[lit-ideas] Prince Maurice's Parrot
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 21:19:38 EDT
Galen on Natural Faculties -- and Arendt and Grice
Helm, who likes to read -- and share with this list, which I love -- his
sharing and the list:
"so bought another of
her books, The Life of the Mind. I was surprised to learn that she
apparently wasn't completely sure what she meant after Eichmann and began
this three part work on Thinking, Willing, and Judgment, except she died
before she could complete the third part."
Yes, said. If Heaven should exist for _something_ is to allow philosophers
to complete their unfinished books. Grice had a MS on his bedstand too, "The
Eschatology for a New Discourse on Metaphysics" in 8 volumes, and only the
first two pages were completed.
But back to Arendt, I see a lot of parallelism with Grice, in their attempt
to go to the _root_ of things.
I notice some differences, though.
Grice was _obsessed_ with 'judging' and 'willing'. These concepts he
elaborated along the lines of Oxford philosophy of mind, notably Ryle and
Prichard
-- "willing that..." versus "willing to...") But I don't think he WOULD
distinguish, as Arendt apparently does, between:
thinking
and
judging.
Grice's idea, ultimately Cartesian, is that there are TWO and only TWO
faculties of the mind, the will and the intellect, as W. Oksh. also pointed
out.
In "From the banal to the bizarre" Grice attempts to REDUCE 'judging' to
"willing" -- and he succeeds. He notes, however, that a similar reduction of
'willing' to judging would be possible.
Personally, being a classicist, I use 'Greek' terms for these two abilities
(dunameis) of the mind, as Galen calls them -- in LCC --.
I use
'doxa' (or 'doxastic') for the cognitive side (after Gk. 'belief' as
opposed to 'knowledge')
and I use
'boulomaic' (from Gk. 'boule', will) for the volitive side.
-- In a dual scheme like that -- which can be reduced to a monist scheme --
there does not seem to be a place for a distinction between 'judging' and
'thinking'.
But then it's back to Prince Maurice's Parrot -- discussed by Locke and
Geary ("I guess the parrot is saying, "If I parrot, he will feed me").
Cheers,
JL
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