Re: Eschatology and Metaphysics

Speranza

Jones writes:

"It is nice that Grice uses a special word "eschatology" for (at least some of) his metaphysical ruminations, since that makes it easier to talk about the different conceptions of metaphysics that Carnap and Grice have, and slightly easier to find a way of talking about them both at once."

Good. It is perhaps not so nice (but then, 'nice', in Latin, meant 'silly', almost -- ne-scius, don't-know-it-all) that Grice does not use

"ontology" -- at least in that essay. He just speaks broadly of 'metaphysics' as categorial and eschatology as supracategoria.

This may be compensated by the long ruminations he has on "theory theory" in "Reply to Richards". I may have posted some of that material at the Grice Club. By "Theory Theory" he just means Aristotle's "prote philosophia", first philosophy.

But, as I see things, Grice is best to allow to understand Carnap in NOT distinguishing too much between 'philosophy' and 'science', so distinctions in the discipline of metaphysics is of secondary importance to him.

My favourite Grice quote must be his reaction to Russell's dismissal of 'metaphysics' as "stone-age metaphysics". Russell was replying to Strawson ("Mr. Strawson on referring") and other issues. Russell notes that ordinary language (silly things silly people say, I think is his expression) embodies a "stone age metaphysics". Grice, in "Reply to Richards", replies: "lovely rhetoric; but why not, 'stone-age PHYSICS'?"

Grice's most developed arguments come from "Actions and Events", where he refers to entities like electrons, and wavicles (his "Two Tables by Eddington" argument -- cfr. my "Cake-Eat and Have-It" principle, sometime).

There is also a good quote from "Method in philosophical psychology" that Jones and I have discussed elsewhere -- at Bayne's site --: Grice's "Ontological Marxism": how to bring entities into the picture. This may not just refer to 'universalia'. In fact, in "Action and Events" he expands on this, and quotes from Robinson, an Oxford don at Oriel: "You name it". This was Robinson's criterion for ontological acceptance: you name it and I deem it existent, as it were.

As we proceed on this, consider -- Heidegger's silly phrase as examined by Carnap:

"Nothing noughts".

"Das Nichts nichtet."

"Nothing" is possibly supracategorial. It's not like 'table' and 'chair'. To allow for 'Nothing' to stand as a subject-item is quite a challenge, and a feat!

Now, to add, as predicate-term, the so-far unexistent term, "to nought" (nichten), was Heidegger's contribution.

Is it true that Nothing noughts? Carnap just found it nonsensical. Alla, "Caesar is a prime number", or "If they but they they so so they" -- a breach of syntax.

In allowing for eschatology, perhaps Grice is saying that there may be something behind this apparently silly claim by whom he considers "the greatest living philosopher" (jokingly, in WoW:i -- Heidegger in name index).

Jones goes on:

"So far as Aristotle is concerned, the word metaphysics doesn't really come in, because it only appeared after Aristotle, his contribution being just the order in which his books came (I have no idea whether even that really was down to Aristotle). What Aristotle called the contents of the book which we call the Metaphysics was "First Philosophy" which sounds just like an opposite of "Eschatology"."

Good you mention this. As I say, Grice used 'theory theory' extensively. I think he did mean 'first philosophy' -- prote philosophia. The point being about the principles or 'arkhai', of course. It is true that there is no mention of this in the "Eschatology" essay by Grice, but I may have provided at the Grice Club some relevant quotes about his "theory theory". It is a erudite expression enough, "theory theory", to allow for an easy search, sometime!

----

Incidentally, the "Eschatology" paper is concerned with very specific issues, as I re-read it. Grice uses Baker's application of 'eschatology' to show that Aristotle reaches an 'aporia' with the theory of the 'alter ego'. The way Grice finds this interesting is interesting. Why a metaphysician, as it were, may find eschatology practical to 'save' the appearances, and avoid consistencies. "Theory theory", as it were? His own application concerns the word 'right'. This relates to "Reply to Richards". There, he notes that when we say, say

mind is prior to matter.
matter is prior to mind.

and so on, there may be different 'levels' or directions: ontological, cognitive, epistemological, valuational. The possibility of these different schemata may concern the eschatologist, who is now dealing with supracategorial epithets, as it were.

----

Jones goes on:

"This is probably just a curiosity, since there isn't much doubt that Aristotle was thinking of "First Philosophy" as being "ultimate" in some sense or other."

Indeed, a bit of a pun. What strikes me as odd is that there should be more than one 'principle'. The word 'principle' (the formulation of which is the task of 'prote philosophia') seems like to disallow the use of the plural. "The principles of ...", and so on. In old Latin, it meant just 'start'. And how different starting points can there be?

Jones:

"In Speranza's story about Grice's philosophical eschatology, it seems that Aristotle's categories loom large."

Indeed. I would think this is the keyword in Kantotle or Ariskant. Recall that what is an ontological realm for Aristotle, is merely cognitive or epistemological for Kant. Grice amused himself with Kant's treatment of Aristotle's categories. Consider just the quartette:

qualitas
quantitas
relatio
modus

--- what is the criterion to distinguish the category of 'quantitas' from that of 'qualitas', say?

Kant notably thought that Aristotle had posited 6 categories too many. So, Aristotle's ten categories become just four in Kant -- and jokingly, in the Grice of "Logic and Conversation". Note that the first category does not count as one in Kant: the substance. It's with 'qualitas/quantitas' that we start the 'categorial' game in Kant, since 'substance' is too much of a scholastic metaphysical (Jones is right that 'metaphysical' is post-Aristotelian -- Kant may be having Baumgarten's terminology in mind) term to care for...

The category of 'relatio' is an interesting one, and one that was later to be formalised by Russell

Rx
R(x, y)
R(x, y, z)

symmetry, transitivity, etc., all applied to 'relatio' as such.
Modus is more of a mixed bag!

---

Recall that in Grandy's and Warner's festschrift

P hilosohpical
G rounds of
R ationality
I ntentions
C ategories
E nds

the "C" is key!

Jones:

"I suppose this is understandable in the context of Ryle making a big deal about category mistakes, but it sounds more like descriptive or exegetical metaphysics than "revisionist" metaphysics, which is probably where we need to be to escape accident and language and home in on essence and the absolute."

Too true. Perhaps the word 'absolute' is overrated, though. True, Collingwood (whose prose Jones charmingly finds 'horrifying') does think of 'metaphysics' as (pretentiously) the 'science of absolute presuppositions'. But one wonders what a 'relative' presupposition would look like. Grice (and myself, for that matter) is a thorough constructivist. So he thinks that whatever we may end (unluckily) deeming an 'absolute' presupposition is still something we've constructed out of our own relativities...

Jones:

"So far I don't have a good idea of how Grice is separates out the truly eschatological from the accidents of descriptive metaphysics."

The "Reply to Richards" section on 'stone age physics' is a good start. He grants that Russell is being too rhetorical, and that

"S is P"

say, Aristotelian, or Kantotelian categories, refer to 'stone age metaphysics'. Russell may be thinking of, and indeed explicitly refers to 'twentieth-century physics', as needing a DIFFERENT metaphysical scheme.

So, Grice grants this, and makes a few points. A few of those points are descriptive. He notes that we may accept the study of 'stone age physics' as a legitimate HISTORICAL discipline. How people talked of and thought of the world before Einstein, say.

He then goes to refer to these categories not as being 'conversational' as he charmingly had it in "Logic and Conversation" but just _linguistic_. I like to read that in connection with Strawson's lectures on "Subject and Predicate in Grammar and Logic". For Grice is surely defending vintage Oxford analysis: if people do use 'subject and predicate' logic (rather than a pure predicate calculus, say), and if they also allow for different 'orders' (as when 'nothing' or 'blueness' becomes a subject-item, say), or when 'right' is used valuationally rather than epistemological, we may want to pay attention to the logic behind this. So this is the metaphysicist as a 'descriptive' grammarian, as it were.

Some unpublications of Grice at the Bancroft Library (UC/Berkeley) refer to his 'new method' or 'discourse' in metaphysics: from Genesis to Revelations, I think he called it -- in truly eschatological verbal fashion. So, he did think that the philosopher should go beyond the accidents of grammar, as it were, to the absolute, or the Snark if you must!

("For the Snark was a boojum, you see" -- Gardner has edited Lewis Carroll's work as an analysis of a neo-Hegelian search for the absolute).

Cheers.