Because Moore in effect builds the conditions for the world to be intelligible to us into what he takes reality itself to be, MacBride thinks his early realistic philosophy can be likened, ironically, to "absolute idealism" in Hegel's sense, though I must admit I find it obscure what this label is supposed to entail, or in what sense this should be seen as ironic.įurther developments of Moore's views on "concepts" are the focus of the next chapter. Because such propositions are the very reality our judgments related to them involve, their truth or falsehood cannot be understood as a relation or correspondence to a distinct reality. Moore took ordinary things to be complex concepts containing the concept of existence, and generally, complex concepts to be mind-independent "propositions", possessing their capacity for truth, falsity and logical relationships independently of the mind. Moore provided an act/object account of consciousness where the objects of awareness - which Moore called concepts - are independent from the subject. ![]() For Moore, Kant's position failed to provide for either the genuine truth or the necessity of such distinctions: something's being necessary for our forms of cognition is not an absolute necessity, and may not reflect objective reality. In particular, dividing the world into substances and attributes is necessary for the "synthetic unity of apperception", or a rational being's ability to keep track of its own various experiences as states of one subject.Ĭhapter 2 deals with early Moore's break with Kant and idealism generally. ![]() The applicability of the distinction is known synthetically a priori as a requirement of the formal features of the kind of rational cognition we employ, or any we would recognize as such. In Kant's philosophy, the distinction between substance and attribute was identified as a pure concept of the understanding or category, something which is not forced upon us either by what we experience, or by the avoidance of contradiction. Even those in the tradition who did hold a fairly conventional version of the dualism between universals and particulars found difficulties with it and often were able to solve problems only by taking the categorization of the possible logical forms of facts to be something discovered only with empirical research, rather than something knowable a priori.īefore MacBride delves into the later developments he sketches, in Chapter 1, their Kantian background. Others advanced categorical pluralisms that embraced more distinctions in logical kind than allowed for by the traditional division between particulars, monadic relations, dyadic relations, and so on. ![]() Some of these figures, at least temporarily, advanced "categorical monisms", according to which all the constituents of a fact or state of affairs or proposition are alike in their logical role. Perhaps the major theme of the work is that the early analytic philosophers found compelling arguments for rejecting the Kantian idea that the distinction between substances and attributes, or between particulars and universals, is something that can be known to hold a priori. It argues that our contemporary understanding of this history is oversimplified and in need of supplementation by examining positions, arguments and nuances that have been neglected in the intervening years. ![]() The word "Genealogy" in the title is true to its Nietzschean overtones: the book is in part a historical deconstruction of how the debate came to be framed the way it is. Ramsey and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, G. This book offers a detailed look at the initial development of the debate over the universal/particular distinction in the context of the emergence of analytic philosophy, especially in Britain, in roughly the first three decades of the 20th century.
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