For national leaders and specialists in the study of diplomacy alike, the notion that religion has affected United States foreign policy is.
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Introduction I first became aware of Allan H. Frey's work at Willow Grove in 1972, just after completing 'The Holographic Concept of Reality.'. Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo. There is no doubt that Ken Wilber appreciates and has been influenced and inspired by Sri Aurobindo. As I see it, Wilber is (like Jung. The word 'psychokinesis' was coined in 1914 by American author Henry Holt in his book On the Cosmic Relations. The term is a linguistic blend or.
The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Here is a paper I began in the summer of 2.
Nevertheless, I'm still not completely satisfied with it. Addition: A version of the paper was published, titled . USCHANOV, Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki.
The Concept of Mind is one of those books that is often cited by people who haven’t read it butread about it, and think they know what is in it. They have read that it epitomizes two woefullyregressive schools of thought that flourished unaccountably in mid- century but are now utterlydiscredited: Ordinary Language Philosophy and Behaviourism.
Yes, and imbibing alcohol willlead you inexorably to the madhouse and masturbation will make you go blind. Don’t believe it.— Daniel C. Dennett (2. 00. 0: xiv)But ordinary language is all right.— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1. Introduction. Which book criticizing certain developments in post- war analytic philosophy won favours from both Karl Popper and the Soviet Union, moved I. Richards to write a poem, inspired British situation comedy, caused an angry month- long correspondence in the Times, was the subject of concerned editorials in both that paper and the Economist, and still strikes sparks today?
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature? It was in fact Words and Things by the Czech anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1.
Words and Things is a vehement attack on the style of philosophizing known as . OLP was identified mainly with British analytic philosophers of the last mid- century and more specifically those at the University of Oxford. Its chief practitioners were regarded to be such philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1.
Gilbert Ryle (1. 90. J. Austin (1. 91. P. Strawson (1. 91. Paul Grice (1. 91. John Wisdom (1. 90. From the late 1. 94.
OLP was an integral part of the mainstream of analytic philosophy; as Stephen Mulhall (1. In fact it’s safe to say that, with the possible exception of Bergson’s and Driesch’s vitalism, OLP is the most deeply unfashionable of all the main currents of twentieth- century Western philosophy. It has fallen victim to what Stan Godlovitch has called philosophy’s equivalent of . The present paper is argued from a historiographical position voiced candidly by Martin Kusch — . I have three reasons for attempting such a task.
First, there have been very few studies of what made once lively intellectual milieus and climates disappear. The history of ideas and the sociology of knowledge have hitherto concentrated almost exclusively on the success and propagation of ideas, not their failure and erasure. This has led to forgetting of the fact that victors write the histories in intellectual history as well as political history, and therefore source criticism is often conspicuously lacking when historians of ideas treat schools of thought that failed to maintain their legitimation. With a few exceptions (e. Francks 1. 98. 5; Candlish 1. Mc. Carty 1. 99. 5), the historiography of philosophy has not paid any significant attention to the role of hostile caricatures in discrediting philosophers and their ideas (except perhaps in the atypical case of Aristophanes’s lampooning of Socrates). I hope to demonstrate that showing an opponent’s accusations to be caricatures can constitute as extensive and agile a form of philosophical criticism as looking for straightforward factual errors or logical fallacies in them.
Second, I think that Words and Things is a very bad book and that its influence has been almost totally deleterious. I agree completely with Antony Flew’s assessment that it is not only a . In my opinion Gellner’s criticisms of OLP are for the most part unjustified, and even when this isn’t the case, the point would have been better off being made without his smarmy sensationalism. Stephen Mulhall has interestingly suggested that . Even if chances of reviving OLP on a grand scale are slim, by curing part of that amnesia I hope to take some tentative steps to clean the name of a period in which, in P.
Third, familiarity with the influence of Words and Things is important if one wants to understand many aspects of the reception history of Wittgenstein, the one philosopher attacked by Gellner who is still generally considered one of the true greats of Western philosophy. Even if, per impossibile, all the writings of all other practitioners of OLP should turn out to be worthless, it would still be interesting to demonstrate how the reception of Wittgenstein reflects the influence of Gellner’s attack.
In hindsight, the influence of an instantly recognizable (if often tacit) style of Wittgensteinian misinterpretation, exploited by thinkers as diverse as Herbert Marcuse, Karl Popper, J. It is also a key source of a rhetorical style of arguing against Wittgenstein that almost every Wittgensteinian thinker regularly finds himself confronted with. The content of Gellner’s book.
One of the first things that strike the reader of Words and Things is Gellner’s extreme rudeness. Hardly a paragraph goes by without some invective being used. Like Alan Sokal did recently in the aftermath of his hoax article, Gellner used essentially populist rhetorical strategies. He ingeniously exploited the general public’s fascination with embarrassment and ridicule when attacking a philosophy perceived as disastrous.
His book exudes through its every pore the sense that OLP is not only useless, but evil and dangerous. Characteristic chapter headings include . Another feature of the book is the making of numerous negative existential statements: no practitioners of OLP own up to their mistakes, they never refuse to use such- and- such an invalid argument, and so on.
The paradigm case argument: language proves, for example, that tables must exist, since we use the word . In its paradigm actual usages a concept must be correctly applied, for what else could it mean? The generalized version of the naturalistic fallacy: linguistic norms and recommendations can legitimately be inferred from currently accepted usage (Gellner 1. The contrast theory of meaning: any meaningful term must have both a possible example and a possible counterexample. There must be something a term does not cover. Contrastless concepts are meaningless, because nothing could conceivably count as their refutation (Gellner 1. Polymorphism: a logically homogeneous .
What were thought to be homonyms are actually different meanings of the same concept. Any general models of languages are impossible (Gellner 1. Gellner’s most famous objection to OLP, which he claims must follow from the pillars, is that OLP is deeply conservative. It defers to the linguistic habits of the boorish common man; it tends to preserve the social status quo and belittle the significance of social problems; and it can only exist in a closed system such as the social world of the University of Oxford, . According to Gellner, OLP . Furthermore, Gellner argues that .
The book became a succ. I am returning it to you (separately) since I shall not have a review of the book in Mind.
Abusiveness may make a book saleable, but it disqualifies it from being treated as a contribution to an academic subject.(Quoted in Russell 1. Bertrand Russell, who had written a laudatory introduction to the book, protested this in a letter in the Times, Ryle replied, and the exchange started a controversy finally involving nineteen different correspondents, both the merits of the book and the rightness of Ryle’s decision being contested with equal vigour (Mehta 1. R. About a month later, the Economist devoted a similarly worried and seemingly impartial editorial to . For a while, Gellner’s assault seemingly became . Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic.
Most reviewers were of the opinion Mind’s would undoubtedly have been. The most negative estimate was probably Michael Dummett’s view, expressed in the English Dominicans’ journal Blackfriars, that the book didn’t even have . Closely behind was Arnold Isenberg’s review in the Journal of Philosophy, which considered the book . In the Scientific American, Morton White submitted a long list of logical fallacies in Gellner’s arguments, speaking of . In the Philosophical Review Willis Doney, one of the young American philosophers to whom Norman Malcolm had introduced Wittgenstein in 1.
Gellner’s treatment of the paradigm case argument (Doney 1. The unsigned Times Literary Supplement notice. Words and Things . In Synthese, the scholastic logician Gabri. The Cambridge Review assigned Words and Things to Geoffrey Warnock, who found it .
In the New Statesman, Alasdair Mac. Intyre stated that although Words and Things was .
Anthony Quinton, writing in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, shared this last regret, while devoting most of his long review to providing textual counterexamples to Gellner’s specific accusations (Quinton 1. Marshall Cohen’s review in Commentary suspected Gellner of professional envy towards the holders of prestigious Oxford jobs, suggesting that there was . Gellner has not shaken this view or given me any reasons for changing it. The critical notice of the phenomenologist J. Findlay, published in the short- lived Indian Journal of Philosophy, described Gellner as a talented caricaturist, who regrettably . Ayer — a recent victim of an open stonewalling action by Austin and Ryle, who wanted to keep him out of an Oxford chair — was censorious.
In his notice in the Spectator, he praised both his nemeses for having achieved genuinely important results, referring to OLP as . Acton (1. 95. 9); the Popperian John Watkins (1. Oxford logician William Kneale (1. P. Heath (1. 96. 2), the Scottish critic of OLP. Even they invariably complained about the book’s abusive style and made other concessions to Ryle’s viewpoint. The few completely laudatory comments were all by non- philosophers.
Richards wrote to Gellner expressing his . Bernard Crick, the political scientist and future biographer of Orwell, made the most of Ryle’s refusal in claiming that there had been an entire .