As secretary to the university’s department of philsophy it fell to me to make a record of the discussion at the most recent academic committee meeting. And what a meeting it was! The main item for discussion that day was “the matter at hand”. And this is how the meeting unfolded…
Professor Moore: “I now think it is time to turn to the matter at hand.”
An uncontroversial beginning one might have thought, but rarely are things so simple at a gathering of the philosophical “great and good”:
“I object to that!” offered Professor Bradley, more sharply than was normal on these occasions, “there is no ‘matter’ to be ‘at hand’ if by that you intend to refer to some underlying substrate in which ‘matter’ might inhere. I might give you a ‘hand’ but there will be no accompanying ‘matter’ to place next to it. Or underneath it. Or anywhere else for that….And any ‘hand’ whose existence I am prepared to assent to would not be individuated separately but would be part of an inclusive Whole.”
My colleagues appeared restless at this. For Professor Bradley had a point: if we could not agree on the existence of matter then it followed a fortiori that there could be no matter at hand and that further discussion was therefore pointless. Luckily Professor Ayer, his mind no doubt on a later assignation, was keen to move things along…
Professor Ayer: “We can accept, following Berkeley, that to talk of ‘matter’ in this way is literal nonsense. There can be no discussion of the matter in hand since any proposition which includes the term ‘matter in hand’ will be neither analytic nor verifiable. We might, however, following Russell (following Hume), agree to refer instead to ‘the logical construction out of sense data at hand’. We could then proceed in a manner that preserves the requisite clarity and rigour. We can if you like (and following me) resume discussion of the matter in a hand in a way that is analogous to the discussion of other minds…” there were nods of assent at this sage proposal and it looked as if Professor Ayer might have saved the day. But then, not for the first time, he overreached himself, “…and anyway time is marching on.”
At this there was a sharp intake of breath for we all knew what was coming…
“I would ask you to retract that Sir!” thundered Professor McTaggart, “I have not spent the best part of the last decade proving that time does not exist only for you to glibly ascribe to it not merely existence but some peculiar species of causal powers! “Marching on” indeed! I did not come here only to be confronted by your obnoxious conflation of the A-series with the B-series! Were there such a thing as time you would undoubtedly be wasting mine Sir!”
At this the idealists sided with McTaggart against the empiricists whom they accused of attempting to hijack the agenda of the meeting. The rationalists took the side of the idealists whilst the contrarians took the side of nobody. At one point Professor Wittgenstein demanded that everyone be quiet. And, as head of department, Profeesor Moore appealed in vain for common sense to prevail. It fell to the department’s token Kantian, Professor Strawson, to effect an uneasy truce between these disparate camps.
Discussion of the matter at hand was eventually deferred until the next meeting of the academic committee where it appears on the agenda as Item 3: “the logical-construction-from-sense-data-at-hand-in-a-way-that-is-metaphysically-and-ontologically-neutral”.
Then Professor Heidegger made it clear that what matters is not the Being of matter, but the matter of Being and that if one looks at the etymology of “matter” in pre-Homeric Indo-Greek, Being makes itself matter in matter and for all matters-that-matter and are-mattered in their mattering. Professor Arendt agreed.
it doesn’t matter.
Professor Bradley, anxious to defuse any acrimony arising from the meeting, was finally heard to say that it was all a case of mind over matter, so if nobody minded, then it didn’t matter. Apparently however, Professor Charlie Broad had been a bit spooked.
How about looking at the question from this perspective: the hand is part of the human body which is material (part of the matter)? This implies that if there is no matter, then there are no bodies and so no hands in the first place. The existence of the matter, in this case, is a priori required for the hand to be.
If we change the perspective and consider «the matter at hand» as a metaphor, then it is more likely a logical problem: how much of any matter do we have at hand (mind)? How much of the objective world (external matter) do we, as subjects, “get”? It is the same old subjectivity/objectivity problem, just disguised under a new figure.
The “matter at hand” only has existence, at most, as a “being- in-itself” because it is a topic for discussion among humans and may have had a physical existence as an item on a meeting agenda. The “matter at hand” can only become a “being-for-itself”, if at all, when humans are engaged in the activity of discussing the topic. It is only then that the “matter at hand” exists.
The scenario is clever, and interesting in various ways. If a philosopher is one whose words and beliefs articulate, the Ayer snippet is an intriguing put-down of Ayer.
What do empiricists make of metaphor and innuendo? How does an empiricist account for words which mean one thing and say another?
But who hired McTaggart anyway? What does an empiricist verify when he verifies that the meeting has gone on too long? And if the claim is neither true nor false, how would an empiricist know when to end the meeting?