Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)

Leslie Stephen was a 19th century British philosopher, man of letters, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. The portion of his writings which bear upon philosophy is small only in relation to his total literary output. He was born in Kensington Gore on November 28, 1832. In 1842 Stephen's parents moved to Brighton for the sake of his health. He attended a day school, but soon entered Eton College. His parents took a house at Windsor so that he could live at home. Stephen made little progress, and was removed by his father in 1846. He was later sent to King's college, and later entered Cambridge's Trinity Hall in 1850. He won a scholarship in mathematics and gained a reputation as an athlete. He was ordained a deacon in 1855, appointed junior tutor in 1856, and ordained a priest in 1859. In 1862 his position at Cambridge changed. His reading in Mill, Comte, and Kant led him to reject the historical evidences of Christianity. He declined to take part in the chapel services. Thereupon at the Master's request, he resigned his tutorship. Hs skepticism steadily grew, and on in 1875 he relinquished his holy orders. When freed from his tutorial and clerical duties, his interests took a wider range, and he subsequently published in the fields of politics, literary criticism, and social criticism. Religious and philosophical speculation engaged much of his attention, and he presented his views in Fraser's Magazine, and Fortnightly Review. A collection of religious and philosophical essays entitled Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking came out in 1873. The book make him a leader of the agnostic school, and a chief challenger of popular religion, which he charged with being unable to satisfy genuine spiritual needs.

He devoted much of his time to his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) in which he explained the arguments of the old English deists and the skepticism of Hume. He places the philosophers and moralists in their due position in the whole literary activity of the period. A further stage of the same history ---The English Utilitarians (1900) was completed toward the end of his life. That same year appeared his "An Agnostic's Apology" in the Fortnightly Review; this further revealed his private convictions and helped familiarize the public with the term "agnostic" which had been invented in 1870 by Thomas Huxley, but had not yet become in vogue. In 1878 he joined the Metaphysical Society on the eve of its dissolution, and read two papers at its meetings, In 1882 he produced his Science of Ethics, in which he summed up his final conclusions on the dominant problems of life, in light of his study of Mill, Darwin, and Spencer. He devoted the remainder of his life to other literary projects and died in 1903 of cancer. After his death his monograph on Hobbes appeared (1904).

The first writers who worked out more general consequences of the theory of evolution were scientists with a philosophical turn of mind. Others outside the sciences soon followed in drawing out the consequences of evolution; Stephen was foremost among these, particularly in the area of the ethics. His own independent contribution is given in The Science of Ethics (1882). After Spencer's Data, this is the first book which worked out an ethical view determined by the theory of evolution. He followed Mill and Darwin as an ally of the empirical and utilitarian creed; but he came to see that more extensive changes were necessary. Spencer's compromise between hedonism and evolutionism failed to satisfy him, and he found the ethical bearing of evolution better expressed by the conception of social vitality than by that of pleasure. The great merit of the work consists in its presentation of the social content of morality in the individual mind as well as in the community; but it does not sufficiently recognize the distinction between the historical process traced by the evolution theory and the ethical validity which evolution is assumed to possess.

Sophists

The growing demand for education in 5th century BCE. Greece called into existence a class of teachers known as sophists. They were a professional class rather than a school, and as such they were scattered over Greece and exhibited professional rivalries. The educational demand was partly for genuine knowledge, but mostly reflected a desire for spurious learning that would lead to political success. They wandered about Greece from place to place, gave lectures, took pupils, and entered into disputations. For these services they exacted large fees, and were, in fact, the first in Greece to take fees for teaching wisdom. Though not disgraceful in itself, the wise men of Greece had never accepted payment for their teaching. The sophists were not, technically speaking, philosophers, but, instead taught any subject for which there was a popular demand. Topics included rhetoric, politics, grammar, etymology, history, physics, and mathematics. Early on they were seen as teachers of virtue in the sense that they taught people to perform their function in the state. Protagoras of Abdera, who appeared about 445 BCE. is named as the first Sophist; after him the most important is Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis. Wherever they appeared, especially in Athens, they were received with enthusiasm and many flocked to hear them. Even such people as Pericles, Euripides, and Socrates sought their company.

The most popular career of a Greek of ability at the time was politics; hence the sophists largely concentrated on teaching rhetoric. The aims of the young politicians whom they trained were to persuade the multitude of whatever they wished them to believed. The search for truth was not top priority. Consequently the sophists undertook to provide a stock of arguments on any subject, or to prove any position. They boasted of their ability to make the worse appear the better reason, to prove that black is white. Some, like Gorgias, asserted that it was not necessary to have any knowledge of a subject to give satisfactory replies as regards it. Thus, Gorgias ostentatiously answered any question on any subject instantly and without consideration. To attain these ends mere quibbling, and the scoring of verbal points were employed. In this way, the sophists tried to entangle, entrap, and confuse their opponents, and even, if this were not possible, to beat them down by mere violence and noise. They sought also to dazzle by means of strange or flowery metaphors, by unusual figures of speech, by epigrams and paradoxes, and in general by being clever and smart, rather than earnest and truthful. Hence our word "sophistry": the use of fallacious arguments knowing them to be such. Early on Sophists were seen to be of merit as people of superior skill or wisdom, as we find in Pindar and Herodotus. We learn from Plato, though, that even in the 5th century there was a prejudice against the name "sophist". By Aristotle's time, the name bore a contemptuous meaning, as he defines "sophist" as one who reasons falsely for the sake of gain.

With the revival of Greek eloquence, from about the beginning of the second century CE., the name "sophist" attained a new distinction. At that time the name was given to the professional orators, who appeared in public with great pomp and delivered declamations either prepared beforehand or improvised on the spot. Like the earlier sophists, they went generally from place to place, and were overwhelmed with applause and with marks of distinction by their contemporaries, including the Roman Emperors. Dion Chrysostom, Herodes Atticus, Aristides, Lucian, and Philostratus the Elder belong to the flourishing period of this second school of sophists, a period which extends over the entire second century. They appear afresh about the middle of the fourth century, devoting their philosophic culture to the zealous but unavailing defense of paganism. Among them was the emperor Julian and his contemporaries Libanius, Himerius, and Themistius. Synesius may be considered the last sophist of importance.

Synderesis

"Synderesis" is a technical term from scholastic philosophy, signifying the innate principle in the moral consciousness of every person which directs the agent to good and restrains him from evil. It is first found in a singe passage of St. Jerome (d. 420) in his explanation of the four living creatures in Ezekiel's vision. Jerome explains that most commentators hold that the human, the lion, and the ox of the vision represent the rational, the irascible, and the appetitive (or concupiscent) parts of the soul, according to Plato's division, while the fourth figure, that of the eagle, represents a fourth part of the soul, above and outside these three:

This the Greeks call synderesis, which spark of conscience was not extinguished from the breast of Adam when he was driven from Paradise. Through it, when overcome by pleasures or by anger, or even as sometimes deceived by a similitude of reason, we feel that we sin; ... and this in the scriptures is sometimes called spirit.... And yet we perceive that the conscience (conscientia) is itself also thrown aside and driven from its place by some who have no shame or modesty in their faults.

In this passage no distinction seems to be drawn between synderesis and conscientia. It has even been maintained that the former word is a copyist's error for synderesis, the usual Greek equivalent for "conscientia".

The use of synderesis as distinct from conscientia among the scholastics, and to a slight extent among early Protestant moralists, is founded on its description by Jerome as scintilla conscientiae - the spark - from which the light of conscience arises. Thus Jeremy Taylor calls it "the spark or fire put into the heart of humans," while synderesis, which is specifically called conscience of the deed done, is the "bringing fuel to this fire (Ductor Dubitantium 1:1:1) As distinguished from synderesis, conscientia is applied by these writers to the particular attitude of a person to good or evil action, and may accordingly be an unsafe guide. Synderesis is thus a faculty or habit (it was disputed which) both of judging and of willing the right, in agreeement with "original righteousness" and persisting in the separate powers of the soul in spite of the corruption of human nature brought about by the Fall. In the earlier descriptions it is spoken of as volitional as well as intellectual. According to Aquinas, however, it is distinctly practical reason - certain principles belonging to the practical side of reason which point out the right direction for action, just as the theoretical axioms of the understanding do for thinking. Both synderesis and conscientia are placed among the intellectual powers. A different view is given by Bonaventura, who makes the whole distinction between conscientia and synderesis rest upon the distinction between judgment and will. God (he says) has implanted a double rule of right in human nature: one for judging rightly, and this is the moral strength of conscience; another for right volition, and this is the moral strength of synderesis, whose function is to dissuade from evil and stimulate to good, and which may therefore be described as the original moral tendency of the disposition.

This, however, does not seem to be either the best or the most prevalent view of scholasticism regarding synderesis. The question is fully discussed by Duns Scotus, who decided against Bonaventura that both synderesis and conscience belong to practial reason, the former giving the first principles or major premises of its practical syllogisms, the latter corresponding to their conclusions (In Sent. Reportationes Bk 2:39, Q1-2). Jeremy Taylor also follows the Thomistic use and makes synderesis "the general repository of moral principles or measures." This is the "rule of conscience," while conscience itself is "a conjunction of the universal practical law with the particular moral action." It applies the rule to the particular case, and is thus both witness and judge of moral actions. It may be noted that the term "conscience," when used (as by Kant) as equivalent to practical reason regarded as infallible, corresponds to the medieval synderesis, and not to the medieval conscientia.