[lit-ideas] Cabbages and Kings (Was: Telos)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 16:31:55 EDT
The time has come," the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
In a message dated 10/4/2004 3:55:40 AM Eastern Standard Time,
JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx writes:
>In Ancient Greece there was a word ["arete"] that meant
>(roughly) "virtue", which actually meant that
>something functioned according to its intended purpose
> -- an arrow which flew from a bow and shot something
>was behaving "virtuously", while a pitcher which was
>intended to pour water, if it struck the same animal
>and killed it, was not.
-----
Again, I'm not sure the Greeks used 'virtue' (arete), but they possibly did.
As I mentioned in the other post, that Donal McEvoy commented ("a
philosopher bullshitter"), Grice gives two examples:
A tiger tigerises.
-- which Donal McEvoy sees as _essentialist_ while I see as slightly
'tautological'.
The other example Grice gives is the cabbage that cabbages:
Grice writes:
"It does not require very sharp eyes, but only the willingness to use the
eyes one has, to see that our speech -- and our thought -- are permeated with
the notion of _purpose_ [Greek 'telos', rather than 'arete' -- JLS]."
"To say that a certain kind of thing [x -- JLS] _is_ is, only too
frequently, *partly* to say what it is for."
"This feature applies to our talk and thought of, for example, ships, shoes,
sealing wax, and kings; and, possibly and perhaps more excitingly, it
extends even to cabbages."
[The reference is to Lewis Carroll -- JLS]
"I suspect that it applies to items which are related, in one or another of
a variety of ways, to the notion of _life_ (including that notion itself)."
(Grice, _Aspects of Reason_, Clarendon Press, p. 35).
Cheers,
JL
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