Subject: BHA: RE: RE: Request for info re: early critical realists
Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 09:44:43 -0500
From: "Groff, Ruth" <ruth.groff-AT-marquette.edu>


Thank you very much Dick; this reference is extremely helpful.

Ruth




-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU on behalf of Moodey, Richard W
Sent:	Fri 5/7/2004 9:33 AM
To:	bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Cc:	
Subject:	BHA: RE: Request for info re: early critical realists
Hi Ruth,

There is an article in the Spring,2003 issue of Method: Journal of
Lonergan Studies, Vol 1, #21, pp. 1-23:  Morelli, Mark D. "The Realist
Response to Idealism in England and Lonergan's Critical Realism."
Morelli is at Loyola Marymount University (I don't have his e-mail
address).  Here is a quotation (pp. 9-11):

Critical Realism, as a name for a philosophical position, gained
currency in British and American philosophy in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.  It appeared initially as a translation from
German.  The earliest reference in the English context is to a
philosophical p[ostion that characterized itself as Critical Realism is
perhaps to be found in a review of A. Riehl's Der Philosophische
Kriticismus und seine Bedeutung fur die positive Wissenschaft in the
January 1889 issue of Mind written by Robert Adamson, the Kant scholar
and mentor of Dawes Hicks.  In his review article, Adamson reported the
Tiehl called his own point of view "the standpoint of Critical Realism."
[note: Contemporary British Philosophy (Second Series), 70.]  A little
more than a decade later Charles Judd concluded an expository article in
The Philsophical Review on the system of Wilhelm Wundt, under whom Dawes
Hicks had studied in Leipzig, by noting that "the best short phrase for
the description of the system is that which Wundt is making use of in
recent articles, 'critical realis.'" [note: Charles Judd,
"Wundt's System of Philosohy," The Philosophical Review, July 1897,
385.]

	I appears, though, that the first use of the name Critical
Realism to designate an English or American philosophical position or
movement was that of Roy Wood Sellars who, in 1916, published Critical
Realism: A Study of the Nature and Conditions of Knowledge. [New York:
Rand McNally & Co., 1916]  But, just a year later an article titled "The
Basis of Critical Realism" by Dawes Hicks appeared in the Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society [Cited in G. Dawes Hicks, Critical Realism:
Studies in the Philosophy of Mind and Nature (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1938)], and it seems that he employed the name without any awareness of
Sellar's volume.  In 1920, Sellars, joined by six other American
philosophers, published a collaborative volume entitled Essays in
Critical Realism: A Co-operative Study.  Sellars's collaborators were
Durant Drake, Arthur O. Lovejoy, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur K. Rogers,
George Santayana, and C. A. Strong.  A response came at a joint session
of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society in July 1924, when
Dawes Hicks chaired a symposium on the theme "Critical Realism:  Is the
difficulty in affirming a nature independent of mind overcome by the
distinction between essence and existence"?  The participants, in
addition to Dawes Hicks, wer J. Loewenberg of the University of
California, C.D. Broad, and the Reverend C. J. Shebbeare. [Announced in
Mind, NS, 33, 130 (April, 1924), 230-31.]  Loewenberg, in his published
report on the symposium, described it as an attempt to "liberate Cricial
Realism [as proposed by the Sellars group, and especially by Santayana]
from its polemical context." [brackets inside the quotation are
Loewenberg's; Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary
Volume IV (1924): 87.]  It was a Dawes-Hicksian Critical Realist
evaluation of American Critical Realism.  In 1927, C.D. Broad used the
name "Critical Realism,"but only once and in passing, for the position
he espoused. [C.D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature,1927, 422ff.]
	During the 1920's the phrase "critical realism" occurred fairly
frequently in the articles in the three prominent journals of the time,
Mind, The Journal of Philosophy, and The Philosophical Review.  Almost
invariably these uses are related directly to the movement associated
with Sellars and his six compatriots. [Morelli provides a list of
examples]  Indeed, a fair number of these articles were by Sellars
himself who had undertaken to defend his personal version of Critical
Realism against different versions espoused by his former collaborators.
Finally, in 1938 Dawes Hicks published Critical Realism: Studies in the
Philosopy of Mind and Nature.  Even though it was published eight years
after Lonergan left England, this volume should be included among the
important loci of the phrase "critical realism," because it brings
together in one volume articles published by Dawes Hicks during the
previous twenty years, the first being his paper of 1917. . . . [end of
quotation]

I have quoted this at some length because you probably don't have this
issue of Method right at your fingertips, and also because it is
provides some history of the phrase that I have wanted to share with
members of this list.

Best regards,

Dick



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
[mailto:owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU] On Behalf Of Groff,
Ruth
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 5:38 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: BHA: Request for info re: early critical realists

Hi all,

Does anyone know anything about the original early 20th century Critical
Realists and/or about their relationship to the New Realists?  I'm
interested both in the school of thought in general and in Roy Wood
Sellars in particular.

I remember that there was a person on the list who made mention of this
group; I just don't remember who it was.

Thanks!  




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