Background
Carritt, Edgar Frederick was born on February 27, 1876 in London.
Ethical intuitionist aesthetical expressionist
Carritt, Edgar Frederick was born on February 27, 1876 in London.
Hertford College, Oxford.
Fellow of University College, and University Lecturer in Philosophy, Oxford, 1898-1945. Visiting Profess°r. State University of Michigan, 1924-1925. Fellow °f the British Academy, 1945.
Carritt was an outstanding tutor and lecturer at Oxford for almost fifty years: R. G. Collingwood. A. D. Lindsay and E. R. Dodds were tutored by him. Audiences for his lectures on dialectical materialism in 1933 overflowed the College Hall. For many years he was the only Oxford philosopher to give serious attention to the subject of aesthetics. He claimed his principal motive in philosophy was to preserve individual and social life from the harmful effects of bad philosophy. As he wrote, ‘For bad philosophy the only cure is better’. Carritt’s reputation was made in the two fields of ethics and aesthetics. He developed Prichard's conception of ethical intuitionism in his own way, arguing in The Theory of Morals (1928) that we morally apprehend what we ought to do in particular situations. Only then arc we able to generalize rules or principles which, in consequence, are not strictly known to be true. Carritt extended the intuitionist theory to political philosophy in Ethical and Political Thinking (1947), arguing that our duties to the state do not differ in kind, but only in degree of complexity, from most of our other duties to our neighbours. In aesthetics Carritt was an enthusiastic, though not uncritical, follower of Croce. He disputed Croce’s indentification of expression with intuition but applauded Croce’s rejection of the problem of genres in art, and he espoused the thesis that beauty, whether of nature or of art, is the expression of feeling and that all such expression is beautiful. In What Is Beauty? (1932) Carritt attempted to combine his account of beauty as a mental experience with his conviction that there is a genuine distinction between good and bad taste. Since, he maintained, bad taste is the tendency to mistake something merely ‘agreeable or profitable or edifying’ for ‘the experience of beauty pure’, we all need to be scrupulous about the sincerity and disinterestedness of our experiences.