2021-07-07
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Saw’s Leibniz begins with an introduction by A. J. Ayer. Saw presents the philosopher in a manner with which I, as a historian of philosophy have great sympathy. She sees the corpus of his works as a living, holistic expression of his response to the great scientific, political and religious issues of his day. In Saw’s view, Leibniz considered philosophy and mathematics to be tools with which to reach a systematic response to those issues. Thus, questions like “what is the status of scientific knowledge” “how do we know the nature and structure of the universe” and “how can God have created the universe as a law-like structure while preserving free will for humans” provided the raison d'etre for the Theodicee, the Monadologyf New System, Discourse on Metaphysics and other writings. Interestingly, it was to answer just such questions that Emilie du Chatelet demonstrated how Leibniz’ metaphysics and Newton’s physics could be made consistent with each other.296 According to Saw,
He continually recommended his metaphysical system on the ground that it was compatible with the beliefs of all branches of the Christian Church. Indeed, many of his metaphysical doctrines developed from his attempt to find an account of material substance which would be equally acceptable to Catholic and Protestant theologians.297
Saw correctly notes that the supposed inability of Leibniz’s system to resolve inconsistencies such as that between the concept of the universe as a pre-established harmony with the theological doctrine that humans exercise a free will is not peculiar to Leibniz. When his system is properly understood, we see that it deals with these inconsistencies more satisfactorily than did other metaphysical systems.298
In Saw’s view, Leibniz’s choice of the metaphor of Monad as mirror is incompatible with his theory, and this conceptual confusion is in part what makes Leibniz so difficult for scholars.
At first sight the metaphor appears clear and adequate for the con-ception which Leibniz has in mind: that is, that changes taking place in one part of space have their counterpart in changes which are going on in another part of space, without there being, in the ordinary
sense of the word, a causal sequence of events connecting the two sets of changes. We can glance quickly backwards and forwards from a mirror to the room and notice the similarity between the real bee, buzzing in a vase of flowers, and its reflection in a mirror. If it moves from one flower to another, there is the reflected movement from one mirror flower to another, but this similarity is for a spectator who is watching the two sets of happenings and noting their correlation. If we are using the mirror metaphor, it is to explain not the similarity of changes for a spectator, but what we should call the correlation of real changes between real events. It is intended to offer us a picture of what happens, for instance when steel is drawn to a magnet. The metaphor is applicable in the sense that changes in one place lead us to expect changes in another place, but it is unsuitable in that mirroring leads us to expect a duplication of appearances in two places, while the state of affairs in the magnet is not duplicated by the state of affairs in the steel.299
The mirror metaphor creates other problems for Leibniz, Saw says.
The fact of the matter appears to be that Leibniz never put together his view of the simple substances mutually mirroring one another, and his view of their possession of properties. If he had, he would have seen that the notion of simple properties, all of them mutually compatible, will not do when we think of them as belonging to unique individuals which together form a series. Simple properties can form nothing but a collection, but a mere collection of properties cannot belong to a subject uniquely determined by its position in a series.300
Saw reportedly later contributed sections on Ockham and Leibniz to a volume called A Critical History of Western Philosophy, but I have been unable to verify this.
By the late 1950’s Ruth Saw’s interests in philosophy again took a turn, this time towards aesthetics. The publication of three articles on aesthetics in the early 1960’s coincided with her appointment as Professor of Aesthetics at the University of London, and her founding of the British Society of Aesthetics. Saw’s views on aesthetics were influential and were discussed by Smart and Margolis, among others. In “What is a ‘Work of Art’?”301 Saw addresses conventions for identifying something as a “work of art” or a person as an “artist,” and explores the
relationships between such diverse artistry as crafts and athletics. In “Sense and Nonsense in Aesthetics”302 she says:
... the proper work of aestheticians is to take note of psychological facts, of historical facts about art and criticism, of the judgments of critics and people in general, and to become clear about what we want to do with these facts. We have to be clear about what kind of question requires a factual answer and about the kinds of questions for which a factual answer would be irrelevant. We have to extract the assumptions implicit in the standards used by artists and critics when they talk about their work. This is a point at which it becomes important to take notice of the facts of the history of art and taste. When art changes its function in society, the standards by which people judge it change too.303
Art, she claimed, has much in common with language, and a theory of aesthetics would have much in common with philosophy of language. A satisfactory theory of aesthetics, like a satisfactory theory of language would have to account for the “facts” of aesthetic experience (what its constituent parts are), just as philosophy of language must account for what the constituent parts of linguistic experience are. A satisfactory theory of aesthetics must account for the components of a work of art (what counts as a work of art) just as philosophy of language must account for utterances, etc. Saw was, in essence sketching a meta-aesthetics. Her sketch, along with the views of Susanne Langer and Nelson Goodman are discussed by Joseph Margolis, in his “Art as Language.”304
Ninian Smart criticized the facts which Saw claimed a satisfactory theory of aesthetics must explain, and showed how, on Saw’s account, “aesthetic phenomena and judgements in and about cricket are properly part of the subject-matter of aesthetics.”305 In a reply to Smart, Saw conceded the point, urging that it did no harm to her meta-aesthetics. The Smart-Saw exchange generated some secondary literature by Wertz306 and by Best307 on sport as art form in which Wertz defends and Best criticizes Saw’s view. In a lengthy paper, “Art and the language of the emotions,”308 she considers the contributions that Gombrich and Fry have made to aesthetic theory and in that context, explores the question how art does communicate emotion.
Ruth Lydia Saw’s final publication was “The Logic of the Particular Case”.309 In that work Saw argued that a work is a work of art in part
because it is an instance of a “brilliant illumination” of a universal. As such, the definition of a unique person and of a work of art must be understood as comparable formal concepts. Although I have described Saw’s professional life as one of evolution from logic and philosophy of language in the early years to metaphysics in middle age and to aesthetics toward the end of her life, it is perhaps more apt to describe her professional life’s journey as a cycle. “The Logic of the Particular Case” was, like her first work, in the area of logic and philosophy of language; and, like her first work it was presented before the Aristotelian Society. Unlike her first work, it explored the logic of the language of aesthetic experience, thus bringing together several of her major philosophic interests.
26. Ivy MacKenzie: fl. 1902
Ivy MacKenzie was granted her B.Sc., M.A. and M.D. She was a member of the Aristotelian Society. Her interest in medicine is reflected in her two philosophical articles. “Sensation and Attention” explores the nature of organisms which possess sensory organs and react to environmental stimulation. MacKenzie questions the the capacity for sensation as we humans understand it in these organisms.310 “The Biological Basis of the Sense of Time” discusses the conception of time and space as it is related to theories of memory and evolutionary biology. MacKenzie attempts to look toward the origin of the ideas of time and space.311 MacKenzie’s writings focus on scientific examples and less on philosophical investigations.
27. Margaret Masterman Braithwaite: fl. 1905
Margaret Masterman Braithwaite was a student at Girton College in the 1930’s.
Masterman married and later published under the name Braithwaite. She participated in a symposium in 1949 with Farrell, and Mace. The symposium was titled “Causal Laws in Psychology” and Masterman identified three questions in her discussion. “These are 1) Scientific prediction, as being the function for which, in science, we have law, and of the necessity of establishing predictiveness in psychology; 2) That of causality, i.e., of the causal nexus and what its status is in science, and, more particularly, how indispensable it is in psychology; 3) that of the general scientific status of psychology.”312
Masterman’s other works focused on language and the exploration
of the field of psychology. She seemed particularly interested in the place of psychology in the realm of science. Masterman published “The Psychology of Levels of Will” in 1948 and “Words” in 1954. According to Alice Ambrose, Masterman recently died of a degenerative disease.
28. Margaret MacDonald: fl. 1907-1956
Margaret MacDonald was an abandoned child. As an adult, MacDonald never married, devoting herself instead to philosophical pursuits. She received her Ph.D. from Bedford College with the financial assistance of Lizzie Susan Stebbing.313 MacDonald was made a Cambridge fellow at Girton College in 1932. During 1933-1935, MacDonald studied under Wittgenstein and Moore at Girton College. During the year 1934-1935, Alice Ambrose and MacDonald shared notes taken during Wittgenstein’s lectures. Wittgenstein absolutely forbade his students to take notes in his class. MacDonald and fellow student, Alice Ambrose, secretly took notes during Wittgenstein’s lectures by hiding their notes in their skirts. MacDonald and Ambrose felt that the lectures were an important contribution to academic philosophy and later successfully convinced Wittgenstein to allow them to continue writing his lectures down. Ambrose compiled a draft of these notes several years later. Mr. Rush Rhees had offered the original draft of MacDonald’s notes to Ambrose for her compilation.314
Ambrose later published two volumes of Wittgenstein’s Lectures and the books were referred to as the blue and yellow books to reflect the color of the skirts where they hid their original notes.315 Ambrose wrote that “In addition to taking notes of lectures of 1933-1934, Ms. MacDonald and I took notes of his informal discussions in the intervals between dictation when, as he thought, and sometimes regretted, no record had been made of what he said. Subsequently, explicit per-mission was given us to continue with notetaking of his informal discussions.316
MacDonald edited the philosophical journal, Analysis for several years. From 1932 until her death in 1956, MacDonald was very active in academic philosophy. Her early published works focus on criticisms of several contemporary philosophers in an effort to develop her own views of the criterion of significance in philosophical discussion. In “Verification and Understanding” MacDonald criticizes C. S. Peirce’s notion that “the rational meaning of every proposition lies in the
future.”317 MacDonald does not believe that verifiability requires either that a proposition is tautologous, or that the proponent of a (true) propo-sition is, when uttering that the proposition is true, really asserting that when in the circumstances described by the proposition, the person uttering the proposition will undergo certain sensory experiences as described by the proposition.
In 1937 Margaret MacDonald was a symposiast at the joint meeting with the Mind Association along with Ryle and Berlin on the subject “Induction and Hypothesis.” Discussants included Ewing, Ayer, Moore and Stebbing.318 At that meeting, she also served as a discussant along with many of the same participants at a symposium by Stebbing, Ayer and Duncan Jones “Does Philosophy Analyse Common Sense?” We may assume that she received her doctorate around 1938 as she is first referred to as “Dr. Margaret MacDonald” in May 1938, when she pre-sented her paper “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy,” which was discussed by Max Black and others.319 The paper explored the burden of philosophers in their quest to arrive at convictions of belief and meaning. The scientist implements a method to prove his convictions, while the philosopher must rely on his own reasoning and opinions. MacDonald points out that there is no accepted criterion for the method of the philosopher.320 MacDonald concludes that perhaps “philosoph-ical problems can be solved by understanding how language is ordinarily used, how certain uses of it have provoked these problems and how it has been misused in many alleged situations.”321
In 1938, MacDonald began teaching at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She was a discussant at a December, 1938 meeting of Max Black’s “Some Problems Connected with Language,” along with Ayer, Stebbing, Mace, Acton and others. In 1940 she was a discussant at Christchurch Oxford (with the Oxford Philosophical Society) of Katkov’s “The Pleasant and the Beautiful.”
MacDonald’s later works focused on aesthetics. In “Art and Imagination” published in 1953, MacDonald rejected the general answer to questions regarding art, preferring instead to explore the complexities of discourse about art, and the logic of language. MacDonald suffered from a heart condition and in 1956 had surgery at St. Thomas Hospital in London. She died on January 7, 1956 during her recovery from surgery. Her obituary for the journal Analysis which she had edited was written by Ruth Saw.
29. Helen M. Smith: fl. 1907
Miss Helen M. Smith of Kelso, Scotland became a member of the Aristotelian Society in 1932 and gave a paper, “Mr. Bertrand Russell on Perception.” She was inactive for several years until her presentation at a joint session with the Mind Association and Scots Philosophical at St. Andrew’s in 1936 where she gave a paper on the subject “Is there a Problem of Sense Data?” She served as a discussant along with Stebbing, Black and Ayer on Mace’s “Physicalism” in 1937. In 1938 at a joint meeting with the Mind Association she was a discussant along with Ewing, Ross, Price, Ayer, Ryle, Wisdom and others of H. A. Prichard’s paper “The Sense Datum Fallacy.”
