Lewis, Clarence Irving (1883–1964)

Author(s):  
Sandra B. Rosenthal

The American philosopher C.I. Lewis held that in all knowledge there are two elements: that which is presented to sense and the construction or interpretation which represents the creative activity of the mind. Contrary to Kant, Lewis claimed that what is fixed and unalterable is not the structure that we bring to the sensibly presented, but rather the sensibly presented itself. The categories that mind imposes do not limit experience; they determine the interpretation we place upon experience, and if too much of experience eludes our categorizations, new ones should be established. It is pragmatically necessary that we create interpretive structures which will work in getting us around in sensory experience. This important and novel doctrine, Lewis’ ‘pragmatic a priori’, emerged through the development of ideas which took root during his study of logic. The problems of choosing among alternative logics led him to assert the need for pragmatic criteria. The way we conceptually structure or categorize experience answers to pragmatic criteria of purposes, intents and interests. Only within a context defined by a priori categorizations can empirical judgments be made. These empirical judgments proceed from apprehensions of the sensibly presented to assertions of objectivities. Moral judgments require both judgments of good and decisions of right. Judgments of value are tied to qualitative satisfactions disclosed in experience and are empirical claims. Decisions about the morally right are based on imperatives of reason.

Author(s):  
Ralph Wedgwood

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. So moral epistemology is the study of what would be involved in knowing, or being justified in believing, moral propositions. Some discussions of moral epistemology interpret the category of ‘moral propositions’ broadly, to encompass all propositions that can be expressed with terms like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘ought’. Other discussions have focused on a narrower category of moral propositions – such as propositions about what rights people have, or about what we owe to each other. According to so-called noncognitivists, one cannot strictly speaking know (or be justified in believing) a moral proposition in the same sense in which one can know (or be justified in believing) an ordinary factual proposition. Other philosophers defend a cognitivist position, according to which it is possible to know or be justified in believing moral propositions in the very same sense as factual propositions. If one does know any moral propositions, they must presumably be true; and the way in which one knows those moral truths must provide access to them. This has led to a debate about whether one could ever know moral truths if a realist conception of these truths – according to which moral truths are not in any interesting sense of our making – were correct. Many philosophers agree that one way of obtaining justified moral beliefs involves seeking ‘reflective equilibrium’ – that is, roughly, considering theories, and adjusting one’s judgments to make them as systematic and coherent as possible. According to some philosophers, however, seeking reflective equilibrium is not enough: justified moral beliefs need to be supported by moral ‘intuitions’. Some hold that such moral intuitions are a priori, akin to our intuitions of the self-evident truths of mathematics. Others hold that these intuitions are closely related to emotions or sentiments; some theorists claim that empirical studies of moral psychology strongly support this ‘sentimentalist’ interpretation. Finally, moral thinking seems different from other areas of thought in two respects. First, there is particularly widespread disagreement about moral questions; and one rarely responds to such moral disagreement by retreating to a state of uncertainty as one does on other questions. Secondly, one rarely defers to other people’s moral judgments in the way in which one defers to experts about ordinary factual questions. These two puzzling features of moral thinking seem to demand explanation – which is a further problem that moral epistemology has to solve.


Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muh. Hanif

The paper discusses the introduction of hermeneutics, Gadamer's biography, Gadamer's hermeneutics and Quranic exegesis, and examples of interpreters using the Gadamer hermeneutics model. hermeneutics tried to grasp the meaning of the Quranic text. Meaning comes from the German "Meinen" which means "to be in the mind or right." Meanings are produced on the basis   of a fusion of horizon or a mixture of the author's horizon of thought, reader, and text.  interpretation is a productive act involving the subjectivity of the interpreter and is  influenced by the historical reality and the presupposition of the interpreter. Gadamer hermeneutics is widely applied in the way of interpretation of the Qur'an bi al-ra'yi.


PMLA ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 73 (5-part1) ◽  
pp. 501-504
Author(s):  
Harold Bloom
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell assaults what Blake termed a “cloven fiction” between empirical and a priori procedure in argument. In content, the Marriage compounds ethical and theological “contraries”; in form it mocks the categorical techniques that seek to make the contraries appear as “negations.” The unity of the Marriage is in itself dialectical, and cannot be grasped except by the mind in motion, moving between the Blakean contraries of discursive irony and mythical visualization.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
Kirstin A. Mills

This article examines the processes of fragmentation and haunting surrounding the explosion of competing translations, in 1796, of Gottfried August Bürger's German ballad ‘Lenore’. While the fragment has become known as a core narrative device of the Gothic, less attention has been paid to the ways that the fragment and fragmentation operate as dynamic, living phenomena within the Gothic's central processes of memory, inspiration, creation, dissemination and evolution. Taking ‘Lenore’ as a case study, this essay aims to redress this critical gap by illuminating the ways that fragmentation haunts the mind, the text, and the history of the Gothic as a process as much as a product. It demonstrates that fragmentation operates along lines of cannibalism, resurrection and haunting to establish a pattern of influence that paves the way for modern forms of gothic intertextuality and adaptation. Importantly, it thereby locates fragmentation as a process at the heart of the Gothic mode.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Solomon Awuzie

This article contends that, in the same way as some postcolonial literature, the latter third generation Nigerian literature is a product of the writer’s experience. When the writer does not reproduce his sociopolitical experience, he reshapes his expectations into literature. The writer manipulates his experience into creative activity that fulfils his innate desire – this is the same desire which he is ordinarily unable to achieve in reality. This article argues further that even though the literature is a product of the writer’s experience, it is harmless and beneficent. Using Camillus Ukah’s Sweet Things as a representative text of the fiction produced by a latter third generation Nigerian literature writer, emphasis is made on the way in which Camillus Ukah has recreated his experience. It concludes that through the novel, Ukah expresses his bitterness towards a certain matrimonial experience that is of his particular concern.


2022 ◽  
pp. 147035722110526
Author(s):  
Sara Merlino ◽  
Lorenza Mondada ◽  
Ola Söderström

This article discusses how an aspect of urban environments – sound and noise – is experienced by people walking in the city; it particularly focuses on atypical populations such as people diagnosed with psychosis, who are reported to be particularly sensitive to noisy environments. Through an analysis of video-recordings of naturalistic activities in an urban context and of video-elicitations based on these recordings, the study details the way participants orient to sound and noise in naturalistic settings, and how sound and noise are reported and reexperienced during interviews. By bringing together urban context, psychosis and social interaction, this study shows that, thanks to video recordings and conversation analysis, it is possible to analyse in detail the multimodal organization of action (talk, gesture, gaze, walking bodies) and of the sensory experience(s) of aural factors, as well as the way this organization is affected by the ecology of the situation.


Author(s):  
Jesse Matz

Orlando and other texts express Woolf’s interest in subjective ‘time in the mind’, an interest she shared with other modernists who challenged chronological norms, but Woolf explored other forms of time as well. Some align her work with the theories of Henri Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Mary Sturt, and this variety—the way Woolf developed forms of time across her career as a writer—tracks with the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. His Time and Narrative explains the dialectical pattern according to which Woolf perpetually found new ways for time and narrative to shape each other, culminating in novels that thematize this reciprocal relationship between the art of narrative and possibilities for temporal engagement. Woolf’s early fiction breaks with linear chronology, starting a series of virtuoso performances of temporal poiesis.


Episteme ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-383
Author(s):  
Paul Boghossian

AbstractI argue for the claim that there are instances of a priori justified belief – in particular, justified belief in moral principles – that are not analytic, i.e., that cannot be explained solely by the understanding we have of their propositions. §1–2 provides the background necessary for understanding this claim: in particular, it distinguishes between two ways a proposition can be analytic, Basis and Constitutive, and provides the general form of a moral principle. §§3–5 consider whether Hume's Law, properly interpreted, can be established by Moore's Open Question Argument, and concludes that it cannot: while Moore's argument – appropriately modified – is effective against the idea that moral judgments are either (i) reductively analyzable or (ii) Constitutive-analytic, a different argument is needed to show that they are not (iii) Basis-analytic. Such an argument is supplied in §6. §§7–8 conclude by considering how these considerations bear on recent discussions of “alternative normative concepts”, on the epistemology of intuitions, and on the differences between disagreement in moral domains and in other a priori domains such as logic and mathematics.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document