Table Of ContentKNOWLEDGE AND VALUE
Tulane Studies in Philosophy
VOLUME XXI
Knowledge and Value
ESSAYS IN HONOR OF HAROLD N. LEE
edited by
ANDREW J. RECK
TULANE UNIVERSITY MARTINUS NIJHOFF
NEW ORLEANS THE HAGUE
1972 1972
@ I972 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Ha~ue, Netherlands
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1972
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1321-9 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2824-0
001: 10.1007/978-94-010-2824-0
CONTENTS
PREFACE
MONISM, LOGOS, FIRE, and FLUX: Shannon Du Bose 9
KANT'S THEORY OF SYMBOLISM: John D. Glenn, Jr. 13
DUALISMS IN WILLIAM JAMES'S Principles ot Psychology; 23
J.
Andrew Reck
CHARLES PEIRCE AND THE FIRSTNESS OF PROCESS: San-
dra B. Rosenthal 39
THE MEANING OF SAMENESS OR FAMILY RESEMBLANCE
IN THE PRAGMATIC TRADITION: David L. Miller 51
PRAGMATICS AND DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS: John A.
Barker 61
DISTINGUISHING PRESUPPOSITION IN EPISTEMOLOGY:
Donald S. Lee 85
VERIFICATION IN METAPHYSICS: Peter M. Burkholder lO1
GENTZEN'S CUT ELIMINATION THEOREM FOR N ON-
IIs
LOGICIANS: Larry Miller
THE AESTHETICS OF HAROLD N. LEE: A RECONSIDER-
ATION: Louise Roberts 127
ON THE PHENOMENON OF OBLIGATION: Edward G.
Ballard 139
POSITIVISTIC PATHS TO VALUE: Robert C. Whittemore 159
PUBLICATIONS BY HAROLD N. LEE 191
PREFACE
Harold N. Lee retired from Tulane University in June 1970.
At first the event was too incredible for us to react. Harold N.
Lee is a "character" in the best sense of the term. Surely he
would never leave us. He was too much an institution for our
institution to proceed without him. But he had attained the
mandatory retirement age of seventy, as he himself informed
us, and we could not refute the calendar. When at last we
came to acknowledge the event, we - his colleagues, profession
al friends, and former students - realized that we wanted to
honor him in a manner more permanent than dinners and
parties. So the idea of the present collection of essays dawned.
Harold N. Lee taught philosophy at Tulane University for
forty-five years. As professor of philosophy at Newcomb
College, the undergraduate women's division of Tulane, and
head of the Newcomb philosophy department, he carried a
heavy burden of teaching and administration. He introduced
many of the courses that are now a basic part of the curriculum,
such as the courses in aesthetics and symbolic logic. Shortly
after World War II he became chairman of the then newly
formed university department of philosophy and played a
major role in the establishment of the doctoral program in
philosophy. Throughout the decades he also continued his
philosophical researches, and he has published and continues
to publish important articles and books at regular intervals.
His colleagues throughout the South have long recognized his
achievements as a philosopher. He has the unique distinction
of being past president of both the Southwestern Philosophical
Society and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psy
chology.
Harold N. Lee's interests in philosophy are broad, and he
VIII PREFACE
has cultivated them with a remarkable depth of scholarship
and critical analysis. The essays offered here reflect the range
of his interests - in the history of philosophy, in American
philosophy, in epistemology, in metaphysics, in logic, in
aesthetics, in ethics, and in value theory. We offer these
essays in the hope that they do honor him.
Harold N. Lee was co-founder and long-time co-editor of
Tulane Studies in Philosophy. It is fitting that the present
collection of essays be published as a volume in the series.
J.
ANDREW RECK
New Orleans, Louisiana
MONISM, LOGOS, FIRE, AND FLUX
SHANNON DUBOSE
Newcomb College, Tulane University
Descartes recognized that once two things have been dis
tinguished, and their difference firmly established, it is
uncommonly difficult to grasp their unity,1 The difficulty of
reassembling divided unities is nowhere greater than in the
study of ancient thought. One may grant that the division
between mind and matter, or between form and its embodi
ment, belongs to Anaxagoras or perhaps waits for Plato. But
since we are accustomed to some such division, how are we to
understand Ionian monism?
Aristotle's general approach to Ionian philosophy has been
rather consistently followed, despite attacks on his credentials
as an historian of philosophy. Even when scholars take pains
to remark that in early thought no distinction occurs between
matter on the one hand and either form or mind on the other,
they tend to suppose with Aristotle that the Ionians concerned
themselves with the material cause (De Partibus 640 b 5).2
1 R. Descartes, Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: Cerf, 1899), III,
pp. 690-695.
2 J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th edition (London: Black, 1930).
Burnet treats the evidence of Aristotle with reservations (p. 31), and recognizes
the ambiguity of the label "matter" (p. vi); he is never the less persuaded that
the Ionians were looking for some sort of Urstoff or primary substance (p. 12n).
G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1962), cited hereafter as 'HCF', appears to follow Burnet's interpretation.
W. K. C. Guthrie does so as well in A History 01 Greek Philosophy, I, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1962), cited hereafter as 'HGP', but Guthrie defends
Aristotle's merits as an historian (pp. 41 ff). H. Cherniss argues to the contrary in
Aristotle's Criticism 01 Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1935), (Reprinted New York: Octagon 1964). After exhaustive
discussion of Aristotle on his predecessors, Cherniss concludes that the Ionians
were interested in the problem of change, and that Heraclitus particularly is a
process philosopher (p. 382). I believe that Cherniss' emphasis is correct; but that
Burnet rightly observed that the Ionians spoke of something "ageless" and
"deathless" (p. 10). Consequently I believe that the subject of Ionian speculation is
Being in process.
2 MONISM, LOGOS, FIRE, AND FLUX
There is a tendency to treat the Ionians as if they were quite
familiar with matter, and attended to the problem of describing
it, but had not yet discovered mind or immaterial entities. In
deed, one finds a widespread impulse to take rather too literally
the spatial metaphor implicit in "division" and "separation",
and a consequent treatment of intellectual discovery as if it were
a species of successful geographical exploration. Mind and im
material entities, however, do not simply occupy a new territory
where some intrepid traveller makes an eventuallandfall. What
ever definition one makes of the form/matter distinction, the
two are not separate from each other as Europe is separate
from Australia; either continent might be known without the
other, but types of being are mutually dependent. Notions of
material and immaterial entities depend upon each other in
so far as each is defined by contrast or limitation. One may
emphasize, as does Anaxagoras, the contrast between inert and
active entities. One may, like Plato, emphasize the difference
between a formal principle apprehended intellectually, and a
perceptible entity. One may distinguish, with Descartes,
between what thinks and what is extended. In all these
theories, however, each entity is marked off by the limit of
the other. The distinction is a logical one, within a given unity.
To suppose otherwise is to suppose that the historical de
velopment of thought proceeds like Magellan from island to
island and from one continent to another, until at last the
whole world is circumnavigated. To follow Aristotle in main
taining that the Ionian monists sought to describe the material
cause is to impose upon their views a distinction (however
important to later philosophers) which is foreign to them. To
abandon this distinction is to recognize that, just as Heraclitus
is no idealist,l so also is it true - and by the same token - he
is no materialist.
Heraclitus is not a materialist in either an Aristotelian or a
Cartesian sense of the word 'matter': that is, Heraclitus does
not attempt to describe a substratum,2 nor does he refer to
1 See G. T. W. Patrick, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on
Nature, translated from the Greek text of Bywater with introduction and critical
notes, 1889. Reprinted Chicago: Argonaut, 1969.
2 G. S. Kirk points out in HCF that the identification of fire as substratum in
De Caelo 298 b 35 is "sheer Aristotelianism" (p. 17); but Kirk nevertheless goes
MONISM, LOGOS, FIRE, AND FLUX 3
an entity characterized by geometrical attributes, moving
mechanically. Furthermore, Heraclitus does not, like a Pla
tonist, distinguish between entities which are known by sense,
and those which are conceived.
The central considerations for an exposition of Heraclitus'
theory are the nature of the Logos, the special status of fire,
and the authenticity of the flux doctrine. Abandoning the
assumption that reason and nature belong to different cate
gories will permit clarification of the Logos doctrine and the
status of fire. This clarification will be further illuminated by
Diogenes of Apollonia's defense of monism. This discussion
will support the authenticity of the flux doctrine, and vindi
cate Plato's interpretation of Heraclitus.
Aristotle berated Heraclitus for denying the law of contra
diction! on the grounds that such denial makes anything true.
But Aristotle's criticism comes from a point of view which
identifies individuals within species as the real existences (De
Partibus 644 a 24), and which emphasizes logical analysis and
distinction. Heraclitus, by contrast, makes a claim that he
"distinguishes each thing according to its nature" (fr. 1),2
even while he urges that "the Logos is common" (fr. 2). The
teaching of the Logos is just that "all things are one" (fr. 50).
This statement of the Logos doctrine is not isolated. It is
echoed in fr. 10 and again in Heraclitus' doctrine of opposites.
Fr. 10 asserts that "things taken together are whole and not
whole ... from all things can be made a unity, and from a
unity all things." The analytic approach is not supreme; one
may also and (if we read this passage in the light of fr. 50) more
properly take the synoptic view to recognize the whole as
prior. Furthermore, the several assertions of the unity of
opposites show, as Kirk (HCF, 166) justly observes, that
Heraclitus perceived the fundamental continuity of such
complementary pairs as hot and cold (fr. 126), youth and age
(fr. 88), feast and famine (fr. 67), up and down (fr. 60); and,
on to identify fire as the "originative world mass" (p. 306), which is an analogous
in terpreta tion.
1 Topics 159 b 30, Metaphysics 1012 a 33; the latter concerns fro 49a, which
Kirk queries (ReF, 374).
2 Fragments are identified here according to the numbering of H. Diels and W.
Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edition (Berlin: Weidman, 1951).
