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A Hundred Years of Philosophy A HUNDRED YEARS OF PHILOSOPHY John Passmore PENGUTNsOors Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlsex, England Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenu€, New york, New york 10022,U.S,A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 28Ol John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R lB4 Penguin Books (N.2.) Ltd, t82-l9O Waimu Road, Auckland 10, New Zealmd Contents First published by Duckworth 1957 Second Edition 1966 heface 7 Published in Penguin Books 1968 ll Reprinted 1970, 1972, 1978 Abbreviations 1. Jobn Stuart Mill and British Empiricism l3 Copyright @ John Pusmore, I9S7,1966 2. Materialism, Naturalism and Agnosticism 35 All rights reserved 3, Towards the Absolute 48 72 Made and print€d in Grcat Britain 4. Personalityand the Absolute by C. Nicholls & Company Ltd Pragmatism and its European Analogues 95 Set in Mouotype Time 5. 6. New Developmentsin Logic 120 7. SomeCritics of Formal Logic 156 8. The Movement towards Objectivity 174 9. Moore and Russell 201 10. Cook Wilson and Oxford Philosophy 2M ll. The New Realists 2s8 12. Critical Realism and American Naturalism n9 13. Recalcitrant Metaphysicians 298 14. Natural Scientists turn Philosophers 320 15. SomeCambridge Philogophers;and Wittgen- stein's Tractatus 343 367 Except in the Unit€d Statcs ofAmerica. 16.Logical Positivism tbis book is sold subjat to the condition 17.Logic, Semanticsand Methodology 394 that it shall not, by way of trade or otbcruisc. be lent, re{old, hired out, or otherwisc circulatcd 18.Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy 4U without the pubtish€r,s prior consent in atry form of binding or cov€r other than that in which il is 19.Existentialismand Phenomenology 466 published and without a similar condition Explanation or Revisioo? 504 including this condition being imposed 20.Description, on th€ subscquent purchascr Notes 531 Funher Reading 616 Index of Names 619 IndexofC,oncepts 632 A HUNDRED YEARS OF PHILOSOPHY attitudesto preciselythis sameobject, can supposeit, deny it nrrd so on. CHAPTER 9 Stout doesnot mean that .world there is a of possibilitior, Moore and Russell whichis quitedistinct from theworld of particularexistences: .ll the contrary, he insists on thet close interconnexion. Evcry possibilityis possibleonly relativelyto certainconditions: it nr'y, 'Moonn andRussell' - the conjunctionis inevitable.Nor is this for example,be a mathematicalpossibility but yetbe mechanicllly nrerelyan historian's stereotype.Russell, then completing his impossible.But if thepossible thus depends on theactual, so aho. undergraduatestudies at Cambridge,diverted his younger con- Stoutargues, the actual depends on thepossible: to beactual is tn tcmporary,Moore, from classicsto philosophy;Moore led that be 'possiblein all ways'.The actualis a realizedpossibifity. attackupon Idealism,particularly the Idealismof Bradley,which A fuller expositionof this view must connectit with Stoul,r lirst won for Moore and Russelltheir reputationas philosophers. theory of universals,and that we shall discussin a later chaptcr. 'l do not know that Russellhas ever owed anythingto me except The importantpoint, for the moment,is that Stout'swork, front nistakes,'Moore writessomewhat ruefully, 'whereasI haveowed the beginning,is closely concernedwith the kind of quesliorr to his publishedworks ideaswhich were certainly not mistakes, which Brentanoand Meinong had broughtto the attention of :rndwhich I think very important.' Russellgives a different,and philosophers.Like them, he was concernedto defend and to rnoreaccurate, account of their relationship: 'He took thelead in examinethe conceptof objectivity.And Stout, we must r€fi€ffi. robellion,and I followed, with a senseof emancipation.'l ber, taught both Moore and Russellin the days when he wnl Yet the two men were very different. In his Autobiography working on his Analytic psychology.In a variety of ways, tholr Mooremakes a confessionwhich givesus an importantclue to philosophyis continuouswith Stout's. lhe understandingof his teachingand his influence:'I do not think,'he writes,'that the world or the scienceswould everhave suggestedto me any philosophicalproblems. What hassuggested problemsto me is thingswhich other philosophershave said about theworld or about natural science.'Locke, Berkeleyand Hume, in their various ways, begin from Newton; Green, Bradley, Ilosanquetand Spencerhave Darwin at the back of their minds; Moore'sphilosophy, on the other hand, is curiouslyremote from lhe'greatcontroversies'ofour time.Neither Freud,nor Marx, nor l:instein,so far as onecanjudge, has affected his thinking in the lcast.He is a'philosopher'sphilosopher' if everthere was one.2 Russell'sphilosophy, on the other hand,moves in an atmos- lrlrerethick with science.His first book was on GermanSocial l)antocracy(1896); his second bore the title An Essay on the litanf,alisw of Geometry(1897). Philosophy for him is continu- ,rrrs with social, psychological, physical, and mathematical rnvestigation.When he is technical,as in, say, ThePrinciples of Aluthematics(1903), his free use of mathematicalsymbols pro- tlrrcesin the ordinary reader the feeling that if this is incompre- I'r:rrsible,it is for only-too-familiarreasons. Moore is almostnever 200 201 A HUNDRED YEARS OF PHILOSOPHY MOOREAND RUSSELL technical,in this sense;no writer has ever sought so The'concept', Moore maintains,is 'neither a mental fact nor to achieveutter clarity and utter simplicity, unlessit be nnypart of a mentalfact'. No doubt it is what, in our thinking,we yet, Stein. And sturdy defenderof common sensethough lto lJ tuke as our object: but if it did not exist independentlyof our point the and the method of Moore's philosophy are scttrtp| thinking, there would be nothing for us to think about. Like a yeats intelligibleto the ordinary educatedreader. W. B. wrott tr Itlatonicform, which it closelyresembles, the concept is eternal T. your S. Moore :r 'I find brother extraordinarilyobscuro' I th* und immutable; that is why, Moore says, it can appeaf, as an is the reaction of a literary man, who expectsa philosophorI identical ingredient in a number of different judgements, linking discuss questions large in a large way. As John Wisdom tlremin chainsof reasoning. out, the ,Mooro scientistis likely to be no lessdisconcerted. of,lf] Moore's pu{pose,in this essay,is much like Brentano'sand game a of Logic, and a peculiarone at that for it lacksmuch tll|f Meinong's:to maintain the objectivity and the independenceof gives satisfactionin ordinary logic and mathematics.In lt nO objectsof thought. His starting-point,one must again insist, is architecture proof possible, of is and with that goes too thl llradley, not the British empirical tradition; there was in Brad- with Q.E.D. its note of agreementachieved and triumphant d||1 lcy's Principles of Logic, as we have already noted, an anti- covery'.4Yet Moore has a great deal to offer to thosewho psychologicaltendency to which Moore fell heir. The break with felt the fascination of his drastichonesty - difficult though it lf Itritish empiricism in Moore's early work could, indeed, scarcely convey that fascination, or that honesty,by meansof be a cleaner one. According to the empirical tradition a concept When he brought together,inhis PhilosophicalStudies ( is an 'abstraction', which the mind manufacturesout of the raw thoseof his contributions philosophy to which he thought material supplied by perception. Moore axgued' in complete of preservation,he included neitherhis early articlesin Mind contrast, that 'conceptions cannot be regardedfundamentally as- the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society nor his rbstractionseither from thingsor from ideas,since both alike can' to Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, il' anything is to be true of them, be composedof nothing but indeed, he condemns in his Autobiography as 'ex concepts'.A'thing', on this view, is a colligation of concepts;a crude'.But he great alsotells us that he'took pains'over pieceof paper,for example,is whitenessand smoothnessand . early writings; and if the theory they expoundwas one he Yet a relation between concepts, Moore also says, is 'a pro- abandoned, it has neverthelessmade its mark on English position'; he is preparedto acceptthe inevitable consequencethat ophy, partly through Russell's adherenceto it. In i u 'thing', a 'complex conception', a'proposition', are different respects,furthermore, it problems set the which many namesfor the sameentity. On this foirndation,he constructshis century philosophers particularly were to explore. theory of truth. Accorping to the conventional view a proposition Of those early articles the most important is 'The NeturG is true when it corresponds to reality. There is here involved a Judgment' (Mind, 1899). Bradley'sPrinciples of Logic is its contrastbetween the true proposition- commonly thought of as of origin. Bradley, Moore thought, had not been I set of words or a set of ideas- and the 'reality' it represents. ruthlessin his dealings judgementr with Locke'sdoctrine that Moore, on the other h'and,identifiestrue proposition and reality. about 'ideas'. Althouefi he had at times written as il 'Once it is definitely recognized,'he wrote in his article on are about what ideasmean, at other times one would gathcr 'Truth' in Baldwin's Dictionary., 'that the proposition is to the ideaitself psychicphenomenon - as a - is an ingredientin tlcnote not a belief (in the psychological sense),nor a form of judgement. former, The Moore argues, is the only tenable vi words, but the object of belief,
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