In the introduction to the second volume of her collected papers, Anscombe says that she got into philosophy by way of two stumbling blocks. The first was the idea that every event must have a cause. She goes on:
The other central philosophical topic which I got hooked on without even realizing that it was philosophy, was perception. I read a book by Fr Martin D'Arcy, S.J., called The Nature of Belief and got just that out of it. I was sure that I saw objects, like packets of cigarettes or cups or . . . any more or less substantial thing would do. But I think I was concentrated on artefacts, like other products of our urban life, and the first more natural examples that struck me were 'wood' and the sky. The latter hit me amidships because I was saying dogmatically that one must know the category of object one was speaking of -- whether it was a colour or a kind of stuff, for example; that belonged to the logic of the term one was using. It couldn't be a matter of empirical discovery that something belonged to a different category. The sky stopped me.Yesterday I learned that at a school prize-giving ceremony, when Anscombe was in the sixth form, the school sang "The Spacious Firmament on High," a hymn I don't think I've ever heard of before. The words (by Joseph Addison) are rather nice:
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.
The unwearied sun from day to day
Does his Creator's power display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an almighty hand.
Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings, as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.
Anscombe won a lot of prizes at school, including the "Mary Sybil Raymond Prize (for the best girl going on to a University)".What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball;
What though nor real voice nor sound
Amid their radiant orbs be found;
In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
For ever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'
Here's that hymn:
"... the idea that every event must have a cause ..."
ReplyDeleteThat's a good stumbling block to set off a rich life in Philosophy. But I wouldn't put it like that. I would rather say that given any event, where "event" refers to an objective situation involving what in most (but perhaps not all) languages is understood as a change of state together with some aspect of the situation that remains invariant through the change, the occurrence of this event will always be dependent on some (logically prior) initial condition that made it possible. E.g., "the big bang": what were the initial conditions that made the "big bang" possible? (Use of the term 'cause' here seems to involve circularity, so I try to avoid it in causal analysis.) Also, perhaps related, given any statement asserted with the expectation of critique, not just empirical statements, but including "self-evident truths", axioms, tautologies, etc., the acceptability of this statement (truth, applicability, accuracy, coherence, etc.) will be dependent on something else, also expressible, at least descriptively, in language. OK, These are just conjectures; maybe they're not correct, but give me a counterexample. (I think I also want to say that the search for explanation will always be, in logical form, open-ended. I realize that might sound weird in the case of deductive systems and formal language mode.)
JPL
I don't have any counterexamples to offer, I'm afraid/happy to say.
DeleteI like the idea of getting into philosophy through problems. I can't say I did (I've always wondered about things and wanted to make sense of life, but I wasn't initially hit amidships by anything as Anscombe was). I have, though, a couple of times got into an issue because I just didn't see how someone could be right (Anscombe in MMP, for instance) and ended up agreeing with them.