History of Analytic Philosophy Series Editor: Michael Beaney, University of York, UK Titles include: Stewart Candlish THE RUSSELL/BRADLEY DISPUTE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Siobhan Chapman SUSAN STEBBING AND THE LANGUAGE OF COMMON SENSE Annalisa Coliva MOORE AND WITTGENSTEIN Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense Giuseppina D Oro and Constantine Sandis (editors) REASONS AND CAUSES Causalism and Non-Causalism in the Philosophy of Action George Duke DUMMETT ON ABSTRACT OBJECTS Mauro Engelmann WITTGENSTEIN S PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT Phenomenology, Grammar, Method, and the Anthropological View Sébastien Gandon RUSSELL S UNKNOWN LOGICISM A Study in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics Jolen Gallagher RUSSELL S PHILOSOPHY OF LOGICAL ANALYSIS: 1898 1905 Anssi Korhonen LOGIC AS UNIVERSAL SCIENCE Russell s Early Logicism and its Philosophical Context Gregory Landini FREGE S NOTATIONS What They Are and What They Mean Sandra Lapointe BOLZANO S THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY An Introduction Omar W. Nasim BERTRAND RUSSELL AND THE EDWARDIAN PHILOSOPHERS Constructing the World Ulrich Pardey FREGE ON ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE TRUTH Douglas Patterson ALFRED TARSKI Philosophy of Language and Logic
Erich Reck (editor) THE HISTORIC TURN IN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Graham Stevens THE THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS Mark Textor (editor) JUDGEMENT AND TRUTH IN EARLY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGY Maria van der Schaar G.F. STOUT AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Nuno Venturinha (editor) WITTGENSTEIN AFTER HIS NACHLASS Pierre Wagner (editor) CARNAP S LOGICAL SYNTAX OF LANGUAGE Pierre Wagner (editor) CARNAP S IDEAL OF EXPLICATION AND NATURALISM Forthcoming: Andrew Arana and Carlos Alvarez (editors) ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS Rosalind Carey RUSSELL ON MEANING The Emergence of Scientific Philosophy from the 1920s to the 1940s Sandra Lapointe (translator) Franz Prihonsky THE NEW ANTI-KANT Consuelo Preti THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF ETHICS The Early Philosophical Development of G.E.Moore History of Analytic Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978 0 230 55409 2 (hardcover) Series Standing Order ISBN 978 0 230 55410 8 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
G.F. Stout and the Psychological Origins of Analytic Philosophy Maria van der Schaar University of Leiden, The Netherlands
Maria van der Schaar 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-24978-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-32097-4 ISBN 978-1-137-31540-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137315403 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Contents Series Editor s Foreword Acknowledgements vii x Introduction 1 1 Introduction 1 2 G.F. Stout 4 1 Judgement and the Emergence of Logical Realism in Britain 8 1 Introduction 8 2 The empiricist tradition 13 3 Bradley s account of meaning and judgement 20 4 G.E. Moore between 1897 and 1903 24 5 Russell between 1894 and 1904 33 2 From Descriptive Psychology to Analytic Philosophy (1888 1899) 45 1 Analytic psychology and its method 45 2 Wholes, parts and relations 52 3 The distinction between act, content and object 60 4 Judgement and other propositional attitudes 66 5 G.F. Stout: between Bradley, Moore and Russell 74 3 Psychologism and the Problem of Error (1899 1907) 82 1 Psychologism 82 2 Stout as a logical realist in 1900 87 3 The problem of error 91 4 Stout s reaction to Russell s theory of descriptions 97 4 Judgement, Propositional Attitudes and the Proposition (1908 1944) 101 1 Stout s critique of Russell s multiple relation theory of judgement 101 2 The proposition as possible alternative 105 3 Stout s opposition to logical atomism 114 4 The act of judgement and implicit belief 116 5 Questions and categories 122 v
vi Contents 5 Tropes and Predication 128 1 Three ontological distinctions 128 2 An ontology of tropes 131 3 Relations as tropes 135 4 Motives and arguments for tropes 137 5 Predication and the semantics of adjectives 140 Conclusion 149 Notes 152 Bibliography 161 Index 169
Series Editor s Foreword During the first half of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy gradually established itself as the dominant tradition in the Englishspeaking world, and over the last few decades it has taken firm root in many other parts of the world. There has been increasing debate over just what analytic philosophy means, as the movement has ramified into the complex tradition that we know today, but the influence of the concerns, ideas and methods of early analytic philosophy on contemporary thought is indisputable. All this has led to greater self- consciousness among analytic philosophers about the nature and origins of their tradition, and scholarly interest in its historical development and philosophical foundations has blossomed in recent years, with the result that the history of analytic philosophy is now recognised as a major field of philosophy in its own right. The main aim of the series in which the present book appears, the first series of its kind, is to create a venue for work on the history of analytic philosophy, consolidating the area as a major field of philosophy and promoting further research and debate. The history of analytic philosophy is understood broadly, as covering the period from the last three decades of the nineteenth century to the start of the twenty-first century, beginning with the work of Frege, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, who are generally regarded as its main founders, and the influences upon them, and going right up to the most recent developments. In allowing the history to extend to the present, the aim is to encourage engagement with contemporary debates in philosophy, for example, in showing how the concerns of early analytic philosophy relate to current concerns. In focusing on analytic philosophy, the aim is not to exclude comparisons with other earlier or contemporary traditions, or consideration of figures or themes that some might regard as marginal to the analytic tradition but which also throw light on analytic philosophy. Indeed, a further aim of the series is to deepen our understanding of the broader context in which analytic philosophy developed, by looking, for example, at the roots of analytic philosophy in neo-kantianism or British idealism, or the connections between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, or discussing the work of philosophers who were important in the development of analytic philosophy, but who are now often forgotten. vii
viii Series Editor s Foreword George F. Stout (1860 1944) is one of those philosophers who are now often forgotten, but who did indeed play a significant role in the development of analytic philosophy in Britain around the turn of the twentieth century. Educated at Cambridge, Stout taught at Cambridge from 1884 to 1896, at Aberdeen from 1896 to 1899, and at Oxford from 1899 to 1903, when he took up the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at St Andrews, where he stayed until he retired in 1936. In 1891 he took over as Editor of Mind (founded in 1876 as the first philosophy journal in Britain), which was to become the foremost journal of analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world, and remained Editor until 1920, when Moore succeeded him. In 1896 he published Analytic Psychology, which introduced ideas about analysis and mental phenomena that were to influence subsequent analytic philosophers. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century he wrote on all the main topics that we now associate with early analytic philosophy such as relations, judgement, universals and particulars, sense-data, and truth and directly engaged with the work of Russell, Moore and many others. One of the roots of analytic philosophy has generally been seen as Moore s and Russell s rebellion against British idealism, but Stout had already been raising objections to idealism several years before. Stout, too, came to develop a form of realism, but it was different in important ways from the early realism of Moore and Russell. The difference between these forms of realism is one of the main themes of the present book, in which Maria van der Schaar offers an account of Stout s philosophy, focusing on his theory of judgement. This is the first monograph to be published on the work of Stout since 1985 (when a book by David Seargent appeared on Stout s theory of universals), and it will go a long way to making Stout s ideas better known and filling in a significant gap in our understanding of the early development of analytic philosophy. Stout taught both Russell and Moore at Cambridge in 1893 1894. In his autobiography, Moore reports that he owed a great deal to Stout. Stout, he writes, has a quite exceptional gift for seizing on some particular point of importance, involved in a confused philosophical controversy, and putting that point in the simplest and most conversational language: he is peculiarly direct, and utterly free from anything approaching pretentiousness or pomposity (1942, 18). Although this could equally well be taken as a self-description by Moore, it clearly shows the high respect in which Moore held him. Russell was rather less respectful. In his own autobiography, Russell attributes his early
Series Editor s Foreword ix idealism, partly, to the influence of Stout, and reproduces a letter to Quine dated 4 February 1949 in which he writes: When I first sent my theory of description to Mind in 1905, Stout thought it such rubbish that he almost refused to print it (Autobiography, London: Unwin Paperbacks, pp. 136, 537). In Russell s typical fashion, Stout was lined up among the reactionaries. However, as Schaar notes, Russell read Stout s Analytic Psychology in 1896, and it remains the case that Stout did publish Russell s most famous article. More important, the various criticisms Stout made of Russell s ideas clearly influenced their further development, as Schaar persuasively shows. Stout had himself been influenced by Franz Brentano, and so was, to some extent, the conduit through which Brentano, and his students such as Alexius Meinong and Kazimierz Twardowski, influenced Moore and Russell. Again, as Schaar brings out very well, Moore s and Russell s philosophical concerns are part of a much broader debate about judgement, act and object, form and content, wholes and parts, and the unity of a proposition that had been going on in Europe. One of Stout s most important ideas was his conception of (explicit) judgement as an answer to a question, and this idea not only motivated Stout s critique of Russell s theory of descriptions, but was also to influence three generations of Oxford philosophers, from John Cook Wilson through R. G. Collingwood to P. F. Strawson, among others. Stout s account of universals and particulars also anticipates contemporary trope theory. As Schaar convincingly demonstrates in this book, not only does Stout s role in the development of analytic philosophy deserve far greater recognition, but his ideas are also worth investigating in their own right, for the light that is shed on issues that remain of central concern in the analytic tradition. Michael Beaney February 2013
Acknowledgements I warmly thank Kevin Mulligan, Barry Smith, Peter Simons and the late Gabriel Nuchelmans for their support in the early phases of the project. I thank the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University and the Forschungsstelle und Dokumentationszentrum für Österreichische Philosophie in Graz for allowing me to make use of their resources. And I thank Palgrave Macmillan for the permission to reproduce parts of my paper G.F. Stout and Russell s Earliest Account of Judgement in Mark Textor (ed.) Judgement and Truth in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (2013). x