On Ralph Hawtrey’s Thought and Things Toshiaki Hirai

On Ralph Hawtrey’s Thought and Things – Struggling to Build a Bridge between “Theory of Aspects” and “Science” Toshiaki Hirai (Sophia University) Abstract 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as well as one who advocated the so-called “The Treasury View” as an opposite view to Keynes’s, through his only and unpublished book, Thought and Things (Hawtrey Papers, 12/1. 314 sheets of typescript.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. 1. Introduction 2. Theory of Aspect 2.1 Fundamental framework 2.2 Aspect Obtained through Sense Experience 2.3 Aspects Obtained as the States Induced in the Mind 3. Mind and Matter 3.1 The Main Theme 3.2 Science 3.3 Criticism of Behaviorism and Logical Positivism 4. Philosophical Currents in Cambridge 4.1 G.E. Moore 4.2 Russell 4.3 Keynes 4.4 Wittgenstein 4.5 Theory of Aspect in Hawtrey and Wittgenstein 4.6 Hawtrey’s Philosophy Re-stated 5. Conclusion