Footnotes to the week: Mellor, Sets, Mozart

Hugh Mellor in 2008

It is difficult to believe that Hugh Mellor died over five years ago: he was a very generous and loyal friend, and still much missed. And I have been thinking about him particularly this week, prompted by Tim Crane’s newly published biographical memoir for the British Academy. I think Tim does a really fine job, both on the man and his philosophy. Read his piece!

I am quite out of the loop now, on current discussions about causation, chance, time, dispositions, facts, and others of Hugh’s metaphysical preoccupations. My sense, though, is that his work is less read, less engaged with, than it surely deserves. For example, I see that the Stanford Encyclopaedia article on the metaphysics of causation in effect mentions him just once in passing. Why this lack of impact of Hugh’s major The Facts of Causation (1995) which says a lot on just this topic? Perhaps it is not irrelevant that that book is surprisingly hard going, as reviewers at the time noted. Oddly so, when his earlier books and indeed contemporaneous papers (and Hugh in conversation) were so lucid and accessible. The book’s arguments too could be unsatisfyingly brisk, as e.g. Dorothy Edgington found in her fine BJPS review article. But, echoing Tim, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an original metaphysical story here about how causation, chance and the rest hang together, and one whose realist, anti-reductionist, themes have considerable attractions and deserve further exploration.

I’ve been rather distracted, then, from what I planned to be doing this week by dipping again into some of Hugh’s writing that you can find linked at hughmellor.com. And I was amused to come across this, in an interview published in Theoria in 2001. Noting that people postulate entities, such as properties, for various semantic purposes, Hugh continues:

It seems to me that before doing that, they should check what reasons there are for thinking there are such entities, as indeed they often do. That is why, for example, many logicians would prefer a logic or a semantics that did without sets, in which, to be honest, I doubt if anyone really believes. Talk about a set of things looks, to the outsider, like a way of using a singular term

Amusing, because the logic-related book I’ve been looking at this week is The Philosophy of Penelope Maddy, a substantial collection of papers published last year, mostly with replies by Maddy. The first group of six pieces is by a number of enthusiasts for sets, who most certainly believe in sets (Maddy herself countenances a more nuanced Arealism).

Now, it might be said that the sort of set that Hugh is sceptical about — e.g. a supposed set of heroes {Ramsey, Braithwaite, Reichenbach}, which arguably is really nothing over and above the men, plural — is not the kind of mathematical purely abstract object of the set-theorist’s dreams: so there is no lurking clash here. But the trouble is that set-theorists are wont to initially motivate their talk of sets with humdrum examples of sets of people, playing cards, and the like. And if such humdrum talk is indeed not really referring to special entities but is ripe for elimination in favour of frankly plural talk about people, cards and other whatnots, where exactly does that leave our supposed route into understanding what abstract set theory is about?

I’ll leave that question hanging as a tease! — but I want to return to say something more serious about the Maddy collection next week.

What have I been listening to? A year or two back, I really enjoyed a couple of earlier CDs of Scarlatti sonatas by the young Italian pianist Francesco Colli, so I was intrigued to see he has started releasing some Mozart discs, with the second out this month. But sadly, I think he tries more than a bit too hard to be inventive and imaginative. His approach works, perhaps, with the K331 Sonata where Colli manages in particular to make the hackneyed, oh-so-familiar, Alla Turca final movement sound fresh and full of wit. But he surely overdoes it with e.g. the delightful 12 Variations on ‘Ah, vous dirai-je maman’ (‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, to you). Elisabeth Brauß, for one, plays the piece with the gentler charm and affection it calls for, so listen to her instead.

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