Harvard Lectures Research Articles

The civic importance of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934)

In the Harvard lectures that became Art as Experience (1934) Dewey developed a democratic account of art that not only expanded the range of creative experience (watching a huge digger, the architectonics of a mutually satisfactory conversation, are included in the reach of art) but developed an account of art that was vitally reciprocal, participatory and social. Maker and perceiver are equally interactive creators as they mutually develop new modes of feeling and thinking. For Dewey this relationship necessarily re-makes the experience of community and, just as important, creates a civic space for interrogation and critique. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)

Whitehead and Victorian Philosophy of Science: A Historical Investigation of the Concept of Hypothesis

Abstract In the Harvard lectures of 1924–1925, Alfred North Whitehead proposed that our various intellectual activities amounted to an attempt to understand the world and our experiences through hypothesizing. He explained the importance of hypothesis in scientific research and extended the idea of hypothesis to the philosophical method called “speculative philosophy.” For Whitehead, philosophy was the attempt to formulate general hypotheses that can transcend disciplines. This paper is intended to explore the possible influence of Victorian philosophers on Whitehead. Victorian philosophers such as John Herschel, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill discussed the role of hypothesis in scientific discovery. Was Whitehead aware of this tradition? Was he influenced by it? This article indicates that Whitehead at least indirectly inherited the Victorian idea of hypothesis, notably in the thought of Whewell, as mediated by Charles Darwin.

Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead's Eternal Objects

Abstract Alfred North Whitehead's first book as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, Science and the Modern World, is not only a historical treatment of the rise and fall of scientific materialism. It also marks his turn to metaphysics in search of an alternative cosmological scheme that would replace matter in motion with organic process as that which is generic in Nature. Among the metaphysical innovations introduced in this book are the somewhat enigmatic “eternal objects.” The publication of the first and second volumes of Whitehead's Harvard Lectures on the philosophical presuppositions (HL1) and general metaphysical problems (HL2) of science provides students of his corpus with an opportunity to catch the thinker in the act of creating his concepts. In searching through student notes for glimpses of what Whitehead really meant, I have kept in mind his admonition that “no thinker thinks twice” (PR 29). Whitehead never ceased philosophizing, and surely he intended for us to continue thinking with but beyond the letter of his ideas. In this spirit and in light of HL1 and HL2, this article seeks to elucidate the role of eternal objects as a category of existence in Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, with the goal not simply of textual exegesis, but of showing how the meaning of the fifth category of existence (as he refers to eternal objects in PR) is exemplified in the gradual ingression of the idea in Whitehead's imagination. My aim is to sustain the effort at constructive thought he began, making his speculative hypothesis as explicit as possible so as to better prepare it for critical improvement (PR xiv).

From a Philosophy of Evolution to a Philosophy of Organism

Abstract In this article, Whitehead's transition from a Philosophy of Evolution to a Philosophy of Organism is studied primarily on the basis of the evidence provided by the first two volumes of The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, especially the second volume that deals with the period 1925–1927 and that is subtitled General Metaphysical Problems of Science.

Whitehead's 1925–1927 View of Function and Time

Abstract Whitehead's 1925–1927 Harvard lectures (HL2) are too rich in content to easily summarize. Consequently, I limit myself in the present article to giving an account pivoting around Whitehead's functional theory of reality and his epochal theory of time.

The Path to Understanding: Relation and Solidarity in Whitehead's Metaphysics

Abstract In this article, I will respond to questions regarding the ontological status of relations by exploring Whitehead's pivotal notion of solidarity, especially focusing on the recently published Harvard lectures. Particularly, I shall investigate how solidarity become a metaphysical law in the development of Whitehead's thought, also exploiting other Whiteheadian works of the same period, such as Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making. I will attempt to show that the comprehension of an immediate brute fact necessarily requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. I will thus provide my interpretation on solidarity through a comparison with Hegel's notion of Wirklichkeit.

The Work of Community in Raposa's Theosemiotic

The Work of Community in Raposa's Theosemiotic

The Dipolar Character of Being in Plato and Whitehead

Abstract It has often been noticed that Plato's metaphysical view of being is dipolar. The purpose of the present article is to detail what it means to say that being is dipolar in Plato. Further, I will explore the extent to which dipolarity in Whitehead is indebted to Plato and the extent to which Whitehead's dipolarity is different from Plato's. In this regard I will concentrate on Whitehead's recently published Harvard Lectures.

Testament Leonarda Bernsteina – The Unanswered Question w świetle zagadnień dyrygenckich

Leonard Bernstein’s Testament — The Unanswered Question in the Light of Conducting Issues In 1973, Leonard Bernstein gave a series of six lectures at Harvard University, entitled The Unanswered Question: Six talks at Harvard. This interdisciplinary course, drawing on Noam Chomsky's theory of transformational-generative grammar, presented an original conception of music as a universal language based on tonality and outlined the history of its development, concluding with Bernstein’s personal credo regarding its future. The argumentation used, although encompassing fields as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and art history, was based primarily on musical analyses presented at the piano, supplemented by recordings of the symphonic works being discussed, performed under the baton of Bernstein himself. The Harvard lectures thus represent the summa of his aesthetic reflections and performance experiences, providing a unique insight into his views on music and its interpretation. This paper focuses on synthesising these views, subjecting them to factual verification, and then showing their influence on Bernstein's art of conducting through the example of the recordings used in The Unanswered Question series, focusing in particular on the issue of expression.

Judith N. Shklar on disobedience and obligation in a “society of strangers”

Judith N. Shklar on disobedience and obligation in a “society of strangers”

Republican Elements in the Liberalism of Fear

Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear is distinct from other liberalisms; it gains its unique imprint and quality through a long and consistent engagement with, and critical discussion of, republicanism. Her account of the contemporary relevance of notions of virtues and vices, justice and injustice, the questions of rights, representation, citizenship and democracy all point to older republican influences. However, Shklar also knew that unreconstructed republicanism and republican ideas of the virtuous life were no longer applicable to modern societal and political conditions. This becomes especially clear in her discussion of Rousseau and in her study Ordinary Vices. The irreducibly pluralist and individualist nature of modern democracy have made it inconceivable that we would all agree on what the virtuous life consists in. Shklar’s emphasis on positive liberty, critically directed against Isaiah Berlin’s argument that negative rights and negative liberty are at the heart of modern liberalism; her insistence on the need for a common spirit as distilled in her study of Montesquieu; the need for equality in terms of voting and earning as stressed in American Citizenship; and finally her discussion of the changing nature of both loyalty and political obligation in her last Harvard lectures, are all indicative of the republican elements that can be detected in her barebones liberalism.

C. S. Peirce’s Semiotic and Mathematical Conception of Economics

C. S. Peirce had a keen interest in the most mathematical economics of his era. We know that Peirce read and wrote about the mathematical economics of Cournot and Jevons and at least mentions the names of Ricardo, Marshall, and Walras. Peirce also provided a mathematical, optimizing model of the insurance firm as his most elaborate example of pragmatism in the Harvard Lectures of 1903. What is significant is that Peirce chose economic examples to illustrate what is really a semiotic and mathematical conception of pragmatism. Diagrams and semiotics play a central role in Peirce’s philosophy of mathematics. Just a few years ago, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath authored a long treatise on evolutionary economics with Peirce’s semiotics as a central aspect of that work. Additionally, Herrmann-Pillath makes significant use of diagrams and equations from various scientific disciplines. Diagrams are a central feature of Herrmann-Pillath’s treatise giving it something of a Peircean, qualitative mathematical character. These similarities and differences between Peirce and Herrmann-Pillath on semiotics, economics, mathematics, and evolutionary processes are quite novel and thus of intrinsic interest.

Probability, risk, and pragmatism: an outlook on Peirce's insurance firm model

C. S. Peirce used to discuss the validity of synthetic inferences by comparison with the way that insurance companies predict the extent of their risks collectively, even though they cannot predict particular losses. This topic appears in at least three essays from different periods of Peirce's works, indicating that it involves an important issue during the development of pragmatism. By the way, it is important to note that Peirce’s view on this matter was gradually improved over the course of those works: initially, it is practically only mentioned, later it takes the form of a full argument, and finally it was presented as a mathematical model whose discussion is quite complex. I begin with Peirce’s puzzling assertion that “each of us is an insurance company”, trying to explain how his frequentist conception of probability implies the famous statement that logic is rooted in the social principle. Next, I intend to show how such an issue sheds light on the reformulation of the maxim of pragmatism, which was initially based on psychological considerations, but which became grounded in the field of logic. This shift may be better understood as one considers the relation between the validity of synthetic inferences and securitization procedures. I conclude that some obscurities of the first Harvard lecture of 1903 derived from Peirce´s expertise on a subject matter whose discussion was still incipient at his time.

Sincerity and authenticity in celebrity culture: introduction

In his Harvard lectures of 1969–1970, collected in Sincerity and Authenticity, the American critic Lionel Trillling (1971) at one point states, somewhat surprisingly: ‘Irony is one of those words, ...

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Context of Its Historical Relations with Ukraine in Omeljan Pritsak's Academic Research

Analyzing the creative heritage by Omeljan Pritsak on the history of Poland, the authors concludes that the historian began to explore the issues of medieval and early New Poland as early as in the pre-war period, the earliest period of his formation as a scholar, and continued into his American and Ukrainian periods. Based on the number of archival documents and printed works, the authors of the article claims that while in his pre-war period the scholar was engaged in debunking the mythical legends existing in Polish historiography about Hetman Ivan Mazepa and wrote several reviews on the works by Polish historians, in his American period, the scholar wrote a range of papers of historiosophic character. Pritsak concludes that these were the Lithuanians who caused the changes in the leadership elite and the interruption in the historical tradition of Ukraine, and that with the transition of Ukrainian lands from Lithuania to Poland, for the first time since the Kyiv period, Ukrainian territory began to produce its own, conscious political rights and privileges. It was during the Polish times, according to Pritsak, that a new political phenomenon, namely the homeland of Rus, began to emerge. Demythologizing the myths about the destructive nature of the Mongols and the Ukrainian character of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Pritsak characterizes the Ukrainian "registry" Cossacks as a new type of Ukrainian elite. In his lectures written in the American period, the scholar constructs a historiosophical synthesis of syllabic ties in the context of exploring the role played by Poland in Eastern Europe and examines the peculiarities of the economic and socio- political situation of the Ukrainian lands under the Polish domination. In this respect, he estimates the special significance that such phenomena as reformation, counter-reformation, mercantilism, the Magdeburg law, and the creation of Polish literary poetry by Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski had for the Polish literary language. In his Ukrainian period, Pritsak supplemented Harvard lectures with new material and visions of the Commonwealth in the context of its relations with Ukraine. It substantiates four major groups of problems that caused the fall of the Commonwealth as a state and emphasizes the special role of counter-reformation and the Jesuits, as well as the manorial economy with special functions of magnates and Jews, which, in his opinion, eventually caused the uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Thus, Pritsak examined the history of Poland and the Polish people during three periods of his life: pre-war, American and Ukrainian. The subjects he touched upon in the articles differed, since the scholar set various goals in different periods. It is important to emphasize that almost all research papers on the history of Poland were not conducted by the historian outside the Ukrainian context. Pritsak’s historiosophic vision of the key problems of the history of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and of modern Poland is an important contribution to the study of the essential aspects of the common subjects of the Polish and Ukrainian history in Eastern Europe. Keywords research heritage, main trends of research activity, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the myths of Polish historiography, historiosophical synthesis, syllabic ties, mutual relations.

The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science

The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science

A Peircean account of concepts: grounding abstraction in phylogeny through a comparative neuroscientific perspective

The nature of concepts has always been a hotly debated topic in both philosophy and psychology and, more recently, also in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts have been proposed of what concepts are. These accounts reflect deeply different conceptions of how the human mind works. In the last decades, two diametrically opposed theories of human cognition have been discussed and empirically investigated: the Computational Theory of Mind, on the one hand (Fodor 1983 The modularity of mind: an essay on faculty psychology; Pylyshyn 1984 Computation and cognition: toward a foundation for cognitive science), and Embodied Cognition (Barsalou 2008 Annu. Rev. Psychol.59, 617-645. (doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639); Gallese & Lakoff 2005 Cogn. Neuropsychol.22, 455-479 (doi:10.1080/02643290442000310); Shapiro 2011 Embodied cognition), on the other hand. The former proposes that concepts are abstract and amodal symbols in the language of thought, while the latter argues for the embodied nature of concepts that are conceived of as grounded in actions and perception. The embodiment of both concrete and abstract concepts has been challenged by many (e.g. Mahon & Caramazza 2008 J. Physiol.102, 59-70. (doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.004); Caramazza et al 2014 Annu. Rev. Neurosci.37, 1-15. (doi:10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-013950)). These challenges will be here taken seriously and addressed from a comparative perspective. We will provide a phylogenetic and neurobiologically inspired account of the embodied nature of both abstract and concrete concepts. We will propose that, although differing in certain respect, they both might have a bodily foundation. Commonalities between abstract and concrete concepts will be explained by recurring to the Peircean notions of icon and abductive inference (CP 2.247). According to Peirce, icons are the kind of signs on which abductive inferences rest (Peirce CS 1931 in Collected papers of Charles S. Peirce, Hartshorne C, Weiss P, Burks AW. (eds), 40; Peirce CS 1997 In The 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism (ed. A. Turrisi)). It will be claimed that the mechanism of Embodied Simulation (Gallese & Sinigaglia 2011 Trends Cogn. Sci.15, 512-519. (doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.09.003)) can be described as an icon (Cuccio V & Caruana F. 2015 Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation. Versus, n. 119, 93-103), and it will then be suggested that on these, basic natural signs rest, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, the capacity to conceptualize.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

A estética de Peirce como uma ciência dos fins ideais

Argumenta-se aqui que a melhor interpretação da estética de Peirce é como uma ciência normativa de fins ideais. As influências de Peirce neste particular incluem a noção de kalos de Platão, A educação estética do homem de Friedrich Schiller, e a arquitetônica kantiana. Baseada principalmente nos rascunhos de Minute Logic em 1902 e as Palestras de Harvard em 1903, as características essenciais de uma ciência normativa são discutidas e a relação da estética às outras duas ciências normativas da lógica e da ética é analisada. O conceito de Peirce de bondade estética é desenvolvido, e os critérios para o que ele considera como um summum bonum são examinados. As próprias formulações de Peirce do summum bonum são examinados, inclusive sua noção de razoabilidade concreta, como também uma explicação interessante dos ideais fundamentais encontrada em um fragmento de manuscrito de 1903. O artigo conclui com uma discussão entre o que é chamado de estética positiva e negativa de Peirce, entendido como duas abordagens diferentes à formulação de fins ideais.

“Man Himself is a Sign”: Emerson, C. S. Peirce, and the Semiosis of Mind

“Man Himself is a Sign”: Emerson, C. S. Peirce, and the Semiosis of Mind Austin Bailey (bio) In the 1890s, while living a life of relative isolation in the rural Pennsylvania woods, pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce engaged in a prolonged reflection on “the significance of his past while attempting to systematically present his mature metaphysical views.”1 According to Peirce’s own recollections, earlier seminal influences encompassed “the presence of his erudite father [the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce] and the eminent scientific, philosophic, and literary persons who visited his childhood home in Cambridge”—persons such as “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Theodore Parker, Francis Bowen, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Margaret Fuller, and, one whom he distinctly remembers, ‘Mr. Emerson’” (“C,” 217). Peirce’s father knew Emerson well. As cofounder with Emerson of the Saturday Club, Benjamin regularly hosted Emerson for dinner at the Peirce family home, and Charles even recalled “hearing Emerson deliver an address on nature” as one of his earliest and most formative childhood memories (“C,” 221–22). Emerson’s intellectual as well as literal proximity to Peirce extended well beyond childhood, however. As David Dilworth notes, in the early 1870s Emerson delivered a series of sixteen Harvard lectures [End Page 680] posthumously published under the title Natural History of Intellect (1893). One of his co-lecturers was “an upstart of a logician, mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, Charles S. Peirce, 30 or 31 years old at the time!”2 Peirce’s most direct (yet wry) allusion to Emerson’s influence comes in his 1892 essay, “The Law of Mind,” penned for the July edition of the Monist: “I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord,—I mean in Cambridge,—at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous mysticism of the East.” Peirce then notes that such thinkers have “implanted in my soul, unawares,” and that now, “after long incubation, [they have] come to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations.”3 As Peirce’s passage suggests, many of his own philosophical ideas then appeared to him as the belated—if logically more precise—inheritance of Emerson’s gnomic formulations. Peirce’s remark echoes Emerson’s proto-Darwinian image of the phylogenetic continuity of Mind in “The Poet”: “when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs … a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings … which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrevocably into the hearts of men” (EL, 459).4 As David O’Hara astutely observes, Peirce’s “repeated emphasis on influence through proximity [his being ‘reared in the neighborhood of Concord’] rather than through identity underscores Peirce’s belief that ideas are not discrete but spread continuously and organically.”5 According to Peirce’s mental law—what he calls synechism—“ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectability. In this spreading they [End Page 681] lose intensity … but gain generality and become welded with other ideas” (EP, 1:23). Peirce’s law entails an antinominalist metaphysics, for it rejects the notion that general ideas exist in name only. As Nicholas L. Guardiano puts it, nominalist conceptions of mind presuppose that ideas are “separate detached entities interacting in mechanistic fashion” (“C,” 220). For Emerson and Peirce, Mind—with a capital M—is diffuse, nondiscrete, and transcends embodiment in any one individual mind; “we are,” as Peirce puts it, “in a thought” more than “thoughts are in us” (G, 237).6 Subtending Peirce’s law of mind is his objective idealism or panpsychism, which posits Mind as primordial substance and matter as a degraded form of Mind—that is, Mind crystalized into physical law through habit. As Peirce claims, “it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct...

Пирс и парадокс лжеца

The liar paradox is a well-known logical and philosophical paradox, yet it has always been a tough call for professional philosophers, and it played a critical role in the history of philosophy, logic, and even mathematics. examine the works of the founder of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce and his approaches to this problem, and try to reconstruct the evolution of his views on this issue. We may approach the proposition This proposition is not from three points of view: its meaning, its truth value and its significance. The earliest Peirce's approach focuses on the meaning and truth value. He argues that the proposition This proposition is not is meaningless and at the same time both true and not true. He introduces this way of reasoning in the 1865 in his Harvard lectures on the logic of science. His second approach was presented in the article Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities, published in 1869. He rejected his earlier account and based a novel solution in truth value on a Scholastic philosopher Paul of Venice's statement that every proposition asserts its own truth. Thus, the proposition This proposition is not implies assertion of its own truth and at the same time says that it is not true; ergo it is false inasmuch it is self-contradictory. In 1903 Peirce rejected this approach because for any proposition it is true that it is not equivalent to proposition I assert this proposition. Peirce has never presented a third solution of the liar paradox, but there are three issues closely connected with the topic: Russell-Peirce connection, Peirce mature theory of truth, which may propose a way to solve the liar paradox focusing on its significance, and Peirce's development of triadic logic. discuss them in the second part of the article.