Oh, That Aristotle

 A while ago, I noticed in Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? an unfavorable reference to Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, concerning the implications of the name "Aristotle". I don't think that MacIntyre was quite fair to Kripke, who argued against (I believe) Russell's theory of definite descriptions. I jotted a question mark in the margin, kept on reading, and spent a couple of weeks not thinking about Aristotle.

Last week, though, I picked up Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, intervening reading having made me curious about Frege's argument that the reference of a sentence is a truth value. Along the way, in the famous essay "On Sense and Reference", a couple of pages in I encountered a footnote on the sense of such a name as "Aristotle". 

It is easy to forget, but Aristotle, Hesperus (or the evening star), Phosphorus (or the morning star), as cases for such arguments do go back to Frege.

The essay appeared in 1892, Naming and Necessity in 1972, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in 1988.

Appliance Jack

 The other Sunday, we found our freezer and refrigerator not working, and scrambled to locate and obtain small substitutes. They served until the repairman diagnosed and replaced a failed fan, then sat in our hall through the week.

Our two-wheel dolly had served well enough in getting the appliances into the house, but we weren't sure about its stability down the stairs to the outside, then to the basement. I announced that what we needed was an appliance jack, a two wheel dolly with a strap to secure an appliance--a refrigerator, a washer, or so on--and that our local hardware store probably rented them. I called up, and after the man in the rental department told me that I needed a dolly, we seemed to agree on what I needed, and he said they had it.

They did not. They had regular dollies just like ours. They did have a "Rachet Tie-Down", which sold for a few cents less than the price quoted for rental, and which worked nicely.

I wondered, though, whether "appliance jack" was a term used only by the company I worked for years ago, or something I dreamed up. A web search turned up many more actual jacks--items for lifting something--but about one image in ten was the item I had in mind. My brother thinks that the more common term may be "appliance dolly".

One of the Dozen Best

 In Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of Peter Geach as "one of the dozen best British philosophers of the twentieth century." This may be so, but it made me wonder whether I could name a dozen British philosophers of the twentieth century, of any quality. Counting only those who wrote their major works in the last century, and leaving out edge cases--if we count Wittgenstein as British, must we then count Whitehead as American?--I just about could, though I hadn't necessarily read their works. I came up with

1. G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe (two books)
2. J.L. Austin (two books)
3. A.J. Ayer (one book)
4. Philippa Foot (two books)
5. Peter Geach (no books, though much of a volume of Frege he helped to edit)
6. Stuart Hampshire (two books)
7. R.M. Hare (no books)
8. Anthony Kenny (philosophically, just the judgments in Brief Encounters)
   
9. Alasdair MacIntyre (one book)
   
10. Mary Midgley (one book)
11. Iris Murdoch (one book of philosophy)
    
12. Bertrand Russell (some of Essays in Analysis)
13. Gilbert Ryle (one book) 
    
14. R.L. Strawson (some of a collection of essays he edited)

I did not pay that much attention to British philosophy when I was younger, but now I can't come close to that number for any other combination of country and century.