Background
Stace, Walter Terence was born on November 17, 1886 in London.
Stace, Walter Terence was born on November 17, 1886 in London.
Trinity College, Dublin.
Professor, Princeton, 1932 55.
The most conspicuous feature of Stace as a philosopher is the superb clarity and lucidity of his writing, an attribute accompanied, in his case. By a certain simple-mindedness. His style reflects his admiration for Moore but it is better than Moore’s because less cluttered and repetitious. Stace did not become a professional philosopher until his mid-forties, after a career in the Ceylon civil service where he rose to be Mayor of Colombo. During that career he wrote some books, most notably an encyclopedic survey of the philosophy of Hegel. In 1934 he published a famous article in Mind called ‘Refutation of realism’, arguing that there could be no valid argument of any kind from the private impressions with which alone we are directly acquainted to anything beyond or outside them. He is said to have claimed that the article was a kind of joke, but its central thesis is embodied in his main epistemological work. Theory of Knowledge and Existence (1932), where, however, he avoided its apparently solipsistic implications. He maintained that most of the constituents of the common-sense and scientific pictures of the world are hypothetical constructions, taking Russell’s ‘supreme maxim of scientific philosophizing’ to its uttermost limit. As elements of the construction, he allowed himself to draw on the sense-experiences of other minds to assist in the construction of an objective world. The exercise, fortified by this bold assumption which appears to leap over the fact that our knowledge of other minds requires antecedent knowledge of the bodies through which they are manifested, is carried through with great perseverance. The Nature of the World! 1940), which Stace subtitled ‘an essay in phenomenalistic metaphysics’, pursues the ontological consequences of his epistemic reductions. The ultimate elements of the world are ‘cells’, bipolar entities consisting of an act of consciousness and a datum. Both acts and data are abstractions, incapable of independent existence. Only those pulses of consciousness that enter into the history of persons actually exist. In a chapter on God Stace dismisses all proofs of his existence and says that it can be justified only on the basis of mystical experience. That theme was developed in the last three books, all on religion. His unappetizing conclusion is that the testimony of mystics is none the worse for being intrinsically self-contradictory. In ethics Stace defended a sensible kind of utilitarianism, disentangling happiness from pleasure. Stace’s writings received some attention from H. H. Price and A. J. Ayer, and some Mind articles of the 1930s critical of positivism from a traditionally empiricist standpoint aroused discussion.