Ipsedixitism, Part 1

"Ipsedixitism: dogmatic assertion or assertiveness" (Merriam-Webster). 

"Ipse dixit: an arbitrary and unsupported assertion" (Collins). 

"Ipsedixitism: ... the practice of dogmatic assertion" (The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: The Century dictionary, 1889).  

The charge applies when one makes an assertion without giving supporting reasons. 

The word 'ipsedixitism' was introduced into English by Jeremy Bentham. He used the word and several of its cognates in his Deontology; or the Science of Morality, a manuscript that was edited by his literary executor, Sir John Bowring, and published posthumously in 1834. 

In an essay that he contributed to that edition, Bowring traced the expression to Cicero: 

The appellative of ipse-dixitism is not a new one; it comes down to us from an antique and high authority, —it is the principle recognised (so Cicero informs us) by the disciples of Pythagoras. Ipse (he, the master, Pythagoras), ipse dixit, —he has said it; the master has said that it is so; therefore, say the disciples of the illustrious sage, therefore so it is.(Bowring, "History of the Greatest-Happiness Principle," [pp. 287-331, at pp. 322-323], in Jeremy Bentham, Deontology; or, The Science of Morality: in which the Harmony and Co-Incidence of Duty and Self-Interest, Virtue and Felicity, Prudence and Benevolence, are explained and exemplified. Vol. I. 'Arranged and edited by John Bowring.' London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, Green, and Longman, 1834)

Bowring's aetiology resembles the one given in Bentham's "Article on Utilitarianism: Long Version," according to which:

This appellative is not a new one invented for the present purpose, but an old one borrowed from an antique and consequently high authority. It is the principle pursued, so Cicero informs us, by the disciples of Pythagoras. 'Ipse' (referring to Pythagoras) 'ipsedixit': 'He has said the matter is so and so, therefore', said a disciple of the illustrious sage, 'so it is'. ("Article on Utilitarianism: Long Version," in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 5, Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983], p. 305, n. 43) 

It is difficult to determine the author of this last remark. Is it Bentham or Bowring? The editor of the quoted volume, Amnon Goldworth, writes that Bowring wrote sections of Bentham's posthumous works (and did not note when he had done so), adding that since parts of the original manuscript no longer exist, it is impossible sometimes to determine whether a given passage was penned by Bentham or by Bowring. Even if it was written by Bowring, Goldworth says that Bowring had discussed these works with Bentham many times and took himself, when he added material, to be adding only what Bentham had said. 

Both of the above quotations mention Cicero's criticism of the Pythagoreans, which appears in paragraph 10, Book I, of Cicero's De Natura Deorum (The Nature of the Gods). Cicero wrote as follows: 

Those who seek my personal views on each issue are being unnecessarily inquisitive, for when we engage in argument we must look to the weight of reason rather than authority. Indeed, students who are keen to learn often find the authority of those who claim to be teachers to be an obstacle, for they cease to apply their own judgement and regard as definitive the solution offered by the mentor of whom they approve. I myself tend to disapprove of the alleged practice of the Pythagoreans: the story goes that if they were maintaining some position in argument, and were asked why, they would reply: 'The master said so', the master being Pythagoras. Prior judgement exercised such sway that authority prevailed even when unsupported by reason. (Cicero: The Nature of the Gods, ed. and trans. Peter G. Walsh, [Oxford University Press, 1997; electronic: 2016], Book I, paragraph 10; DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780199540068.book.1)

Here is the same passage in H. Rackham's 1933 translation (in the Loeb series), with the original Latin on the facing page (and also available here). 

According to Cicero, a Pythagorean was prone to appeals to authority, resting his/her claims on their assertion by someone whose word provides insufficient support. This error of reasoning is not the same one as making assertions without giving supporting reasons. After all, the Pythagoreans did offer a reason for their claims ('Pythagoras said it!') even if not a very good one. So, the error of ipsedixitism, as defined at the beginning of this post, is not the error that Cicero charged the Pythagoreans with committing. 

Afterwit: knowledge that comes too late

Afterwit, a handy word that seems to have faded from common use in the 17th century.

The OED offers these two definitions:

Recognition of a mistake made earlier, leading to a change in one's actions, views, etc.

and

Wisdom acquired after the event, typically too late to be of use. 

Most of the OED's examples of the word's use are drawn from the 1500s and 1600s.

Here are some other definitions:

Websters: "wisdom or perception that comes after it can be of use";
The American Encyclopaedic Dictionary: "wisdom, which comes after the event which it is designed to affect"; and
The Treasury of Knowledge and Library of Reference: "wisdom that comes too late."

The ever resourceful Samuel Johnson defined 'afterwit' as, "The contrivance of expedients after the occasion of using them is past."

I like the gloss given by T. J. B. Spencer in his 1980 edition of John Ford's play The Broken Heart (1633), where 'afterwit' is "knowledge that comes too late." (Manchester University Press, p. 160 n. 12)

The word made it to America, where it was used by Captain Edward Johnson (1599-1672) in his Wonder-working providence of Sions Saviour in New England. (1654). The word lingered long enough in American memory to make it into the writings of Benjamin Franklin, who took the pseudonym 'Anthony Afterwit.'

As a fictional character's name, 'Afterwit' appears to have been a popular satirical device. In his journal Champion (1739), Henry Fielding took the name Afterwit while penning a letter to Captain Hercules Vinegar (another of Fielding's pseudonyms). A 'Mrs. Afterwit' figures in Issue No. 652 of Addison and Steele's Spectator. (Feb. 28, 1715, pp. 76-77) More than fifty years earlier, John Wilson applied the name to a royalist character in The Cheats (1663). And William Burnaby had two characters discuss a Sir Humphrey Afterwit in Act IV (Scene I) of his 1700 play, The reform'd wife a comedy.

In 1600, Samuel Nicholson wrote a poem called 'Acolastus his after-wit'. We also find the word 'afterwit' in this passage from Ch. 12 of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy: "Trust me, dear Yorick, this unweary pleasantry of thine will sooner or later bring thee into scrapes and difficulties, which no afterwit can extricate thee out of." Finally, in the 9th episode of his Ulysses ('Scylla and Charybdis'), James Joyce writes, "Afterwit. Go back."

In the 20th century, the word survived in the dialect of Yorkshire, where it was said that "Durham folks are troubled with afterwit."

Such dialect uses preoccupied an anonymous author in the Guardian in 1943. On Sept. 20 and 22, 'afterwit' is the focus of the column headed 'Miscellany'. In the first entry, 'afterwit' is defined as realizing a witty retort too late to be of use and, so, is assimilated to Diderot's l'esprit de l'escalier. The author credits a correspondent from Lancashire with bringing 'afterwit' to his attention. In the second entry, the author reports that (according to some readers) the word occurs more often in Yorkshire than Lancashire. S/he adds that 'afterwit' is sometimes replaced by 'latter-wit', especially when preceded by the phrases 'troubled with ...' and 'plagued by ...'. The author then says, "In the OED version the 'wit' of afterwit has to do with knowledge rather than repartee; the word means after-knowledge as opposed to fore-knowledge." (p. 3)

On March 20, 1931 (p. 6), the Washington Post reprinted a piece from the London Times under the heading 'Afterwit'. The author uses the phrase "the pangs of afterwit" and "troubled by afterwit" and asks "whether afterwit is a blessing or a curse." S/he adds, "Is it preferable to go on in blithe unconsciousness that we might have done so much better, or to become painfully aware of opportunity gone by; to be permanently stupid, or to be wise too late? The choice is hard."

Misology - a hatred of argument, reasoning, or enlightenment

"Misology: a hatred of argument, reasoning, or enlightenment." That's Merriam-Webster's definition. Here's the definition in Dagobert Runes' Dictionary of Philosophy (1942): "Misology: (Gr. miseo: to hate; logia: proposition) A contempt for logic." In the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1902), James Mark Baldwin gives this definition:

Misology [Gr. ...] : Ger. Misologie ; Fr. misologie ; Ital.misologia. Hatred and despair of reason.Sometimes applied to intellectual PESSIMISM. (v. 2, The Macmillan Company, 1902)

Closely related is "misologia: an aversion to speaking or arguing" (APA Dictionary of Psychology).

The Wikipedia entry for misology provides an interesting history of the word. It notes the occurrence of the ancient Greek μισολογία in Plato's Phaedo (89d). Wikipedia also identifies Kant's use of the German "Misologie" in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (395.32, 1785), where Kant defines it as a 'hatred of reason.' According to Henry Hitchings, Samuel Taylor Coleridge based his use of "misology" on Kant's misologie.

Webster's pegs the introduction of the English "misology" as being "circa 1834." The online version of Webster's does not identify the source. I believe the author of the Webster's entry had in mind the appearance of "misology" in an article in The Quarterly Review by Henry Nelson Coleridge, nephew and son-in-law of the great romantic poet. ("The Poetical works of S. T. Coleridge," The Quarterly Review, No. 103 [1834], p. 21) The article was published anonymously in 1834, but here is a cleaner copy of it with H. N. Coleridge identified as its author.

Henry Coleridge used "misology" while quoting his famous uncle's assessment of Goethe's epic poem: "The intended theme of the Faust is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and depreciation of knowledge, caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled." (Ibid.) Henry C. seems to have based the quotation on some written record of his uncle's 'table talk', since the same passage appears in the "Table Talk" entry for February 16, 1833. Apparently, S. T. Coleridge also applied "misology" to some religious sects in his book annotations.

In his 1992 article, James McKusick counts "misology" among Coleridge's "merely bizarre" coinages. (James C. McKusick, "'Living Words': Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Genesis of the 'OED' Modern Philology, Vol. 90 [1992]: 1-45, at 20) In fact, though, Coleridge was not the first author to use the word in English.

I found an earlier use of "misology" in John Richardson's 1819 translation of Kant's Logik (1800): Logic from the German of Emmanuel Kant. (London: Printed for W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1819) Here is an excerpt from Richardson's translation:

Who hates science, but does not love wisdom the less on that account, is named a misologist. Misology commonly arises from a want of scientific knowledge, and from a certain sort of vanity therewith conjoined. And sometimes those, who at first cultivated the sciences with great diligence and success, but in the end found no satisfaction in all their knowledge, fall into the fault of misology. (p. 32)

I have consulted Thomas Taylor's 1793 translation of Plato's Phaedo (esp. 89d2-3), and did not find any use there of "misology." Rather than using a single word for Plato's term, Taylor uses the phrase "hatred of reason." (Four Dialogues of Plato: The Cratylus, Phædo, Parmenides and Timæus, [1793], pp. 197-8) It may be, though, that some earlier translator of Plato's work into English used "misology."

Professor Mark Mercer has a pdf entitled "In Defence of Misology."

Misosophy: hatred of wisdom. A label applied to Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Papists, Positivists, and Calvinists

Misosophy, n. Hatred of wisdom. So says the OED. The earliest use of the word cited by the OED is in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's posthumously published "Notes of Hooker" (in the 1830s).  Coleridge there writes,

There are, and can be, only two schools of philosophy, differing in kind and in source. Differences in degree and in accident, there may be many; but these constitute schools kept by different teachers with different degrees of genius, talent, and learning; — auditories of philosophizers, not different philosophies. Schools of psilology (the love of empty noise) and misosophy are here out of the question.

About forty years before Coleridge's coinage, Bertrand Capmartin de Chaupy wrote a book called  Philosophie des lettres, qui aurait pu tout sauver. Misosophie voltairienne, qui n'a pu que tout perdre, which translates roughly as Philosophy of letters, which could have saved everything. Voltairian misosophy, which could only lose everything. (Paris, chez Mme. Dufresne, au Palais royale, 1790, 2 volumes)

"Misosophy" pops up  in a philosophical dictionary in 1878:

MIS, MISO.-1. (Gr. [...], to hate;) in a number of compounds, as misagathy, hatred of the good; misandry and misanthropy, hatred of men; misarety, hatred of virtue; misogyny, misology, misosophy, misotheism. 2. From the Germanic languages, denoting wrong, failure, defect, as misdeed, mistrust, misuse. (Charles Porterfield Krauth, A Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences: [Including the Vocabulary of Philosophy, Mental, Moral and Metaphysical, by William Fleming, from the 2d Ed., 1860: and the 3d, 1876, Ed. by Henry Calderwood, LL. D.], Sheldon & Company, 1878, p. 770)

The word appeared in religious controversies. For instance, here's the barrister Henry Thomas Braithwaite in 1872: "That therefore is misosophy which discourages spoken petitions to the Throne of Grace on the plea that a Spirit cannot hear words." (Esse and Posse: A Comparison of Divine Eternal Laws and Powers [London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1872], p. 252)

In 1880, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne used the term in a dig at Carlyle. I can't resist quoting the whole intriguing passage:

Four principles of thought, we may say, are here impeached and impugned: a double enemy is assailed by the lover of faith and reason, love and hope, in the militant materialism of Papists and Positivists; by the lover of justice and mercy, humanity and freedom, in the Catholic philosophy of de Maistre and the Calvinistic misosophy of Carlyle. And if the sarcasms on theology seem to any reader more keen and violent than the satire on any other form of unbelief or infidelity to the truth as here conceived, he should remember that superstition with a lining of materialism is surely a worse thing than materialism stark naked; and that while it is palpably possible to be a materialist without being a Christian, it is implicitly impossible to be a Christian without being a materialist. ("Victor Hugo: Religions et Religion," Fortnightly Review no. 162 [June 1, 1880], p. 763)

WHEW! A few years later, Henry Hayman slaps the label on German pessimism, especially the thought of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. ("Pessimism," The Churchman No. 62 [November, 1884], pp. 113-125, at p. 124)

In these late 19th-Century cases, the authors take themselves not to be introducing a new word when they use "misosophy," unlike some later authors. For example, the word was re-invented (or reconstructed from the ancient Greek roots) by the Congregationalist theologian Peter Taylor Forsyth in 1915. He wrote, "Its Christianity has at heart always protested against its philosophy, or rather, if one may coin a word, its misosophy." (P. T. Forsyth, "Faith, Metaphysic, and Incarnation," The Methodist Review [September, 1915], p. 701) 

I cannot tell whether Gilbert Ryle thought he was coining a new term when he wrote the following: "A fraternity of persons of kindred credulities could only constitute a school of 'misosophy'." ('Taking Sides in Philosophy,' Philosophy 12 [Jul., 1937]: 317-332, at 318-319) His decision to flag the term with quotation marks suggests that he might have (thanks to Bernard Kobes for this observation).

Seyyed Hossein Nasr attributes the coinage of the word (or of its German equivalent) to Hermann Türck, a 19th-Century critic of Nietzsche. Here's Nasr:

The result has been the creation of philosophies which, from the traditional point of view, could only be called monstrous and which can only be characterized as what the German scholar H. Türck has called 'misosophy', that is, the hatred rather than love of wisdom and which others have considered as 'antiphilosophy'. (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred: Revisioning Academic Accountability, State University of New York Press [19889], p. 43)

Türck did this in applying the term to his opponents (Nietzsche, Stirner, and Ibsen), contrasting these putative egoists with persons of true genius.

In The Way of Phenomenology, (Pegasus [1970], p. 23, n. 4) Richard M. Zaner credits Gabriel Marcel with inventing the word. Zaner cites Marcel's book Man against Mass Society. (Regnery, [1952], trans. G. S. Fraser) Marcel's book (Les hommes contre l'humain) appeared first in French in 1951. (La Colombe) Since the libraries are closed, I cannot find hard copies of Marcel's book (in translation or in the original French), so it is difficult to determine what Marcel wrote. Based on some web searching, Marcel seems to have written (in G. S. Fraser's translation) of a

civilization in which technical progress is tending to emancipate itself more and more from speculative knowledge, and finally to question the traditional rights of speculative knowledge, a civilization which, one may say, finally denies the place of contemplation and shuts out the very possibility of contemplation, such a civilization, I say, sets us inevitably on the road towards a philosophy which is not so much a love of wisdom as a hatred of wisdom: we ought rather to call it a misosophy. (Man Against Mass Society, p. 48)

Finally, there is Gilles Deleuze's remark in his 1968 book Différence et répétition: "Everything begins with misosophy." (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, [1994])


3. "The Oklahoma Senate does not like what Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson said about the National Guard but it refused yesterday to call him 'ultracrepidarian.' A resolution had been introduced accusing Wilson of 'gross and unwarranted insult' .... Senator J. R. Hall, a Democrat, introduced an amendment which would have inserted 'ultracrepidarian.'" St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Jan. 31, 1957): 1.

4. "Now if Sino-Indo-European lexical comparison was just yet another drowsy backwater of the inveterate craze for ultracrepidarian transcontinental etymologizing, it would probably not even be justified to mention Ulenbrook's book in print." Wolfgang Behr, Review of Zum Alteurasischen. Eine Sprachvergleichung by Jan Ulenbrook, Oriens 36 (2001): 356-361, at 360.

5. "Philosophers are good at answering broadly conceptual questions of the first sort. They are no better than anyone else at answering questions of the second sort, despite their ultracrepidarian tendencies." Dudley Knowles, "Good Samaritans and Good Government," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series 112 (2012): 161-178, at p. 161.

6. "The FBI Hair Comparison Review does not seek to provide a precise and scientifically defensible estimate of the prevalence of ultracrepidarian testimony." David H. Kaye, "Ultracrepidarianism in Forensic Science: The Hair Evidence Debacle," Washington and Lee Law Review 72, no. 2 (2015): 230-257, at p. 247.



The inspiration for Hazlitt's coinage seems to lie in Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder, in which a painter tells a shoemaker and wannabe art critic to stick to judging shoes. This episode in Pliny gave rise to the Latin saying, "Sutor, ne ultra crepidam."


This post is derived from my Facebook post of April 8.