Cutie Stories: September 2014

Moral and Legal Responsibility

The term responsibility or one of its variants figures in moral discussion in many different ways. Philosophers have traditionally been especially interested in the concept of moral or personal responsibility. It is with the problems connected with this notion that the following discussion is primarily concerned.

Judgments of Personal Responsibility

F. H. Bradley once claimed that "for practical purposes we need make no distinction between responsibility and liability to punishment." Although it is true that discussions of responsibility have often turned quickly to discussions of blameworthiness and liability to punishment, there is little justification for Bradley's claim.

For responsibility is equally relevant to many other forms of social treatment—among others, praise, reward (including special honors such as honorary degrees or titles), legal punishment, legal liability. And, of course, the topic is intimately related to the theological issue of salvation, the allocation of divine rewards and punishments.

Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur is widely regarded as among the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. He had contributed to most of the major philosophical movements from the 1940s to the present, including existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, critical theory, narrative theory, philosophy of religion, ethical theory, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.

Ricoeur was a prolific author of twenty-seven books and more than 500 articles as of 2004. His works tend to focus on theories of interpretation and the philosophy of human nature, examining the limits on our ability to understand the world and to know ourselves.

If there is a guiding thread that runs through Ricoeur's career it would be an attempt to develop a philosophical anthropology of human capability, in particular our capacities to act, understand, communicate, and be responsible.

Eugenio Rignano

Eugenio Rignano was an Italian positivist philosopher and founder (1907) and lifelong editor of the scientific journal Scientia. Rignano's first works were sociologically oriented, but he later turned to biology and philosophical biology.

His major work, Psicologia del ragionamento (1920), places the activity of memory at the basis of all biological and psychic phenomena. Memory is an activity that, through the specific accumulation of concepts, makes possible the progressive adaptation of the organism to the environment, the formation of instincts and emotions, and, in higher organisms, of reasoning.

According to Rignano, reasoning is "a series of operations or experiences merely thought out simply"; in other words, a series of operations performed in imagination. The results of these operations are also imagined and are assumed as the conclusions of the reasoning itself.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The German poet Rainer Maria (René) Rilke was born in Prague, the son of a minor railway official. His mother, who was of upper-middle-class origin, encouraged him in his early ambition to become a poet. The years 1886–1891, which Rilke spent at military academies in Moravia and Austria, had a traumatic effect on him, and not until 1920 was he able to come to terms with his unhappy childhood and family background.

His first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, appeared in Prague in 1895. Desultory studies, mainly in the history of art, at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Berlin were followed by two journeys to Russia in 1899 and 1900 in the company of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a German-Russian to whom Friedrich Nietzsche had proposed marriage and who later became a follower and friend of Sigmund Freud.

During the second of these journeys he met Lev Tolstoy. On his return Rilke joined an art colony in Worpswede near Bremen, and early in 1901 he married the sculptress Clara Westhoff, one of its members. They had a daughter, but the short-lived marriage was only an interlude in Rilke's essentially solitary and unsettled life.

Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet

Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet, the French littérateur and speculative philosopher, was born in Rennes. He started to become a Jesuit, but withdrew from the order and went to Holland to devote himself to letters.

There he published his principal work, De la nature (4 vols., Amsterdam, 1761–1768), and in 1768, Considérations philosophiques de la gradation naturelle des formes de l'être, ou les Essais de la nature qui apprend à faire l'homme (2 vols., Amsterdam and Paris).

He eked out an existence by hackwork, translating English novels and giving English lessons. He became embroiled with Voltaire by selling the manuscript of Lettres secrétes for publication without Voltaire's permission. He went to Paris in 1778 when he was made royal censor and secretary to one of the king's ministers.

Jacques Rohault

Jacques Rohault was a mechanistic Cartesian experimental physicist. He was born in Amiens, France, and earned his MA in Paris in 1641. There, he became Claude Clerselier's Cartesian disciple and son-in-law. He was Pierre-Sylvain Régis's teacher and converted him to Cartesianism.

In the 1650s Rohault was a private tutor in Paris, and his "Cartesian Wednesday" evening lectures, complete with laboratory table demonstrations, were attended by many members of the noble class, women as well as men, and did a great deal toward popularizing Cartesianism.

His Traite de physique (Paris, 1671) was a standard text for nearly fifty years. John Clarke and Samuel Clarke, rather than writing a Newtonian physics, translated Rohault's work into Latin (1697) and English (1723) and added Newtonian footnotes to correct Rohault's Cartesian mistakes.

Romanticism

"Romanticism" and "romantic" are protean words, the despair of a rigorous semanticist. They designate a generally accepted period, especially in literature and the arts, of Western cultural history, roughly from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

They embrace a cluster or syndrome of ideas about the true, the good, the beautiful, philosophical ideas both in the popular and in the technical sense, ideas endlessly debated in the last few centuries.

Although the behavioral scientists groping to establish a rigorous classification of human personality generally eschew the word, romantic remains in common use to describe a temperament or personality often, perhaps usually, held to be a constitutional element of an individual and at least in part independent of cultural fashion.