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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson’s ‘particularizations of the universal’ are thus “strictly objective” and “not a mere thought of ours” (SI, 335–336); they thus cannot be phenomenal entities. His thinking here is of apiece with his anti-idealist views on ‘apprehension’. He had argued against T. H. Green’s neo-Kantian stance, that apprehension has no ‘synthetic’ character: any synthesis apprehended is attributed to the object and not the result of an activity of the ‘apprehending mind’. As he put it, “in the judgement of knowledge and the act of knowledge in general we do not combine our apprehensions, but apprehend a combination” (SI, 279), and it is “the nature of the elements themselves” which “determines which unity they have or can have”; the ‘apprehending mind’ has “no power whatever to make a complex idea out of simple ones” (SI, 524). This view implies that universals and connections between them, as particularized, are in rebus and to be apprehended as such (Price 1947, 336). The view is, therefore, that there is no possible apprehension of the universal except as particularized: | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Just as the universal cannot be, except as particularized, so we cannot apprehend it except in the apprehension of a particular. (SI, 336) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson further reasoned that, when one states that ‘a is a triangle’, one is predicating of a the universal ‘triangularity’ and that, analogously, in stating that ‘triangularity is a universal’ one would then put the universal ‘triangularity’ in the subject position—the ‘nominative case to the verb’ as he quaintly puts it (SI, 349)—and treat it as if it were a particular, while putting ‘universal’ in the predicate position. But to talk about the universal in this way would require per impossibile that one apprehends the universal in abstraction from any of its particularizations. Cook Wilson held his conception as being, if not popular among philosophers, at least in accordance with ordinary language and common sense (SI, 344–345). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | It is thus the particularization of a given ‘characteristic being’ which we are said to apprehend, but “neither as universal nor as particularized” (SI, 343). There is no suggestion in Cook Wilson’s writings of something akin to Husserl’s act of ‘categorial intuition’ or ‘ideational abstraction’, in virtue of which the universal would be “brought to consciousness and […] actual givenness” (Husserl 2001, 292). He believed instead that the ‘intrinsic character’ of any universal is inexplicable, because the relation between particular and universal, although fundamental and thus presupposed by any explanation (SI, 335 & 345), is sui generis, therefore not explainable in terms of something else: | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | I seem to have discovered that the true source of our metaphysical difficulties lies in the attempt, a mistaken attempt too frequent in philosophy, to explain the nature of the universal in terms of something other than itself. In fact the relation of the universal to the particular is something sui generis, presupposed in any explanation of anything. The nature of the universal therefore necessarily and perpetually eludes any attempt to explain itself. The recognition of this enable one to elucidate the whole puzzle of the Parmenides of Plato. (SI, 348, see also SI, 361) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson thus believed to have found an answer to the notorious set of regress arguments known as the ‘third man’ in Parm. 132a-143e. (Ryle argued later on that Cook Wilson’s answer would not do, developing his own regress argument against the notion of ‘being an instance of’, that Ryle read Cook Wilson as presupposing, while merely claiming that it is sui generis (Ryle 1971, vol. I, 9–10).) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson did not contribute to logic. His inclination was at any rate conservative. For example, there was for him no room even to try and make a case for an alternative logic, since he held the Aristotelian principles (the principle of syllogism, the law of excluded middle and the principle of contradiction) to be “those simple laws or forms of thoughts to which thought must conform to be thought at all. Thought therefore cannot throw any doubt on them without committing suicide” (ETA, 17 & SI, 626). Cook Wilson also rejected new developments in symbolic logic from Boole to Russell. He was not as such adverse to the “symbolization of forms of statements”: when criticizing Boole’s he alluded to “an improved calculus of [his] own” (SI, 638), which he called “fractional method” (SI, 662). But he did not publish it and all we have is the beginnings of an outline (SI, 192–210). His main objection to Boole—a common one at the time—was to the algebraist’s use of equations, perceived as an intrusion of mathematics in logic (SI, 635–636). (See the whole chapter (SI, 635–662).) And the little he knew of mathematical logic, Cook Wilson ferociously opposed. He did think of syllogistic as “a science in the same sense as pure mathematics” (SI, 437), but he was opposed to the very idea of logical foundations for mathematics because he believed that logical inferences are exhausted by syllogistic and, “mathematical inference as such is not syllogistic” (SI, xcvi). This is a misunderstanding, common at the time, of the expressive power of quantification theory as developed among others by Gottlob Frege and C. S. Peirce, of which he was clearly insufficiently cognizant, if not plainly ignorant. | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson used his interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of Idea numbers as ἀσύμβλητοι ἀριθμοί as a basis for an attack on Russell and the logicist definition of numbers, Plato’s doctrine being understood (see section 2) as entailing that there cannot be a universal of the members of the ordered series of universals: 1-ness, 2-ness, 3-ness, etc. because they do not share an ‘intrinsic character’. Confusing this series with that of the natural numbers, he concluded that the logicist definition in terms of classes of classes, e.g., of the number 5 as the class of all classes equinumerous with a given quintuplet, is “a mere fantastic chimera” (SI, 352). In line with the argument about putting the universal ‘triangularity’ in the subject position (previous section), Cook Wilson reasoned for the case of natural numbers that there would be an alleged ‘universal of numberness’ and that this would lead straight to a contradiction: since all particulars of a universal are said to possess its quality, a group of 5 as a particular of ‘5-ness’ would thus possess the ‘universal of numberness’, thus contradicting his claim that a particular cannot be a universal (SI, 353). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | By the same token, Cook Wilson thought that this line of reasoning shows that Russell’s paradox of the class of all classes that do not contain themselves (Russell 1903, chap. X) is a “mere fallacy of language” (SI, cx). He thus argued at length (SI, §§ 422–32), including in his correspondence with Bosanquet (SI, §§ 477–518) that there can no more be a ‘class of classes’ than ‘universalness’ could be a ‘universal of universals’ and that a class can no more be a member of itself than ‘universalness’ could be a particular of itself: the implied ‘universal of universals’ or ‘universalness’, of which universals would be the particulars, would be a particular of itself, which is, Cook Wilson claims, “obviously absurd” (SI, 350). For bad reasons such as these, Cook Wilson was contemptuous of what he called “the puerilities of certain paradoxical authors” (SI, 348). He even wrote to Bosanquet: | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | The problem with Cook Wilson’s arguments is that they are based on an elementary confusion between membership of a class and inclusion of classes (see for example SI, cx & 733–734). Peter Geach called Cook Wilson “an execrably bad logician” (Geach 1978, 123) for committing blunders such as this. (Cook Wilson’s claim in a letter to Lewis Carroll that it is not possible to know that ‘Some S is P’ without knowing which S it is which is P is another such elementary blunder (Carroll 1977, 376).) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Fortunately, Cook Wilson made a more interesting contribution to philosophy of logic in his discussion of Lewis Carroll’s paradox of inference (Carroll 1895), of which he gave the following formulation: | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | … let the argument be A1 = B1, B1 = C1, therefore A1 = C1. The rule which has to be put as the major premiss is, things being equal to the same thing are equal to one another. Under this we subsume A1 and C1 are things equal to the same thing, and so draw the conclusion that they are equal to one another. This is syllogism I. Now syllogism I, which is of the form MP, SM, SP, in turn exemplifies another rule of inference which is the so-called dictum de omni et nullo. This must now appear as a major premiss. The resulting syllogism may be put variously; the following short form will serve. Every inference which obey the dictum is correct; the inference of syllogism I obeys the dictum; therefore it is correct. This is a new syllogism (II) which again has for rule of inference the same dictum; hence a new syllogism (III) and so on in saecula saeculorum. (SI, 444) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Leaving aside the incorrect identification of the inference rule as the dictum de omni, this is recognizably the infinite regress in Carroll’s paradox and, while Carroll did not provide one, Cook Wilson offered the following diagnosis: | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | … it is clearly a fallacy to represent the rule according to which the inference is to be drawn from premisses as one of the premisses themselves. We should anticipate that this must somehow produce an infinite regress. (SI, 443) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | These passages cannot be precisely dated and his correspondence with Carroll for the relevant period is lost, so one cannot tell who framed the paradox first (Moktefi 2007, chap. V, sect. 3.1). They were both anticipated, however, by Bernard Bolzano, who already stated the paradox in his Wissenschaftslehre (1837) and provided a similar diagnosis (Bolzano 1972, § 199). (For a discussion, see Marion (2016).) Interestingly, Cook Wilson’s diagnosis is linked to his own views on the apprehension of universals via their particularizations (see the previous section): | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | A direct refutation may, however, be given as follows. In the above procedure the rule of inference is made a premiss and a particular inference is represented as deduced from it. But, as we have seen, that its an inversion of the true order of thought. The validity of the general rule of inference can only be apprehended in a particular inference. If we could not see the truth directly in the particular inference, we should never get the general rule at all. Thus it is impossible to deduce the particular inference from the general rule. (SI, 445) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | In Lewis Carroll’s presentation of the paradox, the Tortoise refuses to infer the conclusion when faced with an instance of the rule of Modus Ponens and Achilles suggests that one should then add the rule as a further premise, but the Tortoise still refuses to infer, so that Achilles then suggest to add the whole formula resulting from adding the rule as a premise as yet a further premise to no avail, and so forth. It is often claimed that the Tortoise’s repeated refusals indicates that rules of inference are in themselves normatively inert, so that a further ingredient is needed for one to infer, e.g., a ‘‘rational insight’’ (Bonjour 1998, 106–107). Cook Wilson’s claim that one can only ‘apprehend’ the validity of the rule in a particular inference, thus ‘seeing the truth directly’ or possessing a ‘direct intuition’ (SI, 441), is an analogous move. | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | The idea that a rule of inference cannot be introduced as a premise in an inference in accordance with it, on pains of an infinite regress, was also reprised by Ryle (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 216 & 238). But he used it to argue for his celebrated distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’: ‘‘Knowing a rule of inference is not possessing a bit of extra information. Knowing a rule is knowing how. It is realised in performances which conform to the rule, not in theoretical citations of it.’’ (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 217). However, if ‘knowing how’ is no longer a state of mind (even dispositionally), then the view is no longer Cook Wilson’s. | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson believed that all statements are ‘categorical’, arguing away ‘hypothetical judgements’ with the claim that “in the hypothetical attitude”, we apprehend “a relation between two problems” (SI, 542–543 & Joseph (1916a, 185)). In other words, conditionals do not express judgements but connections between questions. This view was elaborated by Ryle into his controversial stance on indicative conditionals as ‘inference-tickets’ in ‘‘If’, ‘So’, and ‘Because’’ (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 234–249). Ryle compared conditionals of the form ‘If p, then q’, to “bills for statements that statements could fill” (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 240) and he rejected the form ‘If p then q, but p, therefore q’, claiming that in some way the p in the major premise cannot for that reason be the same as p asserted by itself. This, of course, runs afoul of Geach’s ‘Frege Point’ (Geach 1972). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson also questioned superficial uniformity of the form ‘S is P’, calling the subject of attributes ‘metaphysical’ (SI, 158) in order to distinguish it from the subject of predication. He thus distinguished the ontological distinction between substance and attribute from the logical subject-predicate distinction. Using the traditional definition of the subject as ‘what supports the predicate’ and the predicate as ‘what is said concerning the subject’ (quoting Boethius, SI, 114–115), he noted that a ‘statement’ such as ‘That building is the Bodleian’ has different analyses, depending on the occasion in which it is used. If in answer to ‘What building is that?’, with the ‘stress accent’ on ‘the Bodleian’ as in ‘That building is the Bodleian’, the subject is ‘that building’ and the predicate as ‘what is said concerning the subject’ is ‘that that building is the Bodleian’ (SI, 117 & 158). But, if in answer to the question ‘Which building is the Bodleian?’ with the ‘stress accent’ now on ‘that’ as in ‘That building is the Bodleian’, then the Bodleian is the subject and the predicate is ‘that building pointed out was it’ (SI, 119). The same goes for ‘glass is elastic’, where elasticity is predicated of glass and ‘glass is elastic’, when it is stated in answer to someone looking for substances that are elastic. This shows that the relation of subject to predicate is somehow symmetric, but it is not the case, however, with the subject/attribute distinction because ‘‘The subject cannot be an attribute of one of its own attributes’’ (SI, 158). Cook Wilson also noted that ‘‘the stress accent is upon the part of the sentence which conveys the new information’’ (SI, 118), and he would thus say that the subject-predicate relation depends on the subjective order in which we apprehend them (SI, 139), while the relation between ‘subject’ and ‘attribute’ is objective in the sense that it is holding between a particular thing and a ‘particularized quality’, it is a ‘‘relation between realities without reference to our apprehension of them’’ (Robinson 1931, 103). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | In ‘How to Talk’ (Austin 1979, 134–153), Austin further developed distinctions akin to Cook Wilson’s differentiation between the logical subject/predicate and metaphysical subject/attribute distinctions, and this differentiation was shared by P. F. Strawson (Strawson 1959, 144), who also believed in ‘particularized qualities’ (Strawson (1959, 168) & (1974, 131)). In a bid to avoid Bradley’s regress (Strawson 1959, 167), he introduced the idea of ‘non-relational ties’ between subject and attribute, leaving ‘relations’ for the link between logical subject and predicate. Some non-relational ties are thus said to hold between particulars and particulars: to the relation between Socrates and the universal ‘dying’ corresponds an ‘attributive tie’ between the particulars that are both Socrates and the event of his death. That such ‘ties’ are less obscure than ‘relations’ and that this maneuver actually succeeds in stopping the regress are further issues, but it is interesting to note that Strawson chose the name ‘attributive tie’ in honour of Cook Wilson (Strawson (1959, 168), see SI, 193). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Strawson also noted that Cook Wilson’s argument for differentiating between the logical subject/predicate and metaphysical subject/attribute distinctions involves an appeal to ‘‘pragmatic considerations’’ (Strawson 1957, 476). Cook Wilson’s claim that a sentence such as ‘glass is elastic’ may state something different depending on the occasion in which it is used also had an important continuation in J. L. Austin’s more general point that, although the meaning of words plays a role in determining truth-conditions, it is not an exhaustive one: it “does not fix for them a truth-condition” because that depends on how truth is to be decided on the occasion of their use (see Travis (1996, 451) and Kalderon & Travis (2013, 492 & 496)): | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | … the question of truth and falsehood does not turn only on what a sentence is, nor yet on what it means, but on, speaking very broadly, the circumstances in which it is uttered. (Austin 1962, 111) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | This line of thought has been pursued further by Charles Travis under the name of ‘occasion-sensitivity’, i.e., ‘‘the fact that the same state of the world may require different answers on different occasions to the question of whether what was said in a given statement counts as true’’ (Travis (1981, 147), see also (1989, 255)), this being a recurring theme, see the papers collected in Part 1 of (Travis 2008)). Thus, Cook Wilson’s above examples, ‘That building is the Bodleian’ or ‘glass is elastic’, are genealogically related to what are commonly known as ‘Travis cases’, i.e., sentences used to make a true statement about an item in one occasion and a false one about the same item in another. (For examples of these, see Travis (1989, 18–19), (1997, 89), (2008, 26 & 111–112).) | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | R. G. Collingwood also took Cook Wilson as putting forth a slightly different thesis, namely that the meaning of a statement is determined by the question to which it is an answer (Collingwood 1938, 265 n.). He used this idea as the basis for his ‘logic of questions and answers’ (Collingwood 2013, chap. 5) and for his theory of presuppositions (Collingwood 1998, chaps. 3–4), this last being further developed by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot (1980, 42f.). Collingwood was reluctant, however, to recognize Cook Wilson as an inspiration, since he thought ill of the idea of ‘apprehensions’ as a non-derivative basis for knowledge and he believed instead that knowledge comes from asking questions first (Collingwood 2013, 25), and thus that knowledge depends on a ‘complex of questions and answers’ (Collingwood 2013, 37). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson hardly wrote on topics outside the theory of knowledge and logic, but two remarks ought to be made concerning moral philosophy. First, the last piece included in Statement and Inference is composed of notes for an address to a discussion society in 1897, that was announced as ‘The Ontological Proof for God’s Existence’. In this text, which opens with a discussion of Hutcheson and Butler, Cook Wilson argued that in the case of “emotions as are proper to the moral consciousness”, such as the feeling of gratitude: | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | He argued further, in what amounts to a form of moral realism, that there must be a real experience, i.e., in the case of gratitude, “Goodwill of a person, then, must here be a real experience” (SI, 861), and that the feeling of “reverence with its solemnity and awe” is in itself “not fear, love, admiration, respect, but something quite sui generis” (SI, 861). It is a feeling that, Cook Wilson argued, “seems directed to one spirit and one alone, and only possible for spirit conceived as God” (SI, 864). In other words, the existence of the feeling of reverence presupposes that God exists. Cook Wilson thus sketched within the span of a few pages a theory of emotions, which is echoed today in the moral realism that has been developed, possibly without knowledge of it, in the wake of David Wiggins’ ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’ (Wiggins 1976) and a series of influential papers by John McDowell—now collected in McDowell (2001). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Cook Wilson’s ideas had a limited impact on Oxford theology. Acknowledging his debt, the theologian and philosopher C. C. J. Webb described religious experience as one that “cannot be adequately accounted for except as apprehension of a real object” (Webb 1945, 38), but he nevertheless chose to describe his standpoint as a form of ‘Platonic idealism’ (Webb 1945, 35). Cook Wilson’s realism also formed part of the philosophical background to C. S. Lewis’ “new look” in the 1920s, via E. F. Carritt’s teaching. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis also described awe as “a commerce with something which […] proclaims itself sheerly objective” (Lewis 1955, 221), but he quickly moved away from this position (see Lewis (1955, chaps. XIII–XIV) and McGrath (2014, chap. 2)). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Secondly, Prichard is also responsible for an extension of Cook Wilson’s conception of knowledge to moral philosophy, with his paper ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ (Prichard 1912), whose main argument is analogous to Cook Wilson’s argument for the impossibility of defining knowledge. In a nutshell, duty is sui generis and not definable in terms of anything else. The parallel is explicit in Prichard (1912, 21 & 35–36). That we ought to do certain things, we are told, arises “in our unreflective consciousness, being an activity of moral thinking occasioned by the various situations in which we find ourselves”, and the demand that it is proved that we ought to do these things is “illegitimate” (Prichard 1912, 36). In order to find out our duty, “the only remedy lies in actually getting into a situation which occasions the obligation” and “then letting our moral capacities of thinking do their work” (Prichard 1912, 37). This paper became so influential that Prichard was elected in 1928 to the White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy at Corpus Christi, although his primary domain of competence had been the theory of knowledge. His papers in moral philosophy were edited after his death as Prichard (1949, now 2002). Prichard stands at the origin of the school of ‘moral’ or ‘Oxford intuitionism’, of which another pupil of Cook Wilson, the Aristotle scholar W. D. Ross (Ross 1930, 1939) remains the foremost representative, along with H. W. B. Joseph, E. F. Carritt, and J. Laird. Some of the views they expressed have recently gained new currency within ‘moral particularism’, e.g., in the writings of Jonathan Dancy (Dancy 1993, 2004). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | The historical importance of Cook Wilson’s influence ought not to be underestimated. In his obituary, H. W. B. Joseph described him as being “by far the most influential philosophical teacher in Oxford”, adding that no one had held a place so important since T. H. Green (Joseph 1916b, 555). This should be compared with the claim that in the 1950s Wittgenstein was “the most powerful and pervasive influence” (Warnock 1958, 62). The ‘realist’ reaction against British Idealism at the turn of the 20th century was at any rate not confined to the well-known rebellion of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. There were also ‘realisms’ sprouting in Manchester (with Robert Adamson and Samuel Alexander), and in Oxford too, where Thomas Case had already argued for realism in Physical Realism (Case 1888) (Marion 2002b), although it is clearly Cook Wilson’s influence that swayed Oxford away from idealism. Since he published so little, it is therefore mainly through teaching and personal contact that he made a significant impact on Oxford philosophy, not only through the peculiar tutorial style to which generations of ‘Greats’ students were subjected—as described in Walsh (2000) or Ackrill (1997, 2–5)—but also through meetings that he initiated, which were to become the ‘Philosophers’ Teas’ under Prichard’s tutelage, the ‘Wee Teas’ under Ryle’s and ‘Saturday Mornings’ under Austin’s. | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | His legacy can thus be plotted through successive generations of Oxford philosophers. E. F. Carritt, R. G. Collingwood (who reverted to a form of idealism later on), G. Dawes Hicks, H. W. B. Joseph, H. A. Prichard, W. D. Ross and C. C. J. Webb are among his better-known pupils at the turn of the century. After his death, his influence extended through the teaching of Carritt, Joseph and Prichard, and the posthumous volumes of Statement and Inference to the post-World War I generation of the 1920s, including Frank Hardie, W. C. Kneale, J. D. Mabbott, H. H. Price, R. Robinson and G. Ryle, and the early analytic philosophers of the 1930s, J. L. Austin, I. Berlin, J. O. Urmson, and H. L. A. Hart, in particular. For example, Isaiah Berlin’s described Hart as “an excellent solid Cook Wilsonian” in a letter to Price (Berlin 2004, 509), and admitted himself to have been at first an Oxford Realist (Jahanbegloo 1992, 153). (See Marion (2000, 490–508) for further details.) Thus, Oxford Realism first dislodged British Idealism from its position of prominence at Oxford and then transformed itself into ordinary language philosophy and, as pointed out in the previous section, moral intuitionism. In the post-World War II years, Cook Wilson’s name gradually faded away, however, while ‘ordinary language philosophy’, which owed a lot to his constant reliance on ordinary language against philosophical jargon, blossomed. It became one of the strands that go under the name of ‘analytic philosophy’, so Cook Wilson should perhaps be seen as one of its many ancestors. | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | The only Oxford philosopher of note who opposed the ‘realists’ before World War II was R. G. Collingwood, who died too soon in 1943. He felt increasingly alienated and ended up reduced to invective, describing their theory of knowledge as “based upon the grandest foundation a philosophy can have, namely human stupidity” (Collingwood 1998, 34) and their attitude towards moral philosophy as a “mental kind of decaudation” (Collingwood 2013, 50). Collingwood objected to Cook Wilson’s anti-idealist claim that ‘knowing makes no difference to the object known’, that in order to vindicate it one would need to compare the object as it is being known with the object independently of its being known, which is the same as knowing something unknown, a contradiction (Collingwood 2013, 44). But Collingwood’s argument did not rule out the possibility of coming to know an object, while knowing that it was not altered in the process. (For critical appraisals, see Donagan (1985, 285–289) Jacquette (2006) and Beaney (2013).) In another telling complaint, he criticized the Oxford Realists for being interested in assessing the truth or falsity of specific philosophical theses without paying attention to the fact that the meaning of the concepts involved may have evolved through history, and so there is simply no ‘eternal problem’ (Collingwood 2013, chap. 7). This points to a lack of historical sensitivity, which is indeed another feature of analytic philosophy that arguably originates in Cook Wilson. | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | There was another deleterious side to Cook Wilson’s influence in Oxford: his contempt for mathematical logic. It explains why one had to wait until the appointment of Hao Wang in the 1950s for modern formal logic first to be taught at Oxford. In the 1930s, H. H. Price was still teaching deductive logic from H. W. B. Joseph’s An Introduction to Logic (Joseph 1916a) and inductive logic from J. S. Mill’s System of Logic. This reactionary attitude towards modern logic and later objections to ‘ordinary language philosophy’ go a long way to explain why Cook Wilson’s reputation dropped significantly in the second half of last century. In the 1950s, Wilfrid Sellars was virtually alone in his praise: | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | I can say in all seriousness that twenty years ago I regarded Wilson’s Statement and Inference as the philosophical book of the century, and Prichard’s lectures on perception and on moral philosophy, which I attended with excitement, as veritable models of exposition and analysis. I may add that while my philosophical ideas have undergone considerable changes since 1935, I still think that some of the best philosophical thinking of the past hundred years was done by these two men. (Sellars 1957, 458). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | As the tide of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ ebbed, Cook Wilson’s views on knowledge showed more resilience. In the 1960s, Phillips Griffiths’ anthology on Knowledge and Belief included excerpts from Cook Wilson (Phillips Griffiths 1967, 16–27) and John Passmore was able to write that “Cook Wilson’s logic may have had few imitators; but his soul goes marching on in Oxford theories of knowledge” (Passmore 1968, 257). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | As shown in sections 5 and 6, Cook Wilson’s views on knowledge and perception are now once more involved in contemporary debates. They had remained influential all along, although his name was often not mentioned. His peculiar combination of the claims that knowledge is a factive state of mind and that it is undefinable, argued for anew by J. L. Austin, has been taken up and further developed by John McDowell (McDowell 1994, 1998), Charles Travis (Travis 1989, 2008), and Timothy Williamson (Williamson 2000, 2007), who is currently Wykeham Professor of Logic, New College. One has, therefore, what Charles Travis once described as “an Oxford tradition despite itself” (Travis (1989, xii), on this last point, see also Williamson (2007, 269–270n)). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | During the twentieth century, secondary literature on Cook Wilson’s philosophy was not considerable, with a few papers of unequal value by Foster (1931), Furlong (1941), Lloyd Beck (1931) and Robinson (1928a, 1928b), along with a few studies on universals in the post-war years (see section 7), and only one valuable commentary, Richard Robinson’s The Province of Logic (Robinson 1931). Interest in the study of his philosophy was only revived at the beginning of this century, with Marion (2000) giving a first overview of Oxford Realism. In a short book, Kohne (2010) charts the views of Cook Wilson, Prichard and Austin on knowledge as a mental state. An important contribution, Kalderon & Travis (2013) secured Oxford Realism’s place in the history of analytic philosophy, comparing it with other forms of realism in Frege, Russell and Moore, while drawing links with later developments in the writings of J. L. Austin, J. M. Hinton and John McDowell. As a result of this revival of interest, the philosophies of J. L. Austin (Longworth 2018a, 2018b & 2019, and the entry to this Encyclopedia) and of Wilfrid Sellars (Brandhoff 2020) are now being re-interpreted in light of Cook Wilson’s legacy. | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | For a complete list of Cook Wilson’s publications during his lifetime, see (SI, lxv–lxxii). Cook Wilson’s papers were deposited at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford in 1970, ref. GB 161 MSS. Top. Oxon. c. 580–4, and a carbon copy of his lecture notes on Plato’s The Republic, that had been in possession of A. D. Woozley, was donated to the Houghton Library, Harvard University in 2008. Another such typescript was deposited among the papers of Percy William Dodd at Jesus College, Oxford (JC:F12/MS5/I). | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | [Please contact the author with suggestions.] | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Austin, John Langshaw | knowledge: analysis of | moral non-naturalism | perception: the problem of | Prichard, Harold Arthur | properties | tropes | wilson |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | Thanks to Guy Longworth, whose comments greatly improved this entry, along with Benoît Castelnérac, Maxime Deschênes, Cora Diamond, Pascal Engel, Mark Kalderon, Vincent Lizotte, Alessandro Moscarítolo, Colin Tyler and two anonymous referees. | wilson |
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/ | The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2022 by The Metaphysics Research Lab, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University | wilson |
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) was a German neo-Kantian philosopher. He is considered the founding father of the Baden (or Southwest) school of Neo-Kantianism. The Baden school included his student and successor at Heidelberg, Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), and Rickert’s student Emil Lask (1875–1915) as its core members. Alongside his contemporary Hermann Cohen (1842–1918)—the founder of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism—Windelband is a central proponent of the anti-psychologistic interpretation of Kant that became dominant in German academic philosophy from the 1880s onwards, and that constituted the backbone of “orthodox” neo-Kantianism in the late nineteenth century. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband’s main philosophical contribution consists in reformulating Kant’s transcendental approach in terms of a “philosophy of values” that focuses philosophical analysis on questions of normativity. Although Windelband thinks of his project as an anti-metaphysical “scientific philosophy”, he is keen to secure for philosophy a role that is independent of the special sciences. He finds the grounds for philosophy’s independence in its formal-teleological method, and in its concern with a quaestio juris, rather than a quaestio facti. That is, philosophy deals with questions of justification, it does not determine matters of fact. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband is well-known for having introduced a distinction between the “nomothetic method” of the natural sciences and the “idiographic method” of the historical disciplines. His argument that history is a science [Wissenschaft] that captures the unique, unrepeatable and individual character of reality has been highly relevant for subsequent debates on historical method. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | He also made a name for himself in the history of philosophy by pioneering the method of structuring the historical presentation in terms of fundamental philosophical problems, rather than as a chronology of individual thinkers. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband was a marvelous essayist. He developed his ideas not in the format of a larger systematic work, but in a series of addresses and individual papers, a selection of which was published in his famous Präludien [Preludes] in 1883. The genre of Windelband’s writings does not lend itself to the development of a philosophical system, and he often changes the emphasis, framing, and terminology of his claims and arguments from one essay to the next. Nevertheless, he was a rigorous thinker. This entry provides a rational reconstruction of the systematic insights that Windelband developed in his various addresses and essays, and groups them around the central themes that reoccur throughout his oeuvre. With respect to many of these themes—the anti-psychologistic interpretation of Kant, the fact-value distinction, the question of historical method, and the conception of the history of philosophy—Windelband was a highly influential contributor to the philosophical landscape of his time. Although he did not develop a detailed and encompassing philosophical system like his student Rickert, or the neo-Kantians of the Marburg school, most notably Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), his ideas shaped subsequent debates on these issues more profoundly than is often acknowledged. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Wilhelm Windelband was born in 1848 in Potsdam, Germany. His father, Johann Friedrich Windelband was a state secretary for the Province of Brandenburg. Windelband studied in Jena, Berlin, and Göttingen, attending lectures by Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) in Jena and studying with Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) in Göttingen. Fischer and Lotze would deeply influence Windelband’s philosophical thinking, as well as his work as a historian of philosophy. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | In 1870, Windelband completed his dissertation on Die Lehren vom Zufall [Doctrines of chance] under Lotze’s supervision. The following year he served as a soldier in the German-French war. After his military service, he completed his habilitation in Leipzig and took up a position as “Privatdozent” there. His habilitation was published in 1873 under the title Ueber die Gewissheit der Erkenntniss: eine psychologisch-erkenntnisstheoretische Studie [On the certainty of knowledge: a psychological-epistemological study]. In 1874, Windelband married Martha Wichgraf with whom he would have four children. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Two years later, Windelband became professor (ordinarius) of “inductive philosophy” in Zürich. He lectured on psychology before taking up a position as professor of philosophy in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1877. In 1882 he accepted an offer from the University of Strasbourg. While his inaugural lectures in Zürich and Freiburg had centered on the relation between psychology and philosophy, his works from the Strasbourg period develop his core themes in the philosophy of values and the philosophy of history. Windelband served as “Rektor” of the University of Strasbourg in 1894/95 and 1897/98. He remained in Strasbourg until 1903, when he accepted a call from the University of Heidelberg. Between 1905 and 1908 he served as representative of the University of Heidelberg in the Baden “Landtag”. He was a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and of the Academies of Sciences of Göttingen, Bayern and Heidelberg. He remained in Heidelberg and taught there until his death in 1915. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband’s views on normativity are strongly influenced by his teacher Lotze. In his Logic (1874), Lotze distinguishes between psychological laws which determine how thinking proceeds as a matter of fact, and logical laws, which are normative laws and prescribe how thinking ought to proceed (Lotze 1874: §x; §332, §337). This distinction also corresponds to a distinction between act and content. Lotze observes that “ideas” do occur in us as acts or events of the mind. But their content does not consist in such acts, is not reducible to mental activity, and does not exist in the way empirical processes and entities may be said to exist. It is not real, but “valid” (Lotze 1874: §§314–318). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The distinction between the factual and the normative would become the cornerstone of Windelband’s “philosophy of values”. In his early writings, however, Windelband does not yet embrace this distinction. In his habilitation thesis Über die Gewißheit der Erkenntnis (1873), he argues that logic is a normative discipline, but that it needs to be put on a psychological basis. This is because the justification of our knowledge claims is always dependent on and relative to specific epistemic purposes which, in turn, are given psychologically. Although he criticizes the identification of the conditions of knowledge with psychophysical processes, he does think of psychology and logic or epistemology as continuous with one another. His 1875 “Die Erkenntnislehre unter dem völkerpsychologischen Gesichtspunkte” [“The theory of knowledge from the perspective of folk-psychology”] which was published in Moritz Lazarus’ and Heyman Steinthal’s Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft [Journal of folk psychology and linguistics], is more radical. It denies that logical norms are independent of the conscious mind and claims that the origins of logical norms are to be found in the social history of humankind: the principle of contradiction emerges in situations of social conflict together with the distinction between true and false beliefs; and the law of sufficient reason comes into being when conflicts between rival views are no longer settled by brute force. On this picture, logical principles exist only when humans cognize them. There is no boundary between psychological acts and objective logical laws, or between actual historical acceptance and normative validity. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | This is precisely the type of thinking that Windelband will later reject as “psychologistic”, “historicist”, and “relativist” (1883: 116–117, 132). It is not clear what led Windelband to this change of view, but a deeper engagement with the Critique of Pure Reason and with the Kant scholarship of his time, in particular with works by Kuno Fischer (1860), Herman Cohen (1871), and Friedrich Paulsen (1875), seem to have factored in. The clear contours of Windelband’s anti-psychologistic interpretation of Kant emerge for the first time in his 1877 paper “Über die verschiedenen Phasen der Kantischen Lehre vom Ding-an-sich” [“On the different stages of the Kantian doctrine of the thing-in-itself”]. In this essay, Windelband argues against the idea, held by prominent figures of the “back-to-Kant” movement like Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875) and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), that knowledge emerges from an interaction between subject and object. According to their view, the object affects the subject’s mind, while the subject provides the a priori cognitive structures that organize representations. These a priori structures are innate as they consist in the psychophysical constitution of the human sensory apparatus and mind. Cohen’s critique of this (mis)interpretation focuses on the concept of the a priori and the question of objectivity (Cohen 1871). Windelband, in contrast, takes the problem of the thing-in-itself and the concept of truth as his starting points. His critique of the subject-object-interaction model leads him to an immanent conception of truth, according to which truth consists in the normative rules according to which our judgments ought to be formed. The immanent concept of truth thus shifts the focus of philosophical analysis on the universal and necessary “rules” that ground our judgments. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The 1877 essay gives a genetic account of the development of Kant’s views about the thing-in-itself from the Inaugural Dissertation (1770) to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787). This genetic reconstruction is supposed to reveal the underlying philosophical problems and motivations that drove Kant’s thinking, as well as the inner tensions that, according to Windelband, permeate critical philosophy. In particular, Windelband identifies a “gulf” (1877: 225) between Kant’s critique of knowledge and the metaphysics of morals, as well as a tension between the psychological account of the faculties, and Kant’s mature anti-psychologism. He distinguishes between four phases in Kant’s thinking about the thing-in-itself, and argues that residues of the latter three stages are present in both editions of the Critique (1781; 1787) and in the Prolegomena (1783). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The first phase, Windelband argues, is that of the Inaugural Dissertation (1770). Kant adopts Leibniz’s distinction between noumena and phenomena while formulating a genuinely novel thought: he introduces the psychological distinction between receptive sensibility and the spontaneous intellect. This distinction allows him to maintain the claim that, unlike intuitions, concepts relate to things-in-themselves (1877: 240–241). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | In the second phase, Kant concerns himself more deeply with the question how the concepts of the understanding can relate to objects. He is driven to the insight that | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | [w]e can only have a priori knowledge of that which we produce by the lawlike forms of our rational activities [Vernunfthandlungen]. (1877: 246) | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Here, Windelband follows Fischer’s claim that the categories of the understanding are a priori valid for experience because they produce or “make” it (Fischer 1860). Because the understanding cannot “make” the thing-in-itself, the thing-in-itself cannot be known. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | According to Windelband, Kant then proceeds to inquire why we are even assuming the existence of things-in-themselves if we cannot know them. Here he enters his third, most radical phase. Kant now thinks of the thing-in-itself as a fiction, an illegitimate hypostasis in which | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | the universal form of the synthetic act of the understanding is seen as something that exists independently of experience. (1877: 254) | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband argues that it is only by dismissing the existence of the thing-in-itself and by jettisoning the phenomena-noumena distinction that Kant can undertake his anti-psychologistic turn. With the rejection of the thing-in-itself, the characterization of sensibility as “receptive” also needs to be abandoned. And that makes a psychological construal of the faculties nonsensical. Kant is then also able to abandon the concept of truth as correspondence between representations and objects in favor of a strictly immanent conception. The immanent conception defines truth in terms of the universal and necessary rules that the relations between our representations need to accord to (1877: 259–260). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | And yet, Kant could not rest with this radical view given his commitments in moral philosophy. Practical reason, and in particular the idea that the moral law does not depend on the qualities of humans as sensuous beings, but only on reason, demands a return to the assumption that the thing-in-itself exists (1877: 262). In the fourth phase, Kant thus reintroduces the thing-in-itself, while maintaining his anti-psychologism. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | This genetic reconstruction allows Windelband to think of the conflict between the different views of the thing-in-itself that had emerged within the neo-Kantian tradition as reflective of inherent tensions in the Critique. He argues that Kant was especially unclear with respect to psychologism: the distinction between judgment (as a cognitive process) and justification (as logical and normative) is inadequately articulated in the first Critique. Hence Kant is at least partly responsible for the fact that in the first wave of neo-Kantianism represented by Lange and Helmholtz “the new concept of aprioricity was soon dragged down to the old idea of psychological priority” (1883: 101). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | But Windelband’s approach to Kant is not merely historical. His sympathies clearly lie with the Kant of the third phase. For Windelband, the insight that natural psychological processes are “utterly irrelevant” for the truth value of our representations (1882b: 24), and the idea that the ultimate problem of philosophy is that of normativity and justification—not a quaestio facti, but a quaestio juris (1882b: 26)—need to be defended from Kant’s own unclarities on these matters. Windelband’s “philosophy of values” can thus be understood as an attempt to purify, explicate and develop the radical insights of the anti-psychologistic move in Kant’s “third phase”. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The cornerstone of this endeavor is the immanent conception of truth. Windelband repeatedly returns to discussing the correspondence theory of knowledge with its metaphor of a “mirror relation” between mind and object. He criticizes the misconception that our sensual perceptions are the things-in-themselves and that these things could be compared with our representations. Any comparison must occur between representations, since things and representations are “incommensurable” (1881: 130). According to Windelband, Kant’s central innovation consists in the insight that the truth of our judgments, and the relation of our representations to an object are not to be found in correspondence at all. Rather, it consists in the “rules” for combining representations (1881: 134). This leads Windelband to define truth as the “normality of thinking” (1881: 138)—with “normality” meaning that thinking proceeds in accordance with rules or norms. Windelband also conceptualizes the object of knowledge in terms of the rules of judgment. The object of knowledge is nothing other than | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | a rule according to which representational elements ought to organize themselves, in order for them to be recognized as universally valid in this organization. (1881: 135). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband uses the terms “axioms” and “values” interchangeably to refer to the most fundamental rules, and he uses the term “norms” often, but not fully consistently to refer to values or axioms as they relate to psychological experience and the cultural-historical world. Focusing his interpretation on “values” and “norms”, Windelband captures the structural similarity of Kant’s three Critiques in terms of immanent truth: if truth is nothing other than accordance with a rule, then there is moral and aesthetic truth in just the same way as there is epistemic truth (1881: 140). In a later text, Windelband describes the unified project of the three Critiques in terms of the necessary and universal relation between thought and object. He writes that the postulates of practical reason relate to intelligible objects (ideas) just “as necessarily” as the intuitions and categories relate to the object of experience, and that teleological judgment constructs the purposive whole of nature just “as universally” as the principles of pure understanding apply the categories to experience (1904a: 151). While this formulation glosses over some of the nuances of the distinction between constitutive and regulative uses of reason, Windelband’s main intention is not that of giving a detailed and fully accurate reconstruction of Kant’s philosophy. In line with his famous dictum that “understanding Kant means to go beyond him” (1915: iv), he instead seeks to revive the critical project in a manner that allows it to answer the needs of his own time. And Windelband thinks that the critical philosophy required at the time of his writing is a “philosophy of values” which reveals the most fundamental values in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | As indicated above, Windelband bases his “philosophy of values” on Lotze’s distinction between the factual and the normative. Throughout his career, he seeks to explicate and clarify this distinction and to illuminate its consequences for philosophical method. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | In “Was ist Philosophie?” [“What is philosophy?”] (1882), Windelband approaches the factual-normative distinction by identifying two basic and irreducible types of cognitive operations: judgments and evaluations. While judgments relate representations in a synthesis, and thus expand our knowledge about an object, evaluations presuppose an object as given. They do not expand our knowledge. Rather, they express a relation between the “evaluating consciousness” and the represented object in a “feeling” of approval or disapproval (1882b: 29–30). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Despite characterizing evaluations in terms of the feelings and subjective attitudes of the evaluating consciousness, Windelband argues that some evaluations are “absolutely valid”. Even if they are not embraced by everyone as a matter fact, they entail a normative demand: they ought to be accepted universally according to an absolute value (1882b: 37). The basic idea seems to be that the normative force of any particular evaluation that is carried out by an empirical consciousness is derived from its relation to a non-empirical, absolute value. Windelband argues that even if there is disagreement about which evaluations ought to be embraced as universal and necessary, the demand for absolute validity itself can be recognized by everyone: we all believe in the distinction between that which is absolutely valid and that which is not (1882b: 43). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Accordingly, there must be a system of absolute values from which the validity of judgments in epistemology, aesthetics, and ethic derives. Critical philosophy, then, is nothing other than the “science of necessary and universal values” (1882b: 26) that explicates this system and thus reveals the grounds of normative appraisal and valid judgment. Note that for Windelband, normativity and validity are closely linked, if not identical. Absolute values endow our judgments with a normative demand. Our judgments are valid if and only if they raise a normative demand, that is if they ought to be accepted universally and necessarily. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Having distinguished the factual and the normative by reference to different cognitive operations, Windelband also seeks to identify the points of contact between the two realms. Ultimately, he wants to explain how empirical beings can recognize absolute values. His idea that there is a system of absolute values is thus accompanied by the conception of a “normal consciousness”. In normal consciousness the absolute system of values is, at least partially, represented in the form of norms that are known by “empirical consciousness” and that have an effect on it. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Starting from the immanent conception of truth as accordance with a rule, Windelband distinguishes from among the infinite possible combinations of representations that might or might not be formed by empirical consciousness a subset of combinations: the subset that accords with universal and necessary rules, and which hence ought to be formed (1881: 135–139: 1882a: 72–73). This subset is what he calls “normal consciousness” (1881: 139). Thought is related to and valid for an object if of the infinite possible combinations of our representations, our thinking forms exactly those judgments that “ought to be thought” (1881: 135). One might say that empirical consciousness contains (parts) of the system of absolute values as its “normal consciousness”. To the extent that philosophy seeks not only to reveal the absolute system of values, but also to inquire into how they can be norms for empirical—embodied, psychological and historically situated—human beings, critical philosophy is not only a “science of values”, but also a “science of normal consciousness” (1882b: 46). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Although Windelband refers to the “philosophy of values” as a science, he emphasizes that philosophy does not rely on the methods of the empirical sciences. Philosophy is a second-order science that reflects on the methods and results of the various empirical disciplines in order to reveal the values “by virtue of which we can evaluate the form and extent of their validity” (1907: 9). Crucially, this reflective endeavor cannot be carried out by means of empirical investigation. Here, the distinction between the factual and the normative assumes a methodological dimension. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | In “Kritische oder genetische Methode?” [“Critical or genetic method?”] (1883) Windelband lays out in great detail the differences between the “explanatory” and “genetic” method of the empirical sciences, on the one hand, and the “teleological” or “critical” method of philosophy, on the other. And he warns of the devastating consequences that result if the two are conflated. He singles out two disciplines that might be thought to be relevant to philosophical questions about values: individual psychology and cultural history. He does not call into question the legitimacy of these disciplines or of the “genetic method” in general. He even thinks that the genetic method can be applied to values. That is, individual psychology and cultural history can yield valid genetic theories that explain the actual acceptance and development of values in an individual’s mental life and in cultural history. But actual acceptance is not the same as normative validity, and validity proper cannot be found by generalizing from the empirical. A firm boundary separates the genetic method and its approach toward actually accepted values from the critical method of philosophy which concerns values as normative. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband’s argument against the application of the genetic method to philosophical questions has three components. First, he argues that the genetic method cannot solve philosophical questions about normativity and validity, because there is too much variety regarding the values that have been and are actually accepted. The empirical method will not uncover values that are universally embraced by all cultures (1883: 114–115). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Second, the genetic method can show and explain why some values have been accepted by this or that individual, or in this or that culture. But insofar as it is an empirical method, it cannot establish that the values in question are universal and necessary. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The universally valid can be found neither by inductive comparison of all individuals and peoples nor by deductive inference from … the ‘essence’ of man. (1883: 115) | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband points to the absurdity of trying to justify by empirical means that which is the presupposition of any empirical theory: the axioms upon which the validity of any theory is based (1883: 113). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Third, Windelband argues that the genetic method leads to relativism. The argument rests on the two claims just outlined, and can be reconstructed as follows. There is variation between individuals and cultures regarding which beliefs are actually prevalent, and the naturally necessary [naturnotwendig] laws of psychology lead to the formation of both true and false beliefs. As an empirical method with no access to the universal and necessary, the genetic method of cultural history and individual psychology has no criterion for distinguishing between valid and invalid beliefs. This means that it has to treat all beliefs as “equally justified [alle gleich berechtigt]” (1882b: 36). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | For [the genetic explanation], there is thus no absolute measure; it must treat all beliefs as equally justified because they are all equally necessary by nature… [R]elativism is the necessary consequence of the purely empiricist treatment of philosophy’s cardinal question. (1883: 115–116) | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Note that Windelband does not differentiate between the idea that all beliefs have only relative validity and the claim that they are all equally justified or equally valid. In his view, the genetic method does not merely render belief relative to individuals and cultures; it also forces us to conclude that all beliefs are equally valid. An empirical psychology or cultural history that oversteps its boundaries and tries to address philosophical questions about normativity and validity leads to “historicism”, “psychologism”, and “relativism” and destroys the basis of normative appraisal altogether. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Having rejected the genetic method in philosophy, Windelband explains that philosophical method is purely “formal”. The axioms, or values, on which the validity of our judgments is based upon cannot be proven. But it can be shown that the purposes of recognizing truth, beauty, and can only be achieved if absolute values are presupposed. Hence the critical method of philosophy has a teleological structure: | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | [F]or the critical method these axioms, regardless of the extent to which they are actually accepted, are norms which ought to be valid if thinking wants to fulfil the purpose of being true, volition the purpose of being good, and feeling the purpose of capturing beauty, in a manner that warrants universal validation. (1883: 109) | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | And yet, while Windelband insists on the distinction between the empirical-genetic method of science and the critical-teleological method of philosophy, he takes his theory of “normal consciousness” to imply that empirical facts do play a role in philosophy. In particular, he wants to maintain that empirical facts about individual psychology and culture can provide the starting points for philosophical reflection. He therefore describes the philosophical method as a method of reflection [Selbstbesinnung], in which the empirical mind becomes aware of its own “normal consciousness”. Philosophy examines existing claims to validity in light of teleological considerations, and in this way reveals the “processual forms of psychic life that are necessary conditions for the realization of universal appraisal” (1883: 125). Put differently, teleological considerations allow the empirical consciousness to distinguish within itself between empirical and contingent contents, on the one hand, and the “contents and forms” that “have the value of normal consciousness”, on the other (1882b: 45–46; 1881: 139). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The distinction between the normative and the factual and the question how the two realms are related also structure Windelband’s reflections on human freedom. Throughout his intellectual career, Windelband returns to this problem, presenting different strategies for reconciling causal determinism and human freedom. His dissertation, completed under Lotze in 1870, deals with the concepts of chance, causal necessity, and freedom. At that time, Windelband still embraces the Kantian concept of transcendental freedom, according to which the noumenal self is the uncaused cause of all intentional action (1870: 16–19). But after the 1877 essay, which had uncovered the anti-metaphysical rejection of the thing-in-itself in Kant’s “third phase” as the radical starting point for the “philosophy of values”, Kant’s metaphysical solution to the problem of freedom ceased to convince him. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband’s most fully developed effort to arrive at an alternative solution to the problem of freedom can be found in his 1882 essay “Normen und Naturgesetze” [“Norms and natural laws”] and in his 1904 lectures Über Willenfreiheit [On freedom of the will]. In these texts, Windelband articulates the following core claims. First, the Kantian dualism between phenomena and noumena needs to be overcome, and we need to think of moral responsibility in a way that does not presuppose a noumenal realm. Second, causal explanation and normative evaluation are two irreducible, but ultimately compatible, ways of viewing, or constructing, the world of appearances. Third, the object of moral evaluation is neither a particular moral action, nor a transcendentally free will, but a “personality”—understood as a set of relatively stable motivations and psychological dispositions—that is the natural cause of our actions. Although articulating these same core thoughts, the two texts differ in how they motivate these ideas, and in the consequences that they draw from them. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | “Normen und Naturgesetze” begins by postulating a conflict between natural law and moral law: if the moral law demands an action that would also result from natural causes alone, it is superfluous. But if it demands an action that does not accord with natural causes, it is useless, because natural necessity cannot be violated (1882a: 59). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Windelband holds that causal determinism extends to mental life and that for this reason the conception of freedom as a fundamental capacity that violates “the naturally necessary functions of psychic life” (1882a: 60) is implausible from the get-go. However, he grants that there are two different and irreducible ways of viewing the same objects: on the one hand, there is psychological science which explains what the facts of mental life are. On the other hand, there are ideal norms, which do not explain what the facts are, but express how they ought to be (1882a: 66–67). The solution to the antagonism between natural law and moral law is to be found in the relation between these two points of view. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Here, Windelband introduces the claim that although ideal norms differ from causal laws, they are not incommensurable with them and, in fact, act on us causally. His argument builds on his conception of “normal consciousness” as the representation of the system of absolute values within empirical consciousness. Windelband argues that a mind that becomes aware of its own “normal consciousness” is capable of acting on the basis of and in agreement with the norms that it has discovered within itself: | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | [E]ach norm carries with it a sense that the real process of thinking or willing ought to form itself in accordance with it. With immediate evidence a form of psychological coercion attaches itself to the awareness of the norm. (1882a: 85) | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The norm becomes a determining factor in and for empirical consciousness. It acts as “part of the causal law” and determines psychological life with natural necessity (1882a: 87; see also 1883: 122). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | The result is what Windelband calls a “deterministic concept of freedom” (1882a: 88), according to which freedom consists in nothing other than the becoming-aware of the norms that command how we ought to act: our becoming-aware of them determines our actions with natural necessity. Freedom is the “determination of empirical consciousness by normal consciousness” (1882a: 88). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | But Windelband still needs to explain how it is possible that we can be aware of a moral norm and not act on it. Long passages in the 1904 lectures are devoted to developing the thought that what determines our moral decisions and actions, and hence decisions if and when we act in accordance with the moral law is our “personality”. Windelband approaches this as a theoretical, not as a normative, question and concludes that we may well call those decisions and actions “free” that are predominantly determined by our constant personality, as opposed to being determined by external circumstances or contingent affects. Freedom is “the unhindered causality of a pre-existing willing” (1904b: 106). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | However, Windelband concedes that this analysis does not exhaust our concept of freedom since there is not merely a theoretical, but also a normative use of the concept. In this context, Windelband acknowledges the attraction of the Kantian argument that moral responsibility is possible only if we have transcendental free will and with it the capacity for genuine alternatives: we could act differently given the same circumstances. But Windelband rejects the project of grounding human freedom in a noumenal world. He thinks that Kant’s distinction between an intelligible noumenal self that is the uncaused cause of our actions, and a deterministic empirical world as constructed by our understanding reproduces the same problems that earlier metaphysical accounts of freedom had encountered. He discusses two problems in particular. | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | First, on the one hand, the personality that a particular individual has developed is part of the empirical world and therefore, on the metaphysical picture, does not feature into the free decisions of the individual. But, on the other hand, the noumenal self is empty. It is an abstract, general self, uniform in all of us; and thus it cannot account for the differences in the moral life of individuals (1904b: 161–163). | wilhelm-windelband |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-windelband/ | Second, transcendental freedom is fundamentally incompatible with the “all- encompassing reality and causality of the deity” (1904b: 187). God is the ultimate uncaused cause, and the only way to understand this thought is by assuming a “timeless causality” between God and the intelligible characters (noumenal selves)—a view which ends up undermining the freedom of the latter (1904b: 186–9) | wilhelm-windelband |