Peter Winch

Can We Understand Ourselves

When it is asked if it is ‘possible’ for us to understand alien cultures, a contrast is implied with a certain conception of the understanding we have of our own culture. This contrast has certain parallels with the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’, in which a contrast is also drawn between understanding myself and others. Though these are different questions, they are related — in that somewhat parallel confusion about the notion of ‘understanding’ are involved in both. Our own culture is not in principle transparent to our understanding; neither are other cultures in principle opaque.

Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due

I am neither competent nor inclined to follow Dr Mulhall into the labyrinths of Taylorian exegesis. His own discussion is so closely entwined with his interpretation of Taylor that I find it sometimes difficult to discern how far he is agreeing with Taylor and how far not. Rather than try to disentangle these threads I shall take up certain issues arising from Mulhall’s discussion and treat them largely independently, though distancing myself from time to time from certain emphases in Mulhall’s paper that I find disturbing, or at least misleading. The subject which we were invited to discuss in this symposium was ‘whether God is a social construct’. Mulhall’s main explicit points on this theme are as follows: Taylor’s position entails that ‘a theistic vocabulary (like any other) is a social construct’. Belief in God is inconceivable for anyone whose culture’s ‘webs of interlocution’ provide no appropriate vocabulary. It does not, however, follow that ‘the Being whose nature is elucidated and whose existence is proclaimed’ in such structures is dependent on them ‘for his nature or his existence’. He goes on: ‘We may be dependent on them for an understanding of that nature and existence — we may require them if our form of life is to be theistic, if we are to orient ourselves properly towards God; but He does not.’

Professor Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy

In 1958 Professor Anscombe made the following claim: the concepts of obligation, and duty — moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say — and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer survives, and are only harmful without it.2

Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil.@@@Simone Weil: "The Just Balance."

Between the Human and the Divine will introduce American readers to one of the most complex, troubled and troubling, luminous, path-breaking and neglected minds of our time. Dietz has taken an important step towards getting the measure of a thinker who measures our civilization.-THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

Causality and Action

I want to raise some questions about Professor von Wright’s treatment of the relationship between the causal explanation of events and the concept of human action. One of his main aims is to show the relation between the concept of ‘Humean causation’ (meaning by this no more than a causal relation in which “cause and effect are logically independent of one another” (cf. Explanation and Understanding, London 1971, p. 93) without commitment to Hume’s regularity view) and the concept of human action. Two of the most important conclusions that he works towards are that human action cannot be fully explained in terms of Humean causation and that the concept of Humean causation itself depends on the possibility of human action, conceived in a teleological way.