On
Ralph Hawtrey’s Thought and Things
– Struggling to
build a bridge between “Theory of Aspects” and “Science”
Toshiaki
Hirai
(Sophia
University)
The main purpose of this paper is to explore the
philosophy of Ralph Hawtrey (1879-1975), who is known for an economist who
developed a monetary theory of economic fluctuations as well as one who
advocated the so-called “The Treasury View” as an opposite view to Keynes’s,
through his only and unpublished book, Thought and Things (Hawtrey
Papers, 12/1. 314 sheets of typescript. Churchill College, Cambridge). It is
composed of Ch.1 ‘Aspects’, Ch.2 ‘Cause’, Ch.3 ‘Purpose’, Ch.4 ‘Thought’, Ch.5 ‘Truth
and Inference’, Ch.6 ‘Science’, Ch.7 ‘Philosophy’ and Ch.8 ‘Man and His World’.
The main
theory of Thought and Things should be a theory of Aspect. There the
principal actor is Mind. Before it does the field of consciousness stretch out.
Mind brings things as aspects by means of sense – such as vision, touch,
hearing – into the field of consciousness. This is called sense experience.
The whole
field of consciousness comprise, together with the above-mentioned field, the one
in which many aspects appear in the mind such as moral, feeling, volition, thought,
concept to uncertainty, mathematical reasoning and empirical reasoning.
Having
argued his theory of aspects, Hawtrey proceeds to the more serious problem of
how we should grasp the relation between mind and matter. The ultimate
objective of this book is to explore how we could build a bridge between the
two without falling into dualism.
Even
in the theory of aspect, it presupposes an existence of things although mind
cannot prove its existence.
On
the other hand, science presupposes an existence of things at the origin of its
theory. Science introduces things as an initial mover of its causal hypothesis.
However, they are introduced without the relation between causal property and spatial
property being argued, so that the concept of things remain incomplete.
Hawtery
develops a harsh criticism of behaviorism and logical positivism which advocate
to see the world from a point of view of science, neglecting mind.
Finally this
paper examines Hawtrey’s philosophy in comparison with other great philosophers
in Cambridge.
Probably
no one seems to have so far studied Thought and Thing. The impression
that the reporter has is that the book should be an intellectual struggle
searching for a bridge between a theory of aspect peculiar to Hawtrey and
scientific knowledge. The main theme of this paper stands just here.
