Cutie Stories

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 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.