Guy Woodall | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)

Papers by Guy Woodall

My last talk on the purpose of philosophy was in essence a defence of Platonic idealism. To recap... more My last talk on the purpose of philosophy was in essence a defence of Platonic idealism. To recap briefly, the question was where do our ideas come from? For modern philosophy there are only two possibilities: reason, and experience. As Hume said, all propositions are either relations of ideas, or matters of fact, and anything else is ultimately metaphysical and for him this means without meaning. So take the idea of beauty for example. Clearly you can't deduce beauty, so can it come from observation? Do we see beautiful things, recognise that they have something in common, and through the process of learning language learn to give this shared property its conventional name, beauty? Do we abstract the notion of beauty from experience? This is the view of modern philosophy -Locke in particular -and is also the view of common sense. There is however a simple problem with it. How can I experience beauty, if I don't first have the notion of beauty? Imagine if you can a being which has no concept of beauty. That being will never experience beauty; and we will never be able to teach it what beauty is. The truth is that far from abstracting beauty from experience, it is the concept of beauty that allows us to have the experience of beauty. Locke's mistake is that he confuses sense-data with experience. Sense data in fact are just that, data, numbers, readings from our sense organs. In order to turn them into experience we have to apply ideas to them, and the ideas are not part of the data. We cannot therefore say that we take the notion of beauty from experience. This is why Plato said that appearance -in this case of beauty -is illusion, and that the truth of beauty is not the individual appearances of beauty, but the idea of beauty itself. Beauty exists independently of experience and is what allows us to have experience of instances of beauty. This is idealism, the notion that ideas are logically prior to experience, and it is the cornerstone of classical philosophy. Now, that's all very well, but when we read Plato today we have a problem.

Drafts by Guy Woodall

John Rawls' famous work is based on a definition of justice as fairness that is neither necessary... more John Rawls' famous work is based on a definition of justice as fairness that is neither necessary (justice may want to be fair but doesn't have to be) nor sufficient (justice also involves e.g. punishment, control, and retribution). Where Rawls is a rationalist, I propose an alternative " four quadrants " view based on the classical notions of the cardinal virtues and the four causes, arguing that each quadrant is an essential moment of the truth, while Rawls' and most modern philosophers' arguments rest on the notion that only the quadrant of reason/temperance/formal cause matters and the other three (final, material and efficient causes, or the virtues of justice, wisdom and courage) do not exist in their own right, but can be derived from reason alone, or ignored. This is wrong and leads to damaging consequence that I investigate.

My last talk on the purpose of philosophy was in essence a defence of Platonic idealism. To recap... more My last talk on the purpose of philosophy was in essence a defence of Platonic idealism. To recap briefly, the question was where do our ideas come from? For modern philosophy there are only two possibilities: reason, and experience. As Hume said, all propositions are either relations of ideas, or matters of fact, and anything else is ultimately metaphysical and for him this means without meaning. So take the idea of beauty for example. Clearly you can't deduce beauty, so can it come from observation? Do we see beautiful things, recognise that they have something in common, and through the process of learning language learn to give this shared property its conventional name, beauty? Do we abstract the notion of beauty from experience? This is the view of modern philosophy -Locke in particular -and is also the view of common sense. There is however a simple problem with it. How can I experience beauty, if I don't first have the notion of beauty? Imagine if you can a being which has no concept of beauty. That being will never experience beauty; and we will never be able to teach it what beauty is. The truth is that far from abstracting beauty from experience, it is the concept of beauty that allows us to have the experience of beauty. Locke's mistake is that he confuses sense-data with experience. Sense data in fact are just that, data, numbers, readings from our sense organs. In order to turn them into experience we have to apply ideas to them, and the ideas are not part of the data. We cannot therefore say that we take the notion of beauty from experience. This is why Plato said that appearance -in this case of beauty -is illusion, and that the truth of beauty is not the individual appearances of beauty, but the idea of beauty itself. Beauty exists independently of experience and is what allows us to have experience of instances of beauty. This is idealism, the notion that ideas are logically prior to experience, and it is the cornerstone of classical philosophy. Now, that's all very well, but when we read Plato today we have a problem.

John Rawls' famous work is based on a definition of justice as fairness that is neither necessary... more John Rawls' famous work is based on a definition of justice as fairness that is neither necessary (justice may want to be fair but doesn't have to be) nor sufficient (justice also involves e.g. punishment, control, and retribution). Where Rawls is a rationalist, I propose an alternative " four quadrants " view based on the classical notions of the cardinal virtues and the four causes, arguing that each quadrant is an essential moment of the truth, while Rawls' and most modern philosophers' arguments rest on the notion that only the quadrant of reason/temperance/formal cause matters and the other three (final, material and efficient causes, or the virtues of justice, wisdom and courage) do not exist in their own right, but can be derived from reason alone, or ignored. This is wrong and leads to damaging consequence that I investigate.