Essays on the Foundations of Ethics

C. I. Lewis

Description

2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

C. I. Lewis, one of America's greatest philosophers, was tremendously influential in the fields of logic and epistemology. However, it was to ethics that he devoted the last years of his life. His approach to ethics was not merely as an academic pursuit, but as the deepest and most fundamental challenge of human life, older than philosophy itself: how should one respond to the necessity of action, and cope with the imposed, unforgiving imperatives of self-governance? Drawing from volumes of Lewis's hand-inscribed notes and drafts, John Lange has assembled a version of Lewis's final book, Essays on the Foundations of Ethics, bringing to light his desire to locate and articulate those moral realities which he found to be part of an enlightened common sense, a common sense to be expected in an evolved, self-governing, rational human nature.
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Preface
Editor’s Introduction
Preface—and Confession

Essay 1. Introduction: About Philosophy in General and Ethics in Particular

Essay 2. The Good and Bad in Experience: Prolegomena

Essay 3. The Good and Bad in Experience

Essay 4. Semantics of the Imperative

Essay 5. Ethics and the Logical

Essay 6. Deliberate Acts

Essay 7. Right Acts and Good Acts

Essay 8. Right Doing and the Right to Do

Essay 9. We Approach the Normative Finalities

Appendix

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Éthique et morale
• Ethique et morale
• Philosophy
• Pragmatism
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 07 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438464947
• Langue: English

Extrait

ESSAYS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF ETHICS
Essays on the Foundations of Ethics
CLARENCE IRVING LEWIS
EDITED BY JOHN LANGE
Cover image of C. I. Lewis / courtesy of Andrew Lewis
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, Clarence Irving, 1883-1964, author. | Lange, John, 1931- editor.
Title: Essays on the foundations of ethics / by C. I. Lewis; edited by John Lange.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031426 (print) | LCCN 2016039645 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464930 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464947 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethics.
Classification: LCC B945.L451 L36 2017 (print) | LCC B945.L451 (ebook) | DDC 170—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031426
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Preface
Editor’s Introduction
Preface—and Confession
Essay 1. Introduction: About Philosophy in General and Ethics in Particular
Essay 2. The Good and Bad in Experience: Prolegomena
Essay 3. The Good and Bad in Experience
Essay 4. Semantics of the Imperative
Essay 5. Ethics and the Logical
Essay 6. Deliberate Acts
Essay 7. Right Acts and Good Acts
Essay 8. Right Doing and the Right to Do
Essay 9. We Approach the Normative Finalities
Appendix
Acknowledgments
I t takes a great many people, working together cooperatively, to bring a book to fruition. Most of these are unknown to a book’s author or editor. So I accord a cordial thanks, broadcast forth warmly, if not specifically, to all those involved in this project. You know who you are, even if I do not. Thank you.
More specifically, I would like to thank, first, Andrew Kenyon, Acquisitions Editor at SUNY Press, who supervised a long and arduous journey, patiently, courteously, and expertly; he did not always have an easy time of it; second, Fran Keneston, the Director of Marketing and Publicity for SUNY Press; third, Diane Ganeles, Senior Production Editor at the press; and, fourth, a reader whose anonymity will be respected, a reader not only deeply familiar with the work of C. I. Lewis, but one fully sensitive to, and fully aware of, his importance, philosophically, humanly, and culturally. Would that Lewis could lead us back to large issues, those of major human concern. Philosophy can delight in trivia, and that can be innocent and fun, but there are also more important things for her to do, the sorts of thing with which C. I. Lewis was concerned.
I would also like, in particular, to thank Rob Tempio, of Princeton University Press, who kindly brought the availability of the book to the attention of Andrew Kenyon. That is much appreciated.
Stanford University is the repository of the original Lewis papers, to which it invariably, generously, and helpfully provides access. My principal contact in this regard is Mattie Taormina, Head of Public Service and Processing Manuscripts Librarian, Department of Special Collections, the Green Library, Stanford. I herewith include the official credit line for Stanford’s permission to publish, supplied by Ms. Taormina. “Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.” Thanks to her and the University. Stanford University, however, while housing the physical papers involved, does not own the copyright to the materials, which is owned by the C. I. Lewis Estate. In this regard, I wish to thank Andrew K. Lewis, the Executor of the C. I. Lewis Estate, for permission to publish. Professor Lewis was very fortunate to possess so loving and devoted a son, who took so many pains in so many ways, over so many years, to protect, preserve, and perpetuate the legacy not only of one of the richest, deepest, and greatest of American philosophers, but that of a beloved father. I account myself very fortunate to have studied with Professor Lewis and to have met and known Andrew K. Lewis, not only as an associate in this project, but a friend. I am deeply grieved that Professor Lewis did not live long enough to finish his final book. How marvelous that would have been. It is my hope, however, that our current project, a version of that book, gives us a sense, a good sense, of what might have been.
Editor’s Preface
I t became evident in the fifties and early sixties of the Twentieth Century that the projected culmination of Professor Lewis’ philosophical work, intended to be his crowning achievement, that major gift which he longed to give us, the long-awaited book on ethics, that to be written for all, not merely colleagues, that book which he hoped might make a difference not just to philosophy, but even to civilization, might not be completed.
In his lifetime he published two representative, shorter studies, almost as though taking out insurance against the loss of the race, that desperate labor hurrying against the descent of night: The Ground and Nature of the Right , substantially the Woodridge Lectures, given at Columbia in 1954 and published by the Columbia University Press in 1955, and Our Social Inheritance , based on a set of lectures given at Indiana University in 1956, under the auspices of the Mahlon Powell Foundation and published by the Indiana University Press in 1957.
And he continued to work to the end, with his customary, dogged exactitude, ignoring, and ultimately defying, declining health and increasing age.
I was a former student of Professor Lewis, meeting him late in his career, when I was a student at the University of Southern California, and had the happy, if challenging, job of assisting him one semester in his legendary Kant course, an in-depth study of the first Critique. I need say no more to those hundreds of students, mostly at Harvard, who know that course. There is a bond there. Some years later, in 1963, when I was a young teacher in the northeast, I came west with my wife and son, on a small grant, to spend a summer at the University of California at Berkeley. Since Professor Lewis lived in Menlo Park, which was nearby, I called up to see if he would mind my dropping by, to say “Hello.” It was during this brief visit that I first, personally, became aware of the major project he was trying to finish.
How little did I then understand how much of my own life would be involved in this matter.
He had already accumulated a vast amount of material, literally several feet of draft material, housed in an extensive series of notebooks, here and there about the office, on shelves, by the desk, on the desk, and so on. A Xeroxed copy of this material, for example, without the notebook covers, requires several cartons for its storage.
It was clear even then, in the summer of 1963, that Professor Lewis faced a number of very serious problems, problems serious enough in themselves, but surely exacerbated by age and health. These problems were not only philosophical, those of trying to get things really right, that job in such a field being harrowingly subtle and complex, but, too, easier to understand, many simple logistic problems, those of coordinating, reviewing, managing, and sifting through this enormous amount of material, to extract from it that which might be refined for publication.
It seemed clear that even if Professor Lewis did not need help, and he never had before, he certainly, now, at the least, might be able to use a little.
And there I was, saying “Hello.”
One of the things he proposed, to my dismay, was the offer of a collaboration. Naturally I was unwilling to have my name linked with his in such a manner, as though I might be in his league, which I was not, and am not, but, too, more importantly, it was his book, his thinking, his labor of love, not mine. At best I would have been no more than a helper, hopefully a valuable one, but surely not a coequal, worthy of a shared authorship. That offer, it seemed to me, reflected not so much the expectation of any substantive contribution I might make to the project, as Professor Lewis’ concern, or fear, that the book might otherwise be lost. Happily, without, as I recall, my saying anything one way or the other, he shortly thereafter rethought this matter and explained to me that he could not actually do a collaboration. He had to have things his way in what he did. That was typical Lewis, one of the things one loved him for. He informed me, to my interest, that even in his famous collaboration with Cooper Harold Langford, Symbolic Logic , they had written separate chapters. Thus it was not really a collaboration, so much as a book the separate parts of which were written by separate authors. In any event, we arranged that I would visit him in the summer of 1964, and that we would work on the book together. My job, as I saw it, was not to write the book, or parts of it, but to help Professor Lewis organize and assemble it. Once again I would be an assistant, though now of a rather different sort. My functions would presumably be both seriously editorial and humbly clerical, perhaps locating, reviewing, and editing drafts, offering suggestions, supplying criticisms, and acting as a sounding board for his thinking, and, it may well have been, typing up at least a rough draft that would have served for Professor Lewis’ revisions. It is one of the great regrets of my life