PHILOSOPHICAL FOLDERS 1 █████ THOMAS REID ██ JEREMY BENTHAM ██ CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE ██ EDMUND HUSSERL

Philosophical Folders 1

Philosophical Folders 1

Four pillars of modern Philosophy: Common sense (Thomas Reid), Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham), Pragmatism (Charles Sanders Peirce), Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl)

COMMON SENSE – THOMAS REID

Sensus communis, meaning "common sense" in Latin, is a philosophical concept introduced by Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid. He believed that the human mind is equipped with innate ideas and principles that allow us to understand the world and make judgments about it. These innate ideas and principles form the basis of our common sense, which is a shared understanding of the world that is common to all human beings. According to Reid, common sense is not just a collection of individual opinions, but a shared, universal perspective that provides a foundation for our knowledge and beliefs.

Thomas Reid (Strachan, Scotland, 07/05/1710 – Glasgow, 07/10/1796) was a Scottish philosopher who was a prominent figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He is best known for his contributions to the field of epistemology, or the study of knowledge, and his work has had a lasting impact on both philosophy and other disciplines.

Reid was born in Strachan, Scotland, and went on to study at the University of Aberdeen and Marischal College in Aberdeen. After completing his studies, he spent several years working as a minister in the Scottish Church before taking a position as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

One of Reid's most important contributions to philosophy is his critique of the prevailing "common sense" philosophy of his time, which was largely influenced by the ideas of John Locke and other English empiricists. Reid argued that the empiricist view of knowledge was flawed, and that the human mind was equipped with certain innate ideas and principles that allow us to understand the world and make judgments about it.

Reid's theory of common sense, which he referred to as "sensus communis," held that the human mind has a shared, universal perspective that provides a foundation for our knowledge and beliefs. He believed that this common sense is not just a collection of individual opinions, but a shared, universal perspective that is common to all human beings. According to Reid, common sense provides us with a reliable way of understanding the world and making judgments about it, and is a necessary component of our knowledge and beliefs.

Reid also made important contributions to the field of epistemology, particularly in his views on perception and the nature of knowledge. He argued that our perception of the world is direct and immediate, and that our knowledge of the world is not derived from our ideas, but is instead based on our perception of the world itself. He held that our senses provide us with an accurate representation of the world, and that our beliefs about the world are based on this perception, rather than on our ideas or assumptions.

Reid's ideas have had a lasting impact on the field of philosophy, and his work has influenced a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. His ideas about common sense and the nature of knowledge have been especially influential, and his work continues to be studied and discussed by contemporary philosophers and scholars.

In addition to his contributions to philosophy, Reid is also remembered for his role in the Scottish Enlightenment, which was a period of intellectual and cultural ferment in Scotland in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. During this time, Scotland was a center of innovation and intellectual inquiry, and Reid was one of many Scottish philosophers and intellectuals who made important contributions to the fields of science, literature, and philosophy.

Today, Thomas Reid is remembered as one of the most important philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and his ideas continue to have a lasting impact on the field of philosophy and other disciplines. His contributions to the study of knowledge and his views on common sense have been especially influential, and his work remains an important part of the philosophical canon.

UTILITARIANISM – JEREMY BENTHAM

Jeremy Bentham (London, 26/02/1748 – ibidem, 06/06/1832; alma mater: The Queen's College, Oxford [Master of Arts]), was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment and physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts". Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.

Bentham's students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter's son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin and American writer and activist John Neal. He "had considerable influence on the reform of prisons, schools, poor laws, law courts, and Parliament itself."

On his death in 1832, Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an "auto-icon" (or self-image), which would be his memorial. This was done, and the auto-icon is now on public display in the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London (UCL). Because of his arguments in favour of the general availability of education, he has been described as the "spiritual founder" of UCL. However, he played only a limited direct part in its foundation.

PRAGMATISM – CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE

Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 10/09/1839 – Milford, Pennsylvania, 19/04/1914; alma mater: Harvard University).

Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, and scientist who is best known as the founder of Pragmatism, a philosophical movement that originated in the late 19th century. Pragmatism is a philosophy that emphasizes the practical application of ideas rather than their theoretical or abstract value.

According to Peirce, the meaning of an idea is not found in its origins or in the intentions of its creator, but in its practical consequences or potential results. He argued that the best way to judge the truth of an idea is to consider its practical effects and to see whether it leads to satisfactory results.

Peirce further developed the idea of pragmatism into the concept of pragmaticism, which he defined as the method of finding the meaning of ideas by examining their practical effects. This approach has had a profound impact on various fields, including psychology, sociology, and linguistics, and has been applied to a wide range of practical problems, including the evaluation of scientific theories, the interpretation of legal texts, and the design of public policy.

In conclusion, Peirce's pragmatism and pragmaticism provided a new way of thinking about the meaning of ideas and the nature of truth, and had a significant impact on the development of modern philosophy and other fields.

Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce made major contributions to logic, a subject that, for him, encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder, which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th-century Western philosophy. Additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulated mathematical induction and deductive reasoning. As early as 1886, he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits. The same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers.

In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.

Pragmatism began in the United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."

ORIGINS OF PRAGMATISM

Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development, along with later 19th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Chauncey Wright as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.

The word "pragmatic" has existed in English since the 1500s, a word borrowed from French and ultimately derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma, meaning business, deed or act, is a noun derived from the verb prassein, to do. The first use in print of the name pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. James regarded Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series (including "The Fixation of Belief" [1877], and especially "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" [1878]) as the foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to act". Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism". John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation."

Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt, and said that, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object", which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses—, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics.

Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. While framing a conception's meaning in terms of conceivable tests, Peirce emphasized that, since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual purport, equates to its acceptance's implications for general practice, rather than to any definite set of real effects (or test results); a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", saying that "all went happily" with James's and F. C. S. Schiller's variant uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that he nonetheless coined the new name because of the old name's growing use in "literary journals, where it gets abused". Yet in a 1906 manuscript, he cited as causes his differences with James and Schiller. and, in a 1908 publication, his differences with James as well as literary author Giovanni Papini. Peirce in any case regarded his views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them on other issues.

Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late 20th century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey.

CORE TENETS

A few of the various but often interrelated positions characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include:

—Epistemology (justification): a coherentist theory of justification that rejects the claim that all knowledge and justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of noninferential knowledge or justified belief. Coherentists hold that justification is solely a function of some relationship between beliefs, none of which are privileged beliefs in the way maintained by foundationalist theories of justification.

—Epistemology (truth): a deflationary or pragmatic theory of truth; the former is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a property called truth to such a statement while the latter is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement attribute the property of useful-to-believe to such a statement.

—Metaphysics: a pluralist view that there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content.

—Philosophy of science: an instrumentalist and scientific anti-realist view that a scientific concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality.

—Philosophy of language: an anti-representationalist view that rejects analyzing the semantic meaning of propositions, mental states, and statements in terms of a correspondence or representational relationship and instead analyzes semantic meaning in terms of notions like dispositions to action, inferential relationships, and/or functional roles (e.g. behaviorism and inferentialism). Not to be confused with pragmatics, a sub-field of linguistics with no relation to philosophical pragmatism.

—Additionally, forms of empiricism, fallibilism, verificationism, and a Quinean naturalist metaphilosophy are all commonly elements of pragmatist philosophies. Many pragmatists are epistemological relativists and see this to be an important facet of their pragmatism (e.g. Joseph Margolis), but this is controversial and other pragmatists argue such relativism to be seriously misguided (e.g. Hilary Putnam, Susan Haack).

SOME KIND OF A JUXTAPOSITION OF UTILITARIANISM AND PRAGMATISM 

Now, utilitarianism, as proposed by Jeremy Bentham, is a moral theory that holds that the best action is the one that maximizes overall happiness. It focuses on the consequences of an action to determine its moral worth. On the other hand, pragmatism, as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, is a philosophical approach that emphasizes the practicality of ideas and the ability of an idea to be useful in solving problems.

A juxtaposition of utilitarianism and pragmatism can be seen in the way that both theories focus on the practicality and usefulness of ideas. Utilitarianism evaluates the moral worth of an action based on its ability to maximize overall happiness, while pragmatism evaluates the worth of an idea based on its ability to solve problems. Both theories prioritize the practicality of ideas over abstract principles.

However, there is also a mixture of these two theories as they both share a similar focus on the importance of consequences. Utilitarianism focuses on the consequences of actions, while pragmatism focuses on the consequences of ideas. Both theories value the ability of an action or idea to bring about positive outcomes.

One possible example of this mixture can be seen in the field of education. From a utilitarian perspective, the best education system would be one that maximizes overall happiness by providing the best opportunities for students to succeed in life. From a pragmatist perspective, the best education system would be one that provides students with the skills and knowledge needed to solve problems and be successful in the real world. Both of these perspectives could be integrated in designing an education system that not only provides students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed, but also takes into account the overall happiness and well-being of the students.

In conclusion, while utilitarianism and pragmatism have different origins and different focuses, they share a common emphasis on practicality and usefulness. The juxtaposition and mixture of these two theories can lead to a more holistic approach to problem-solving and decision-making, taking into account both the consequences and the practicality of an action or idea.

PHENOMENOLOGY – EDMUND HUSSERL

Phenomenology is a philosophical movement and method founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (Proßnitz, Margraviate of Moravia, Austrian Empire [present-day Prostějov, Czech Republic] 08/04/1859 – Freiburg, Germany, 27/04/1938; alma maters: Leipzig University, University of Berlin, University of Vienna, University of Halle) in the early 20th century. It is concerned with exploring the structures and essence of conscious experience and aims to uncover the meaning of things as they are experienced.

The core idea of phenomenology is to bracket, or set aside, any assumptions and beliefs about the world, and instead focus solely on the experiences of things as they appear to us. This approach, which Husserl referred to as "phenomenological reduction," allows us to investigate the essence of experience and to understand how things appear to us, free from preconceptions and biases.

Husserl believed that all experience is structured by a set of intentionality, meaning that we are always experiencing things in relation to a particular object or purpose. He argued that objects are not given to us as things in themselves, but are always given in a particular way that is dependent on the perceiver's experience. Thus, our understanding of the world is not determined by objective, external factors, but by our conscious experience of those factors.

Husserl's method of phenomenology involves bracketing all preconceptions and biases and focusing solely on the essence of experience, through which we can uncover the fundamental structures of conscious experience. This can lead to a deeper understanding of the nature of things and a clearer awareness of our relationship to the world.

Phenomenology has had a significant impact on a wide range of fields, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It has also influenced various movements in existentialism, hermeneutics, and structuralism. In recent decades, the work of Husserl and other phenomenologists has continued to be developed and applied in new and innovative ways, and phenomenology remains a vibrant and influential philosophical tradition.