British philosophy
British philosophy refers to the
Medieval
Anselm of Canterbury
Saint Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033 – 1109) was an important philosopher and theologian of the Catholic Church, who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Anselm is famed as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and of the satisfaction theory of atonement. Anselm's works are considered philosophical as well as theological since they endeavour to render Christian tenets of faith, traditionally taken as a revealed truth, as a rational system.[2]
William of Sherwood
William of Sherwood (c. 1200 – c. 1272) was a
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1294), also known as Doctor Mirabilis (
Duns Scotus
John Duns Scotus (c. 1265 – 8 November 1308) was an important philosopher and theologian of the
Nicknamed Doctor Subtilis (the subtle doctor), he is well known for the "univocity of being," the formal distinction, and the idea of haecceity. The univocity of being holds that existence is the most abstract concept we have and is applicable to everything that exists. The formal distinction is a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing such that the distinction is intermediate between what is merely conceptual, and what is fully real or mind-independent. Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas) is the idea of "thisness," a concept which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing.
William of Ockham
William of Ockham (c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an
The words often attributed to Occam: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ("entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity") are absent in his extant works;[13] This particular phrasing comes from John Punch who used it in describing a "common axiom" (axioma vulgare) of the Scholastics.[14]
Modern
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an Englishman who was a
Bacon has been called the father of empiricism.[15] His works established and popularized deductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method or simply, the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. His dedication probably led to his death, so bringing him into a rare historical group of scientists who were killed by their own experiments.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.[16]
Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.[17]
Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of fields, including history, geometry, physics of gases, theology, ethics, general philosophy, and political science. His account of human nature as self-interested cooperation has proved to be an enduring theory in the field of philosophical anthropology. He was one of the key founders of philosophical materialism.
The classic trio of British empiricists
The three 'classic' British empiricists in the early modern era were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The term "British empiricism" refers to the philosophical tradition in Britain that was epitomised by these thinkers (though this tradition did have precursors in Britain stretching back to Roger Bacon). Berkeley, despite being Irish, was referred to as British as County Kilkenny, where he lived in Ireland, was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at the time.
John Locke
John Locke (1632–1704) was an empiricist at the beginning of the Modern period of philosophy. As such (and in contrast to René Descartes), he held that all of the objects of the understanding are ideas, where ideas exist in the mind. One of his goals in his work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is to trace the origin of ideas. There are no innate ideas “stamped upon the mind” from birth, and all knowledge is rooted in experience. Further, there are also simple ideas and complex ideas. Simple ideas enter by the senses, and they are simple and unmixed. Complex ideas are simple ideas that have been combined and related together using the abstracting activity of the mind.
John Locke embodied the idea of religious tolerance and said "no mans knowledge can exceed his experience" based on his background in epistemology.
Locke is also responsible for an early theory of personal identity. He thought that our being the same person from one time to another consists, not in our having the same soul or the same body, but rather the same series of psychological connections. For Locke, to be a person is to be an intelligent thinking being that can know itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.
George Berkeley
George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an
Berkeley is famous for his motto "esse est percipi aut percipere", or otherwise, "to exist is to be perceived, or to perceive". This means that there are no things other than ideas and the minds that house them. There is no such thing as a mind-independent entity.
David Hume
David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish
Hume famously described the problem of induction. He argues that inductive reasoning cannot be rationally employed, since, in order to justify induction, one would either have to provide a sound deductive argument or an inductively strong argument. But there is no sound deductive argument for induction, and to ask for an inductive argument to justify induction would be to beg the question.
Hume's problem of causation is related to his problem of induction. He held that there is no empirical access to the supposed necessary connection between cause and effect. In seeking to justify the belief that A causes B, one would point out that, in the past, B has always closely followed A in both space and time. But the special necessary connection that is supposed to be causation is never given to us in experience. We only observe a constant conjunction of events, with no necessity whatsoever.
In personal identity, Hume was a bundle theorist. He said that there is no robust self to which properties adhere. Experience only shows us that there is only a bundle of perceptions.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics.
Smith studied
19th century
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is well known for beginning the tradition of classical utilitarianism in Britain. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory of normative ethics which holds that an act is morally right if and only if that act maximizes happiness or pleasure. Classical utilitarianism is said to be hedonistic because it regards pleasure as the only intrinsic good and pain as the only intrinsic evil.[20]
Utilitarianism was described by Bentham as "the greatest happiness or greatest felicity principle".[21] Bentham's utilitarianism is known for arguing that the felicific calculus should be used to determine the rightness and wrongness of acts. It does this by measuring the amount of pain and pleasure for various acts. Bentham thought that pleasure and pain be broke down in distinct units called hedons and dolors.
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an influential contributor to
Mill also continued Bentham's tradition of advancing and defending utilitarianism. Mill's book Utilitarianism is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism. The essay first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861; the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863.
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) also focused on utilitarian ethics and was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, was a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women. The Methods of Ethics is a book on utilitarianism written by Sidgwick that was first published in 1874.[23] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy indicates that The Methods of Ethics "in many ways marked the culmination of the classical utilitarian tradition." Well-known contemporary utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer has said that the Methods "is simply the best book on ethics ever written."[24]
British idealism
As an area of
20th century and beyond
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy was based on traditional British empiricism, updated to accommodate the new developments in logic pioneered by German mathematician Gottlob Frege. It has dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world since the early 20th century.
G. E. Moore
George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was an English philosopher. One of the founders of the
Moore is best known today for his defence of
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1918 to 1919.[26]
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) led the British "revolt against
Russell's theory of descriptions has been profoundly influential in the philosophy of language and the analysis of definite descriptions. His theory was first developed in his 1905 paper "On Denoting".
Russell was a prominent
In 1950, Russell was awarded the
A. J. Ayer
Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (29 October 1910, London – 27 June 1989, London), better known as A. J. Ayer or "Freddie" to friends, was a British analytic philosopher known for his promotion of
Ordinary language philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings that philosophers develop by forgetting what words mean in their everyday use.
This approach typically involves eschewing philosophical theories in favour of close attention to the detail of everyday language. Sometimes also called "Oxford philosophy", it is generally associated with the work of a number of mid-century
It was a major philosophic school between 1930 and 1970.
Contemporary times
Recent British philosophers particularly active in the philosophy of religion have included Antony Flew, C. S. Lewis, and John Hick.
Important moral and political philosophers have included R. M. Hare, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Roger Scruton.
Other recent figures in the British analytic tradition include David Wiggins, Derek Parfit, and P. F. Strawson, who have focused on fields such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, logic, and the philosophy of language.
See also
- List of British philosophers
- British Philosophical Association
- The Philosophical Society of England
References
- ^ Matthews, Kenneth (1943). British Philosophers. Great Britain: William Collins. p. 7.
- ISBN 0-521-00205-2.
- ^ Bacon, Roger (1859). "Preface". In Brewer, J.S. (ed.). Fr. Rogeri Bacon opera quædam hactenus inedita. Vol. I. Translated by Kretzmann, Norman. London.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ISBN 0-8493-8102-9.
- ISBN 978-0-415-96930-7
- ISBN 978-0-595-31824-7
- ISBN 978-0-415-42574-2.
- ^ Brampton 'Duns Scotus at Oxford, 1288-1301', Franciscan Studies, 24 (1964) 17.
- ^ "What Ockham really said". Boing Boing. 2013-02-11. Retrieved 2013-03-26.
- ^ 'Sentences of Peter Lombard', Quaestiones et decisiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi (ed. Lugd., 1495), i, dist. 27, qu. 2, K)
- ^ "Ockham's razor". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2010. Retrieved 12 June 2010.
- Knealeand Kneale, 1962, p.243.)
- ^ Flew, Antony (1979). A Dictionary of Philosophy. London: Pan Books. p. 253.
- ^ Alistair Cameron Crombie (1959), Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, Vol. 2, p. 30.
- ^ Home | Sweet Briar College Archived July 8, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. Psychology.sbc.edu. Retrieved on 2013-07-29.
- ^ "Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020. . Retrieved March 11, 2009.
- ^ Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1994) pp 20–38
- ^ Berkeley, George Archived 2015-12-08 at the Wayback Machine – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ^ "David Hume" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved May 15, 2010
- ^ "Consequentialism" at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved April 10, 2011
- ^ AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION, Jeremy Bentham, 1789 (“printed” in 1780, “first published” in 1789, "corrected by the Author" in 1823.) See Chapter I: Of the Principle of Utility. For Bentham on animals, see Ch. XVII Note 122.
- ^ "John Stuart Mill's On Liberty". victorianweb. Retrieved 2009-07-23.
On Liberty is a rational justification of the freedom of the individual in opposition to the claims of the state to impose unlimited control and is thus a defence of the rights of the individual against the state.
- ^ "Henry Sidgwick, 1838-1900" at The History of Economic Thought Website Archived 2010-08-07 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved April 10, 2011
- ^ Peter Singer - Interview at NormativeEthics.com Archived 2011-07-14 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved April 10, 2011
- ^ Analytic Philosophy And Return Hegelian Thought :: Philosophy: general interest :: Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.org. Retrieved on 2013-07-29.
- ^ The Aristotelian Society – The Council
- ^ "Bertrand Russell" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philososophy Retrieved May 15, 2010
- ^ Ludlow, Peter, "Descriptions", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = [1].
- JSTOR 2709246.
- ISBN 0-415-10907-8.
- ^ The Bertrand Russell Gallery Archived 2011-09-28 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ The Nobel Foundation (1950). Bertrand Russell: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950. Retrieved on 11 June 2007.