FSC Northrop

El cineasta Stuart Cuckow Northrop (27 de noviembre de 1893 en Janesville, Wisconsin - 21 de julio de 1992 en Exeter, New Hampshire ) fue un filósofo estadounidense . Después de recibir una licenciatura de Beloit College en 1915 y una maestría de la Universidad de Yale en 1919, pasó a la Universidad de Harvard, donde obtuvo otra maestría en 1922 y un doctorado. en 1924. ^[1] Northrop fue un influyente filósofo comparativo. Su obra más influyente ^[2] , The Meeting of East and West , se publicó en 1946 tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial.. Su tesis central es que Oriente y Occidente deben aprender algo el uno del otro para evitar conflictos futuros y prosperar juntos.

Fue nombrado profesor de Filosofía en la facultad de Yale en 1923, y más tarde fue nombrado profesor en 1932. En 1947 fue nombrado Profesor Sterling de Filosofía y Derecho . Presidió el departamento de Filosofía de 1938 a 1940 y fue el primer Máster del Silliman College , de 1940 a 1947.

Northrop conocía personalmente y era cercano a un gran número de figuras destacadas de la filosofía, la política y la ciencia. Estos incluyeron a GH Hardy , Bertrand Russell , Ludwig Wittgenstein , Erwin Schrödinger , Hermann Weyl , Norbert Wiener , Mao Zedong , John Foster Dulles y Mohammed Iqbal , entre muchos otros. Por ejemplo, vea la dedicación al hombre, la naturaleza y Dios .

Northrop fue un asistente habitual de las conferencias de cibernética de Macy en las décadas de 1940 y 1950. En 1962, reunió a algunos de los participantes clave de esas conferencias (incluidos Warren Sturgis McCulloch y Donald MacCrimmon MacKay ) en un Simposio de la Fundación Wenner Gren sobre el tema La determinación de la filosofía de una cultura .

Fue autor de doce libros e innumerables artículos sobre las principales ramas de la filosofía. Se pueden encontrar estudios de capítulos de siete de estos libros en Introducción a las obras filosóficas de FSC Northrop de Fred Seddon .

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Northrop's major contribution to philosophy is in the area of epistemology, specifically his theory of concepts. He divides all concepts into two kinds: intuition and postulation. For Northrop, the source of the meaning of the concept is the source of its difference. This can be seen from the definitions of these concepts. A concept by intuition is one which denotes, and the complete meaning of which is given by something that is immediately apprehended. Northrop gives blue in "the sense of the sensed color" as an example of a concept by intuition. (The Logic of Science and Humanities, p. 82.)

The other kind is concepts by postulation. A concept by postulation is one the meaning of which in whole or in part is designated by the postulates of the deductive theory in which it occurs. Blue in the sense of the frequency or wavelength in electromagnetic theory is a concept by postulation. (The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 83.)

According to Northrop, these two types of concepts exhaust the available concepts (i.e., providing terms with meanings) from which any scientific or philosophical theory can be constructed and therefore provides a means to do comparative philosophy, analyze and solve the problem of world peace, tame nations, provide a philosophical anthropology, explain why economists from Smith to Marx were incapable of providing a dynamics to supplement their statics, and to ground art and religion as well as legal and ethical theory. Northrop substantiates these claims in his The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities.

There remains one crucial notion: what is the relationship between postulation and intuition. For Northrop the relation is epistemic correlation. Northrop provides the following definition:

An epistemic correlation is a relation joining an unobserved component of anything designated by a concept by postulation to its directly inspected component denoted by a concept by intuition.

(The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 119.)

The sensed color blue is related to theoretical color blue by an epistemic correlation. Note what this relation is not. It is not the relation of causality or identity. Concept-by-postulation blue does not cause concept-by-intuition blue. As Northrop reports in Science and First Principles, (pp. 251–252) concept-by-intuition blue is a multivalued relation. One relatum of concept-by-intuition blue is the angstrom number currently associated with concept by postulation blue. To assume that only one of the relata of a relation could cause that relation is as silly as assuming that the female (or the male) member of a marriage causes the marriage.

Nor is the proper relation between postulation and intuition "identity", as can easily been seen using "blue". Concept-by-postulation blue is not identical with concept-by-intuition blue, but is just one among many relata that go to form this complex secondary quality.

Neither identity nor causality is the proper relation between sensed blue and theoretic blue.

Note that the problem is: "what is the epistemic correlate of one's directly inspected visual image?" The problem is not what is really real. Unlike (certain interpretations of) Plato and Plotinus, there is in Northrop no propensity to degrade or downgrade the world-as-it-is-sensed in favor of the world-as-known by concepts-by-postulation. To experience the visual image of blue is as epistemically valuable and irreducible as knowing blue postulationally. The two sources of all our knowledge give information that is both complementary and supplementary. Without concepts-by-intuition we could never know the world in its particularity. Without concepts-by-postulation we could never know the world in its universality and necessity.

We now have enough information to give a name to Northrop's epistemology. He calls it "logical realism in epistemic correlation with radical empiricism." In other words, reason (in the form of concepts-by-postulation) epistemically correlated with the senses (in the form of concepts-by-intuition).

The consequences of this theory cannot be overestimated. It has ramifications for psychology, epistemology, religion, culture and philosophy. Not only will the world now come to be seen as something that can be known both by theory as well as by sense perception, but the knower can also be known by both methods. Humans are not only what the latest science has postulated them to be, but also what they sense themselves to be.

One early claim by Northrop in Ch. 2 of The Meeting of East and West was that Eastern Thought in general (really most applicable to Chinese thought) deals with the world as an "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum." That is, reality is all connected and unified, not separated into distinct objects (undifferentiated continuum) and is in reality qualitative as perceived (aesthetic = perception, but later related to theory of art). Some Chinese have dismissed this as simple-minded. Others have embraced it as a correct characterization.^{[citation needed]} What Northrop contrasts with it in the west is an abstract, mathematical or formal conception of reality along with an atomistic conception of reality as fundamentally separate objects. Concepts are in the west "by postulation", while in the East "by intuition".

Bibliografía

Science and First Principles, Nueva York: The Macmillan Company, 1931. Reimpreso en 1979, Ox Bow Press.
The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding , Nueva York: The Macmillan Company, 1946. Reimpreso en 1979, Ox Bow Press.
La lógica de las ciencias y las humanidades, Nueva York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1947. Reimpreso en 1983, Ox Bow Press.
(ed.) Ideological Differences and World Order: Studies in the Philosophy and Science of the World's Cultures, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949.
La domesticación de las naciones: un estudio de las bases culturales de la política internacional, Nueva York: The Macmillan Company, 1952. Reimpreso en 1987, Ox Bow Press.
Con Gross, Mason W. (eds.) Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology, Nueva York: The Macmillan Company, 1953.
Política exterior de la Unión Europea y los Estados Unidos: un estudio sobre jurisprudencia sociológica, Nueva York: The Macmillan Company, 1954.
The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experience: Studies in the Method of Normative Subjects, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959. Reimpreso en 1959, Greenwood Press.
Antropología filosófica y política práctica, Nueva York: The Macmillan Company, 1960.
Man, Nature and God: A Quest for Life's Meaning , The Credo Series, planificado y editado por Ruth Nanda Anshen , rústica 1963. Nueva York: A Trident Press Book, Simon and Schuster, diciembre de 1962.
Con Livingston, Helen H. (ed.), Comprensión transcultural: epistemología en antropología. Nueva York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Los prolegómenos a una Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica de 1985, OxBow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut 1985

Otras lecturas

Seddon, Fred, Introducción a las obras filosóficas de FSC Northrop, Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY, 1995. Incluye una bibliografía de diecisiete páginas.

Audio

Conferencia: "Mentalidades culturales y ciencia médica" pronunciada el 28 de junio de 1956

Referencias

^ New York Times , 23 de julio de 1992. Obituario
^ p.54, "Metodologías de la filosofía comparada", 2009. Robert Smid. Prensa SUNY.

enlaces externos

Papeles Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop (MS 627). Manuscritos y Archivos, Biblioteca de la Universidad de Yale. [1]

[1] New York Times , 23 de julio de 1992. Obituario

[2] .54, "Metodologías de la filosofía comparada", 2009. Robert Smid. Prensa SUNY.

[1]