Hampshire, Stuart Newton (1914–2004)

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HAMPSHIRE, STUART NEWTON
(1914–2004)

Stuart Newton Hampshire, born in Lincolnshire, England, was a fellow of All Souls College and of New College, Oxford, and then Grote professor of mind and logic at University College, London (1960–1963); he also was professor of philosophy at Princeton University. From 1970 to 1984 he taught at Wadham College, Oxford; in 1984 he joined the faculty of Stanford University, becoming emeritus in 1990. Hampshire's contribution to philosophy, while clearly belonging to the main current of contemporary work in the English language, was highly individual. His work displays a broad and systematic outlook, concerned with bringing together views in the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. Among influences outside philosophy itself, it shows a particular awareness of psychoanalysis and of the history and criticism of literature and painting. His philosophical style is distinctive, a sensitive blend of the argumentative and the exploratory, which can be seen as the product of two contrasting influences: a sympathy with the outlook of Friedrich Waismann (himself influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein) that there can be no proofs in philosophy, together with a respect for the aim of J. L. Austin and other recent philosophers to reach definite results by definite methods.

Hampshire showed a constant interest in the connections between meaning and confirmation. To this extent, there are links between his concerns and those of logical positivism, and a relatively early paper, "Logical Form," shows a recognizably positivist spirit in explaining differences of form in terms of differences in methods of confirmation. However, Hampshire's views were never positivist. In particular, he was not so much concerned to assign a privileged possibility of certainty to some special class of statements but rather to explore the various certainty conditions of different classes of statement.

The connections between meaning and certainty conditions have been particularly explored with reference to psychological statements. Hampshire rejected the possibility of Cartesian statements of immediate experience, independent of any bodily conditions. He emphasized both the need of communication with other persons for self-knowledge ("The Analogy of Feeling") and the dependence of the subject's sense of his identity on his being a physical agent in a physical environment. This idea is treated in detail in Thought and Action, where some influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and of Maurice Merleau-Ponty can be seen. While stressing the connections between mental concepts and physical agency, Hampshire sought at the same time to give an intelligible place to introspection and to the possibility of incorrigible declarations by a speaker of his own mental states, particularly in the case of intentions: Besides Thought and Action, see "Self-Knowledge and the Will" and the important article "On Referring and Intending." In line with this is his rejection of any thoroughgoing behaviorist analyses of psychological concepts (review of Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind ) and his interesting account of the notion of a disposition as applied to human character ("Dispositions"), an account later elaborated in psychoanalytical terms (in "Disposition and Memory"). Human dispositions must be distinguished logically from merely "dispositional properties," such as are possessed by material objects: Dispositional properties can exist without having been manifested, but ascription of human dispositions implies some actual manifestations of them in the life of the individual. Moreover, the understanding of a human disposition is of a different character, being basically historical or genetical. Psychoanalysis is taken to reveal a basic way of understanding the individual's disposition, as rooted in his early experiences and consisting in the generalization to a class of situations of primitive responses; the influence of the primitive situations is to be seen in terms of unconscious memory. These ideas provide a link between the concept of a disposition and those of rationality and freedom; control over one's dispositions may be increased by self-knowledge, the understanding of how they have come about.

The emphasis on the psychoanalytical type of account of dispositions—that is, a genetical account—is a particular application of the wider view that human activities must be understood historically. This view has had an important influence on Hampshire's outlook on ethics, which rests on two points—that any comprehensible system of ethics must be grounded in a view of human nature and that all views of human nature are historically conditioned and essentially revisable. However, the historical changes in views of human nature or "the powers of the mind" are comprehensible only against a background of something identified, under any view, as essential to human nature, and this Hampshire finds in the possibility of self-conscious intentional action. From this point of view, Hampshire seeks to illuminate two basic (and, he would hold, permanent) distinctions: that between art and other human activities and that between human actions and mere events. Art is connected with the absence of an intentional project (see "Logic and Appreciation"); the appreciation of art is a process of free exploration. The distinction between actions and mere events involves his theory of freedom, which turns on a basic distinction between decision and prediction, and on the claim that there is an ineliminable human power of "standing back" from any prediction of one's future actions, the situation thus being changed (see Thought and Action and "Decision, Intention and Certainty"). Whether this has the consequence that determinism is impossible is perhaps not entirely clear; it is notable that Hampshire treated these questions in an illuminating book on Benedict de Spinoza, and his sympathy for a Spinozist connection of freedom and knowledge, rather than a supposed freedom of the will, certainly continued (see "Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom").