Twentieth Century Women Philosophers 5 страница

A race of beings subject to no fear of terminations, undying and never weary nor defeated, would fashion an art on different laws, with its content and its entire intention different.... But so long as we retain our humanhood it is likely that the rhythm of our emotions will remain as it is, and that we shall alternately sip from the cup of fear and hope, of misery and gladness. So long at least as we do, the things which will yield are united intimations of felicity and of regret.230

“The Obsolescence of Consciousness” which appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods231 investigates the 

notion of the subconscious mind. Parkhurst’s Beauty, written in 1930, interprets art and imagination from the human perspective. “Art is the product of man - perhaps his only genuine and peculiar product.”232 Parkhurst believes that man’s very nature is expressed through art. Art represents the only completely free action of man, free of circumstances and outside limitations.

In the art of artistic creation alone does he (man) seem to have shaken loose from the fetters of circumstance and found himself suddenly free and glorious as a divinity, under no compulsion other than his desire to behold, godlike, the unclouded reflection of his own countenance. And of all the things that he has contrived on earth none but art could be called the full expression of himself as a being compounded of flesh and intelligence and spirit.233

Parkhurst holds that art represents the only true human expression. The human experience creates the standards for art, therefore if the world or the environment changes: art changes. According to Parkhurst, creativity and artistic expression heal the psychic conflict in humans. Art establishes recognition of and sensitivity to history. Parkhurst concludes Beauty with an insightful quote regarding the relation of beauty and art to man’s nature and accomplishments.

Our human species have devised architecture, and through its mate-rials of colossal cloven stone we know a means of uniting orderless inert substance and empty space with the eternal order of abstract geometry. And music is our own, a miraculous fusion of goalless movement and disembodied sound with incorruptible rhythm and the wordless language of the spirit. It is in these two arts that man draws nearest to a vision of the ultimate metaphor; it is in these that he very nearly accomplishes the feat of giving utterance to the unutterable.234

Parkhurst wrote several book reviews, such as, The Aesthetic Attitude by Herbert Sidney Langfeld, which criticized Langfeld’s notion of aes-thetics as elementary.

19. Sister Mary Patricia Garvey: 1888-1952

Mary Patricia Garvey was the daughter of Patrick Garvey and Sarah Shanon Garvey. She was born in Ludington (Bay City), Michigan and 

attended Michigan State Normal College and Notre Dame University. She served as Principal in her home town at Ludington High School from 1923 until 1935.

Sister Garvey’s philosophical interests were in neo-platonism and the early Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine. While studying for the Ph.D. at Marquette University, she was appointed Professor at Our Lady of Cincinnati College in Ohio where she served from 1937-1940. During that period she was actively writing her doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine, and at the age of 50, she completed her dissertation. It was published as Saint Augustine: Christian or Neo- Platonist? From His Retreat at Cassiciacum Until His Ordination at Hippo by Marquette University press in 1939.235

Sister Mary Patricia was appointed President of Mercy College in 1941, and was actively involved in the National Education Association and the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Her translation of Augustine’s Contra Academicos was published by Marquette in 1942, and again, posthumously, in 1957.236

20. Karin Costelloe Stephen: 1889-1953

Karin Costelloe Stephen was bom in 1889, christened Catherine Elizabeth (and called Karin). She is described by Barbara Strachey in her teenage years as “hasty, tactless, emotional, and rowdy... [but Karin also was] quite outstandingly intelligent...”237 From a very young age she suffered ear trouble and in 1905 she had “numerous” operations that left her deaf and “mildly disfigured.”

Her education began at Newnham College in October of 1907, but in 1908 due to hearing problems, depression and family pressure, she left Cambridge to spend a year at Bryn Mawr College.238 It was at Bryn Mawr that she began studying philosophy and psychology. Karin eventually returned to Newnham, in 1909, to take her the first part of her Tripos in Moral Science. She finished the second part the following year. She received First Class Honors in the first Tripos (1910). It was during this time that Bertrand Russell (Uncle Bertie) became her tutor.239 By 1911, Karin began to socialize with the emerging Bloomsbury group. She still was being tutored by Russell in preparing for her final Tripos. She received first in her Tripos and was also awarded the “Star” (Distinction in Philosophy), the first ever awarded to a woman at Cambridge. Russell wrote of her that she “... has more philosophical capacity than I have ever seen before in a woman....”240 

Karin Costelloe was elected to the Aristotelian Society in 1912 where she presented a defense of Bergson, something quite bold, in light of Russell’s objections to them. At one point she visited Bergson in Paris where he praised her for “her clarity and powers of comprehension.”241 She served on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society for several terms.

Costelloe married Adrian Stephen in October 1914, the year she received a fellowship at Newnham. In 1916 she had a daughter (Ann). A second daughter, Judith, was born in 1918. Shortly thereafter she presented a symposium paper on “Space, Time and Material.” According to C.D. Broad who reviewed that paper for Mind:

Mrs. Stephen’s contribution is, as usual, Bergson done much better than Bergson could do it himself. She does not indeed, to my mind, succeed in making the French philosopher intelligible, but her attempts are always amazingly clever and remind the present writer of Dr. McTaggart’s relation to Hegel, about which one feels that the disciple is so much better than the master..,242

Costelloe and her husband had both been conscientious objectors to World War I. After the war Karin began to pursue her interest in abnormal psychology. She and her husband were told by the director of the Psychoanalytical Society that they would have to qualify as doctors to be able to practice psychoanalysis. They enrolled in a five year medical course at University College. In 1927, they both qualified as physicians. He began to practice analysis and she went to work in a mental hospital in Baltimore. By the Second World War, however, Adrian and Karin were no longer Pacifists and Adrian joined the Army as a psychiatrist. He was posted in Glasgow, where Karin went to be with him and study new techniques in drug therapy and shock treatment. He died in 1948, and she soon after became afflicted with manic-depressive order. She was treated with shock treatment without success. Because she was a physician she self-prescribed morphine in larger and larger doses. In December, 1953 she intentionally overdosed. She had been working on two books at the time of her illness and death, but no trace of the manuscripts has been found. The first was a volume for Leonard Woolf on the “life and importance of Freud” and the second was a book she intended to call “Human Misery.” 

21. Phyllis Ackerman: fl. 1893

Phyllis Ackerman lived in New York City at the turn of the century and to my knowledge she taught at Brown243 and published only one article in philosophy, “Some Aspects of Pragmatism and Hegel,” in the Journal of Philosophy; Psychology and Scientific Methods.244 In this article, Ackerman looks at the conceptual and methodological differences between pragmatism and idealism as represented by Hegelianism. She attempts to save pragmatism and idealism as well from shortcomings in their epistemic views.

... knowledge is a thoroughly active process in which each part acts on every other to create a whole, but the whole, since that is what gives meaning to the parts, is prior to the parts even while it is being created. And because knowledge is a completely active process the paradoxical character of it is best exemplified in the judgment of action, the practical judgment. For when we say that we ought to do something our intention determines what we will do, but the act of doing it has to create the fact and modify it. Again whole and parts are mutually prior and constitutive.245

This is where pragmatism ends. It leaves the world in the course of being created into a continuous whole in a series of steps by purpo-sive minds so acting that they can cooperate to construct a trans-individual world.246

But how can there be the constructive series without some background of fixed determinate structure?... To attempt to establish logical relations presupposes that the world is built on a system of logical relations. Professor Dewey’s own commentary on the question has only to be generalized to the whole search for knowledge to make the necessary supplementations to the pragmatic theory.247... The process that pragmatism discusses then, presupposes the already real whole that it tries to deny.

... Certainly pragmatism must admit determinism for it admits the continuity of knowledge. This continuity is basic to the notion of its process. You dive into the future from the springboard the past has made.248 

In Ackerman’s view, pragmatism is really dependent upon Hegelian idealism and is merely a modem application of idealism despite its denial of same. Her essay is an important and interesting one, and one that explores some of the philosophical continuity of developments in metaphysics, ontology and logic from late nineteenth century idealism to early 20th century pragmatism. It is worthy of inclusion in any course in which Hegel or Dewey is taught as part of the history of philosophy.

22. Dorothy Wrinch Nicholson: 1894-1976

According to Professor Ambrose249 Dorothy Wrinch was one of those rare scholars who excelled in two fields of academic inquiry, physics and philosophy. In physics, which she later taught at Smith College for many years, her primary research interests were in crystalline struc-tures.250 Professor Ambrose recollects that Dorothy Wrinch lost a daughter when her home in Cape Cod burned, and that she went to Woods Hole upon her retirement from Smith. The year following her death, a three day symposium honoring her work was held at Smith.251

Dorothy Wrinch was a friend of Bertrand Russell; her corre-spondence with Russell is in the Russell Archives. Apparently some unpublished biographical materials are extant.252 1 have been unable to locate them. Her obituary for Russell’s friend Philip Jourdain was pub-lished in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.253 Wrinch was apparently a graduate of and/or faculty member at Girton College, Cambridge, according to the membership lists for the Aristotelian Society to which she was elected in 1917. She was a member of its Executive Committee for the year 1925-26.

Although Wrinch is primarily a scientist, she was active during her early years in philosophy, publishing more than a dozen papers in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Mind during the period 1917 through 1930. Her first two papers, in 1917, were a defense of Russell against Saunders254 and the second criticizing several points made by Moore in Principia Ethica and by Rashdall in The Theory of Good and Evil.255 A 1919 paper “On the Nature of Judgment” offers an explication of Russell’s theory of judgment which enables it to be extended to more complex judgments than those of the form aRb.256 A 1920 paper “On the Nature of Memory” offers a discussion of acts of memory which include imagery and which are memories of physical objects or of events.257 

Philosophy of science was Wrinch’s real forte. Her strength appears to be in the ability to render the substance, and more often, the method-ologies of the sciences philosophically clear. In “On the Structure of Scientific Inquiry”258 she analyzed the problems of the nature of scientific structure which occur in more advanced sciences, viz., the nature of scientific elements, the nature and role of propositions and hypotheses, the relationship of theory to scientific phenomena. The philosophic import of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and of quantum mechanics were of great interest to Wrinch as well as to other early twentieth century philosophers. In two papers on the theory of relativity, “On Certain Methodological Aspects of the Theory of Relativity”259 and “The Idealistic Interpretation of Einstein’s Theory”260 she explores the contribution that Einstein’s theory of space and time can make to metaphysics. In “On Certain Aspects of Scientific Thought” Wrinch takes a step back from actual physical theories to examine certain aspects of scientific thought that are fundamentally important to early twentieth century physics. She says:

Science at the outset is concerned with the discovery of facts about the external world by means of experiment and observation. These facts are subsequently arranged in groups and by means of proba-bility inference general propositions are suggested for consideration. The second stage in science opens with the statement of these general propositions about physical concepts. A physical concept, refined so as to be significant in science, is a short-hand way of referring to a class of properties. Our field, therefore, at this stage of science, is the body of the general propositions which cover the facts of experience and the general problem is the problem of the relations between properties.261

Wrinch’s focus is on the conceptual, or second stage of science, and the remainder of her article offers an analysis of the nature of postulates of irrelevancy and invariance, laws of combination, and the process of identifying or constructing truly analogous cases.

In a Symposium on the question “The quantum theory: how far does it modify the mathematical, the physical and the psychological concepts of Continuity?”262 that included Alfred North Whitehead and H. Wildon Carr, Wrinch discussed quantum mechanics in relationship to the logical concept of continuity. In a summary section, Wrinch stated her conclusions: 

The discontinuities of the Quantum Theory in themselves cannot be adversely criticized or even discussed by the mathematician. From the continuous set of states considered possible by the classical mechanics, a discrete set has been selected as alone being physically possible. Any criticism of this assumption can only come from a consideration of how far such an assumption is valuable in relating inter se facts of the physical universe which have been adequately established by observation and experiment. Any criticisms on the grounds of our intuitive feelings about continuity are out of place and become quite clearly improper and indeed lacking in cogency when they are stated in terms of the logical concept of continuity. Nevertheless, in so far as the assumptions of the Quantum Theory are introduced ad hoc and are not part of the fundamental structure of science, they cannot be considered finally satisfactory. The assumptions of the Theory of Relativity, stated in the analytically convincing invariant form, alone in science at the present day have the touch of finality about them. They alone in their grandeur lie too deep for criticism. Our intuitive ideas of the physical universe are there left behind, and in their abstract beauty, they may not be approached with the rough and ready weapons of every-day life. The Quantum Theory in the tremendous success which it has experienced is pointing the way to a further postulate of the same unapproachable severity.263

Dorothy Wrinch Nicholson’s contribution to philosophy of science appeared to be that she had a firm grasp of issues in logic, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of language: in short, in analytic philosophy and had the skill to elucidate for philosophers the philosophic import of scientific concepts, laws and methods. She regularly informed philosophers’ understandings of the technical (mathematical, physical) content of scientific analyses and theories by explicating highly technical material of science in philosophical terms. She was quick to point out not only the philosophical import of scientific discoveries, but also the contribution that philosophical analysis could make to emerging scientific theories and to emerging sciences. In this vein, she explored the relationships between the principle of conservation of energy, and philosophical accounts of scientific method,264 between electron theory and scientific method,265 between wave mechanics and scientific method266 and between developmental psychology and scientific method.267 Although the latter part of her academic career was spent teaching physics at one of the best women’s colleges in the United States, 

Smith, many of Dorothy Wrinch’s early contributions were to philosophy of science.

23. Marjorie Silliman Harris: fl. 1913

Marjorie Silliman Harris received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1913. She was granted the Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1921 and was awarded the Susan Linn Sage scholarship in philosophy at Cornell.

Harris worked for a brief time as a professor at the University of Colorado in 1921-1922, but most of her career was spent at Randolph- Macon Women’s College in Georgia where she taught from 1922-1958. She became the chairperson of the Philosophy department and was granted Professor Emeritus status from 1934-1958.

Harris wrote many articles, mostly about Comte, Bergson and Francisco Romero. In one, “Bergson’s Conception of Freedom” she argued that one can only be free in action to the extent that the will is enlightened concerning the goal it wills.268 Harris’ commentary article, “If We Have Life, Do We Need Philosophy” defends the importance of philosophy as a discipline against Alexander Herzberg’s article “The Chief Types of Motivation to Philosophical Reflection.” Herzberg had claimed that the philosopher’s quest for truth is conditioned by his or her own life. Harris’ commentary article concludes that “The life of reflection is truly the most significant life. In order to have life, we need philosophy.”269

Harris discussed Romero’s meaning of transcendence in “A Transcendent Approach to Philosophy”.270 In 1964, she wrote further on the subject: “Philosophy for Tomorrow” gives a detailed account of Romero’s meaning of transcendence.271 Harris also wrote several articles commenting on theories of aesthetics referring to the views of Alfred North Whitehead, Auguste Comte and William James. She also discussed Plato’s aesthetics in “Beauty and the Good”.272

24. E. M. Whetnall: fl. 1900

I have been unable to uncover any personal information concerning a “Miss E. M. Whetnall,” although I suspect that she may have been on the faculty at one of the Cambridge women’s colleges. I have not been able to verify my conjecture; however, her participation in the Aristotelian Society and the fact that Pitt lists a “(Miss) E. W. (sic) Whetnall” acting 

as secretary for a paper given by Russell at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club in 1926273 tends to support this view.

The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society list Miss Whetnall’s election to membership in 1925. She was a discussant of a paper by Price (“Mill’s View of the External World,”) in January of 1927. The following year she published reviews in Mind of Andries MacLeod’s Sur Diverses Questions se Presentant dans VEtude du Concept de ЯёаШё,274 Henry Bradford Smith’s Symbolic Logic275 and Boris Bogoslovsky’s The Technique of Controversy.216

We may assume that she completed her doctorate in 1929, for at this time, her listing among the members of the Aristotelian Society changes to “E. M. Whetnall, Ph.D., B.A.” In this year she published the first of two original philosophical writings, “Symbol Situations.”277 In the middle of that paper, she offers this summary:

What I have tried to do is to limit myself to a discussion of such assertions as seems to me indubitable. They are as follows: - (1) Commands, questions, sentences, clauses and phrases are all complex symbols, that is to say, all have parts used syntactically. (2) The referends of complex symbols are things as related. (3) The structure of a complex symbol seldom, if ever, has a one-one corre-spondence with the structure of its referend. (4) Complex symbols have parts, some of which, at least, stand for the constituents of the referends of the complex symbols. (5) The referends of the non-demonstrative parts of complex symbols are non-specific universals or else universals to which the distinction between specific and non-specific is inapplicable.278

In Whetnall’s view the contexts of signs and symbols are different, with those situations in which symbols occur being social in context (involving speaker and hearer, writer and reader, etc.). The situations in which signs occur are complete with “one experiencing person.” Thus, she takes issue with the views expressed by Ogden and Richards in their work The Meaning of Meaning. This same year, 1929, E. M. Whetnall published a review of Dewey’s Experience and Nature279 and of Latta and MacBeath’s The Elements of Logic2*0 in Mind. She is first referred to in the minutes of the Aristotelian Society as “Dr. E. M. Whetnall” at the end of November, 1931, the year after she edited Welton and Monahan’s An Intermediate Logic.2*1

Whetnall’s second original philosophical article, “Formation of 

Concepts and Metaphysical Analysis”282 analyzes the relationship between the nature and process of metaphysical analysis and the psy-chological formation of concepts. During the early 1930s E. M. Whetnall served on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society for 1931-1932, 1932-1933, 1934-1935, and 1936-1937. Miss Whetnall became librarian for the Society for the term 1933-1934, while Stebbing assumed the presidency of the Association. Whetnall then was reelected to the Executive Committee for 1935-1936, and again for 1936-1937.

E. M. Whetnall was a frequent panel discussant of papers read before the Society during the 1930s, including deBurgh’s “Greatness and Goodness,” Hallett’s “Physical and Metaphysical Reality,” Broad’s “McTaggart’s Principle of the Dissimilarity of the Diverse,” Woodger’s “Some Apparently Unavoidable Characteristics of Natural Scientific Theory;” Oakeley’s “The Status of the Past,” and Mace’s “Hume’s Doctrine of Causality.” In addition she was a discussant for a symposium by Moore, Joseph, and Taylor on “Is Goodness a Quality?” (Other notable panelists for that symposium included Ewing, Joad, and Stace.) In 1936, Miss E. M. Whetnall served as a panel discussant of Wisdom’s “The Psycho-Centric Conception of Right.” I have been unable to ascertain a date of death, however, she does not appear on the membership lists after 1938 and may have died around that time.

25. Ruth Lydia Saw: 1901-1983?283

Ruth Lydia Saw was bom in 1901 and received her early education at the Country School for Girls in Surrey, England. Little is known about her family life, save that she was the child of Samuel James Saw and Matilda Louisa Homer. She had a sister, Grace, who apparently became a mathematician.284 Ruth Lydia Saw apparently graduated from Bedford College of the University of London with a B.A. in 1926, when she is first listed as a member of the Aristotelian Society. She accepted a position as Lecturer in Philosophy at Smith College in Massachusetts from 1927-1934, and apparently completed her Ph.D. while at Smith. She returned to England after completing the Ph.D.285 and became (part-time?) Lecturer in Philosophy at London University in Bedford College.

In 1935 Saw began to play an active role in the Aristotelian Society. In February of that year she gave a paper “An Aspect of Causal Connection,” which was commented on by Stebbing, White and others. She herself commented on Porteous’ “The Idea of the Necessary 

Connection” two months later. She continued as Lecturer at Bedford College until 1944, and was also (part-time?) Lecturer at Birbeck College from 1939 until 1946 when she became Reader there.286 Saw served on the Executive Committee of the Society from 1946-1949. In 1950 she became its Treasurer, a position that she held at least until 1962. She was a founding member and chaired the Council of the British Society of Aesthetics in 1960. In 1963 she became Vice-President and in 1969, President. Saw was promoted to Professor of Aesthetics (in 1961) and Head of the Philosophy Department, a position she apparently retained until her retirement in 1964 when she is designated Professor Emeritus. The next year Ruth Lydia Saw became the fifth woman elected President of the Aristotelian Society following in the tradition of Dorothy Emmett, Hilda Oakeley, L. Susan Stebbing and Beatrice Edgell before her.

During the early part of her professional career, Saw’s interest was in logic and philosophy of language, particularly on the problems of causal connection and induction in Ockham287 and in Whitehead.288 In the late 1940’s however, her interests gradually moved toward modern metaphysics, resulting early the next decade in a paper critical of Russell’s views on Leibniz and knowledge of individuals,289 as well as full length works on Spinoza (1951)290 and on Leibniz (1954).291 Saw’s Spinoza is an attempt to synthesize from Spinoza’s major works292 coherent accounts of his views on ethics and metaphysics. Saw sees Spinoza as a man of his times, trying to give accounts of what for his contemporaries were the problems of philosophy, mathematics, physics and theology. Despite this, there is no account of Spinoza’s life, personal or intellectual, in the volume. Saw reconstructs Spinoza’s views on these subjects by following what she takes to be his methodology as described in his Ethics. According to Saw, for Spinoza the method of obtaining true knowledge is first to

... order our lives in such a way that there are no emotional obstacles to the quiet and calm contemplation of the ideas we already possess. We are then making ourselves into a clear mirror from which the ideas of God may be clearly reflected, or a vehicle for the conveying of God’s ideas without distortion.293

Secondly, we must follow an orderly definitional process so that both the ordering and the relationship between ideas will accurately reflect the ordering and relationship of things. This will assure that our ideas coincide with God’s. 

Saw does not merely offer an exposition of Spinoza’s thought, she evaluates the nature and seriousness of what she identifies as short-comings in his system. For example, she criticizes his position that the soul is passive under the imagination. That position makes it

... very difficult to see how Spinoza could distinguish between the accidental associations of ideas taking place in day-dreaming or in dreaming by night, and the active control of imagined ideas taking place in artistic creation. It may be objected that Spinoza has the very practical aim of showing us how to increase our knowledge, and that he should not be criticised because he has not at the same time given an account of artistic creation. He has, however, not merely failed to give an account of such imaginative construction, but he has given such a description of the functioning of the intellect that it is impossible.294

Despite her regularly critical approach to Spinoza, it is clear from Saw’s account that she is not trying to impose a twentieth century account of the desideratum of any sound metaphysics upon a theory designed for an earlier time. Indeed, she attempts to take Spinoza on his own grounds, showing what is particularly elegant in his ideas (compared, say, to those of Descartes or Newton), and what remains particularly interesting for contemporary philosophy. The introduction and appraisal chapters which frame the book clearly show her attempt to defend her subject against the concerns and objections of Russell and Ayer, among others. Yet, she wants most of all to be Spinoza’s mouthpiece, summing up and making sense out of what would otherwise be dense, impossible passages. For example, on his epistemology, she says:

To sum up this account of knowledge, truth and error. Knowledge is the healthy activity of the mind, truth is the property of the ideas which the mind forms when it is thinking well, and it is immediately recognised. A mind in error is a mind thinking confusedly, connecting things that happened to occur together as though they belonged of necessity, and as a consequence, behaving inappropriately towards external objects. This is one consequence which Spinoza takes to be of fundamental importance. It is knowledge and clear thinking that enable men to live together well, so that the search for a satisfactory metaphysics is a search of great practical importance.295 

In addition to the chapters on methodology and epistemology, and the closing chapter appraising her reconstruction of Spinoza’s views, Saw devotes three chapters to Spinoza’s account of God, one to his account of the universe, space and time, one to human nature, and one to a sketch of Spinoza’s moral theory.