A blupete Essay

Notes, to blupete's Essay
"An Essay On Philosophy"

1 W. Somerset Maugham, Great Novelists.

2 I shall observe: who ever had first started this little story about David Hume and Mr. White likely did not fully appreciate, that Hume, of all the philosophers, was the least likely to make such an inquiry, "What books did you read." Though an answer to such a question is usually quite revealing, it seems strange to think that Hume would ask it. Hume was not at all "bookish" about philosophy, to Hume "philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected."

3 Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975); New Bottles for New Wine, from the preface.

4 There are many rigorous systems of Eastern philosophy with which, in the context of this work, I do not deal.

5 The splendour of Greece extended between 465 BC to 300 BC.

6 It was fundamental to the speculations of the Greeks that knowledge of things were to be found "always outside the mind in the object." See, Miraglia's work, Comparative Legal Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1921). Luigi Miraglia (1846-1903) was a professor of the Philosophy of Law in the University of Naples.

7 The first two opening paragraphs in Emerson's "Montaigne; or, the Sceptic," Representative Men.

8 See Bertrand Russell.

9 I should state there is nothing new to the method of inductive thinking, it can be traced back to Aristotle.

10 See Sir Julian Huxley, Evolutionary Humanism, p. 120.

11 Emerson, Representative Men.

12 Henry Alphern, An Outline History of Philosophy (Forum House, 1969) p. 188-9.

13 "Of Liberty and Necessity," p. 95.

14 "This is the foundation of all. We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do."

15 As quoted by Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 3rd Ed., 1991.) at p. 88.

16 Miraglia, op. cit.

17 Historically, the source of an ethical criterion has been equated with religion, though it might well be equated with a number of things, including for the good of the state (see Hegel and Marx); the good of the individual or a group (see the Hedonism of Epicurus or the monisism of Hobbes, or the Utilitarianism of Bentham, or the democracy of Locke). Other theories exist: such as the instrumentalism of John Dewey, for whom morality is relative to individual experience.

18 Murray's works include: English Grammar, English Exercises and English Reader, and were long the standards in English schools.

19 For example, classical Newtonian theory was completely relied upon and accepted as true for generations; now, it is questioned; now, we have a theory of matter and energy based on that branch of physics developed from the ideas of Einstein in relation to atomic structure, which, in the 20th century, has evolved into quantum mechanics.

20 "Logic, or the science of the general principles of good and bad reasoning." Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations. "Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence." (John Stuart Mill).

21 Bacon, 1605.

22 This is why it is so important, as a collective publicly sponsored task, to see to the proper education of the young; sadly, all to often, the young do not obtain a proper or full set of morals where the job is left just to the parents.

23 The OED cites Dombey ii.

24 As Byron, in 1820, in his letter to his friend Murray, who was likely expressing surprise at how many young and attractive aristocratic Italian ladies were agreeable to bed down with this lame lord, Byron, said: "the moral of the Italian is not your moral; their life is not your life."

25 Henry Alphern, An Outline History of Philosophy (Forum House, 1969) p. 124.

26 From Frederic R. White's introduction to his work, Famous Utopias of the Renaissance (Chicago: Packard, 1946) at pp. x-xi.

27 For Bentham's reference to the social contract theory see the Theory of Legislation (1789) (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner; 1931) pp. 81-82.

28 Utilitarianism (1863), ch. 2.

29 See Bertrand Russell's Dictionary of Mind, Matter & Morals (New York: Citadel Press, 1993), p. ,266.


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2011 (2019)