Abstracts
David Crossley
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
crossleyd@sask.usask.ca
A Unified Theory of Punishment
Green and Bosanquet discuss the traditional theories of punishment:
deterrence, retribution and rehabilitation. And both remark that a true
theory of punishment would have to include all three perspectives.
This suggests a “mixed theory “ (Moore, 92
ff.), produced by distinguishing issues about the justification of the
institution of punishment from those addressing its distribution. A. J.
Milne found such a theory in Green’s Lectures on the Principles of
Political Obligation: the institution of punishment is justified in
terms of deterrence, with the distribution questions introducing
justice constraints.
However, one could argue that Green actually
held the converse mixed theory, whereby the institution of
punishment is justified in terms of what justice demands (and so is
centered on a retributivist conception of desert); with the
distribution questions introducing consequentialist (deterrence and
rehabilitation) concerns.
A third possibility is that Green and
Bosanquet held a unified theory in which all three elements are
entailed by the system of rights. How this is possible in the
face of their complaints about the various traditional theories
presents a difficulty for this interpretation.
In this paper I offer a case for this third
interpretation of Green and Bosanquet’s theory of punishment, by
drawing on some suggestions made by contemporary communication theories
of punishment (e.g., Duff).
Bob Goodman
Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel
goodmanr@netvision.net.il
“What Is Thought About?”
This paper focuses upon the role of idealistic metaphysics in the
philosophy of history. It discusses the work of four
philosophers: Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey, R.G.
Collingwood, and Michael Oakeshott. These philosophers
share in common the aim of finding an alternative to the dominant
naturalistic orientation in the human sciences. Each builds his
work upon the foundation of an idealistic metaphysics; and each in his
own way confronts the question of how to treat thought as an object of
analysis.
The paper emphasizes the extent to which different
conceptions of the nature of history and different conceptions of the
aims and limits of research influence each of the philosopher’s
understanding of the nature of thought and of the methods to be
employed to bring to light its structure and content.
Rickert, a late 19th Century Neo-Kantian
philosopher, attempted to show the unique role of primary values as
determinants of human action. Dilthey was among the first
philosophers to develop and employ hermeneutic methods for the study of
thought. Collingwood advocated focusing narrowly upon the thought
of individual agents as they confront particular decisions and
choices. Like Collingwood, Oakeshott was deeply skeptical about
the possibility of explaining history by means of general historical
theories. For him, thought should be understood by analyzing the
preconceptions underlying primary modal categories, and it is in its
guise as a modal category that Oakeshott analyzes the nature of
history.
James Connelly
Southampton Institute: School of Social Sciences, Southampton, UK
<James.Connelly@solent.ac.uk>
Collingwood's moral philosophy - levels, duty and virtue
Raymond Plant
raymond.plant@kcl.ac.uk
Efraim Podoksik
Department of Political Science, Bilkent University, 06800 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey
e-mail: podoksik@bilkent.edu.tr
[non-presenting participant]
Jan Olof Bengtsson
Lund University
janolof.bengtsson@st-cross.oxford.ac.uk
The Idealist Origins of the Ethics of Personalism
While a personalist ethics in a vague, general sense is commonly
accepted in today’s liberal democracy, personalism’s stricter,
theoretical formulation as a distinct school (or schools) of philosophy
is not only less well known, but antithetical to long dominant currents
of both analytical and broadly postmodern philosophy. The paper looks
at the earlier philosophical sources of the defence of the personalist
values which, while undermined by contemporary philosophy, is still
very much with us in humanist rhetoric. Philosophical personalism,
which in Europe is associated with Mounier and to some extent with
Marcel, Scheler, Buber, and Maritain, i. e., with phenomenology,
existentialism, and Thomism, is defined by the major Anglo-American
philosophical encyclopedias rather in terms of the American school of
B. P. Bowne. This, I show, is correct, but not for the stated reason
that this is the origin of personalism. It is correct rather because as
an idealistic version of personalism the American school continues in
important respects an earlier European tradition, often ignored by
scholars, which should properly be considered the origin of modern
philosophical personalism. Twentieth-century European personalism is
non-idealist, but some of its most characteristic ethical positions
developed, I argue, in the personalistic counter-current in German
Spätidealismus which, as is also shown, was continued in the British
and American schools of ‘personal idealism’, the latter of which it was
that soon came to be called ‘personalism’ tout court. A focus, in this
historical perspective, on the ethical side of personalism rather than
its metaphysics, enables us to see that some of the the specific
positions of the earlier tradition were fundamental to the later
schools even as they relinquished its idealism.
Don MacNiven
York University, Toronto
de.macniven@sympatico.ca
IDEALISM, HOMOCENTRISM AND THE SIN OF PRIDE
It is frequently argued that the root of our current environmental
crisis lies in our homocentrism - our belief that nothing in the
universe has intrinsic value except mankind. It is our vanity
which leads us to think that we alone have intrinsic worth and that the
rest of nature can be exploited and ravaged for our benefit.
Pride, fuelled by our scientific and technological triumphs, is the
true cause of our disastrous approach to the environment. Until
we conquer our Pride, abandon homocentrism, and adopt a biocentric
attitude towards nature, in which we recognize the intrinsic value of
all living things, the environmental crisis will always be with
us. Acquiring the appropriate humility to do this will not be an
easy task because homocentrism is so deeply entrenched in western
culture, which currently possesses world dominance. For example,
Judeo-Christian morality which informs western culture is essentially
homocentric, as is western moral philosophy.
My paper offers a critical
analysis of his standard critique of homocentrismn. Intuitively
one might think that Idealism would be the natural ally of biocentrism
because both support holistic views of nature. However I argue,
using an Idealist approach to virtue ethics, that the concepts of
homocentrism, biocentrism, and pride are more complex than this
critique implies. I suggest that we need to distinguish between
true and false pride and rational and irrational pride before we can
determine if homocentrism necessarily involves the sin of pride.
I conclude that false pride is
certainly part of the problem, as the biocentrics maintain, but
nevertheless a homocentric viewpoint is unavoidable in both theory and
practice. When properly developed homocentrism does not imply
false pride and hence is not i icompatible with Idealism or
antithetical to nature.
Ian Winchester
University of Calgary, Canada
winchest@ucalgary.ca
Does physics presuppose history?
In a number of places Collingwood claims that natural science in
general and physics in particular presupposes history. This paper
will try to understand what Collingwood means by this apparently absurd
claim by looking at his various writings that suggest or boldly state
this proposition. It will also try to answer the question which
is the title of this paper, namely, does physics in fact actually
presuppose history.
Cristiano Camporesi
Università Degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
effegi@ats.it
Green, Bosanquet and Burke. A Synoptic View of three Styles of Moral Philosophy
The three principal issues of my paper are holism, volitional
attitudes and belief. These aspects are connected in many Idealist
thinkers: see, for instance, William Ritchie Sorley's works. the final
result is not an Eclectic philosophy, as instanced in Victor
Cousin'metaphysics, or the Hegelian universal synthesis, but the
"synoptic view". Philosophical inquiry means Abstraction,
notwithstanding Michael Bereford Foster's criticism of the "concrete
universal", as exemplifed in the writings of Bosanquet, Bradley and
Cook Wilson. I do consider Green's and Bosanquet's approach to moral
philosophy similar from the standpoint of the "Synoptic view". Leonard
T. Hobhouse's criticism is less positive.
Rebecca Toueg
University of Haifa
rtoueg@hotmail.com
The Idea of History and the History of Ideas: Conceptual Change in Lovejoy and Collingwood
The idea of conceptual change in historical analysis is presupposed by
literary, philosophical and sociological historians. It was a
predominant concern for both Lovejoy in his Great Chain of Being (1936)
and Collingwood in his Idea of History (1945). But they differed in
their conception of historical ideas and the processes by which they
changed, developed or evolved, and this paper deals with their
underlying metaphysical presuppositions that place them in diametrical
opposition. Each tries to work out a rational framework in which
conceptual change can be made intelligible, but each makes use of a
different rationale – Lovejoy uses the hypothetico-deductive methods of
experimental science while Collingwood uses the dialectical methods of
emergent evolutionary processes to explain conceptual change.
Stamatoula Panagakou
University of York
sp117@york.ac.uk
Religious Conciousness in the Philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet
William Sweet