{"title":"Between Intuition and Empiricism","authors":"P. J. Hale","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"William Benjamin Carpenter was a central figure in the Metaphysical Society. Aware of the tensions between the theists and the scientific naturalists in the Society he offered a middle ground. Although his early work in physiology had led him to doubt his own Unitarian faith, his mentor James Martineau had reassured him. However, as his studies in science developed, Carpenter found physiological evidence to underpin his faith. Although Carpenter failed to convince the most extreme among his friends in the Society; namely, Richard Holt Hutton and Thomas Huxley, or his lifelong mentor, Martineau, his ideas were attractive to many others. Henry Edward Manning adopted Carpenter’s ideas in defence of his own theism, for instance, and his ideas were publicized and appreciated in the wider scientific community.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125692322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Expertise in the Miracles Debate","authors":"Anne DeWitt","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyses debates about miracles at the Metaphysical Society, arguing that members claimed authority to speak on this topic by positioning themselves as experts in their disciplines. The essay begins with debates about miracles in the public sphere of the 1860s and 1870s, showing how these debates raised questions about who was qualified to speak on the subject. These questions were taken up in a series of papers at the Society. As speakers focused on witnesses to alleged miracles and what kind of testimony could be relied on, they asserted their own reliability on the basis of their disciplinary training. These assertions cut across the different positions on miracles taken by the Society’s members and across the disciplines they represented. Still, these commonalities do not show that the Society’s members were unified as participants in elite culture, since they presented competing claims about what constituted expertise and who possessed it.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":" 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113953147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evolution, Ethics, and the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1875","authors":"I. Hesketh","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter seeks to chart the lively debate about the evolutionary origins and development of morality as it occurred at the Metaphysical Society, a debate that began with the first paper delivered at the Society in 1869 and, after the intervention of several subsequent papers on the topic, came to an end in 1875. Proponents of an evolutionary ethics included the Darwinians John Lubbock and William Kingdon Clifford, while the critics included the journalist and editor Richard Holt Hutton, the classicist Alexander Grant, and the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Much of the debate focused on competing interpretations of the historical record and the nature of historical evidence itself. For the critic of an evolutionary morality, the evidence for the origins and development of morality had to be sought in written records; for the proponent, the evidence needed to be sought much further back in time, in the era known as ‘prehistory’. This important distinction brought to the fore a related area of contention, namely the relationship between civilized European and contemporary aboriginal societies, and what that relationship meant for understanding the deep history of human moral development. The debate largely came to an end when Sidgwick challenged the unjustifiable normative claims that were often embedded in evolutionary descriptions of the origins and development of morality. He showed that a supposedly naturalist account of ethical principles was just as fraught as was the intuitionist account it sought to critique.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127517860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：