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The first paragraph of C.S. Lewis' essay "Bulverism, or, the Foundation of 20th Century Thought" reads as follows:

It is a disastrous discovery, as Emerson says somewhere, that we exist. I mean, it is disastrous when instead of merely attending to a rose we are forced to think of ourselves looking at the rose, with a certain type of mind and a certain type of eyes. It is disastrous because, if you are not very careful, the colour of the rose gets attributed to our optic nerves and its scent to our noses, and in the end there is no rose left. The professional philosophers have been bothered about this universal black-out for over two hundred years, and the world has not much listened to them.

Emphasis mine. Which philosophers does he mean and who would be a good introduction to the topic?

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  • It seems an allusion to Idealism (and solipsism : "the colour of the rose gets attributed to our optic nerves and its scent to our noses, and in the end there is no rose left"). Dec 20, 2019 at 14:23
  • See also the difference between primary and secondary qualities as discussed by thinkers like Galileo and Locke. It's also possible Lewis is alluding to Kant and his phenomenal/noumenal distinction which was very influential for a lot of later philosophers, but from what I understand this is a more subtle distinction than primary/secondary qualities and it's harder to follow what he meant without reading him in detail.
    – Hypnosifl
    Dec 20, 2019 at 15:52
  • Immanuel Kant is said to have a "Copernican Turn" when he had the paradigm-shift experience that knowledge is not a product coming from the object (the rose), but from the subject (me). Kant is a synthesis of rationalism (experience is not essential to get knowledge) and empiricism (all knowledge comes from experience). Such is an amazing journey through philosophy.
    – RodolfoAP
    Dec 23, 2019 at 7:23
  • Thank you all for your suggestions!
    – dev_willis
    Dec 31, 2019 at 12:08

1 Answer 1

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Welcome dev_willis

'Bulverism' involves subsituting causes for reasons (Brian Barbour, 'Lewis and Cambridge', Modern Philology, Vol. 96, No. 4 (May, 1999), pp. 439-484: 456, n.42.)

More particularly with reference to Lewis:

... only by looking into Undeceptions (1971) will one discover that "Bulverism," in contrast to the usual sort of ad hominem argument, signifies the a priori blanket dismissal of some position on the grounds that its adherents have only a (generic) motive, not any reason, for holding it (e.g., that the belief in question is correlative to social class or gender). (Robert M. Philmus, 'Reviewed Work(s): The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia. A Complete Guide to His Life, Thought, and Writings by Colin Duriez', Utopian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2003), pp. 189-190: 190.)

Lewis seems to suggest that the scent of the rose is in some sense (unspecified) a property of the rose of which we are aware by smelling the rose. He wants to avoid a reductionist account on which there is no such property of which we can become aware, rather the interaction of our olfactory nerves with chemical substances projected by the rose cause us to have a sensation which we call and think of as the scent of the rose.

Locke on secondary qualities comes to mind. References are to Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690):

(1) A quality of x is a power of x to produce any idea in our mind. (II, viii, 8).

(2) Primary qualities of body are those which are utterly in- separable from it; are such as sense finds constantly in every perceptible particle of matter, and the mind finds inseparable from every particle. (II. viii. 9).

(3) Secondary qualities are nothing in objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities. (II. viii. 10).

(3) seems pretty much in line with the causal explanation of (our experience of) the scent of the rose outlined above. It also appears to me both plausible and correct.

Lewis has, I think, used an unfortunate example in support of a thesis better supported (if one wants to support it) in other ways: the objectivity of values. He wants to resist a naturalist, reductionist account of e.g. judgements of goodness and beauty to merely emotivist responses in which the properties of goodness and beauty are not independent of us and 'out there' but are explained away in causal terms of our psychology, quite in line (mutatis mutandis) with the causal explanation of the scent of the rose.

His mistake is, I think, not to realise that even if the scent of the rose has a causal explanation of the kind outlined, its beauty may still be an objective property - one that supervenes on the causally induced olfactory experience. I do not say beauty is an objective property but I'm sure Lewis thought it was.

Where Bulverism comes in, I assume, is through Lewis's notion that since philosophical critics of objective values, who formed the main body of the (once) prevailing British empiricist tradition, could see no reason, no adequate evidential grounds, for believing in the existence of such values (by what means could we perceive them?) and could see no reason why anyone else should believe in them either, these critics supposed that there could only be a motivation to believe in the existence of objective values. A Christian such as Lewis might be motivated by his belief in God to posit objective values while he lacked evidence-based reason for believing in them.

This was not a position Lewis accepted or could accept - this could not, he was sure, be the right account of his belief in objective values. He warns us therefore against philosophers who banket-dismiss adequate evidential grounds for a belief in such values and automatically and in his view question-beggingly look only for the motivation we might have for believing in them.

Fair enough but then, what are the adequate evidential grounds? I suppose Lewis can only point out to the arguments he put forward in his books. On the proper assessment of those arguments I make no comment.

The universal blackout is pretty much the story of British empiricist ethics from Hume to Ayer, one might say - or J.L. Mackie, Inventing Right and Wrong. If you read Mackie, you would get a more specific grasp of why the blackout was imposed and just what it was. Mackie provides most of the historical references you need. (I reserve judgement, here at least, on Mackie's moral epistemology.)

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    At certain point in History, one person, could have been compete or one of three of his contemporaries claimed that qualities could be divided into primary and secondary. Primary qualities formed the basis of the subject matter of physical sciences. They were therefore deemed 'real'. Secondary qualities share the property of nd being able to be quantitatively measured.
    – user37981
    Dec 21, 2019 at 21:34
  • Thank you for your thorough answer, which is interesting in it's own right, but I was merely looking for more information about the topic he was referencing.
    – dev_willis
    Dec 31, 2019 at 12:08

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