2021-07-07
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The final work in Bosanquet’s own name was not really a work of philosophy, rather it was an historical analysis of a social work movement. In its earliest conception, social work, founded by Jane Addams was an applied field of practical ethics. Its purpose was founded on two simple ideas about societies. First, societies have moral duties to provide moral leadership by encouraging individuals toward right action. Second, societies have moral duties to compensate for inequities in distribution of wealth, opportunities and rights through a combined system of social reform for the future and the provision of social services to the presently disadvantaged. Social Work in London54 recounted the history of social and moral principles implemented through the development of social services programs by the Charity Organization Society.
4. Jane Addams: 1860-1935
Jane Addams was born September 6, 1860 and lived 74 years.55 More appropriately she is considered a social activist and sociologist, never-theless some of her works are rightly considered to be works of social philosophy. Addams follows in that tradition of American women like Catherine Ward Beecher56 who attempted to reconcile their analyses of philosophical ethics with their social situation as women. Like Beecher and other feminists and pacifists, Addams employed the concept of “righteousness” as a standard not only of personal morality, but of social morality. As such, several of Addams’ many works deserve merit as examples of tum-of-the-century American social and political philosophy. On Jane Addams’ view, “righteousness” required that we go beyond the mere concerns that in our personal life we uphold the moral law, but seek outside our personal, familial and immediate social circles that which “the time” demands. Thus, a righteous individual looks
also at the social order. To do less is a moral shortcoming of a serious nature:
To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one’s self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.57
Rather, she applauds those who realize that “righteousness” imposes another requirement. Speaking approvingly of those who use the insights gained by contemplating the nature of personal virtue, she says:
The test which they would apply to their conduct is a social test. They fail to be content with the fulfillment of their family and personal obligations, and find themselves striving to respond to a new demand involving a social obligation; they have become conscious of another requirement, and the contribution they would make is toward a code of social ethics. The conception of life which they hold has not yet expressed itself in social changes or legal enactment, but rather in a mental attitude of maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence between their consciences and their conduct. They desire both a clearer definition of the code of morality adapted to present day demands and a part in its fulfillment, both a creed and a practice of social morality. In the perplexity of this intricate situation at least one thing is becoming clear: if the latter day moral ideal is in reality that of a social morality, it is inevitable that those who desire it must be brought in contact with the moral experiences of the many in order to procure an adequate social motive.58
Addams’ view was that democracy as a social philosophy required the widest type of accommodation of liberty of individual pursuits. Thus, she held that social institutions must be responsive to the widest range of views. In her view, society must be supportive of the rights and inter-ests of each individual in identifying and pursuing personal goals independent of race, nationality, creed, gender, disability or age. Education in its widest sense was a right of individuals and a responsi-bility of society.
In an article in the International Journal of Ethics in 1898, Addams makes a case for the responsibility to teach moral virtue in a way that respects moral pluralism.59 In that article she inquires what the limits
are on the duty to be just when one lives in inherently unjust and oppressive circumstances. The location is a Chicago Ward. The neighborhood is multicultural and therefore morally pluralistic with respect to values. The system of law is profoundly corrupt and the social conditions are profoundly impoverished and oppressive. There is neither social cohesiveness nor significant experience in self-government. The politicians are corrupt through and through. Addams asks how either moral virtue or the extent of the responsibility to obey the law can be assessed under such circumstances. Dismissing assessment of blameworthiness as besides-the-point, Addams focuses instead on the duty of the virtuous (herself, in particular!) to inculcate virtue and respect for law while respecting the plurality of values within the community and taking into account conditions that to some degree may be morally exculpatory.
Addams also had well-articulated views on women and morality. Like Beecher before her, she held that women naturally tend to be caring and nurturant, and that they have moral obligations to set an example of virtuous behavior. In The Long Road of Woman's Memory60 she urges women to overcome the past myths about women and to strive for self-determination. In her view, women, as victims of social and political oppression, but also as shapers of the consciences of men and of children were uniquely situated and therefore had a unique duty to influence the development and implementation of social ethics. These views are further developed in “Why Women Should Vote,”61 “Why Women are Concerned with the Larger Citizenship,”62 and in “The World’s Food Supply and Woman’s Obligation.”63 In “The College Woman and the Family Claim” (1898) she argued forcefully for recognition of women’s rights to college education supported by a social recognition that the educated woman cannot be considered to be shirking her moral duties towards her family if she chooses instead to put her education to use for social good.64
An early work, Philanthropy and Social Progress65 (1893) argued that in order to assure that individuals had opportunities to pursue their own interests, society, in the form of philanthropic and government efforts, needed to establish conditions of free inquiry. This meant the provision of safe living conditions, fair working conditions, protective legislation for women and children,66 and life-long educational opportunities in formal school settings for children and through adult education.
Jane Addams’ social philosophy applied far beyond the urban domestic spheres of social work. She was an ardent, committed pacifist. Newer
Ideals of Peace61 (1907), The Overthrow of the War System68 (1915), “Patriotism and Pacifists in War Time,”69 (1917), and other writings evidence not only a lifetime commitment to pacifism as a moral duty, but the breadth and connectedness of her philosophical views. From her basic views on the central role that moral “righteousness” played in individual and social ethics and her views on women’s special moral virtues and duties, she led the development of a social movement that applied her views on moral, social and political theory in a coherent system of social thought. She left behind a legacy as founder of the field of social work: the practical application of ethical ideals of justice, fairness and respect through personal activism, social reform and the provision of services to the needy and oppressed. That legacy is reflected in the vast bibliography of her own writings, as well as the secondary literature that it has generated. That she lived her moral ideals in part through her remarkable achievements as founder of Hull House, does not detract from the significance of her analysis of the relevance of applying philosophical thought to contemporary events.
5. Elizabeth S. Haldane: 1862-1937
Elizabeth Haldane was the only daughter of a wealthy Scottish family. She was tutored at home and always had an interest in philosophy. Despite the lack of a university education, she translated Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy70 over a period of ten years in collaboration with Frances Simson. The three published volumes are still the standard English edition. She was the first woman to receive the honorary LL.D. from St. Andrews University.
Haldane wrote a biography of Descartes71 in 1905. Shortly thereafter Haldane began to work with G. R. T. Ross to provide the first complete English translation of Descartes’ philosophical works. Their translation was published in two volumes in 1911 and 1912.72 A. E. Taylor com-mented that “the translation as a whole, may be commended as a faithful, though not always an elegant, reproduction of the original.”73 Haldane defended her translation by responding to Taylor’s criticisms in Mind. There, she argued that Taylor’s criticism of the scope of the book was unfounded. She pointed out that certain limitations of text had to be made because including additional text would have meant including the scientific writings in the same volume as the philosophical. Instead, Haldane and G. R. T. Ross chose to create a distinction between the philosophical and scientific portions of Descartes’ writings.74
According to Kersey, Haldane received recognition for her commit-ment to the fields of social welfare, nursing services as well as for founding the Auchterarder Institute and library.75 Haldane’s autobiog-raphy, From One Century to Another: The Reminiscences of Elizabeth
5. Haldane76 was published in 1937, the year she died.
6. May Sinclair: 1863-1946
Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair was born in 1863 near Liverpool, of well- to-do Scottish parents whose business failed when Mary was seven years old. Mary and her mother moved around from one relative to another. Mary apparently received her early education at home, in a narrow, repressive Anglican family that believed that her four brothers merited formal education and that she should learn household manage-ment. Mary, who near age thirty will begin to call herself “May,” taught herself Greek and German from her brothers’ books, and through the secretive collaboration of a neighbor, borrowed the works of Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and other philosophers from the London Library. Grudgingly, at age eighteen, she was permitted to enroll for a year in Cheltenham Ladies College where Dorothea Beale encouraged her to study and to write philosophy. Beale urged Sinclair to train at Oxford, and encouraged her not to confine her writing of philosophy to her novels, but to “give it to us sometimes ‘neat.’ ”77 And “neat” it was, in 1893 in “The Ethical and Religious import of Idealism,”78 in 1912 in her essay Feminism19 and in other works listed in the Bibliography, some of which are discussed below.
During World War I, May Sinclair served on the front lines in Belgium, in an ambulance corps. From the records of the Aristotelian Society, we see that Miss May Sinclair was elected in 1917. Her philosophic interests centered around issues related to psychology, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics in the context of mysticism. She credited her friend Evelyn Underhill (see infra) with first introducing her to mystical philosophy.
May Sinclair served the Aristotelian Society Executive Committee for four terms from 1922 through 1926. In November of that year she is listed as a discussant for the paper “Objects under Reference” by C. Lloyd Morgan. Her interests in idealism led her to an interest in psychoanalysis as a tool for developing self-consciousness. She joined the Society for Psychical Research and was a founding member of Dr. Jessie Margaret Murray’s Medico-Psychological clinic. The development
of Sinclair’s writings, including her novels, shows an assimilation of ethical idealism, pantheism, mysticism and psychoanalytic theory in a rejection of Victorian morality and in support of radical feminism.
If May Sinclair’s philosophical writings had been her only writings, she would be considered to be a philosopher. However, she was a prolific and highly successful novelist and is known primarily as a woman of letters. Her many literary works include The Belfry, Mary Olivier, The Romantic, The Three Sisters, The Tree of Heaven, Mr. Waddigton of Wyck, The Return of the Prodigal, Journal of Impressions in Belgium, and Life and Death of Harriet Frean. Zegger is a reliable source on Sinclair’s novels, most of which are strongly philosophical and psychological. Sinclair wrote two full length works of philosophy, A Defence of Idealism and The New Idealism. She also wrote three philosophical articles, “The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism,”80 “Primary and Secondary Consciousness”81 and “Gitanjali of Sir Rabindranath Tagore,”82 as well as the pamphlet, Feminism}3,
Feminism, published in 1912, offered an idealist defense of the use of violence as a last resort of women denied legal rights, particularly, the vote. It was a response to a letter to the London Times by the influential scientist, Bible scholar and self-educated philosopher, Sir Almwroth Wright. Dubbed “Sir Almost Right” by later critics, Wright’s letter to the Times, together with a Times editorial and letters from other eminent men denounced the breaking of some storefront windows by suffragists. Wright, a famous physician, had identified the violence as medical evidence of a psychological illness that came to be named “suffragist hysteria.”
May Sinclair’s book The New Idealism was reviewed by John Laird somewhat favorably. He comments that she takes on “formidable antag-onists” (Whitehead, Russell, James) on their own ground. He praises her critical eye and incredible scrutiny that she even gives her own theory.84
Sinclair has a delightful style of writing and a healthy disregard for the pompousity with which early twentieth century philosophy claimed to have found all the answers. For example, in A Defence of Idealism she says:
It is, however, a personal misfortune when your choice causes you to differ, almost with violence, from those for whose accomplishment you have the profoundest admiration. You cannot help feeling that it would be safer to share some splendid error with Samuel
Butler and M[onsieur]. Bergson, or with William James and Mr. Bertrand Russell (If the uncompromising virtue of Mr. Russell’s logic left him any margin for error) than to be right in disagreeing with any of them.85
Sinclair is no apologist for mysticism. She finds idealism in general, and pantheistic mysticism in particular to be personally rewarding, intel-lectually enlightening, religiously comforting and philosophically superior to the then rampant vogues of realism:
Pan-Psychism has an irresistible appeal to the emotions. I like to think that my friend’s baby made its charming eyelashes, that my neighbour’s hen designed her white frock of feathers, and my cat his fine black coat of fur, themselves; because they wanted to; instead of having to buy them, as it were, at some remote ontological bazaar. But my emotion doesn’t blind me to the possibility that things may not, after all, have happened quite in this way.86
Sinclair sees her primary objective as forcing a choice between plural-istic and monistic philosophies. Her question is whether existence can be explained by a single metaphysical principle or whether it requires multiple principles. On her analysis the problem narrows down to a choice between a realism that is pluralistic in nature, or an idealism that is monistic. She gives due credit to Hegelianism and Kantianism, but offers as a serious criticism the observation that nobody thinks of Kant or Hegel as
... nice comfortable philosophers whose bosoms they could lay their heads on.87
What Sinclair means is that neither philosopher’s theories accord with very basic facts about human psychology: the universal desire to form relationships; and the search for spiritual and emotional comfort. It is, however, idealism that she ultimately argues for: an abstract amalgam of ancient and medieval forms of mysticism from eastern and western traditions. “Mystical metaphysics” she says “are an abomination. But metaphysical mysticism is another matter.”88
Should the preceding give the impression that A Defence of Idealism is primarily about mysticism, let me offer a correction. Most of the work involves an analysis of how the dominant philosophies and psy-
chologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Kant, Hegel and Bergson to James, McTaggart and Russell fail to offer a unified account of the reason for evolution. Nor can they account for basic facts of human psychology and the human quest for life, for rela-tionships, for religious knowledge and for moral virtue. Sinclair offers humourous but rigorous analyses of the failings of both idealism and realism to adequately account for what appears to be the facts of science (especially evolution and medicine) as well as the facts of human psy-chology (especially the will to live). She accuses pragmatism of being a “very important branch of casuistry” and of being a long argument ad hominem unbridled by the usual precautions philosophical theories take: to preserve consistency, to draw valid conclusions, etc. Her criti-cisms frequently decry what we might call the macho character of pragmatism. She says:
Pragmatism, by its very nature, knows nothing of these precautions. It does not sterilize its instruments before it uses them. It does not want to sterilize them. It is courageous. It courts rather than fears infection. It must stand or fall by its appeal to the pragmatic instinct, the business instinct in men, or it would not be Pragmatism.89
Sinclair opens her second book The New Idealism90 with an acknowl-edgement of its shortcomings, the worst of which were the failure to understand the importance of space-time in the problem of conscious-ness, and the role of values in morality. She attempts to see what can be said against idealism, as those criticisms are implied in the works of Alexander, Broad, Drake, Lovejoy, Pratt, Rogers, Russell, Santayana, Sellars, Strong and most particularly Whitehead. She acknowledges, too, the defects of earlier forms of idealism in which the universe was considered as a system of thought-relations. Recent philosophers including Wildon Carr claimed that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity sup-ported idealism. Sinclair reluctantly disagreed, noting that
Professor Einstein doesn’t say a word about minds of reference; and if a realist chooses to insist that there is nothing here but the eccen-tricities of unminded Space-Time it would be hard to refute him out of Professor Einstein’s mouth alone. Professor Einstein is concerned, not with space-time systems as occupying his observer’s conscious-ness, but with his observer’s body as occupying certain positions in a space-time system.
All the same, there is nothing in his theory which can be used as a refutation of idealism. For idealism each “observer” will carry with him his own space-time system based on his personal perspective; his body of reference will itself be part and parcel of his conscious-ness; and his consciousness will only not appear in the equation because it already contains the equation and its terms.91
May Sinclair distinguishes two forms of consciousness, primary con-sciousness and secondary consciousness. If I understand Sinclair correctly, primary consciousness is tantamount to what we mean by “being conscious,” while secondary consciousness begins with “being conscious of” and all subsequent operations of the mind upon the objects in the domain of consciousness.92 Primary consciousness is defined in the article “Primary and Secondary Consciousness” as:
... all that is present to the subject from moment to moment in one unitary block, or it is the continuous succession of such presences, before reflection, judgment or reasoning have set in; before there is any consciousness of consciousness.93
Secondary consciousness is therefore dependent upon primary con-sciousness. If Space-Time holds the universe together, what, Sinclair asks, holds Space-Time together?94 The answer for her is “ultimate con-sciousness,” God. God unites the personal perspectives of the finite selves, it is only for God that being and knowing are the same. Sinclair suggests a revised pantheism, complaining about the poor press philos-ophy has given Deistic concepts:
Philosophers have created strange Absolutes. They have seen God as the parish beadle, as the President of the Ethical Society, as a mathematician geometrizing eternally, as a company of snow-white categories. Sir Isaac Newton thoughtfully provided him with the comfort of a sensorium - all space - much as he provided a big hole in the door for his cat and a little one for her kitten. Other philosophers have left God very poorly off in this respect.95
May Sinclair argues for a new pantheism, one that avoids the problem of attributing omnipotence and omniscience to God at the expense of attributing moral responsibility to us. She notes that it is difficult to accept that God is manifested in each of us. It is much easier to look at persons as the physicists do: as bits of Space-Time:
So long as we are only bits of Space-Time, our backslidings will not so much matter. A bit of Space-Time bashing in its wife’s head with the kitchen poker in a two-pair back; a bit of Space-Time coming drunk out of the Bald-Face Stag; a bit of Space-Time telling an improper story at its club is not so shocking to the religious con-sciousness as a bit of God doing all or any of these things.96
She proposes revising ideas of omniscience and omnipotence so that omnipotence is omnipotentiality, not omniactuality.
But he is what is actual. He is the finite selves and the universe of the finite selves. They are parts of God, their consciousness is part of his consciousness, their bodies are parts of God’s body which is the universe. He is everything that is. But he is not bound to be anything but what he is.97
Free will and the problem of an omniscient God that is necessary evil is taken care of by making omniscience a power, the ability to know everything. Whether God chooses to know or not is part of his free will and his perfection. Moral virtues are simply exemplifications of the perfections of God which we are free to strive towards, or not. Ideal states, from a human perspective, are, from a divine perspective, real states. Process and history and creation are to a human perspective what eternity is to the divine perspective. The road to perfect states of secondary consciousness is the road through self-knowledge and knowl-edge of all things in God. As ultimate consciousness, God has the power to know all, but is not constrained by the need to know all. The perfect exercise of the power that is ultimate consciousness is when God knows himself in us knowing him.98
7. Ellen Bliss Talbot: 1867-1968
Ellen Bliss Talbot was born in Iowa City, Iowa and earned her B.A. at Ohio State University in 1890. From that time until 1894 she worked as a high school principal, first in Dresden, Ohio and then in Troy, Ohio. She was Sage Scholar in Philosophy from 1895-1897 and Sage Fellow for 1897-1898 while completing the Ph.D. at Cornell University. She continued to teach at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York until 1900, at which time she was appointed Professor of Philosophy at one of the “Seven Sister” schools, Mount Holyoke College in
Massachusetts. She spent the Summer of 1901 engaged in post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago. The Fall of 1904 was spent at the University of Berlin, and the Spring of 1905 at Heidelberg University. By 1904 she had become “Chairman” of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Mount Holyoke, a position she retained until her retirement in 1936.
Talbot’s primary philosophical interests were in philosophy of mind, and ethics, particularly in contemporary pragmatism and in the work of the German philosopher, Johann Fichte. Her doctoral thesis The Fundamental Principles of Fichte's Philosophy was published in the Cornell Studies in Philosophy series in 1906." In “The Doctrine of Conscious Elements,” (1905)100 Talbot criticizes earlier psychological theories that held that sensation, affection and conation (knowing) was adequately explained by the metaphysical hypothesis that the soul, by virtue of its own nature has the capacity for the activities of knowing, feeling and willing. She identifies what she considers to be four defects of such theories:
(1) they misunderstand what an “element” is;
(2) they depend upon metaphysical assumptions concerning the existence and powers of the soul;
(3) they explain unknown elements of sensation, affection and conation in terms of other undefined unknowns (capacities of knowing, feeling and willing); and
(4) by positing abstract faculties as though they explained the phe-nomena of consciousness, they neglect to explain the phenomena themselves.
In “The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism”101 Talbot points out the differences and similarities between Fichte’s moral phi-losophy and philosophy of mind, and that of the pragmatists. In particular, she examines both philosophies on the subject of the relationship between the practical aspects of life and the theoretical. She finds, for example that the pragmatists’ attempt to overcome the apparent antithesis of theoretical and practical (by claiming that practice gives rise to theory and not vice-versa) is consistent with Fichte’s view that human life is characterized by purposive activity. Thought and theory-formation are therefore teleological in nature: they are activities with a practical purpose. In this sense, Talbot claims, Fichte’s account of Ego is consistent with James’ account of a “will to believe.”
In “The Relation of the Two Periods of Fichte’s Philosophy,”102 Talbot
takes issue with views on Fichte articulated by two different groups of scholars: the one who have claimed that Fichte’s later works represent a complete abandonment of his earlier views, the other who have claimed that there is no essential difference. Talbot finds herself defending a middle view: that there are differences, but the differences do not amount to Fichte’s abandonment of early views. Rather, she claims that Fitche’s views on Being, Absolute and God as the ultimate principle of reality in the later works represent a development and not a retraction of his early views on Ego, Idea of Ego or God as the ultimate principle.
In a two part article appearing in the Philosophical Review103 Talbot considers the role that time plays in assessing the moral and aesthetic values by which we measure human life: goodness, beauty, truth and pleasure. If these values are realized earlier or later in life, or at some particular point in time during a person’s life, she asks, are they on that account somehow more or less valuable? Although we are aware of being tempted to value present pleasure over pain, upon reflection, we tend to value pleasure later in life and to conclude that earlier pains are worth the pleasure they will bring in the future. We do not ignore present pain, nor is it always worth the future pleasure it will bring, but generally, when we anticipate that present pain will bring future pleasure we are willing, if we are reflective, to endure the present pain. With respect to morality, we often feel that a person can atone for past misdeeds. From the moral point of view, we likewise feel that a life of goodness is somehow overshadowed by vices or evil deeds that later characterize our actions. In assessing the moral character of a person, we look toward an evaluation of the quality of their character at its greatest maturity, that is, at the end of life. The presence of goodness, truth, beauty and pleasure at the end of life is considered more important than their presence early in life. That is, the value of an individual’s life is assessed temporally.
She supports McTaggart’s response to authors who have denied the reality of the progress of time and on that account have denied the reality of evil, calling it mere illusion. McTaggart had attempted to reconcile the two doctrines of the unreality of time and the reality of progress and concluded, in his paper “The Relation of Time and Eternity” (Mind, N.S. XVIII), that change was unreal. To this Talbot says:
If the time-process is unreal, all the less and more adequate repre-sentations of the changeless reality exist eternally. And the existence
of the more adequate can in no sense do away with that of the less
adequate. If the time-process is real, such atonement for the earlier by the later - for the less adequate representations by the more adequate - is conceivable; but if it is unreal, the atonement is not conceivable.104
If we believe in the unreality of time, then we must also commit ourselves to moral systems and theories that deny the possibility of compensating for past moral lapses by exemplifying virtue. Progress, compensation, punishment, salvation, atonement and redemption would be empty moral and religious concepts.
In “Individuality and Freedom” Talbot addresses pragmatist and other philosophical views on three issues: (1) free will vs. determinism, (2) the nature of human individual moral character and (3) the predictability of individual choice. She argues that insofar as each human individual has a unique moral character our understanding of each person’s character is constrained (at best) to knowledge of past acts. We cannot predict with confidence how that individual will act in the future, therefore, we cannot verify whether human acts are determined. In fact, she argues, once we are committed to viewing each human as unique, we are committed to the view that past selves do not determine action, present selves do. In that sense, the “I” always is at the moment of choosing to act. This does not imply that individuals are always free to choose how to act; however, it does imply that we cannot claim with confidence that they are determined either.105
