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Philosophy and Practice: Some Issues About War and Peace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

R. M. Hare
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Extract

I am going in this lecture on ‘Philosophy and Practice’ first to say something about philosophy and then something about practice, in order to show you how they bear on one another. But I must start by paying a tribute to the President of the Society for Applied Philosophy, Professor Sir A. J. Ayer, who has kindly agreed to take the chair at this lecture. I can honestly say that he is more responsible than anybody else for putting me on the right track in moral philosophy. He did this by convincing me, when young, that the ways people were doing it at that time had no future. In the famous chapter on ethics in his marvellously readable and exciting book, Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer was thought to be trying to show that moral philosophy itself, and perhaps even ordinary first-order moral thinking, was a waste of time. From later work of his, and from his occasional pronouncements about moral and political questions, it is evident that the second of these slanders was false. But even on the theoretical side the lessons I learnt from his book were positive as well as negative. That is not to say that the negative lessons were unimportant. Some people have still not absorbed them, and continue to waste our time. But here are two positive points which you will find in Ayer's book, and which for me were crucia

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 18: Philosophy and Practice , September 1984 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1984

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References

1 Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, 1961), 234Google Scholar; How to Do Things with Words (Oxford Univesity Press, 1962), 3.Google Scholar

2 The Language of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1952), 2.Google Scholar

3 See my paper ‘Supervenience’, in Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 58 (1984).Google Scholar

4 Cited in Mill, , UtilitarianismGoogle Scholar, Ch. 5, s.f.

5 Plato, , Meno 98b.Google Scholar

6 Ibid. 97b.

7 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1095 b6.Google Scholar

8 Moral Thinking (Oxford University Press, 1981), 2ff.Google Scholar

9 Nicomachean Ethics, 1144 b31.Google Scholar

10 See my paper ‘Utilitarianism and the Vicarious Affects’, in The Philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, Sosa, E. (ed.) (Reidel, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See my paper ‘Liberty and Equality: How Politics Masquerades as Philosophy’ in papers presented to conference on Liberty and Equality at Key Biscayne, , 1983Google Scholar, J. Paul (ed.) (forthcoming).