Twentieth Century Women Philosophers 4 страница

Continuing through the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, Beatrice Edgell remained a regular contributor to the Aristotelian Society, intermittently serving three terms on its Executive Committee.179 She participated in a 1919 symposium with Hicks, Moore and Broad where she continued to criticize Russell’s views on knowledge by acquaintance.180 In June of 1920 Edgell presented her paper “Memory and Conation”181 in which she reviewed the problem of memory in the context of volitional thought and desire as expressed or implied in the theories 

of the philosopher James Ward, psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and biolo-gist Richard Semon. What she wants to determine is does “the faculty of memory imply the existence of conation as a specific mental function?”182 In this question,

... “faculty” belongs to the scheme of terms for analysing and describing minds, “function” to the scheme for analysing and describing experience.183

In the end, she supports Freud’s view:

In conclusion, what answer shall be returned to the question as to the faculty of memory and conation? In accordance with Dr. Freud’s theories, it is not memory which implies a specific function of conation, but unconscious conation which implies memory and the laws of unconscious conation which determine many of its manifestations.184

In “The Structure of Mind”185 Edgell gives philosophers a history of two branches of psychology, “structural” and “functional,” labels which would be quite misleading to contemporary philosophers unfamiliar with the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century psychology. The structural branch of psychology would perhaps be better described in contemporary terms as that part of philosophy of mind which includes philosophical psychology: the reduction of laws of the connection of mental processes to their simplest components. As an example of a branch of functional psychology, on the other hand, Edgell mentions a school of psychology in America from which “... there has arisen that extreme left wing - Behaviourism without a “u” (and also without an “I”).”186 After describing the major schools of both types of psychology and their relative inabilities to account for perception, recognition, meaning and thought, she urges closer collaboration between the schools and, therefore, greater interaction between philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind and clinical psychology.

In the symposium on “Immediate Experience,” Edgell criticizes G. Dawes Hicks’ account of immediate experience as feeling. According to Edgell, Hicks fails to show what he set out to show: first, that immediate experience as experience is a subjective state that varies in intensity from pleasure to pain. Second, Hicks uses “content” to refer to the char-acter of an act, but he also uses “content” to refer to that which is

apprehended. Third, she claims that Hicks’ thesis that immediate expe-rience is entirely devoid of cognition is inconsistent with his views on self-knowledge. Finally, she criticizes Hicks on grounds that his account of immediate experience precludes the knowing subject having any awareness of change thereby rendering his account of continuity of person and unity of the self unintelligible.187

In 1930 Beatrice Edgell received one of the highest professional honors ever accorded to a woman philosopher. Twelve years earlier, in 1918, Mary Whiton Calkins had been elected President of the American Philosophical Association. In 1930, Beatrice Edgell became the first woman to be elected President of the Aristotelian Society. On November 10, 1930 she delivered the Presidential Address: “Images.” Discussants included Brown, Dawes Hicks, Ross, Hannay, Nott and Stebbing.188 In her address, Edgell analyzed the concept “image” in the light of recent developments in psychology and philosophy. After careful analysis of various versions of the “trace” theory of image,189 Edgell explores the possibility that Freud’s theory of the unconscious may provide a solution to the problems of retention, imagery and association of ideas. She acknowledges the apparent treatment successes of Freudian and later psychoanalytic theory and concludes that theories of unconscious imagery fail to account for the actual imagery-forms of memory and imagination.190 And then she deplores the “ungracious task” of having offered destructive criticism in the absence of some constructive suggestion. All she has to offer, she claims, is a suggestion of the direction that psychology should be reoriented towards. That direction is toward a “genetic” concept of mind in which memory processes are understood in relation to the processes of sense perception; in which memory is understood as awareness of something other than the image, and (following Stout) in which patterns of sensory perception are regarded as events in the life-story of an individual.

These events bring the individual into communication with the patterns of the world external to his organism. Images will be events in the same sense; they are the patterns determined by past pattern-making, but patterns for which the epistemological implication of the term “reproductive” has no relevance.191

Beatrice Edgell presided over many of the Aristotelian Society meetings that year and through 1931 and was a discussant of load’s “Modern Science and Religion,” of MacMurray’s “The Conception of Society,”

and of Helen Knight’s “Sensation in Pictorial Art.” Edgell’s final pub-lication was an essay written in honor of her deceased colleague Lizzie Susan Stebbing. In “The Way of Behavior”192 Edgell again urges that philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic and philosophy of psychology jointly seek an account of the logic and psychology of thought.

We need a psychology of thinking which shall be a basis for the logic of thought. Without recognition of the subject - object relationship as fundamental for cognition, and as other than the causal relationship, such a psychology seems to me an impossibility. The three old laws of thought, A is A, A is not not-A and A must be either A or not-A, embody profound psychological truth. They are the acknowledgment that sameness can be found and discriminated from differences, that in the progress of knowledge patterns are built up, oppositions and incompatibilities determined. To regard such patterns not as ideas but as ways of behaving, closely as the latter may be associated with pattern formation, is to cut away from the psychology of thinking the character upon which Professor Stebbing declared the ability to think depends, “the power of seeing connexions.”193

15. F. Rosamond Shields: fl. 1913

Very little is known about F. Rosamond Shields. According to mem-bership lists of the Aristotelian Society she received her M.A. in 1910, but it is not clear from what school. Shields, Hilda Oakeley and Lizzie Susan Stebbing were discussants at an Aristotelian Society meeting on April 2, 1917. The topic was “Our Knowledge of Value.”

Shields wrote an article titled, “The Notion of the Common Good” which appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in 1913.194 In this article Shields argued that the good is a common good. She analyzed two reasons for the non-acceptance of the common good. Firstly, Shields investigated the notion that the good of different individuals is conflicting. Secondly, Shields discussed the two opposing positions: 1) The Good is common, and 2) Whatever is, is right. Shields criticized the view that the common good is a slow process of realization. She states,

On this theory, the common good would be simply the goal, and not in any sense the presupposition of ethical endeavor.195 

Shields concludes that the common good is a primary principle of ethics. However, she admits that the common good is not a concrete answer to all ethical problems nor does it always lead to the expected result.

16. Katherine Everett Gilbert: 1886-1952

Katherine Everett received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Brown University in Rhode Island (where she studied under Meikeljohn) and her Ph.D. in 1912 from Cornell University in New York (where she studied under James Creighton). She married Allan Gilbert in 1913 and had two children. Two years following her marriage, Gilbert took a position as an editorial assistant to the editor of The Philosophical Review, James Creighton. From 1922 until 1930 she was at the University of North Carolina, first as research fellow, then as acting professor and lecturer. The next twenty-one years were spent at Duke, where Gilbert would become its first full professor. In the early 1940s Gilbert was called upon to chair the newly-created Department of Aesthetics, Music and Art, an appointment that she retain until her retirement in 1951, the year preceding her death.

Gilbert’s primary interests in philosophy were in aesthetics,196 including philosophy of art, art criticism, architecture, dance,197 and literature. While serving as editorial assistant for The Philosophical Review, Gilbert published “The Mind and its Discipline” in that journal.198 In that article she compared the positions of competing philosophies of education: those who claim that individuals have broad, general mental capacities that can be developed through education, and those who claim that individuals have only narrowly defined, specific capacities that must be developed piecemeal. Gilbert argues against what she saw as the deficiencies of education that teaches specific facts and skills, and in favor of classical liberal education to cultivate analytical, creative and communicative abilities.

In 1922 Gilbert presented to the American Philosophical Association a paper called “The Philosophy of Feeling in Current Poetics”199 which was published the following year. In it, she recited a litany of names of the traditional great poets and the general principles of poetry which they aspired to apply in their writings. Poets, she insisted, ought to be able to leave their readers with a satisfied sense that the familiar has been made more immediate, more “real.” Instead, she criticizes contemporary poetry as a literary phenomenon that has embraced principles of obscurity, unintelligibility and bizarreness, leaving readers perplexed and 

confused. Instead of making the world more realistic, contemporary poetry makes the world distant, unfamiliar and unrecognizable.

Notwithstanding its title “The Principle of Reason in the Light of Bosanquet’s Philosophy”200 discusses Bosanquet’s conception of reason in art and regarding action. Gilbert’s interest in theories of action cul-minated in her 1924 book Maurice BlondeTs Philosophy of Action201 which received mixed critical notice.202 Upon the death of her mentor Creighton, Gilbert wrote a commemorative article, praising in part Creighton’s aesthetic sensibilities for style in philosophical writing. The paper was read before the American Philosophical Association in 1924 and published in the Journal of Philosophy.203

Gilbert greatly admired the works of Thomas Hardy. In “Hardy and the Weak Spectator”204 Gilbert derides as superficial, the general reader’s complaint that Hardy’s writings are excessively tragic. Instead, Gilbert explores Hardy’s works and finds that they are basically too philosophically challenging for the ordinary reader. In “Hardy’s Use of Nature (II)”205 she identifies three levels of complexity in which the theme of nature appears in Hardy’s writings. First, nature is simply a backdrop or “foil” for human action in a dramatic situation. Second, humans struggle against nature which now is a central figure in a chapter. Finally, nature is an overwhelming, mechanical, creative action process to which humans lose.

In 1939 Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn wrote A History of Esthetics206 in which Gilbert’s contributions drew heavily on her earlier articles on the subject. Among those earlier articles were analyses of the aesthetics of Plato, Aristotle, and Croce, among others. In her article “The Relation of the Moral to the Aesthetic Standard in Plato,”207 she supported Collingwood’s view in his “Plato’s Philosophy of Art,” and criticized views represented by Carritt’s analysis of Plato in his The Theory of Beauty and by Havelock Ellis in The Dance of Life. In this work she sets out her analysis of the relationship of art to education and morality in Plato’s Republic and Laws:

1. The moral quality of a political whole is its most important attribute and quality.

2. To produce high moral quality in the citizenry is, therefore, the most important function of the executive of a state.

3. High moral quality consists in the activity of the following virtues: truthfulness (freedom from illusions about oneself and capacity to place everybody and everything in a correct scheme); benevo- 

lence; courage; the undivided mind and temper; a sense of rational pattern and logical order in politics, art, and common affairs.

4. The production of desirable moral qualities necessitates an appropriate theory of education and genetics.

5. The required theory of education must rest on correct psycho-logical principles.

6. The images of art may symbolize and express moral qualities and logical patterns.

7. Artistic images and patterns, absorbed by the plastic human imag-ination, become vital forces.

8. The unconscious absorption of such charms or forces is more effectual in the production of character than rational notions or information.

9. The executives of the state are therefore primarily under obliga-tion to prescribe a curriculum for elementary schools composed of images of truth, benevolence, courage, and poise, in rhythms and patterns, simple, rational, and attractive.208

Plato, Gilbert reminds us in “Aesthetic Imitation and Imitators in Aristotle,”209 had placed poets and imitators in the sixth class of human beings, for paintings and dramas were, to Plato, “Pale and inert replicas of substantial realities:”

An imitation, it seemed to him, is nothing in and by itself; taken apart from its original, it collapses. And being nothing, it can do nothing. It lacks substance, function, utility.210

Aristotle, Gilbert assures us had a different view. Gilbert sees Aristotle’s view of aesthetic imitation as a revolt against Plato:

Nature and art, Aristotle says, are the two initiating forces in the world. The difference is that nature has her principle of motion within herself, while “from art proceed the things of which the form is in the soul of the artist”.211

Gilbert wrote sympathetically of the great Oxford professor of aesthetics, Ruskin, showing, how, at the very end of his life, this formidable defender of Plato’s aesthetics against much (but not all) of Aristotle’s aesthetics was to realize that he had worked out a theory of aesthetics that was, after all, heavily Aristotelian.212 

Gilbert had decidedly less sympathy for the views of Benedetto Croce than she had for those of Aristotle, or even Plato. Croce, she felt, despite occasional gifted insights into the nature of beauty, espoused a theory of aesthetics that lacked coherence. Croce, she says:

... furnishes us a collection of apercus and images rather than a system of ideas. If “philosophy, like all other genuine sciences, has passed beyond the stage of the merely striking or suggestive treatment of problems, and aims not at an interesting or picturesque results, but at the systematic organization of the facts with which it deals according to some general principle,” then Croce belongs rather to the company of those who make the world interesting than to the company of those who satisfy the mind’s demand for intelligibility.213

In the posthumously published Aesthetic Studies: Architecture and Poetry214 Gilbert offers an anthology on the relationship between the poetic and the structural imagination. Katherine Gilbert’s works in aes-thetics are too numerous to review in detail here. The reader is urged to consult the Bibliography for this volume for a fuller listing of her books, articles and book reviews, and to consult the complete bibliography of her works (compiled by LuLu C. Erwin) in Gilbert’s Aesthetic Studies: Architecture and Poetry. For fuller commentary literature, see works by Ames, Boas, and by Nahm, also in the Bibliography.

17. Una Mirrieless Bernard Sait: 1886-?

Sait earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University, New York, as World War I was breaking out. She studied under Dewey, but her primary philosophical interest was in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. While a student at Columbia she participated in an extensive Bergson project and prepared a bibliography of Bergson primary and secondary sources. Her doctoral dissertation, written prior to World War I was published as: The Ethical Implications of Bergson's Philosophy215 by the Archives of Philosophy of Columbia University in 1914. Sait later was a professor at Claremont Colleges.

Sait tries to demonstrate the way in which Bergson’s philosophy is consistent with moral idealism. In particular she attempts to derive from Bergson’s principles an objective definition of good and evil, and of right and wrong. According to a review by H. Wildon Carr (who would shortly thereafter assume the presidency of the Aristotelian Society) Sait is not 

entirely successful in attempting to make Bergson into a solid moral theorist. What he does find of interest, however, is her feminist view. Carr says:

We may call particular attention to the author’s views of the part which women are to play in the society of the future. She is under no illusion. “It is in man,” she tells us, “that intellect has reached its fullest development.” This she considers is not due to the incapacity of women. In the true Bergsonian spirit she conjectures that intellect slumbers in women ready to awaken when artificial restrictions are removed and freedom is attained. It may even be destined to surpass its achievements in man.216

Sait’s feminism culminates in her 1938 work, New Horizons for the Family217 which, she says is an attempt to develop a broad philosophy of the family. Her indebtedness to Dewey’s principles for achieving social change by identifying the social implications of scientific research is acknowledged in the introduction. Sait begins by tracing the develop-ment of the family in western civilization, particularly in England and the United States. However, rather than a chronological account of views of the family, she traces its historical development topically, in terms of social organization, religion, economics, sex and education, preceded by an outline of the processes of social change. Once she has examined the process through which change in the history of family life has occurred respecting each of these topics, she looks at the family of the twentieth century, primarily in the United States, but also in England.

On Sait’s analysis, individual and social welfare depend upon whether children become sufficiently well-educated. A good education is defined in terms of “progressive education” as that concept was developed by Dewey.218 The social justification, goal and warrant of education is to develop to its fullest individual capacity, social conscience, and analytical abilities. From the first warrant she ultimately derives a social obligation to educate all children, and in particular to educate special needs children: the physically and mentally handicapped and those who are socially handicapped due to illegitimacy, being orphaned or abandoned, or being delinquent children. From the second warrant, the goal of developing social conscience, she derives a social duty to provide cultural understanding and appreciation, as well as a sense of self-esteem in the context of an educational system. The development of critical intelligence, the ability to “think for themselves” implies that education 

must be made child-friendly and adopt methods that take advantage of children’s natural inquisitiveness, boisterousness and joy of discovery. Children must not be thought what to think, but how to think.219 Like Dewey, she advocates the development of a philosophy of education that is firmly based on emerging psychological theories of how children learn. Consequently, education should begin in very early childhood; however, the systems developed and methods used should be scientifi-cally validated and supported by educational research that demonstrates that children learn by those methods, and that the goals of education (mentioned above) are met.

On Sait’s view, education that is aimed at such long-term goals that themselves have such far-reaching social consequences cannot effectively occur in the school setting alone. The education of parents, and the “reciprocal function” of home and school is addressed at some length by Sait220 who recognizes the need for a transitional generation or two during which parental literacy, commitment to child welfare (especially, making financial sacrifices in order to avoid having children enter the work force), and social responsibility will gradually increase to the level needed for progressive education of children to be fully realized.

In a series of chapters Sait examines the conclusions of several White House Conferences on children and notes that the mere physical protection of children from accidents of birth, from disease and from occupational injury and exploitation is inadequate to provide for the needs of children and thus for future society. What is needed also, is protection from social harms. Among those harms are poverty, hunger and inadequate vocational education and training. Children, Sait argues, need stable and happy home lives and social insurance to provide a buffer against orphanage, poverty, hunger, homelessness and other consequences of divorce and family dissolution. She then turns to an examination of women’s roles in and difficulties in remaining in contemporary marriages.

Sait has several chapters that provide a summary of the data on changes in women’s legal status, in occupations open to women, poverty, the need and desire of women to work outside the home, high birth rates and early maternity. All of these factors contribute to a cycle of social disintegration that can be positively influenced through educa-tion, especially sex education.

Here, Sait invokes the ground breaking work of Sanger and many others in support of “conception prevention” as a way of giving women more control over the outcomes of marriage, and society more control over population growth. Instabilities of modem marriages, Sait claims, 

can largely be traced to the tensions that high birth rates create for women and their families. In addition to birth control, Sait advocates that sex education in childhood as well as adulthood be used to promote marriage as a mature partnership. In such a partnership, the spouses have an emotionally mature understanding of themselves and of one another and of the realities of their mutual relationship. This results in “The Emergence of a Cooperative Family”221 in which individuals marry freely, for love and companionship, entering into a partnership in which childrearing is viewed as a rewarding, important, mutual undertaking and in which friendships with members of the opposite sex pose no threat to the mutual, (in her view, ideal) monogamous commitment.

Sait precedes a long section on what would otherwise be called “home economics” with a section on home life. In it she urges the social liberation of both men and women from pre-conceived beliefs about “women’s work” and “men’s work.” Unless the segregation of those traditional occupations can be demonstrated to be scientifically valid, Sait claims, any restriction is premature. Subsequent chapters cover family economic issues such as savings, investments, budgeting, as well as general health and nutrition. She advocates making domestic service a skilled, standardized vocation with contracts covering wages, condi-tions of working, etc. Sait suggests that such “far reaching changes” will remove the stigma from housework and raise the status of household workers.222 Families, however, should work out their own ways of managing housework, and to this end she urges labor-saving machinery, electrical appliances, part-time household help and systematic coopera-tion in housework on the part of all the family members.223 Such cooperation is both part of children’s education, and a necessary pre-requisite for social growth.

The Epilogue which bears the same title as the book notes that

The family has survived through its ability to adjust itself to changing social conditions.... But the recent acceleration of social change has subjected the... family to such unprecedented strain that its fabric has been torn asunder. From this disruption has emerged a new appreciation of the potential values of family life.... For the first time... it becomes possible to view the family from a scientific and experimental point of view; deliberately to plan a family pattern designed to facilitate the performance of the family’s essential functions, while remaining always alert to modify this pattern on the basis of results and in the light of newer knowledge.224 

Sait blends the methodology of Dewey’s pragmatism with a feminist social and moral philosophy. With respect to the former, she urges sci-entific analysis and experimentation in the pursuit of planned social change. With respect to the latter she urges that scientific analysis and experimentation has yielded no evidence of significant, socially relevant intellectual, moral or physical differences between men and women. She advocates massive social reform and experimentation in several areas: first, the removal of sex-based restrictions on education and employment for women; second, the reconceptualization of the family as a cooperative spiritual adventure initiated by two equals who are mutually free to form a relationship; third, universal sex education and reproductive freedom; fourth, social programs to compensate children and families for natural and social disadvantages. To this end, she urges that society itself be characterized by “the spirit of motherliness:”

The spirit of motherliness, utterly opposed to force and violence is found invaluable in human affairs. As more women become eman-cipated from ignorance, idleness and the bonds of tradition, we may hope for fuller integration of scientific knowledge in the interests of human relationships, and for the shaping of new instrumentalities of social control.225

As progressive as were Una Bernard Sait’s views regarding the family and social progress, she retained traditional views about male and female characteristics:

But, as the spirit of motherliness is needed in the life of the world, so is there need for a fuller participation of men in family - for a more intensive fatherliness. Manliness with its emphasis on protective strength, reliability, and courage is the correlative of womanliness, from which all trace of immature dependence has gone, but where the emphasis is still upon qualities conducive to the care of life. Where manly men and womanly women also become developed human beings, the cooperative family will more fully emerge as the prevailing pattern of family life. Only then will its consequences for individual happiness and social well-being become apparent.

18. Helen Huss Parkhurst: 1887-1959

Helen Huss Parkhurst was born in New York City on January 3, 1887. She received her B.A. in 1911 from Bryn Mawr College and her M.A. 

from Cambridge University in 1913. Parkhurst was a fellow at Cambridge University as well as at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1917, Parkhurst was granted her Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Although she started her career as a teacher at Dwight School in Englewood, New Jersey from 1911 to 1912, she lectured on art at Bryn Mawr College from 1915 to 1916. She worked as an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University from 1917 until her death, advancing to rank of Full Professor in 1944. She retired in

1952.

Parkhurst was a active member of the American Philosophical Association. In the Nineteenth Annual Meeting she recounted the details of philosophical disputations in Ithaca, New York.226 She published numerous articles in such notable journals as Mindy Journal of Phi-losophyPsychology and Scientific Methods and The Open Court. Parkhurst’s writing topics focused on art and aesthetics. She wrote “Imageless Beauty” in 1925 and argued that the artist transcends beyond his mere expression in his work to something more. “And yet in no case is the expressed meaning clearly independent of the manner of its expression.”227 For example, the creation of the painter cannot merely be derived through his paintings, but rather through his thought process and the physical product taken together. Parkhurst investigates the com-position of that imageless beauty: “... beauty of meaning or idea- which is the inalienable and peculiar attribute of the work of the creative imagination.”228 Parkhurst focuses on two considerations, how to recon-cile life and art in the first place; and how in the second place to distinguish art and logic?229 Parkhurst concludes with an eloquent para-graph on our human nature. She states that as humans we are all subject to emotions which control our behaviours and our expressions in art: