John Niemeyer Findlay | |
---|---|
Born | 25 November 1903 |
Died | 27 September 1987 | (aged 83)
Nationality | South African |
Education | Transvaal University College Balliol College, Oxford University of Graz (PhD, 1933) |
Spouse | Aileen Hawthorn |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic philosophy |
Institutions | University of Pretoria University of Otago Rhodes University College University of Natal King's College, Newcastle King's College London University of Texas at Austin |
Doctoral advisor | Ernst Mally |
Notable students | Arthur Prior[1] |
Main interests | Metaphysics, ethics |
Notable ideas | Rational mysticism |
John Niemeyer Findlay FBA (/ˈfɪndli/; 25 November 1903 – 27 September 1987), usually cited as J. N. Findlay, was a South African philosopher.
Findlay read classics and philosophy as a boy and then at the Transvaal University College,[3][4] (the forerunner of the University of Pretoria).[5]
He then received a Rhodes scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford for the years 1924–1926. He completed Oxford's classics course (also known as "Greats") in June 1926, and stayed on for a fragment of a third year before returning to a lectureship appointment in South Africa. He later completed his doctorate in 1933 at Graz, where he studied under Ernst Mally. From 1927 to 1966 he was lecturer or professor of philosophy at Transvaal/University of Pretoria, the University of Otago in New Zealand, Rhodes University College, Grahamstown, the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, King's College, Newcastle, and King's College London. Following retirement from his chair at London (1966) and a year at the University of Texas at Austin, Findlay continued to teach full-time for more than twenty years, first as Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics at Yale University (1967–1972), then as University Professor and Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy (succeeding Peter Bertocci) at Boston University (1972–1987).[6][7][8][9]
Findlay was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1955 to 1956 and president of the Metaphysical Society of America from 1974 to 1975, as well as a Fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[10] He was also an Editorial Advisor of the journal Dionysius. A chair for visiting professors at Boston University carries his name, as does a biennial award given for the best book in metaphysics, as judged by the Metaphysical Society of America. Findlay betrayed a great commitment to the welfare and formation[11] of generations of students (Leroy S. Rouner was fond of introducing him as "Plotinus incarnate"),[citation needed] teaching philosophy in one college classroom after another for sixty-two consecutive academic years. On 10 September 2012 Findlay was voted the 8th "most underappreciated philosopher active in the U.S. from roughly 1900 through mid-century" in a poll conducted among readers of Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, finishing behind George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clarence Irving Lewis.[12]
Findlay's autobiographical essay "Confessions of Theory and Life" is printed in Transcendence and the Sacred (1981).[13] Findlay's "My Life” is found in Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay (1985).[14]
At a time when scientific materialism, positivism, linguistic analysis, and ordinary language philosophy were the core academic ideas in most of the English-speaking world, Findlay championed phenomenology, revived Hegelianism, and wrote works that were inspired by Theosophy,[15] Buddhism, Plotinus, and Idealism. In his books published in the 1960s, including two series of Gifford Lectures, Findlay developed rational mysticism. According to this mystical system, "the philosophical perplexities, e.g., concerning universals and particulars, mind and body, knowledge and its objects, the knowledge of other minds,".[16] as well as those of free will and determinism, causality and teleology, morality and justice, and the existence of temporal objects, are human experiences of deep antinomies and absurdities about the world. Findlay's conclusion is that these necessitate the postulation of higher spheres, or "latitudes", where objects' individuality, categorical distinctiveness and material constraints are diminishing, lesser in each latitude than in the one below it. On the highest spheres, existence is evaluative and meaningful more than anything else, and Findlay identifies it with the idea of The Absolute.[17]
Findlay translated into English Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), which he regarded as the author's best work, representing a developmental stage when the idea of phenomenological bracketing was not yet taken as the basis of a philosophical system, covering in fact for loose subjectivism. To Findlay, the work was also one of the peaks of philosophy generally, suggesting superior alternatives both for overly minimalistic or naturalistic efforts in ontology and for Ordinary Language treatments of consciousness and thought.[18][19] Findlay also contributed final editing and wrote addenda to translations of Hegel's Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit.
Findlay was first a follower, and then an outspoken critic of Ludwig Wittgenstein.[20] He denounced his three theories of meaning, arguing against the idea of Use, prominent in Wittgenstein's later period and in his followers, that it is insufficient for an analysis of meaning without such notions as connotation and denotation, implication, syntax and most originally, pre-existent meanings, in the mind or the external world, that determine linguistic ones, such as Husserl has evoked. Findlay credits Wittgenstein with great formal, aesthetic and literary appeal, and of directing well-deserved attention to Semantics and its difficulties.[21]