上記の入手文献
- P.M.S. Hacker “Critical Study: Soames' History of Analytic Philosophy”, (Review of Scott Soames's Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century), in: The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 222, 2006
をちらほら見ると、驚くことがsection VIの冒頭に書いてある。
According to Soames, it was Kripke who at last set analytic philosophy on the true path of a science. This is not the place to determine the truth of Kripke’s theses in his Naming and Necessity. But it did not require Kripke to point out that the analytic/synthetic distinction is different from the epistemological a priori/a posteriori one, and that both differ from the metaphysical necessary/contingent one. Ayer’s mistakes were pointed out, at the very latest, in 1962, by the Kneales in The Development of Logic, where they emphasized that the three distinctions are not synonymous, andnot even co-extensive.
It is equally mistaken to suppose that it was Kripke’s ‘discovery’ that there are a posteriori necessities. Whether this alleged discovery ‘has transformed the philosophical landscape, recalibrated our sense of what is possible, and reshaped our sense of our own philosophical past’, as Soames asserts, is a matter for debate in another forum. But the venerable claim that there are objective a posteriori necessary truths was propounded by twentieth-century analytic philosophers long before Kripke, for example by Kneale in his Probability and Induction in 1949.
To represent the connecting thread of the history of analytic philosophy after 1920 as the tale of a fifty-year entanglement in a misguided assimilation of the analytic, a priori and necessary, from which we were ultimately saved by Kripke, is a caricature.
A posteriori necessities はKripkeさんよりも遥か以前に既にW. Knealeさんによって1949年に発見されていた、という。ほんとなのか？ しかも‘caricature’って…。
この書評の反論をSoamesさんは書かれている。それが上記の本日入手文献
- Scott Soames “Discussions: Hacker's Complaint”, (A Reply to P.M.S. Hacker's Review), in: The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 224, 2006
である。反論が正当なものか、読む時間がない。またにします。SoamesさんはA posteriori necessities の発見をKnealeさんに帰することはできないと正面からHackerさんを反駁しているようだ。
しかしHackerさんの書評は少々やりすぎだとも思えます。彼の書評の結びはこうなっています。
That Soames’ book should be thought to be the best scholarly book in philosophy in 2003 in the USA is disturbing because of its implications for the state of American philosophical scholarship. Soames’ overarching goal was ‘to help forge a common understanding of the recent philosophical past that illuminates where we now stand’(I, p. xvi). What he has done is to strengthen a current American stereotype of the history of analytic philosophy. If, as has been predicted, his book becomes the standard history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, then history will indeed be, as Henry Ford put it, ‘bunk’.
これじゃあアメリカの分析哲学者全員を敵にまわすことになりそうだけど、いいのかな。それに最後の文句はひどすぎる。‘bunk’の原意は、中身のないよいしょ話ということで、つまり「与太話」ということである。これはやりすぎだと思います…。
おやすみなさい。
