Obituary: Peter Alexander

A philosopher focused on how we perceive and explain the world

Andrew Pyle
The Guardian, Tuesday 9 May 2006
Article history

Fonte: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/may/09/guardianobituaries.highereducation

For a quarter of a century, the philosopher Professor Peter Alexander, who has died aged 89, did outstanding work at Bristol University, both as a teacher and a researcher. While his interests were varied, he focused on two particular aspects of how we apprehend the world.
His first major concern was the nature of scientific explanation. The prevailing orthodoxy in the philosophy of science of the 1950s and 60s was logical positivism, a school that derived its account of science from the sensationalism of Ernst Mach. Such philosophers either rejected explanation outright as a goal for science, arguing that it offers only an economical redescription of the phenomena, or sought to explain explanation as no more than deduction from established empirical generalisations, as in the famous "deductive-nomological" model of Carl Hempel.
Alexander sought both to understand the sources of this conception of science and to show its inadequacy. He wrote a series of important articles (on Duhem, Hertz, Mach, Pearson, Poincaré, conventionalism and sensationalism) for Paul Edwards' great Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) and contributed a chapter on Philosophy of Science, 1850-1910, to DJ O'Connor's History of Western Philosophy (1964).
In his first book, Sensationalism and Scientific Explanation (1963), Alexander attacked the sensationalist's account of science as failing to do justice to the crucial explanatory role played by theory (and thus very often by the postulation of unobservable theoretical entities) in scientific explanations worthy of the name. Alexander's work thus made a contribution to the decline of the positivist orthodoxy in the philosophy of science and its replacement by the doctrines of scientific realism, in which inference to the best explanation plays a crucial role.
In the 1970s, Alexander's attention turned to the philosophy of John Locke. At that time, a strange parody of Locke's views (largely derived from George Berkeley's often unfair criticisms) was taught to students, who were left with the impression that Locke held an inconsistent and muddled sort of semi-empiricism, hardly worthy of serious philosophical engagement. Returning to the text of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Alexander became convinced that Locke's views on many topics had been seriously misrepresented, and were far more coherent and defensible than generally reported. In a series of important papers Alexander proceeded to set the record straight.
On the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, Locke is generally represented as having characterised such qualities as red, hot and sweet as secondary qualities. When they turn out to be subjective or perceiver-dependent ("in the mind", in Berkeley's notorious phrase), we have the beginnings of a slippery slope argument leading to idealism. But, Alexander reminded us, Locke consistently distinguishes qualities in bodies from ideas in the minds of perceivers. Red, hot and sweet are mind-dependent, and are therefore not secondary qualities but ideas of secondary qualities.
The secondary qualities themselves are perfectly objective powers in bodies to cause those sensations in appropriate observers. The powers are themselves grounded in objective "textures" (arrangements of corpuscles) in the bodies. This reading of Locke both sets him in his proper historical context (as a contemporary of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton) and enables us to see the close affiliation between his views and those of later scientific realists. This argument is most fully presented in the book Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External World (1985), now accepted as a classic in its field.
Alexander was born in Ashford, Middlesex, but was raised in Canada, returning to England in 1932 as a cabin boy on the SS Romanby. After working for some years as a laboratory assistant and assistant chemist in the food industry, he took a BSc in chemistry with physics in 1940 from the Regent Street Polytechnic, London (now part of the University of Westminster). In 1947 he graduated with a BA in special philosophy from Birkbeck College, London, before getting his first academic post in 1949 at Leeds University. In 1957 he moved to Bristol, where he was lecturer (1957-60), reader (1960-71) and professor (1971-82). He was treasurer of the Mind Association (1964-70), president of the Aristotelian Society (1984-85) and president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science (1987-89).
In addition to his major works, Alexander wrote on a variety of other subjects: logic and humour (eg in Lewis Carroll), absolute versus relational theories of space, the nature of explanation in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and the significance of utopian thinking in political philosophy.
Alexander was a superb teacher, both as lecturer and as tutor and supervisor. His undergraduate lectures worked on the "iceberg principle", always giving the impression of a vast reserve of learning beneath what was on public display. But it was as a postgraduate superviser that he came into his own. He read everything twice, carefully, making meticulous comments not just on content but also on grammar and presentation. He possessed, in very large measure, the rare quality of intellectual conscience, a concern for truth and accuracy that brooked no compromises. He would think nothing of spending two hours with a postgraduate student poring over the pages of Locke or Boyle -before heading off for a well-earned pint of real ale in the senior common room.
Outside philosophy, what else mattered to him? Music, beyond any doubt, was an important part of his life. His wife Caryl, who died in 1996, was a clarinetist and music teacher; his son Meyrick became a professional musician. Beneath his somewhat reserved manner, he had a great love of wit and humour, puns and paradoxes. He admired both the literary craft and the psychological insight of Henry James. And he was a devotee of real ale even before Camra came to prominence, never travelling to a conference without his Real Ale Guide.
After retiring in 1984, he remained philosophically active, giving his last formal paper at the Centre Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques in Paris in 2004, and submitting his last article to Locke Studies in 2005.
· Peter Alexander, philosopher, born January 2 1917; died March 15 2006

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