Background
Price, Henry Habberley was born in 1899.
Price, Henry Habberley was born in 1899.
Educated at Winchester and New College.
Served in the RFC during the First World War. Lecturer at Liverpool University* 1922-1923. Fellow of Trinity, 1924-1935.
Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College* 1935-1959. Retired from this Chair 1959. Gifford Lecturer 1960 and Sarum Lecturer 1970-1971* Visiting Professor.
UCLA, 1962.
The focus of Price’s interest in his first two books 11^32 and 1940) is the philosophy of perception. His overall aim in Perception is to use the notion of sense data to construct a non-phenomenalist theory of perception. The method used, as in ^rice’s later works, is phenomenological, with deliberate exclusion of scientific considerations. Price argues that a relation of belonging can be established between sense data and physical °hjects. Unless they are hallucinatory, all sense data belong to ‘families’, the members of which afe geometrically and qualitatively continuous. The chief member of such a family Price calls the standard solid’ on which all other members of the lamily converge. Not all members of families are experienced by the same person, and so families are public. Price avoids phenomenalism by declining to identify a family with a physical e’bject, on the grounds that the latter can resist, and can operate causally; yet he has to concede that nothing can be said about the physical object except that it has certain ‘powers'. Price’s thought °n perception informs his fine Hume commentary 11940), a study of Treatise I, iv 2. He argues that Hume was wrong to conclude that there is an 'nsoluble contradiction between reason and the penses. The seeds of a solution can be found in Hume’s concept of the imagination, which fills the 8aPs in sensation and makes perception of the Material world possible. Price argues that Hume treats the imagination somewhat as the transcendental ego he is usually supposed to have dispensed with, being closer to Kant in this rcspect than is generally noticed. Price next turned his attention to the philosophy of thinking, and in Thinking and Experience H 953) gives his analysis of the nature of concepts. He disagrees both with views which identify c°nceptual thought with the use of symbols and those which make concepts inspectablc mental entities present to the mind in cognition. Price argues for a variety of dispositional theory. Conceptual cognition is ultimately a function of JOernory. The best way to understand it is to ask how concepts manifest themselves, and they do lhis in a number of ways: for example, in the Production of images, mental or physical, of ‘hstances of the concept or in the use and understanding of words, most importantly in the readiness to use alternative verbal formulations. The root manifestation of a concept is recognition of instances of it: recognitional capacity is the essential precondition of thought and intelligent action. A third major theme of Price’s thought is his interest in religion, a theme which became more prominent in his last works. He became President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1939. and was greatly concerned to elucidate the consequences of mystical and paranormal phenomena for philosophy. Thus, for example, at the conclusion of his revised Gifford Lectures (1969), aftera searching examination of occurrence and dispositional theories of belief. Price considers the implications of his arguments for propositions asserting the immortality of the soul and the existence of a transcendent god. He argues that neither type of proposition is meaningless: there is slight evidence for immortality from the existence of paranormal phenomena, and there can also be empirical evidence for the existence of god, once latent human spiritual capacities arc developed.