Background
Prichard, Harold Arthur was born in 1871 in London.
Prichard, Harold Arthur was born in 1871 in London.
New College, Oxford.
Oxford: Fellow of Hertford, 1895-1898. Fellow of Trinity, 1898-1924. After an illness, appointed White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy and Fellow of Corpus Christi, 1928.
Retired 1937: FBA 1932. Revered as a teacher and regarded, with H. W. B. Joseph, as one of the leading Oxford philosophers of his generation.
Prichard's work on epistemology, dating largely from the early part of his career, shows a profound debt to Cook Wilson. From him Prichard took over the thesis that knowledge is an ultimate and sui generis, and he objected to any epistemologies which deny this. Thus he criticizes the Kantian view that knowledge can be defined in terms of synthesis: and in later papers he attacks the attempts of psychologists to try to explain it as a construction from something held to be more basic, usually sensation or feeling. Again, he objected to sense-datum theory on the ground that it embodies the claim that sensation is a form of knowledge, for example because we know we are seeing a coloured patch. Prichard argues that, strictly, there are no colours to have a knowledge of. The perceptual situation is best described as ‘someone-seeing-acolour/hearing-a sound’. Whilst the colour is not identical with the seeing, it is dependent on it. Further, since knowledge is ultimate and immediate, it needs no further vindication by the further knowledge that it is knowledge. Any further attempts to furnish a criterion of knowledge, like Cartesian clarity and distinctness, are attempts to answer an improperly conceived question. A parallel line of thought underlies Prichard’s ethics, announced in his best-known paper, 'Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?’. His central thesis is that the sense of obligation to do, or the rightness of, an action is absolutely underivative or immediate. We become aware of obligations by careful consideration of the situation in which we find ourselves, and understanding the situation leads us to recognize immediately its possession of the predicate of being obligatory: it is the thesis that moral properties are objects of immediate awareness which has attracted to Prichard the label of 'intuitionist’ in ethics. What Prichard is denying is that our awareness of the obligatory needs vindication by any further, more general moral principle: the ‘mistake’ on which moral philosophy has rested, from Plato onwards, is to look for such a principle. Obligations do not need to be deduced from principles, because they are selfevident. Prichard claims that obligations are irreducibly different and varied in nature, for example paying debts, telling the truth, overcoming timidity. Again, virtue is distinct from morality; these are held by Prichard to be independent if coordinate forms of goods. These views are developed largely by way of criticism of other theories in Prichard's papers. He began a full-length statement of his views in ethics, but did not live to complete it.