Journal of Scottish Thought

Journal of Scottish Thought Volume 10 Published by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies University of Aberdeen 2018 ISSN 1755 9928 Editor: Endre Szécsényi © The Contributors This volume of The Journal of Scottish Thought developed from a conference hosted by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. The Journal of Scottish Thought is a peer reviewed, open access journal published annually by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Correspondence should be addressed to The Journal of Scottish Thought, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG. Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY. CONTENTS Editorial Note v Ronald W. Hepburn’s Agnosticism Mary Warnock 1 Is the Sacred Older than the Gods? Guy Bennett-Hunter 13 Religious Experience, Imagination and Interpretation: A Case Study Peter Cheyne 26 The Voice of Cordelian Ethics: Imagination and the Loss of Religion Michael McGhee 52 Aesthetic and Moral James Kirwan 69 Aesthetic Experience, Metaphysics and Subjectivity: Ronald W. Hepburn and ‘Nature-Mysticism’ David E. Cooper 90 Constructing the Aesthetics of Nature Cairns Craig 102 Ronald W. Hepburn on Wonder and the Education of Emotions and Subjectivity James MacAllister 123 Wonder and the Everyday: Hepburnian Considerations and Beyond Arto Haapala 139 Notes on Contributors 153 Editorial Note On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn. The speakers of this event – Arnar Árnason, Guy Bennett-Hunter, Pauline von Bonsdorff, Isis Brook, David E. Cooper, Cairns Craig, Douglas Hedley, James MacAllister, Michael McGhee, Fran Speed and Endre Szécsényi – discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives.1 For the current enterprise, the collection of the revised versions of their papers has been supplemented by the contribu- tions of other scholars who had been unable to attend the symposium. These papers together with a bibliography of Hepburn’s published works amount to two journal volumes: the current issue (vol. 10) contains the fi rst part of our collection, the second is forthcoming in the next one (vol. 11).2 Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927, he went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from Aberdeen (1955), his tutor was Donald MacKinnon. He taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. ‘Taken over his career – as Stephen Watt writes –, 1 On the occasion of this anniversary, there was another academic event organized also by Endre Szécsényi: a three-paper panel ‘The Roots of Environmental Aesthetics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: in Memory of Ronald W. Hepburn’ presented by Emily Brady, Cairns Craig and the organizer, chaired by Alexander Broadie, in the 31st annual conference of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society at the University of Glasgow on 21 July 2018. 2 I am grateful to Peter Cheyne and Cairns Craig for their help and support. Hepburn’s work represents an impressive exploration of what remains after the abandonment of a theistic worldview. His work has been seminal in the development of environmental philosophy and in extending the understand- ing of aesthetics beyond the experience of the art object.’3 Indeed, he has consensually been considered ‘the founder of the discipline’4 of the environmental and everyday aesthetics, based on his papers of the 1960s in which he pioneered these aesthetic approaches. In the most recent historical narra- tive of modern aesthetics, Paul Guyer devotes a sub-chapter to Hepburn; this one-and-half-page long article in his monumental enterprise undoubtedly expresses the historian’s appreciation (especially, if we consider how many signifi cant theoreticians of the twentieth-century history of modern aesthetics are disregarded). Guyer discusses Hepburn’s contribution to modern aesthetics in the chapter ‘Aesthetics and Knowledge of Nature’ together with Allen Carlson’s and Malcom Budd’s theoretical achievements. Guyer almost exclu- sively relies on Hepburn’s most-cited paper ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ of 1966, and concludes that Hepburn’s ‘account of the aesthetic experience of nature seems to draw upon Kant’s analysis of aesthetic experience in general while supplementing it with emphasis upon the possibility of emotional response as part of such experience.’5 Beside Immanuel Kant, of course, Hepburn too exploited insights and ideas that have been presented by Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, Rudolf Otto, Iris Murdoch, John Niemeyer Findlay, Mikel Dufrenne, or the early Romantic poets just to mention a few from amongst the authors who had signifi cant impact on his aesthetico-theological or aesthetico-mystical thinking. Hepburn never dealt with these various fi elds separately, instead, he was deeply interested in their overlaps and mutual impregnations which led to the formation of a characteristic philosophical language and vocabulary. In Emily Brady’s words: ‘In his exploration of the links and boundaries between the aesthetic, moral, and religious, he was drawn to a particular set of ideas: wonder, imagination, the sublime, freedom, life’s meaning, mystery, respect for nature, and the sacred.’6 He was not an expert of a certain philosophical 3 Stephen Watt, ‘Hepburn, Ronald William’ in Stuart Brown (ed.), Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Philosophers (2 vols, Bristol, 2005), I, 404–6, 405. 4 Allen Carlson, ‘Ten Steps in the Development of Western Environmental Aesthetics’ in Martin Drenthen and Jozef Keulartz (eds), Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground (New York, 2014), 13–24, 23. 5 Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2014), III, 587. 6 Emily Brady, ‘Ronald W. Hepburn: In Memoriam’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49 (2009), 199–202, 200. area, rather he was a philosophos in the ancient Greek sense of the word, his ‘philosophical and personal lives [were] intimately connected, shaping each other significantly.’7 Endre Szécsényi University of Aberdeen and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University December 2018 Cover: Ronald W. Hepburn. A detail of a photograph taken by his younger son on the celebration of his 80th birthday in York in March 2007. By courtesy of Mrs Agnes Hepburn. 7 Ibid. Ronald W. Hepburn’s Agnosticism Mary Warnock In what follows, I shall concentrate on one of Ronald W. Hepburn’s major works on the philosophy of Christian religion, Christianity and Paradox,1 fi rst published in the United Kingdom in 1958, two years before the death of J. L. Austin, and when the impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work was at its height. Hepburn’s aim in this book was to explore the effect of linguistic philosophy on theology, or rather on the perceived intelligibility of discourse concerning God in the Christian religion. The date of his book is signifi - cant, and explains the somewhat limited range of his concept of theology; for the hugely infl uential book, Rudolf Bultmann’s Jesus Christ and Mythology was not published in English translation until 1963 (though Hepburn may well have been aware of Bultmann’s work before this date, for the publication in England of his Kerygma and Mythos was as early as 1948). But at any rate, the idea of ‘demythologising’ the gospels had not become the integral aspect of theology that it later became. Indeed, Bultmann himself fi rst used the term, ‘to demythologise’. I remember attending a series of classes entitled Myth, given by the theologian, Maurice Wiles, in the 1970s, in which he was moving towards his view that God played no active part in the world, after his fi rst act of creation; and that the miracles recorded in the gospels were all to be treated as myth or legend, though there was a good deal of reluctance among the mainly clerical members of the class to abandoning the Empty Tomb. In any case, for much of his book Hepburn is chiefl y concerned with the meaning, if any, to be attached to the word ‘God’ itself, in the light of the insights about meaning, and the uses of language for purposes other than making statements that characterised the analyses of linguistic philosophy. On this issue, he comes out of his discussion, he says, as a regretful agnostic. But he insists that ‘agnostic’ be taken seriously: he does not know whether or not there is a God, or what God would be if He existed; and he is ready to change his mind. Towards the end of the book, he seems prepared to accept the 1 Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth-Century Theology (1958; New York, 1968 2nd edn). 2 Mary Warnock teaching of Jesus of Nazareth as an intelligible account of, or at least a pointer in the direction of the nature of God, and as our nearest approach to encoun- tering God. For he rejected as strictly meaningless existentialist accounts, such as Martin Buber’s, of direct encounters with God, in an ‘I–Thou’ relationship, for Buber the only way there was to know God.2 Other things have changed since 1958.

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