Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 1983"

Devant la Loi

Abstract: …: ainsi faict la science (et nostre droict mesme a, diet-on, des fictions legitimes sur lesquelles il fonde la verite de sa justice);(…) (Montaigne, Essais II, f. XII).Un titre resonne parfois comme la citation d'un autre titre. Mais des lors qu'il nommerait autre chose, il ne citerait plus simplement, il detournerait l'autre titre a la faveur d'un homonyme. Tout cela n'irait jamais sans quelque prejudice ou usurpation.

‘Freedom is Slavery’: a Slogan for Our New Philosopher Kings

Abstract: But if you want to be free, you've got to be a prisoner. It's the condition of freedom—true freedom.‘True freedom!’ Anthony repeated in the parody of a clerical voice. ‘I always love that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn't the contrary; oh, dear me, no! It's the thing itself, but as it truly is. Ask any die-hard what conservatism is; he'll tell you it's true socialism. And the brewer's trade papers; they're full of articles about the beauty of true temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner…

Liberty and Compulsory Education

Abstract: Although it is primarily concerned with the value of liberty and the justification of compulsory education, what lies behind much of this paper is the question ‘;Why treat children like children?’ The fact is that we do not regard children as having the same rights, privileges and liberties as adults, and children may not be thought of as deserving the same degree of respect or consideration as their seniors. In the past this has led to some horrific states of affairs, and while matters have undoubtedly improved, it is still the case that most people accept what Graham Haydon describes as ‘;the assumption that one thing can go for children and quite another for adults’. One likely consequence of this, and an important example of the different treatment reserved for children is compulsory education. Illiterate and innumerate adults are not compelled to practise their letters or play with counters or watch prescribed television programmes. Even when, to quote Mill, we have an adult ‘;who shows rashness, obstinacy and self-conceit—who cannot live within moderate means—who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgencies—who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect’, we do not subject him to character-building games or uplifting scripture readings, or initiate him into the mysteries of home economics, or read Shakespeare at him. But we compulsorily do all of this and more to children. Moreover, compulsory education, as we have it, is not something from which the young can gain remission. The law that requires ‘;every child of compulsory school age…to receive an efficient full-time education suitable to his age, ability, and aptitude’ effectively defines an approach where what counts is the arbitrariness of chronology, not standards or excellence.

Liberty in a Culturally Plural Society

Abstract: I want to begin this paper by recalling a once-lively school of English political and legal thinking which has fallen undeservedly into neglect. I refer to the pluralists, notably the lawyer F. W. Maitland, the religious scholar J. N. Figgis, and, early in their careers, the political theorists Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. All were influenced by the writings of the German legal scholar Otto von Gierke, which Maitland as editor and translator had first introduced into England. The pluralists' concerns were at once political and legal; virtually alone among English writers in this century until the 1970s, their work avoided the barrenness that comes of treating political theory and jurisprudence as unrelated enterprises. I shall describe the problems that preoccupied them and some of their resultant theories, and also the way in which specifically legal doctrine was both a target of their criticism and an important element in their thinking.

Dostoyevsky: Psychology and the Novelist

Abstract: In a lecture on ‘Science and Psychology’ Dr Drury distinguishes between ‘a psychology which has insight into individual characters’ and ‘a psychology which is concerned with the scientific study of universal types’, one which comprises ‘those subjects that are studied in a university faculty of psychology’. The former, and not the latter, he says, is psychology in ‘the original meaning of the word’. ‘We might say of a great novelist such as Tolstoy or George Eliot (he goes on) that they show profound psychological insight into the characters they depict … In general, it is the great novelists, dramatists, biographers, historians, that are the real psychologists.’

Property, Liberty and On Liberty

Abstract: There are at least three tolerably distinct views about the connections between liberty and property; two of these I shall discuss fairly briefly in order to get on to Mill's central claims about the relationship between property rights and freedom, but in conclusion I shall return to them to show how they bear on what Mill has to say.