Charles Stevenson (philosopher) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Charles Stevenson
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Charles Leslie Stevenson
June 27, 1908 Cincinnati, Ohio, US
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| Died | March 14, 1979 (aged 70) Bennington, Vermont, US
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Notable work
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Ethics and Language (1944) |
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| Thesis | The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms (1935) |
| Doctoral students | Joel Feinberg |
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Charles Leslie Stevenson (June 27, 1908 – March 14, 1979) was an American analytic philosopher best known for his work in ethics and aesthetics.
Biography
Stevenson was born on June 27, 1908, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was educated at Yale, receiving in 1930 a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in English literature, at Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1933 he was awarded a BA degree in moral sciences (philosophy), and at Harvard, getting his Doctor of Philosophy degree there in 1935. While at Cambridge he studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. He was an instructor at Yale University from 1939 to 1944, spending some of that time teaching mathematics to wartime naval recruits. His post was not renewed in 1944 because the department did not approve of his emotivist views. After a period on a Guggenheim fellowship at Berkeley, Pomona, and Chicago, he was appointed to the University of Michigan where he taught from 1946 to 1977. Among his students was Joel Feinberg.
He gave the most sophisticated defense of emotivism in the post-war period. In his papers "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" (1937) and "Persuasive Definitions" (1938), and his book Ethics and Language (1944), he developed a theory of emotive meaning; which he then used to provide a foundation for his theory of a persuasive definition. He furthermore advanced emotivism as a meta-ethical theory that sharply delineated between cognitive, scientific uses of language (used to state facts and to give reasons, and subject to the laws of science) and non-cognitive uses (used to state feelings and exercise influence).
Stevenson died on March 14, 1979, in Bennington, Vermont.
Contributions to philosophy
Stevenson's work has been seen both as an elaboration upon A. J. Ayer's views and as a representation of one of "two broad types of ethical emotivism." An analytic philosopher, Stevenson suggested in his 1937 essay "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" that any ethical theory should explain three things: that intelligent disagreement can occur over moral questions, that moral terms like good are "magnetic" in encouraging action, and that the scientific method is insufficient for verifying moral claims. Stevenson's own theory was fully developed in his 1944 book Ethics and Language. In it, he agrees with Ayer that ethical sentences express the speaker's feelings, but he adds that they also have an imperative component intended to change the listener's feelings and that this component is of greater importance. Where Ayer spoke of values, or fundamental psychological inclinations, Stevenson speaks of attitudes, and where Ayer spoke of disagreement of fact, or rational disputes over the application of certain values to a particular case, Stevenson speaks of differences in belief; the concepts are the same. Terminology aside, Stevenson interprets ethical statements according to two patterns of analysis.
See also
In Spanish: Charles Leslie Stevenson para niños
