in the civil service in Ceylon. During this period he published A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London, 1920) and The Philosophy of Hegel (London, 1924).

In 1932 he retired from the civil service to teach philosophy at Princeton University, where he remained until his academic retirement in 1955. He was president of the American Philosophical Association in 1949.

Stace’s The Theory of Knowledge and Existence (Oxford, 1932) is the definitive statement of his general position on philosophical method. His argument rests on the claim that on strict empirical grounds the solipsist position is logically unassailable.

Benedict de Spinoza

Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza was best known for his Ethics (1677), which laid out in geometric form arguments for the existence of an impersonal God, the identity of mind and body, determinism, and a way of overcoming the dominance of the passions and achieving freedom and blessedness.

His Theological-Political Treatise (1670) was a landmark in the history of biblical criticism. He was also, in that work, the first major philosopher in the Western tradition to argue for democracy and for freedom of thought and expression.

In the Port of Amsterdam (1632–1656)

Spinoza was born into the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam in the same year Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. His father, Michael, was an immigrant who had fled Portugal, with other members of his family, to escape the persecution of the Inquisition.

Rudolf Stammler

Rudolf Stammler was a German neo-Kantian legal philosopher. His first major work, Die Lehre vom richtigen Recht, outlined his philosophy of law, which was elaborated in subsequent works. Stammler sought to apply Immanuel Kant’s distinction between pure and practical reason to the law.

The embodiment of pure reason in legal theory is the concept of law, which Stammler defined as “combining sovereign and inviolable volition.” The counterpart of practical reason is the idea of law, that is, the realm of purposes realized by volition.

But whereas for Kant practical reason was not, like pure reason, a matter of intellectual perception, but of morality, Stammler sought to formulate a theoretically valid idea of justice. He based it on the community of purposes and the fact that man is a reasonable being, an end in himself.

Luigi Stefanini

Luigi Stefanini, the Italian personalist philosopher, taught at Messina and Padua. He was a founder of the Gallarate movement and the founder and first editor of the Rivista di estetica. Much of Stefanini’s own philosophy is to be found in his work on the history of philosophy.

He tried to demonstrate by careful historical analysis that authentic religious and metaphysical needs are adequately met by certain historical positions, especially those of St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure.

His guiding principle, “paradigmatism,” is of Platonic and Neoplatonic origin and may be stated thus: that which is created in the image of another (as is man) has as its constitutive imperative, or life vocation, the expression in itself of its transcendental model.

Eduard Spranger

Eduard Spranger

Eduard Spranger, the German philosopher and educator, was born in Grosslichterfelde, Berlin. He studied both mathematics and science at a Realschule and the humanities at a classical Gymnasium. At the University of Berlin he studied under Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Paulsen and earned his right to lecture with Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Humanitätsidee (Berlin, 1909), a classic in the history of German humanism.

He was called to the University of Leipzig as professor of philosophy in 1911 and to Berlin as professor of philosophy and pedagogy in 1920. He spent the most creative years of his career and exercised his greatest influence on the Geisteswissenschaften and on all levels of German education while at Berlin.

In 1933 he submitted his resignation in protest against interference with university freedom by the new National Socialist government but was persuaded by many followers to retain his influential university position. In 1937/1938 he lectured in Japan. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1944 but was released upon the intercession of the Japanese ambassador.

Lizzie Susan Stebbing

Lizzie Susan Stebbing, the English logician and philosopher, was born in London. A very delicate child, she received a discontinuous education until she went to Girton College, Cambridge, in 1906. While at Cambridge she happened to read F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, which led to her interest in philosophy.

She became a pupil of the logician W. E. Johnson. From 1913 to 1915 she lectured in philosophy at King’s College, London; and she became a lecturer at Bedford College, London, in 1915 and a professor in 1933.

In London Stebbing’s philosophical development was stimulated by the meetings of the Aristotelian Society, which were often attended by Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and G. E. Moore; and she always acknowledged the philosophical influence of Moore as particularly strong.

Henrich Steffens

Henrich Steffens

Henrich Steffens, the philosopher, scientist, and novelist and short-story writer was of Danish and German descent. He was born in Stavanger, Norway, the son of a physician in the service of the Dano-Norwegian monarchy. From 1790 to 1794 Steffens studied natural science, especially mineralogy and geology, in Copenhagen. He next studied natural history in Kiel, where he became interested in philosophy.

In 1798 he moved to Jena, drawn not least by the natural philosophy of Friedrich von Schelling, whose Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie had appeared in 1797. In Jena, Steffens met Schelling, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and August Schlegel; and in Berlin in 1799 he met Friedrich von Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In 1802 Steffens returned to Copenhagen to lecture on natural philosophy. Through his large audience he influenced the development of the romantic movement in Denmark, but he failed to obtain the university position he had hoped for, and in 1804 he accepted a chair in natural philosophy and mineralogy at the University of Halle.

Louis William Stern

Louis William Stern

Louis William Stern, the German philosopher and psychologist, was born in Berlin and received his PhD under Hermann Ebbinghaus in Berlin in 1892. From 1897 to 1915 he taught philosophy and psychology at the University of Breslau, and in 1915 he moved to Hamburg, where, in 1919, he helped to found the University of Hamburg. He was forced into exile in 1933 by the Nazi government and became professor of psychology and philosophy at Duke University. He died in Durham, North Carolina.

As a psychologist Stern revolted against the elementarism (the belief in the adequacy of analysis of consciousness into its elementary parts) current in Germany before the general acceptance of Gestalt psychology. In his early studies of the perception of change and motion, he employed phenomenological methods and anticipated some later developments in Gestalt psychology.

He soon gave up psychophysical experimentation, however, and pioneered in various fields of applied psychology, such as psychology of childhood, forensic psychology, intelligence testing (he introduced the concept of the intelligence quotient), and vocational psychology.

Charles L. Stevenson

Charles L. Stevenson

Charles L. Stevenson authored the first thorough emotivist, or noncognitivist, account of ethical language. Traditionally the study of ethics had involved a quest for the truth about what is good and right, but Stevenson abandoned that search and set out to investigate the practical use of ethical language to shape attitudes.

In a series of articles, and in his 1944 book Ethics and Language, he proposed answers to classical philosophical questions about meaning and justification that set the agenda for the next several generations of moral philosophers.

Stevenson earned degrees at Yale and Cambridge before receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1935. He then taught at Harvard and Yale, where his original and challenging ideas about ethics were not popular. In 1946 he joined the philosophy department at the University of Michigan, where he remained till his retirement.

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner, the German philosopher and occultist, was born in Kraljevic, Hungary, of Catholic parents. His early education was obtained at technical secondary schools and the Polytechnic Institute of Vienna. Steiner’s anthroposophical teaching, presented as “spiritual science,” is an extraordinary synthesis of “organic” ideas in nineteenth-century German thought with theosophical material and fresh occult intuitions.

In 1902 Steiner became a lecturer and general secretary of the Theosophical Society’s German branch, but his earlier thought had been basically formed between 1890 and 1897, years devoted to the study and editing of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s scientific writings at the Goethe-Archiv in Weimar.

In this time, and during a period (1897–1900) as editor of the Magazin: Monatschrift für Litteratur, he developed his own views of evolution, natural organization, and science through confrontation with the ideas of Charles Darwin, Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and contemporary German philosophies.

Edward Stillingfleet

Edward Stillingfleet

Edward Stillingfleet, an English Protestant theologian, was born in Cranborne, Dorset. He entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1649. On graduating in 1653 he was elected a college fellow, but after a year went into private employment. He was appointed rector of Sutton, Bedfordshire, in 1657.

The Church of England was then under Presbyterian administration, but Stillingfleet received episcopal ordination in a clandestine ceremony and readily conformed after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. A popular preacher in London legal circles, he became rector of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, London, in 1665, and in 1678 rose to be dean of St.

Paul’s. On the accession of William III (1650–1702) in 1689 Stillingfleet was created bishop of Worcester. He was active in the politico-theological controversies of the time,most of which had a philosophical dimension. None of his writings was narrowly or exclusively philosophical.

Edith Stein

Edith Stein was born into a German Jewish family on October 12, 1891, on Yom Kippur, in the Silesian capital Breslau, Germany (after 1945,Wroclaw, Poland). She was the youngest of eleven children, four of whom died in early childhood. Her father, Siegfried Stein (1844–1893), had a small trade with coals and wood and died too early for his youngest child to have any memory of him.

Her mother, Auguste Stein, née Courant (1849–1936), was a matriarchal, warm-hearted woman who tried to educate her children in the traditional Jewish faith and in the celebration of the rituals. Nonetheless, the industrious and highly intelligent girl became an agnostic from her puberty onward and already in school became a champion of women’s liberation.

After a brilliant performance on school examinations, she studied psychology with William Stern, philosophy with Richard Hönigswald, along with German literature and history, at the Universität Breslau from 1911 to 1913.

Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen, an English man of letters, was the son of James and Jane Venn Stephen, both of whom came from families in the innermost group of the reforming Evangelicals who formed the so-called Clapham Sect. He attended Eton, briefly and unhappily, and then went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was made a fellow in 1854.

Fellows had then to be ordained in the Church of England, and Stephen took holy orders and eventually became a priest, although he was not deeply religious. At the same time, religious doubt and disaffection began to trouble him.

In 1862, as a result of these doubts, he resigned his fellowship, and in 1864 he left Cambridge for good. By 1865 he had completely lost all religious belief. He settled in London and began writing for various journals. Thereafter he wrote continually, copiously, and on a very wide range of topics.

George Frederick Stout

George Frederick Stout

George Frederick Stout was an English philosopher and psychologist. Records of Stout’s early life are scant. He was born in South Shields, Durham. A clever boy at school, he went in 1879 to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he obtained first-class honors in the classical tripos with distinction in ancient philosophy and followed this with first-class honors in the moral sciences tripos with distinction in metaphysics. In 1884 he was elected a fellow of his college, and in 1891 he succeeded George Croom Robertson as editor of Mind.

He was appointed Anderson lecturer in comparative psychology at Aberdeen in 1896; Wilde reader in mental philosophy at Oxford in 1899; and professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews in 1903. He remained at St. Andrews, where he was instrumental in establishing a laboratory of experimental psychology, until his retirement in 1936.

In 1939 he went to Sydney, Australia, to live with his son Alan, who had been appointed to the chair of moral and political philosophy at the University of Sydney. He spent the remaining years of his life joining vigorously in the discussions of a lively circle of younger philosophers at that university.

Dugald Stewart

Dugald Stewart was an Edinburgh professor of moral philosophy who expounded the common sense theory of Thomas Reid and the libertarian political economy of Adam Smith. He taught from 1785 until illness forced his retirement in 1809.

An eloquent spokesman for Reid and Smith rather than an original thinker, he left no legacy of his own but conveyed theirs. He provided his classes with a feast of psychology, ethics, and intellectual history and was the first professor in Britain to offer a course in political economy, which he began in 1800.

A defender of academic freedom (see Brown [2004, 657] and Veitch [1858, lxxv–lxxix on the Leslie affair]), he both consoled and disturbed his audience by sustaining its metaphysical prejudices against Humean skepticism while revising its economic and political ones. He was no utilitarian yet advocated private liberty and the open market as the route to general happiness. His renown as a teacher was sustained by his books, which were translated into German, French, and Italian.

String Theory

Physicists believe there to be four fundamental forces. Three of these—the electromagnetic, the strong force, and the weak force—are amalgamated in the standard model of elementary particle physics, a family of quantum field theories that has enjoyed stupendous empirical success. Gravity, the fourth and feeblest fundamental force, is the subject of a stupendously successful nonquantum field theory, Einstein’s general theory of relativity (GTR).

Desiring to fit all of fundamental theoretical physics into a quantum mechanical framework, and suspecting that GTR would break down at tiny (“Planck scale,” i.e., 10^-33 cm) distances where quantum effects become significant, physicists have been searching for a quantum theory of gravity since the 1930s.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, string theory became the predominant approach to quantizing gravity, as well as to forging a unified picture of the four fundamental forces. A minority approach to quantizing gravity is the program of loop quantum gravity, which promises no grand unification.

Stoicism

Stoicism was a philosophical movement founded in Athens in the late fourth century BCE by Zeno of Citium. Although Stoicism was shaped by many philosophical influences (including the thought of Heraclitus), it was throughout its history an essential part of the mainstream Socratic tradition of ancient philosophy.

Inspired as well by the Cynics (Zeno was taught by Crates, a student of Diogenes of Sinope), Stoicism developed alongside and in competition with Platonism and Aristotelianism over the next 500 years.

For centuries it was the main rival to Epicurean thought as well. Virtually no works survive from the early period of the school’s history. Yet its doctrines have been reconstructed with a fair level of reliability on the basis of later accounts, critical discussions by non-Stoics, and the surviving works of later Stoic writers.

Mathematical Structuralism

Structuralism is a view about the subject matter of mathematics according to which what matters are structural relationships in abstraction from the intrinsic nature of the related objects.

Mathematics is seen as the free exploration of structural possibilities, primarily through creative concept formation, postulation, and deduction. The items making up any particular system exemplifying the structure in question are of no importance; all that matters is that they satisfy certain general conditions—typically spelled out in axioms defining the structure or structures of interest—characteristic of the branch of mathematics in question.

Thus, in the basic case of arithmetic, the famous “axioms” of Richard Dedekind (taken over by Giuseppe Peano, as he acknowledged) were conditions in a definition of a “simply infinite system,” with an initial item, each item having a unique next one, no two with the same next one, and all items finitely many steps from the initial one. (The latter condition is guaranteed by the axiom of mathematical induction.)

David Friedrich Strauss

David Friedrich Strauss, the German theologian, historian of religion, and moralist, was born at Ludwigsburg in Württemberg. He studied from 1821 to 1825 at Blaubeuren, where he fell under the influence of the Hegelian theologian F. C. Baur, and at the Tübingen Stift from 1825 to 1831. He next attended the University of Berlin, where he heard lectures by G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In 1832 he went to the University of Tübingen as lecturer, remaining there until 1835, the year of the publication of the first volume of his most important work, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (2 vols., Tübingen, 1835–1836; translated from the 4th German edition by George Eliot as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, London, 1848). The universal storm of public indignation that this book occasioned resulted in his dismissal from the university and his permanent retirement from academic life.

Master of a clear and forthright prose style, Strauss had no difficulty supporting himself as a journalist and popular exponent of the view that religion—Christianity in particular—is an expression of the human mind’s capacity to generate myths and treat them as truths revealed by God to man.

Peter Frederick Strawson

Peter Frederick Strawson, the British philosopher, was educated at Christ’s College, Finchley, and St. John’s College, Oxford. He holds the BA and MA degrees and is a fellow of University College, Oxford.

Language and Logic

Strawson is a leading member of the circle of philosophers whose work is sometimes described as “ordinary language philosophy” or as “Oxford philosophy.” Of his early work, the most influential and most controversial is the famous article “On Referring” (Mind, 1950), a criticism of the philosophical aspects of Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite descriptions.

According to Russell’s theory any sentence of the form “The f is g”—for example, “The king of France is bald”—is properly analyzed as follows (in terms of our example): “There is a king of France. There is not more than one king of France. There is nothing which is king of France and which is not bald.”

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Structuralism emerged as a dominant intellectual paradigm in France in the late 1950s in part in response to the existentialist emphasis on subjectivity and individual autonomy—personified in the work and person of JeanPaul Sartre—and in part as a reflection of the rising influence of research in the human sciences.

In fact, structuralism has its origins in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), whose 1906–1911 lectures at the University of Geneva, published on the basis of student notes in 1916 as the Cours de linguistique générale, provide structuralism’s basic methodological insights and terminology.

While Saussure’s Cours makes frequent reference to a science that will study language as a system, it was the Russian-born linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) who first used the term structuralism in 1929, and it was Jakobson who introduced the basic principles of Saussurean linguistics to both the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–) and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.