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Fear and Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2013

John Kekes
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Abstract

The subject of this paper is a particular kind of fear. The danger to which it is a response is the possibility that the evaluative dimension of life from which we derive the values by which we live is arbitrary. If it were arbitrary, nothing we value would be valuable. There are strong reasons both for and against this kind of fear. I am concerned with understanding these reasons and judging their strengths and weaknesses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 88 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 555 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013 

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References

1 This is not the place for a review of the relevant works. Interested readers will find an excellent survey and a much fuller bibliography than I can give in Ronald de Sousa's <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/emotion/>.

2 For the Aristotelian view, see Konstan, David, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nehamas, Alexander, ‘Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and the Poetics’ and Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity’ both in Essays on Aristotle's Poetics, (ed.) Rorty, Amelie, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1109a23-29.

4 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. Trotter, W.F., (New York: Random House, 1670/1941), 205–6Google Scholar.

5 This possibility of course has been much discussed. See, e.g. Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus, (New York: Random House, 1942/1955)Google Scholar; Nagel, Thomas, ‘The Absurd’ in Mortal Questions, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Chapter XI in The View from Nowhere, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Taylor, Richard, Chapter 18 in Good and Evil, (New York: Macmillan, 1970)Google Scholar.

6 Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (London: Collins, 1985), 118Google Scholar.

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11 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936)Google Scholar. For most interesting discussions of it, see Winch, Peter, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ in Ethics and Action, (London: Routledge, 1964/1972)Google Scholar and Horton, Robin's ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’ in Rationality, (ed.) Wilson, Bryan R., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967/1970)Google Scholar.

12 Ibid. 194.

13 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed.Nidditch, P.H., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1739/1978), 268Google Scholar.

14 Horton, ‘African Traditional Thought’ op. cit., 165.

15 Montaigne, Michel de, Essays inThe Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Frame, Donald M., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1588/1979)Google Scholar. Reference in the text are to the pages of this edition.

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17 Ibid.

18 Hume, Treatise, op. cit., 268–269.

19 ‘Too many social reformers have an idea that they would like to clean the canvas … of the social world, wiping off everything and starting from scratch. … This idea is nonsense and impossible to realize. … If we wipe out the social world in which we live, wipe out its traditions and create a new world on the basis of blue-prints, then we shall very soon have to alter the new world, making little changes and adjustments. But if we are to make these little changes and adjustments, which will be needed in any case, why not start them here and now in the social world we have? It does not matter what you have and where you start. You must always make little adjustments. Since you will always have to make them, it is very much more sensible and reasonable to start with what happens to exist at the moment, because of these things which exist we at least know where the shoe pinches. We at least know of certain things that they are bad and that we want them changed.' Popper, Karl R., ‘Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition’ in Conjectures and Refutations, (New York: Harper, 1968), 131Google Scholar.

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23 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1790/1969), 171Google Scholar.

24 Hampshire, Stuart, Innocence and Experience, (London: Allen Lane, 1989), 172Google Scholar.

25 I gratefully acknowledge the comments of and conversation with Krisanna Scheiter that led to several improvements of this paper.