Background
Joad, Cyril Edwin Mitchinson was born in 1891 in Durham, England.
politics Objectivist value theorist tnts: Ethics
Joad, Cyril Edwin Mitchinson was born in 1891 in Durham, England.
Balliol College. Oxford (John Locke Scholarship, 1914).
Worked for the Ministry of Labour until 1930. 1930-1953, Head °f the Philosophy Deptartment at Birkbeck °dege, London. Enjoyed contemporary celebrity as a broadcaster on the Brains Trust.
^ain publications:
11929) Matter, Life and Value.
-’2) Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science.
936) Guide to Philosophy.
(1936) Return to Philosophy, second edition, London: Faber & Faber, 1945.
(1938) Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics.
(1940) Philosophy for Our Times.
(1942) Guide to Modern Thought.
(1944) Philosophy.
(1948) Decadence, London: Faber & Faber.
(1952) The Recovery of Belief, London: Faber & Faber.
Joad is now better remembered as a teacher and broadcaster than as a philosopher in his own right. He has paid the price for being out of sympathy with the dominant philosophical currents of his time: in the period of logical positivism and existentialism he argued for the possibility of traditional metaphysics, of the objectivity of values and the existence of a philosophia perennis. He believed that human life could be meaningful only if lived in the belief that the realm of values is as real as those of mind and of physical objects. He saw around him a civilization in crisis, and saw the root cause of the problem in what he called ‘the dropping of the object’ (1948), i.e. the embracing of various forms of subjectivism or relativism in epistemology and value theory. Granted the unfashionableness of his views, it is unsurprising that most of his books are polemics in favour of the forms of objectivism he favoured. They are written with lucidity, elegance and wit. Joad argued that there are four ultimate, real and objective values: truth, beauty, goodness and happiness, and on this basis grounds a set of positive moral recommendations derived from Plato and Aristotle. Appetite is to be subordinated to reason, since this is a precondition for the realization of any of the ultimate values. Reason itself is not merely the instrumental slave of the passions but has goals of its own, namely these same values. The rule reason applies in governing the appetites is the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. The political consequence drawn from the conjunction of these beliefs together with a sustained attack on Hegelian-derived views of the state as an absolute is a reasoned support for democracy. The function of the state is to permit maximal flourishing of the virtues, and it is imperative that those who obey the laws are ultimately responsible for the laws they obey. Concerning philosophy itself, Joad believed that it tends to foster tolerance in its practitioners, based on a freedom from dogmatism whose value cannot be overestimated.