Grice e Zubiena

Grice: As I look back upon my former self, it seems to me that when, fifty years ago, I began the serious study of philosophy, the temperament with which I approached this enterprise was one of what I might call dissenting rationalism.' The rationalism was probably just the interest in looking for reasons which would be found in any intelligent juvenile who wanted to study philosophy; the tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, my father. My father, who was a gentle person, a fine musician, and a dreadful business man, exercised little personal influence over me but quite a good deal of cultural influence; he was an obdurate nineteenth-century liberal nonconformist, and I witnessed almost daily, without involvement, the spectacle of his religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household-my mother, who was heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who was a Catholic convert. But whatever their origins in my case, I do not regard either of the elements in this dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at my stage of intellectual development. I mention them more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance; it seems to me that they have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded, over my philosophical life, and this 1 am inclined to regard as a much less usual phenomenon.

I count myself wonderfully fortunate to have begun my philosophical studies as a pupil of W. F. R. Hardie, later President of my then college, Corpus Christi, the author of a work on Plato which both is and is recognized as a masterpiece, whose book on the Nicomachean Ethics, in one of its earlier incarnations as a set of lecture-notes, saw me through years of teaching Aristotle's moral theory. It seems to me that 1 learnt from him just about all the things which one can be taught by someone else, as distinet from the things which one has to teach oneself. More specifically, my initial rationalism was developed under his guidance into a belief that philosophical questions are to be settled by reason, that is to say by argument; I learnt also from him how to argue, and in learning how to argue I came to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more thanan ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).

Now compare with Kant:

The lower faculty is the rank in the university that occupies itself with teachings which are not adopted as directives by order of a superior, or in so far as they are not so adopted. Now we may well comply with a practical teaching out of obedience, but we can never accept it as true simply because we are ordered to (de par le Roi). This is not only objectively impossible (a judgment that ought not to be made), but also subjectively quite impossible (a judgment that no one can make). For the man who, as he says, wants to err does not really err and, in fact, accept the false judgment as true; he merely declares, falsely, an assent that is not to be found in him. So when it is a question of the truth of a certain teaching to be expounded in public, the teacher cannot appeal to a supreme command nor the pupil pretend that he believed it by order. This can happen only when it is a question of action, and even then the pupil must recognize by a free judgment that such a command was really issued and that he is obligated or at least entitled to obey it; otherwise, his acceptance of it would be an empty pretense and a lie. Now the power to judge autonomously-that is, freely (according to principles of thought in general)—is called reason. So the philosophy faculty, because it must answer for the truth of the teachings it is to adopt or even allow, must be conceived as free and subject only to laws given by reason, not by the government.