Charles L. Stevenson

Charles Leslie Stevenson (born June 27, 1908 Cincinnati , Ohio , † 1979 ) was an American philosopher . He mainly worked in the fields of ethics and aesthetics .

Life

Stevenson first studied English literature at Yale University , then philosophy at Cambridge University with GE Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1930–33), later at Harvard University (1933–35). He received his doctorate from Harvard in 1935, where he worked as a lecturer until 1939 . 1939-46 he was Assistant Professor at Yale, 1946-77 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor . In 1963 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Teaching

Stevenson is mainly known for his metaethical thesis that moral value judgments have no descriptive character ( non-descriptivism ), but rather served the sole purpose of evoking emotions in order to influence or convince others. He is thus - alongside Alfred Jules Ayer  - one of the leading representatives of emotivism .

Stevenson's metaethical theses are based on his theory of meaning , which is based on the work of Charles Kay Ogden and IA Richards . According to this theory, language only serves to psychologically influence the listener, in that certain psychological reactions are to be evoked in him by stimuli.

Selected Works

• Ethics and Language , New Haven Conn., London 1944, ISBN 0-300-00975-5 .
• Facts and Values. Studies in Ethical Analysis , New Haven Conn., 1963, ISBN 0-8371-8212-3 .

literature

• Michael Quante : Introduction to General Ethics. 4th edition. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011, ISBN 978-3-534-24595-6 , p. 50 f. (brief description and criticism of his noncognitivism)

Web links

• Daniel R. Boisvert:  Charles Leslie Stevenson. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

See also

• Noncognitivism