Ethics without Ontology
Hilary Putnam
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0674018516
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered objective--a question that has vexed philosophers over the past century. Looking at the efforts of philosophers from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, Putnam traces the ways in which ethical problems arise in a historical context. Hilary Putnam's central concern is ontology--indeed, the very idea of ontology as the division of philosophy concerned with what (ultimately) exists. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology's influence on analytic philosophy--in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments--Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology. He argues persuasively that the attempt to provide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of either mathematics or ethics is, in fact, an attempt to provide justifications that are extraneous to mathematics and ethics--and is thus deeply misguided.
Certain existence statements exhibit. For certain identity statements are left open by the meanings (i.e., the uses) of the words in ordinary language, and there are equally good choices as to how the openness is to be closed (if we want to close it, say for purposes of formalization). And these “equally good choices” give rise to a coordination problem whose solution is, again, a convention. Adopt one convention and X ϭ Y is true, where X is a certain point in space and Y is a certain set of.
Can take seriously about what there is. But what is wrong with saying that it is only our best scientiªc theory of the world that says anything about what there is? The philosophers I just mentioned do not consider the interpretation of texts to be a matter of a scientiªc theory (as indeed it isn’t). So the statement about Kant isn’t part of our best scientiªc theory of the world—it isn’t part of any “theory.” Are you really prepared to conclude with Paul Churchland that passages which are.
E N T A N D P R AG M AT I S M and the change in terminology is symptomatic of a deep criticism of traditional philosophy. “Reason,” in the traditional sense, was, above all, a faculty by means of which human beings were supposed to be able to arrive at one or another set of immutable truths. It is true that this conception had already been criticized by the empiricists, but the empiricist criticism of reason seemed seriously ºawed to Dewey. Dewey, surprisingly—at ªrst, at least to people with a.
It is perhaps signiªcant that Dewey himself began his 102 E N L I G H T E N M E N T A N D P R AG M AT I S M philosophical career as a Hegelian. For Dewey, as for Hegel, we are communal beings from the start. Even as a “thought experiment,” the idea that beings who belong to no community could so much as have the idea of a “principle,” or a special motive to be guided by principles, is utterly fantastic. On the other hand, unlike empiricist thinkers such as Hume and Bentham, Dewey does not.
Kantian concern with principle have been seen as being in conºict with the Aristotelian concern with human ºourishing. But that is not the way I see things. The tension is real, but so is the mutual support. Kantian ethics, I have argued15 (as Hegel already argued) is, in fact, empty and formal unless we supply it with content precisely from Aristotelian and Levinasian and yet other directions. (Among those other directions, one might mention today concerns with democracy, concerns with.