IDEAS AND IDEALS: HONOURING JOYCE MITCHELL COOK

In the twentieth century, most PhD-trained academic philosophers in both the United States and United Kingdom were white men. The first black woman to earn a PhD in Philosophy was Joyce E. Mitchell Cook (1933–2014). A preacher's daughter from a small town in western Pennsylvania, Cook earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College. She went on to earn degrees in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from St Hilda's College at Oxford University before earning a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1965. At Yale she served as Managing Editor of the Review of Metaphysics and was the first woman appointed as a teaching assistant in Philosophy. She taught at Howard University for nearly a decade and held positions in national government service in Washington, DC, before retiring to a life of independent study of the black experience. Although she did not publish much in her lifetime, Cook deserves to be remembered as: first, an academic trailblazer who proved that race and gender are not barriers to excellence in philosophy; second, a public philosopher who broke barriers as a foreign and economic affairs analyst and presidential speech writer; third, among the first philosophical bioethicists of informed consent and experimentation on humans; and, fourth, an analytic philosopher of race, opposing claims that blacks suffer from inherited intellectual inferiority. Cook's achievements can inspire women of all backgrounds who love philosophy to pursue graduate studies and academic careers.

Perec and Mathews

This chapter looks at a pair of related short stories, one by Perec, one by Mathews. Both concern South Seas ethnographers who stumble upon languages with highly limited vocabularies. These stories draw on the analytic philosopher W. V. O. Quine’s example of the gavagai language, by which he illustrates the indeterminacy of translation, and Perec and Mathews use their stories to similar ends. Perec’s story, from his novel Life A User’s Manual, encodes allusions to Wittgenstein’s ‘slab’ language from Philosophical Investigations, as well as to Borges’s famous Chinese encyclopaedia, in order to reflect on how the categories by which we understand the world, and which are so important to translation, are culturally specific. Mathews’s story meanwhile ends with a riposte to Quine: pure translation may not be possible, but we do as well as we can do.

Objective, Intersubjective Mystical Relationships: Justification and Reality

Amplifying the idea of religious experience as occurring within an encompassing “religious province of meaning” and developing the personal character of the experience of God in the Abrahamic religious traditions, this paper argues that mystics in those traditions experience God “objectively.” Their experience of God is that of experiencing God as what Alfred Schutz called a “Consociate,” despite the lack of God’s bodily presence. Such a phenomenological account of religious experience converges with the description by analytic philosopher William Alston of religious experience as an objectively given, non-sensual perception of God, even though the personal Consociate model is preferable to the perceptual one, given the Abrahamic traditions. Conversely, Alston and Alvin Plantinga show how ascending levels of rational justification of religious experience are possible with reference to the experiential level, and such levels can be accommodated within the Schutzian “theoretical province of meaning” in its collaboration with the religious province. Both the Consociate and Schelerian/personalist accounts of God resist any explaining away of religious experience as mere phantasy, and the religious finite province of meaning provides a more comprehensive explanation of religious experience than either Alston’s or Plantinga’s approaches. However, the strategy of envisioning religious experience as taking place within a finite province of meaning is more noetic in character than Scheler’s view of an eidetically elaborated noematic absolute reality that precedes the rise of consciousness itself and that counterbalances the noetic portrayal of religious experience.

Wisdom, Arthur John Terence Dibben (1904–93)

John Wisdom worked first at the University of St Andrews and then at Cambridge, where he later held the Professorship of Philosophy. At the beginning of his career he was an analytic philosopher much in the style of Russell, Moore and the early Wittgenstein. But when he moved to Cambridge the encounter with the Wittgenstein of the 1930s brought about deep changes in his approach to philosophical problems. Although greatly influenced by Wittgenstein he remained highly individual, indeed rejecting what was arguably the ‘later’ Wittgenstein’s most central claim, namely that metaphysical statements are the result of a misunderstanding of the workings of language.

Williamson, Timothy (1955–)

Timothy Williamson is a British analytic philosopher, who has made major contributions in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and philosophical methodology. Williamson has defended classical logic in connection with the sorites (or heap) paradox, by appeal to epistemicism, the view that vagueness is ignorance. His knowledge first approach has reversed the traditional order of explanation in epistemology. In metaphysics, he has argued in favour of necessitism – the view that what there is (ontology) is metaphysically necessary, not contingent. In the philosophy of language, he has argued that one must (in a certain privileged sense, constitutive of assertion) assert only what one knows; and he has defended a principle of charity according to which the best interpretations of a language maximize the attribution of knowledge (rather than true belief) to its speakers. Methodologically, Williamson opposes naturalism and defends instead the use of ‘armchair’ methods to answer substantive questions; in practice, his work is often characterized by the application of formal techniques, both logical and mathematical, to traditional philosophical problems.

Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane (1922–82)

G.E.L. Owen led the reorientation in ancient philosophy that began in the 1950s in Britain and North America. He approached the texts with a profound knowledge of classical scholarship, but also as an analytic philosopher, understanding them as conceptual investigations of live philosophical interest. Concerned primarily with the logic of argumentation, philosophy of science and metaphysics, he wrote influential articles on Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. Equally important were his classes at Oxford (1953–66), at Harvard (1966–73) and finally at Cambridge, in which he constantly developed and tested his ideas and methods.

Chisholm, Roderick Milton (1916–1999)

Chisholm was an important analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. His work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, the use of a few basic, undefined or primitive terms, and extraordinary clarity. One of the first Anglo-American philosophers to make fruitful use of Brentano and Meinong, Chisholm translated many of Brentano’s philosophical writings. As one of the great teachers, Chisholm is widely known for the three editions of Theory of Knowledge, a short book and the standard text in US graduate epistemology courses. An ontological Platonist, Chisholm defends human free will and a strict sense of personal identity.

Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy

In this chapter, after indicating how analytic philosophers developed a keen interest in the debate about divine action, the author explores the seminal work of analytic philosopher I. M. Crombie. The author contends that Crombie provided an elegant way of naming two critical questions about divine action; but he failed to develop a satisfactory answer to either of them. The problems he discussed quickly became the site of a concerted attack on the whole idea of divine action. The author shows that this attack fails, even as it prompted theologians to resort to paradox to keep divine action afloat as a serious option for theology.