Robert M. Burns

Language, tradition, and the self in the generation of meaning

An analysis of Mark Bevirs account of the role of language and tradition on the one hand, and the individual on the other in the generation of ideas, and proposal of an alternative account It endorses Bevirs project of finding a middle way between individualism and collectivism, but finds that Bevir exaggerates the role of the individual. It argues that human selves always remains dependent on language even to articulate their own intentions to themselves. Whilst they have a capacity to create new linguistic expressions, this is always limited to the exploration of possibilities already latent in the language. However, no one is a mere recipient and conduit of a given language: everyone hands it on transformed by their unique appropriation of it. The antifoundationalist analyses of Wittgenstein, Newman Collingwood, and Neurath are invoked to argue that this state of affairs also applies to the individuals relation to the beliefs and values inherited traditionally: there is no possibility of a wholesale rejection of what is received; no individual can reject all received traditions, and erect an entire belief structure from scratch, but can only modify it on a piecemeal basis, so that received tradition always remains constitutive of the individual mind. It is also argued that human self-consciousness is always socially formed, and no person ever completely integrated, and stabilized. No one is ever therefore in a state of complete self-possession. One therefore must reject Bevirs claim that the historian of ideas must initially presume that individuals are sincere, conscious and rational in their expressed beliefs: ‘sincere’ self-consciousness is an ideal never fully achieved, and beliefs as to what constitutes ‘rationality’ are so varied that specific presumptions cannot be made.

Readings of Heidegger

Few twentieth-century philosophers have exercised greater influence than Martin Heidegger not only on professional philosophy, but many other fields. This should guarantee the interest of historians of philosophy in him, for all that Anglo-American linguistic philosophers can still be found who query his status as philosopher. His enormous impact is evident in the number of publications on Heidegger in English alone. Secondary works continue to proliferate, stimulated especially by the ongoing publication of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, 72 of its planned 102 volumes having been published by 2007. These include course notes from throughout Heidegger’s career. Those from the 1930s and 1940s enable detailed tracking of the transformation of his thinking through to his ‘post-metaphysical’ period, and in particular his attitudes to National Socialism, while those up to about 1930 reveal his engagement with an impressively wide range of philosophical influences up to and beyond the publication of Being and Time. In addition, however, there are book-length texts. That which has generated the most interest so far is Beiträge zur Philosopie (Vom Ereignis), composed in 1936, published in 1989, with an English translation Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) appearing in 1999. Its exploration of the crossing over from metaphysics to ‘the other beginning into which Western thinking is now entering’ seems to many to provide a key statement of his later programme. Much the same could be said of Besinnung written in 1938–9, published in 1997 in German, and translated into English in 2006 as Mindfulness. These have stimulated the publication of numerous

Divine Infinity in Thomas Aquinas: I. Philosophico-Theological Background

A reassessment of Aquinas’s doctrine of divine infinity, particularly in the light of the previous history of the concept within Western philosophy and theology. From the critical perspective provided by this history the central place which has been claimed for it in Aquinas’s thinking is questioned, as are also its originality and coherence. The notion that the doctrine of divine infinity was introduced to Western thought by Judaeo-Christianity is rejected; from Anaximander onwards it had been a central concept in Greek philosophy. Aristotle however had rejected it so effectively that, for several centuries afterwards, it seems to have led an ‘underground’ existence until it finally surfaces again in ‘Gnostic’ and related currents of thought. It is from these circles that it finally, and after some resistance, patchily entered orthodox Christian thinking. Likewise Plotinus was not the source of the doctrine, as some have claimed; historical precedence must be given to the Gnostics. Neoplatonism never, despite the prestige of Plotinus, fully accepted the doctrine; in Proclus it is a subordinate emanation from the One, which is beyond Infinity and Infinitude. Nor, because of the influence of Aristotle, does Islamic Neoplatonized Aristotelianism endorse the doctrine. Aquinas’s commitment to it seems to stem from the impact of John of Damascus’s stress upon the doctrine, the translation of whose work greatly influenced Western theology from the late twelfth century onward, together with his need to distance himself from the restrictions of the divine power and freedom found in the Arabic Aristotelian philosophers, whom, in general, he regarded as philosophical authorities. But his position on the doctrine is flawed by equivocation and self-contradiction, flowing from his attempt to reconcile Christian personalist theism with Neoplatonized Aristotleain necessitarian monism.