'Dictor/Descriptor Philosopher, Colleague of H. P. Grice, Passes'.
R. M. Hare quotes H. P. Grice in a number of publications.
On p.59 of his _Freedom and Resentment_, he refers to Grice's contribution
to the Aristotelian Society, vis-a-vis what we may call the "odd but true"
distinction. Hare is discussing the moral dictum, 'ought implies can'. Hare
writes: "it is the inconsistency or incomprehensibility or falsity of some
utterance on some occasion that tells us about the logical properties of
the words used -- not mere misleadingness or inappropriateness".
A second reference is on pp.25ff of his _Practical Inferences_. This
corresponds to his 'Some alleged differences between imperatives and
indicatives' (_Mind_, vol. 76) -- and the reference is again to the
aforementioned symposium. It is interesting that a footnote on p.25 reads
that Hare's essay was first read to a colloqium at Manchester -- only 4
years after Grice's own essay was read -- and yet Hare's use Grice's
concoction of the 'implicature' of which Grice will make full use in 1967
for the _Logic & Conversation_ Lectures. Hare avails of Grice's notion of
conversational implicature to explain away, as it were, the oddity of some
inferences involving imperatives ("Put on your parachute and jum;
therefore, jump"; "Post the letter; therefore, post it or burn it", etc.).
On p. 81 of his _Moral Thinking_ Hare refers to Grice's 'In defense of a
dogma' (in _Studies in the Way of Words_): i.e. the 'dogma of empiricism'
so called by Quine of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Hare shares with
the early Grice (for the latter Grice's view see 'Reply to Richards' in R.
Grandy's _Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories,
Ends_, pp.54 ff) some optimism re the distinction as it applies to some
'moral' contexts involving, for example, the modal 'ought' ("One ought to
do his duty").
As far as Grice quoting Hare is concerned, Grice refers to Hare as one of
the members of the Play Group that would meet, upon Austin's strict
invitation at various colleges in Oxford mainly throughout the fifties.
Grice is replying to the critic such as Gellner or Bergman who would refer
to 'Oxford analytic philosophy of ordinary language' _en bloc_: [leaving
aside _Ryle's_ little own group of seniors], "within the Play Group, great
diversity was visible, as one would expect of an association containing
people with the ability and independence of mind of Austin, Strawson,
Hampshire, Paul, Pears, Warnock, and Hare (to name a few)." ('Reply to
Richards', p.50).
The next important quote of Grice is not so much to _Hare_ per se but to
his _phrastic_. As early as 1952, Hare, making as he says using of the
Liddell-Scott _Greek Lexicon_ 'improved' on the terminology of his
'Imperative Sentences' (_Mind_, 58) -- the descriptor-dictor distinction --
by coining the phrastic-neustic distinction ('neustic' has other uses in,
for example, ecology, though). The 'phrastic' (from a Greek verb meaning
'to point out or indicate') is the common element in various utterances;
the 'neustic' is the element which distinguishes them (from a Greek verb
meaning 'to nod assent'). Hare will go on to refine this fine distinction
in e.g. Phil. Rev. 79) with the 'tropic' (from the Greek word for 'mode' or
'mood') thus freeing the neustic from this signalling function, and the
'clistic' -- Hare's word -- from the Greek verb 'to close' -- for that
aspect of the utterance (already in Frege's vertical stroke of his
'judgement sign') which represents 'completeness'. Now, Grice refers to the
_phrastic_ at least twice. In 'Retrospective Epilogue', he writes that he
will "perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or
another, have drawn a distinction between 'phrastics' and 'neustics,'
philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of
discourse lay a special emphasis on
(a) the content of items of discourse whose
merits or demerits will lie in such features
as correspondence or lack of correspondence
with the world, and
(b) the mode or manner in which such items are
advanced, for example declaratively or
imperatively, or (perhaps one might equally
well say) firmly or tentatively.
(Grice, _Studies in the Way of Words_ p.367). In _Aspects of Reason_, he
avails (again) of the distinction. Regarding 'John should join AA' and
'John should be recovering his health by now' he mentions the 'radical' (a
term which he borrows from Wittgenstein') and writes: "I am thinking of a
radical in pretty much the same kind of way as recent writers who have used
that term (or the term 'phrastic')."
There will be, indeed, further 'interface' between Hare and Grice, and I'm
working on it.
[R. M. Hare who was a colleage of Grice for thirty years or so in the
University of Oxford, passed away in Ewelme, Oxfordshire, on Jan. 29. 2000.
May he rest in peace.]
Selected bibliography of R. M. Hare in the philosophy of language (Compiled
by J. L. S.):
1949. Imperative sentences. Mind 58. Repr. _Practical Inferences_.
1950. Practical reason. Thesis awarded the T. H. Green Prize in Moral
Philosophy. Oxford. Examiners: H. J. Paton and G. Ryle. Becomes Part I of
_Language of Morals_. Extract from passage on the 'ambiguity' of the Frege
'assertion' sign which he 'wrongly ommitted' in _Language of Morals_ repr.
in _Practical Inferences_ as an 'Appendix' to 'Imperative Sentences'.
1951. Review of Toulmin, _Place of Reason in Ethics_. PQ 1. A discussion of
the relevance of what Grice will later call the 'univocality' of 'reason'
in _Aspects of Reason_.
1952. The Language of Morals. Clarendon. Sections: Imperatives & logic. The
imperative "mood". Revised edition 1961. Hare distinguishes between the
imperative mode proper (as it applies to verbal conjugation), 'ought'
utterances and other utterances involving modals -- notably 'should' and
'must' --, and 'good'. Grice refers to the once fashionable theory of
holding 'x is good' = 'I commend x' in 'Prolegomena' to _Logic &
Conversation_ in _Studies_.
1955. Universalisability. PAS. Repr Essays on the moral concepts. Grice's
discussion of this in terms of what he calls the 'Immanuel' -- a part of
which may well comprise his famous 'Cooperative Principle' -- in _The
Conception of Value_. Grice here refers to "various kinds of generality
which are connected with familiar discussions of universalisability" (p.144).
1956. Review of Nowell-Smith, _Ethics_. Philosophy 31. This book by
Nowell-Smith is usually credited as incorporating some maxim of 'relevance'
prior to Grice, even in term of some kind of pragmatic implication (what
Hare would have as a 'loose sense of 'imply'') which Nowell-Smith calls
_contextual_.
1957. Are discoveries about the use of words empirical. JP 54. Repr. in
_Essays in Philosophical Method_. Hare's most explicit predicament in
philosophical methodology. Interesting to compare with Grice's own attitude
to 'conceptual' analysis in _Studies_ and elsewhere. ('Implicature' as a
_methodological_ notion for the philosopher).
1957. Geach: good & evil. _Analysis_ 13. Repr. in Essays in the moral
concepts. Further comments on 'good'. Expands on what in _Language of
Morals_ he says of functional words. Hare's functional words (his paradigm
is 'auger') compares to Grice's notion of _value-paradigmatic_ terms in
_Aspects of Reason_ ("to know what a good x is is prior to know what an x
is").
1962. Review of Singer, _Genersalisation in Ethics_. PQ 12. Hare's thesis
('universal prescriptivism') is that ought utterances entail imperatives
and conform to the Biblical golden rule ("do as you are done by"). It is
natural that he found support for his thesis in the work of Singer.
1963. Freedom & reason. Clarendon. Ref. to Grice, 'The causal theory of
perception', cited above.
1965. Critical study of Wright. PQ. Hare liked to say that he enjoyed
contributing to the issue of 'deontic' logic in an 'amateur' way -- e.g.
his TV interview with B. Magee, _Men of Ideas_. This is one such instance.
1967. Some alleged differences between imperatives & indicatives. _Mind_
76. Repr. in _Practical Inferences_. Originally delivered at Manchester in
1965. Explicit ref. to 'conversational implicature' as used by Grice.
Mentioned above. The critic being Hare's student at Oxford -- who'll later
succeed him as White's Prof. of Moral Philosophy: B. A. O. Williams (in
_Analysis_, 1963, p. 32).
1969. Practical inferences. Repr. in _Practical Inferences_.
1970. Meaning & speech acts. PR 79. Repr. Practical Inferences_. Sections
include: 'neustics, tropics, & phrastics'. Cited by G. N. Leech in
_Principles of Pragmatics_, and cfr. entry for 'phrastic' in the Oxford
Encyclopaedia of Linguistics and K Allan's 'Hare's trichotomy' in the
Survey of Linguistics. Hare expands turns the trichotomy into a quartette
in 'Some particles' below and he is never dogmatic as to the _number_ of
particles to posit!
1971. _Practical Inferences_. London: Macmillan.
1971. Reply to Warnock on 'Meaning and speech acts'. In 1971. The reply
concerns mainly Hare's view on the meaning of 'x is good' vis a vis
arguments of the Gricean kind as expressed (with regard to 'good' even) in
_Logic and Conversation_ (Studies, p.9).
1971. Austin's distinctions between locutionary & illocutionary acts. In
_Practical Inferences_.
1971. Austin's use of the word 'meaning' & its cognates. In 1971. Hare is
concerned with the issue, which also concerns 'Griceans' -- how much of
'meaning' is _illocutionary_ and how much of it is _perlocutionary_?
1972. _Essays on the moral concepts_. London: Macmillan. Contents:
Wrongness and harm.
1972. _Applications of moral philosophy_. London: Macmillan.
1976. Some confussions about subjectivity. The Lindley Lecture. In J.
Bricke, Freedom and Morality. The issue concerned Grice, in e.g. _The
Conception of Value_ (ch. I: Value and Objectivity).
1978. Prediction & moral appraisal. Mid-West Studies 3.
1978. Relevance. In A Goldman, _Values and Morals_, Reidel. Some general
terms of 'relevance' as relevant to the universabilisability thesis. As he
says in his interview with B. Magee, "what is sauce for the goose is not
necessarily -- pace the Sex Discrimination Act -- sauce for the gander --
there may be _relevant_ differences (a gander can't lay eggs) -- but for
any precisely similar goose".
1979. What makes choices rational. Rev. Met. 32. Grice discusses the topic
at length in _Aspects of Reason_. E.g. on p.83 ff: the man who is invited
by his mother to visit her in Milwaukee, but his firm in Redwood City is
about to do its accounts and he is head accountant. Plus, he is then
'suddenly reminded that his wife has just had a bad car accident and is
lying in hospital in Boise, Idaho, with two broken legs and internal
injuries".
1979. Universal and past-tense prescriptions. Analysis 39. As early as his
'Imperative Sentences', Hare, defying all linguisic arguments (Hare was
especially keen on Boyd/Thorne and Ross), says that the imperative mode is
in principle applicable to all persons and tenses. Grice similarly frees
the imperative mode of any 'phrastic' restriction in _Aspects of Reason_
when he says that 'The sergeant is to muster the men at dawn' is a
"perfectly good imperative" (p.54). Hare's most explicit linguistic ref.
here is to Hindustani, where, he says (in 'Imperative Sentences') that a
form is found in that language "very like a first-person singular
imperative, which means, by courteous implication, 'Please command me
to...'".
1981. _Moral thinking: its levels, method & point_. Clarendon. Contents
include: the Archangel & the Prole, Universalisation. Prudence, morality &
supererogation. Objectivity and rationality.
1984. Supervenience. PASS 58. Repr. Essays in Ethical Theory. The term was
taken by some Griceans (e.g. A. Avramides, of Somerville, in her _Mind and
Meaning: An examination of a Gricean account of language_) to deal with the
difficult issue of the interface between the semantic and the
psychological. The term is introduced by Hare in _Language of Morals_, with
regards to 'moral properties' only.
1986. A reductio ad absurdum of descriptivism. In Shanker. 'Descriptivism'
is Hare's favourite terms for any theory which opposes his. His own brand
of _prescriptivism_ arose against Ayer's _emotivism_ (cfr. Grice's ref. to
C. Stevenson in 'Meaning'), but emotivism can easily adopt a
_descriptivist_ format if one holds, for example that to utter an
indicative is to express a _belief_ and to utter an imperative is to
express a _desire_. Naturally enough, Grice was quite concerned with these
issues, too.
1988. Replies to Critics. In _Hare & Critics_, ed. N. Fotion.
1989. :Essays in ethical theory_. Clarendon. Contents: A reductio ad
absurdum of descriptivism. Supervenience. Relevance. Some confusions about
subjectivity.
1989. Some subatomic particles of logic. _Mind_98, vol. Repr. in
_Universal prescriptions and other essays_. Perhaps my favourite of Hare's
essay. Intended as a festchrift for his Oxford colleague J. O. Urmson, it
was not printed by Stanford University Press -- they would not accept his
punctuations. Refines the descriptor-dictor (neustic-cum-tropic vs
phrastic) distinction vis a vis the _tropic_. Expands on various problems
including truth-conditional semantics and its interface with pragmatics
("We need to know the satisfaction- or beng-the-case-conditions of the
phrastic in order to understand the entire sentence, and one simple way of
conveying this understanding is to say what would be the _truth-conditions_
of the corresponding indicative. [...] It does not follow from this that
the complete indicative has somehow to appear inside the imperative [he is
discussing such a proposal by J. Hornsby in _Mind_]. The thought that it
does may be due to the _prejudice_ [my emphasis. JLS] that
_truth_-conditions are basic to all kinds of meaning, whereas they are
basic, if at all, only to the meanings of indicatives." An interesting
topic here is Hare's reluctance though to say that there _is_ a
corresponding notion to 'truth-condition' notion for imperatives here (e.g.
ala Grice 'satisfaction-condition' in 'Retrospective Epilogue' to
_Studies_). Thus in 'Some alleged differences...' he says of Kenny's
satisfaction/satisfactoriness logic (discussed at length by people like JD
Atlas, SC Levinson and M Gordon) that it 'attempts to find a value which
will play the part in imperative logic which is played by truth in
indicative logic. [...] Many [...] have been led astray by the search of
such a truth substitute. One problem is indeed pointed out by Grice
(_Aspects of Reason_, p.89): "What do we say [about "~"] in cases like 'Let
it be that my bicycle faces north', in which (at least on occasion, it
seems to be that neither "!p" nor "!~p" is either satisfactory or
unsatisfactory? ... Do we assign a _third_ value to "!p" (practically
neuter), or do we say that we have a 'practical value' gap?" [Grice's
amusing ref. to Strawson's eccentric thesis!].
1989. Philosophy of language in ethics. In M. Dascal, Gruyter.
1989. _Essays on political morality_.
1993. _Essays in bioethics_.
1997. _Sorting out ethics_.
1999. _Objective prescriptivism & other essays_. Clarendon. Contents
include: Objective Prescriptions; Prescriptivism; Some Subatomic
Particles of Logic; Imperatives, Prescriptions, and their Logic; A New Kind
of Ethical Naturalism?; Professor Foot on Subjectivism. [Philippa Foot
being also in part the target of attack in Grice's _Conception of Value_];
Weakness of the Will [a favourite topic with Grice, e.g. in 'The Weakness
of the Will' in B. Vermazen and M. Hintikka, _Actions and Events_, and for
which Hare's theory is usually said to provide no good solution]. ('The
phrastic and the neustic -- and the tropic and the clistic', 'Quantum
Pragmatics', and further references).
===
From obit. in
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/humanities/story/0,9850,642990,00.html
R. M. Hare -- Influential philosopher who devoted his life to 'answering
moral questions rationally'. By J. O'Grady. Feb 1, 2002. The Guardian.
Professor R M Hare, who has died aged 82, was one of the most influential
moral philosophers of the mid-20th century. When he began teaching at
Oxford after the second world war, he was determined to refute the
fashionable "boo-hooray" theory of ethics - emotivism - propounded by AJ
Ayer and Charles Stevenson, which held that moral statements were really no
more than expressions of emotion. Hare's theory of prescriptivism argued
that moral statements can achieve objectivity, but of a rational rather
than factual sort. First expounded in Language And Morals (1952), and
refined in Freedom And Reason (1963) and his later books, prescriptivism -
and the opposition to it - took centre-stage in moral philosophy throughout
the 1950s and 60s. Hare was born of dissenting English stock - landowners
and small businessmen. His father owned a paint and floorcloth company
founded by an 18th-century ancestor, and Hare maintained that one of the
things that turned him to moral philosophy was guilt at his family's
comparative prosperity during a time of high unemployment. As a scholarship
boy at Rugby school, he did a lot of work with the unemployed. But the
recession of the 1920s hit the family firm, and the fruitless struggles of
Hare's father to save it brought on a fatal heart attack when Hare was only
12. His mother died five years later, and, for the next 17 years, until his
marriage to Catherine Verney in 1953, his life was, in his words, "a night
of bad dreams". In 1937, Hare won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.
A further spur to his becoming a moral philosopher came from agonising over
whether or not to be a pacifist in the impending war. Munich finally
decided him: he joined the Officers Training Corps in 1938, and, when
Germany invaded Poland, immediately volunteered for the Royal Artillery.
Failing his first medical, due to bad eyesight, he contrived to override
the restrictions and get active service overseas. Discrepancies of wealth
in India, where he was posted, provided further material for philosophical
reflection, as did the straightforwardly mercenary attitudes to war of the
"delightful" Punjabi soldiers he trained. While on leave, he sat down in
his uncle's billiard-room and wrote a 20-page treatise, "my philosophy",
but it was lost to the enemy among baggage captured during the Malayan
campaign. Hare himself got lost twice in the Malayan jungle, suffered
severe malaria, and was taken prisoner after the fall of Singapore in 1942.
In later life, he was characteristically reticent about the ordeals of his
3 years as a Japanese PoW, except to say that he and his fellow-prisoners
were kept alive by the vegetables they grew; he learned Persian and
Italian; and he managed to write a page or two every few days of
philosophical thoughts in "a beautiful ledger" he had looted from the
office of the notorious Changi jail. He nearly died on the long march up
the River Kwai, but carried the ledger on his back throughout. For eight
months, he worked as a coolie on the Burma railway. Hare returned to Oxford
in 1945, and was appointed a fellow of Balliol (1947-66); he went on to
become White's professor of moral philosophy, also at Oxford (1966-83), and
a professor at the University of Florida (1983-94). Emotivism, in its
heyday in the late 1940s, must, after the horrors of war, have seemed still
more irksome than when he had challenged it before. For if approval or
disapproval is all that moral statements convey, then how can they avoid
being merely arbitrary and subjective, or exert any weight except by means
of propaganda? Hare accepted the emotivist premise that moral judgments do
not, in the same way as ordinary statements do, state matters of fact that
are either true or false, but denied that therefore they must be forms of
exclamation. Rather, he argued, they are forms of command. However, unlike
normal commands, which simply reflect one's preferences, they are
"universalisable" - they commit one, in saying an action ought or ought not
to be done (or in calling it good or bad) to similarly prescribing (or
commending) a similar action to anyone else in similar circumstances. Thus,
in morally choosing, one is forced to take account of other people's
preferences, and to bind oneself to one's own prescriptions. Hare's account
seemed cleverly to reconcile the contradictory but essential elements in
morality - that it necessarily combines both choice and compulsion, emotion
and reason, the intensely personal and particular with the universal.
Prescriptivism was eagerly taken up, and, for a time, moral philosophy was
dominated by Hare, and then by the combat between Hare and fellow Oxford
philosopher Philippa Foot, after an article by her in 1958. Foot accused
Hare of being too concerned with the logical structure of moral language to
capture what is important in morality: human well-being - just because one
can universally prescribe the practice of clasping hands together thrice a
day does not make doing so into anything recognisably moral. But Hare
insisted that prescriptivism generated substantial content out of logical
form, that a structure drawn from Kant concerning individual decisions
resulted in preference-satisfaction utilitarianism (the maximisation of the
preferences of the greatest possible number of people). He thus purported
to combine two moral theories, Kantianism and utilitarianism, normally
considered polar opposites. As for the jarringly counter-intuitive
conclusions to which utilitarianism can lead, he sought to avoid these by
distinguishing two levels of moral thinking: an intuitive "prole" level for
everyday use, and a critical "archangelical" level to which we resort when
needing to resolve conflicts between those automatic, routine convictions.
There were also objections that prescriptivism fails to account for
weak-willed people who sincerely - Hare would have to say "insincerely" -
prescribe actions they fail to perform themselves; or for the fanatic who
is happy to prescribe frightful principles even if they hurt him (the
Jewish Nazi); or for the amoral person who refuses to prescribe at all.
Hare professed to have satisfactorily adjusted prescriptivism so as to
resolve these problems, thus achieving "my life's ambition - to find a way
of answering moral questions rationally". He felt, he once said, that all
philosophers were sitting in a basement room, and he had found the way out
to a beautiful garden, although no one else could see it. For
prescriptivism went out of fashion. The moral debate became less centred,
both in geography, as Oxford was supplanted by various American
universities, and in subject matter. Moral philosophers became less
concerned with meta-ethics (analysing moral concepts) than with ethics
itself - evaluating human conduct and character, and tackling practical
moral issues. Hare himself did work in the latter field, especially in
bio-ethics, and he also worked on urban planning. But, until the end of his
life, he continued to refine and clarify his original theory: Sorting Out
Ethics appeared in 1997, and Objective Prescriptions And Other Essays in
1999. Hare always claimed that his critics misunderstood him. Saddened by
the decline of prescriptivism's star, he once had a half-waking vision of
having victoriously scaled a mountain, only to find the graves of
philosophers who, buoyed up by the same perhaps illusory aspirations as
himself, had been nibbled away by "philosophical worms" into surprisingly
similar skeletons. But he said he was lucky, unlike Plato and Kant, who
changed their minds, to have started off on the right track almost at the
outset. However, according to his most illustrious student, Bernard
Williams, Hare, in fact, changed his theory considerably over the years,
although he himself never admitted this. The stubborn determination that
had sustained Hare as a PoW informed his idiosyncratic mores, his
insistence that present-giving is illogical, and his refusal to wear socks
or drink coffee. So, too, did the heroic moral seriousness which made him
so intensely concerned not just with moral philosophy but, above all, with
how to live morally. He leaves his much-loved wife Catherine, daughters
Bridget, Louise and Ellie, and son John, who teaches philosophy at Calvin
College, Michigan. Richard Mervyn Hare, philosopher, born March 21 1919;
died January 29 2002
From obit at
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=118389
(By C. Taylor, 6 Feb. 2002). Prof R. M. Hare. R. M. Hare was one of the
most influential moral philosophers of the post-war era. His first book,
_The Language of Morals_, did much to set the agenda for the subject in the
English-speaking world for at least a generation after its publication in
1952. Hare had a conventional upper middle-class upbringing, at Rugby and
Balliol, and combined the impeccable manners of that background with a
passionate conviction of the practical importance of philosophy, and also
with an unusually close identification of himself with his theoretical
views. This arose in part from an agonising sense of the impotence of the
analytic philosophy of the Thirties, which he had encountered at Balliol,
to cope with the choice, forced on him by the imminent outbreak of war,
between pacifism and enlistment. He eventually resolved that problem by
volunteering in the Royal Artillery. Another source of this deeply personal
engagement with the subject was his experience as a prisoner of the
Japanese from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the end of the the Second
World War. His earliest work in philosophy (never published) dates from
that period, and he was conscious of attempting to develop a system which
should serve as a guide to life in the harshest conditions. The experience
marked him, as it did everyone who underwent it, but one of the many
impressive features of his character was his total lack of rancour towards
his captors and the Japanese people in general. Indeed, he was particularly
pleased by the high reputation which his work enjoyed in Japan in the
post-war era. A characteristic feature of his philosophical method was its
reliance on the imaginative feat of putting oneself in another person's
position and choosing rules to follow when in that position. This too
stemmed in part from his wartime experience. To critics who complained that
this method required them to imagine being people whom they could not
possibly be, he would reply, "I can perfectly well imagine being a Burmese
coolie; I actually was one for a time". Returning to Balliol after the war,
he resumed his interrupted course in Greats, taking a First in 1947.
Elected almost immediately to a tutorial fellowship he embarked on the
arduous teaching duties required in a university swollen by several
generations of returning ex-servicemen, and simultaneuosly on _The Language
of Morals_. Though very much a product of its time, in that it was heavily
influenced both by the emotivism of A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson, and by
the ordinary language philosophy of J.L. Austin and the later
Wittgenstein's view of meaning as use, the book was genuinely
ground-breaking in its attempt to combine ethical non-cognitivism with
constraints of rationality. The essential character of moral discourse
consisted, not, as the Emotivists had held, in its links with subjective
attitudes, but with action. Moral judgements were prescriptive, in that
they expressed commitments to action on the part of the person uttering
them, and at the same time their rationality was assured by their
universalisability, i.e. their property of applying not merely to the
person uttering them, but to all similar persons in similar circumstances.
A consequence of the first feature was that it was impossible for someone
sincerely to make a moral judgement, such as "I ought to give more to
charity" and not to act on it. This denial of the possibility of weakness
of will (a view which Hare shared with Socrates, but for different reasons)
was seized on by critics as a crucial weakness in the system, while
universalisability was criticised as guaranteeing no more than consistency
in a system which could be embraced by someone of the most appalling views,
for example a fanatical Nazi. Hare's response to these and other criticisms
was, throughout his life, robust and uncompromising. He developed and
refined his views in two other major books, _Freedom and Reason_ (1963) and
_Moral Thinking_ (1981) and in many articles and responses to critics in
volumes (in several languages) devoted to his work, but he made little or
no concession to criticism. It has to be said that his insistence that
criticism of his views stemmed from misunderstanding made discussion with
him somewhat unrewarding and gave a certain repetitive quality to much of
his later work. His own views did, however, develop in one major respect.
Utilitarianism, which had been a subsidiary theme in his earlier work, came
to the fore in _Moral Thinking_, to such an extent that he claimed that it
could be _logically_ derived from prescriptivism and universalisablity, and
he subsequently thought of himself primarily as a Utilitarian. Here, too,
the claim that commitment to one's own preferences logically requires one
to embrace everyone's preferences as one's own, and thereby embrace
Utilitarianism, seemed to many to assume a simplistic philosophy of mind,
however luminous its truth appeared to Hare himself. As a tutor Hare was
formidable, immensely challenging and stimulating to those with a bent for
the subject. He carried his total commitment to his theories into the
tutorial situation, meeting opposition with apparently infinite resource in
argument, always expressed with total courtesy. Some of his pupils
subsequently became major philosophers, including Brian McGuinness, John
Lucas and Bernard Williams, who succeeded him in the White's Chair of Moral
Philosophy at Oxford. Hare's election to the Oxford Chair in 1966 took him
from Balliol to Corpus, where he remained a Fellow till his retirement in
1983. He was a highly respected member of the Governing Body, where his few
mild eccentricities, such as his habit of wearing shoes without socks, were
less alarming to his colleagues than he perhaps imagined. His immediate
predecessors in the chair, J.L. Austin and W.C. Kneale, had not been
primarily moral philosophers, and the subject was at something of a low ebb
when he took over. The present situation, by contrast, in which it is one
of the liveliest areas of graduate study in Oxford, owes not a little to
his initiative. On his retiral from Oxford he held for some years a
Research Professorship at the University of Florida at Gainesville,
dividing the year between Florida and his beloved Ewelme, in Oxfordshire,
where he was a considerable figure in the local community and the parish
church. He lectured widely in the US and in other countries, achieving an
increasingly wide reputation in Europe, where his work was the subject of
several conferences and composite volumes. In 1947 he married Catherine
Verney, who shared, among many other things, his love of music and of
Ewelme, and who was by his side in all aspects of his professional life,
not least as a generous hostess at the reading parties which he held for
his Balliol pupils at his brother-in-law's farmhouse at Rhoscollyn, near
Holyhead, Anglesey. In the last years of his life, when he was severely
handicapped by several strokes, her devotion enabled him to attend many of
the concerts and seminars which meant so much to him. Richard Mervyn Hare,
philosopher: Born: Backwell, Somerset 21 March 1919; Fellow and Tutor in
Philosophy, Balliol College, Oxford 1947-66 (Honorary Fellow 1974-2002);
Wilde Lecturer in Natural Religion, Oxford University 1963-66, White's
Professor of Moral Philosophy 1966-83; FBA 1964; Fellow, Corpus Christi
College, Oxford 1966-83 (Emeritus); Graduate Research Professor of
Philosophy, University of Florida at Gainesville 1983-94; married 1947
Catherine Verney (one son, three daughters); Died Ewelme, Oxfordshire 29
January 2002.
---J. L. The Grice Circle.
--
== J L Speranza, Esq Country Town St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8 Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021 La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124 Tel 00541148241050 Tel 00542214257817 BUENOS AIRES, Argentina Telefax 00542214259205 http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/ jls@netverk.com.ar
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